Are you figuring the cost of tools into this? Or assuming they can be rented or borrowed? For all I know, even buying tools might be worth it since they can be used in multiple projects.
Obviously, we just discovered the translation of the word "koldgeon" from the game Gostak! (If you've never seen the game, give the webpage at https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45 a few seconds of your time. It's a text adventure, and it's fantastic.)
"pogrifon n. ? [Made of sindish and koldgeon. Since sindish is what the morleon's walls and ceiling are made of, and koldgeon is edible and hurts to look at, a pogrifon is something rather odd by our standards, like marble-and-marmalade, chocolate-and-gold, or drywall-and-cheese."
Love those posts! It takes me days to get through all of them, so I can only imagine how long it must take to compile them. Then again, I’m slowing down in my old age.
1. I have six months of links saved up and I've got to figure out which ones are obsolete and how to splice the rest into bite-sized chunks.
2. I have lots of other posts from six months saved up, some of them are gradually going obsolete as conditions change, others I'm really interested in seeing what people think and want to get them out as soon as possible - and so the links are sitting on the back burner for now.
Ah, thank you for helping add to this collection! The one about not throwing away the old bucket is perfect. I'm not sure about the others. I just now realized that another way to express the common theme -- maybe a better concept handle for this -- is Ratcheting. You want to make forward progress on something without risking any backward progress.
(You want to improve your water fetching with a fancier bucket but be ready to fall back to your current bucket in case the new one is worse.)
I think so! The only thing it's _maybe_ missing is the idea of attempted progress backfiring. Like bridge-burning may just be a stupid thing people do out of anger that they may regret. Like if it's just "don't be rash" then that feels too general. But if it's like "don't alienate your current friends in your social-climbing attempts" then that would fit perfectly.
Frog tape, good brushes to cut in (Purdy), if you are strong a massive roller, or you could get a paint sprayer. Buy good paint - BM Natura is 0 VOC. It's worth it.
Glad to see you mention taping. Frog tape = essential. Not the dollar store cheap version but real Frog tape. I've had good luck with Benjamin Moore's Emerald line, it is forgiving of bad technique and covers beautifully.
I've been there. You are a better handy-person than I am. I painted several coats over the window & frame, several coats. Like a plaster cast, but stupider.
My first draft was 'For wisdom: First don't say anything stupid" But I think you have to say and think very, very stupid things from time to time to figure out what's smart. What is smart is not always intuitive, so, you have to have the freedom to fumble about.
Ha, yeah, I've heard this as "better to remain silent and thought foolish than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". :) This totally fits the Hippocratic pattern! (But also, yes, it's usually bad advice!)
I was imprecise there. I meant for weight loss, first don't ever let your weight go up. I realize that the question of whether decreasing scale is a rational goal is a whole can of worms
Counterexample: The route from no business with 0 dollars to a sucessful one with missions of dollars often involves passing through a state of being indebted (having negative dollars). To get to your goal, you have to start by moving away from it.
Thanks! I can't decide if it fits the pattern but it's a good pearl of wisdom regardless! If I had to contort it into this Hippocratic pattern, maybe: "(for sewing) measure tentatively all you like but never cut tentatively"?
Also, reddit's cardinal rule on being attractive: "first, don't be unattractive." Maybe there's an 80/20 insight here. Like the most failure in a given domain e.g. attraction is caused by a few, pretty easily identifiable mistakes.
Hmm, I can't decide if this fits the pattern. If it's just of the form "don't do this dangerous thing that might break stuff or that you might regret" then that seems too general. But something like "for coding: keep your experimental features in a separate branch" does sound like it could fit. Thanks for adding this!
Prioritizing not introducing new bugs over introducing new features fits the pattern better, but sadly does not seem to fit the actual priorities of any real software company.
Ha, yes! I hadn't mentioned this for fear of sounding self-promotional but we call this the Pareto Dominance Principle: https://blog.beeminder.com/pdp/
(I'm not even claiming we're a counterexample to your "any real software company" claim, but, um, at least we talk the talk?)
In general for games: "instead of trying to win, try not to lose." Maybe another way of putting this is: "no unforced errors."
I think the common thread of these is an insight that "inverted" recommendations [i.e. don't try to x, try not to -x] are often more concrete and helpful than positive recommendations because they avoid making the assumption that we know how to get to the positive state in the first place. If we knew how to get to the positive state and wanted to be there, we probably wouldn't need advice.
This kind of thinking also implies that "wins" in general may be better off pursued "indirectly," since if you pursue them directly, you will likely make the overconfidence/ignorance mistake referenced above. Far easier to try to eliminate the errors with the end in mind, than to rush straight for the end.
In other words maybe all the statements of the form "primum non nocere" imply that end goals cannot be pursued directly, but instead must ensue. Interested if anyone has thoughts here.
Smart! I can't decide if it fits the pattern exactly. See also the other comment I just now added in reply to CYOA. I think the common theme can be characterized by a ratchet: making forward progress without risking backward progress. I think you're right that there are various ways redundancy can be integral to that.
This occurred to me too late to post on either of the *Cult of Smart* theads, so I'll put it here:
We ought to take some school horror stories with a grain of salt. My partner, who teaches young kids, regularly encounters parents who are a little too credulous w.r.t. stories their kids tell them.
There was a father who was convinced that his son was being systematically starved at lunch time (there have been several of these, actually). There was a mother who fervently believed that a [much younger child in a different class] was physically abusing her [older, larger child] every day at recess. They called at nights and on weekends and demanded to know why their concerns weren't being taken seriously.
From the outside, it was clear what was going on: the kids determined that their parents were sensitive to stories about X, so they supplied them with stories about X. Sometimes there was a kernel of truth: "Mr. Smith, Eve is right: we did tell her she couldn't have any strawberries. That was because the snack today was blueberries. She ate lots of those." But sometimes they were just totally made up: "Mrs. Jones, I know Adam said that Steve punched him at recess today. But Steve's family has been out of the country since Christmas."
This doesn't invalidate anybody's first-person experiences, and doesn't mean that terrible abuses are impossible. Indeed, I witnessed some bad stuff at school when I was a kid. But we should apply our usual amount of skepticism to really outrageous claims.
Wrong. Abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with. False positives may be annoying, but training skepticism towards abuse survivors can only tend to increase cases of actual abuse.
If abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with, so does fraud. Training credulous acceptance of anything said by someone who claims to be an abuse survivor can only tend to increase cases of fraud.
No, we definitely shouldn't dismiss claims of abuse. Eve and Adam's parents (in the examples) were absolutely right to press the school (though it seems like they went overboard on the wrong means). But if they tell us outsiders on the internet, we have no call to just swallow all their claims.
All neurotypical kids occasionally lie to adults, it's a natural part of childhood development. Using the theory of mind to manipulate an outcome is AMAZING to little people who otherwise have no power.
My particular parents *should* have been less credulous about a lot of stuff I had to say as a child, including times I cast myself as a victim to manipulate the outcome I wanted. I was a self-centered, often self-righteous kid and if truthfully arguing for something didn't work, I'd go to the next option of exaggerating or outright lying.
And I had absolutely ZERO guilt or regret about doing so. ZERO. From my point of view, my parents had infinitely more power than me and I didn't feel the slightest moral qualm about using every tool at my disposal to "fight back" for whatever I thought I deserved.
In fact, you know that thing in popular media where an adult telling a child, "I'm very disappointed in you" is supposed to be the very worst kind of emotional consequence of bad behavior?
As a kid I was deeply confused and contemptuous of the trope. What kind of gullible chump kid would fall for that emotional manipulation? Who cares what an adult feels, as long as they don't take away TV time or cancel your social engagements?
And I had and still have a great relationship with my parents! That's why I felt so secure in lying to them, or even risking their "disappointment!"
Human beings lie all the time. That's incompatible with believing all anything.
I've been thinking lately about people who want to make their parents proud of them. It seems like a pattern that can work very well indeed if the parent's ambition for the child is appropriate and the parent doesn't withhold approval.
Why are some children are strongly motivated by their parents' approval and others are not? I have no idea.
Holy crap. I guess I was your polar opposite. I told the truth, never manipulated - couldn't, can't, don't understand how other people work well enough.
Although I don't know if we were actually polar opposites! We might actually be closer together than you think.
I was fine with lying about facts to mislead a parent/adult during an argument and/or interrogation. And to some degree, I was willing to say magic words like "I'm sorry" and "I won't do it again" to avoid a punishment.
But there were kinds of emotional manipulation I wasn't willing to engage in. By maybe 10 years old, I had a obscure sense of personal honor about not crying literal tears or expressing vulnerable emotions during an argument. It somehow felt like "cheating," and I avoided doing it even when it arguably would have been normal and appropriate.
So the only theory of mind I was engaging in was, "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Whereas my younger brother (like lots of kids), was doing both "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?" AND "what does this person feel now, and how can I get them to *FEEL* what I want them to feel about the untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Which is why my younger brother was my matriarch grandmother's favorite kid; he had no personal honor about weeping crocodile tears into her shoulder whenever he wanted her to do something for him. He admitted to using the tactic as a kid and still admits to it today.
He had way higher emotional intelligence than even I did. You, me, and him are all on different parts of that spectrum, I think!
Hmm, I don't think that's a fair summary. I hedged a lot! I said some parents are a *little* too credulous, and that outsiders ought to apply our *usual* skepticism to *outrageous* claims.
People tend to see more value in their education as an adult than as a child, while suffering that is in the past and that has no obvious after-effects, tends to feel less bad than when it happened to you.
So I suspect that people become more positive as they age.
This is a great point. I was specifically talking about being skeptical of outrageous stories, but surely there are plenty of kids who tell their parents by saying "Oh yes, I really love school! Teacher X is so nice" because over-the-top enthusiasm about school gets a good reaction.
As a parent I can say there have been times when I found out something negative had happened at school. Sometimes I found it out from my kid, sometimes from a teacher or aide, sometimes from the principal. I will say that without spending serious time on it - at least half an hour - I never got anything close to the complete story, from any of those reporters. Even after spending time on it, sometimes important details would only surface later.
I did however encounter the perspective you describe: the school employee/teacher/principal attributing motive to the kid. When I look back, there is only a little correlation between stuff the kids knew I might react to, and what they said. Some of the things that happened were totally unexpected to me and also were corroborated by the school.
Other times, the kids were not telling me things that I probably would have reacted to, and when I found out later I freaked out (the daycare where the kids had to watch soap operas, for example)
So I submit that the match between what kids think the parents will react to, and what they actually react to, is not perfect. Also not good enough to fully explain these parents.
Also, I have never met a parent who did Not have a story of something important that happened at school, which no one told them about until long after the fact - not the kid, not the teacher, not the principal. A bad (or good) grade? A punch? A discipline procedure or reprimand?
The communication channels are all imperfect. And the trust is sometimes not very good. Unfortunately when the educators wrap it all up and attribute it solely to the prevaricating little darlings, that's when I know someone's not paying attention.
Educators (and daycare providers) do say that to each other a lot, though. I've certainly heard it a lot. It buffers the teachers against the fear and mistrust from the parents; it buffers the teachers against the conflicts among the students; and it buffers them against conflict with each other (when a student says teacher X did something, that student must be lying, so the teacher doesn't have to investigate further.) So it's a very useful perspective.
Kids' communication can be a little or a lot jumbled. They don't have the norms down yet. But there is very often truth in the emotion (in my limited experience). Eve is upset about the berries? That is, Eve is upset, and Eve spoke about berries. Is Eve "upset about the berries" or is it the emotion sourced to something else, perhaps related to the teacher, perhaps related to something else? Maybe what Eve really wants to say is she's lonely at school, the teacher spends more time talking to other little girls, and the teacher didn't explain what snack was, so Eve was embarrassed asking for the wrong thing, et cetera. The upsetness has an origin even if the details are skewed, and sometimes the details aren't skewed. Kids are also learning to discern the motives of unfamiliar adults, and they're not perfect at that.) One or two adults in a room with twenty-plus children are not able to track every interaction. Yet in order to feel comfortable with the level of responsibility they have, they attribute greater success to themselves than they should. I'm sure that fallacy has a name. It helps the teachers form a bloc, they never have to check the story with each other, if they already know the answer is "The kid is lying or wrong or both."
I'm not sure what collective strategy teachers in a large school *should* use to buffer themselves, if not the "kids lie" strategy. The kids are the least powerful party and least able to defend themselves. If teachers say "We might be wrong," one out of a hundred parents will beat them with that admission and totally overdo it, or kids will tear down all their authority. If a principal says, "Maybe my teacher is a tyrant, maybe Billy really is stalking Jimmy, let me see," that undermines morale. It's very delicate and the individual kid is not usually the most valued unit. I have not yet seen this balance maintained consistently, although lots of people try.
Did your kids ever stall bed time? Mine did (currently do). Every week I'd find myself saying, "OK, I'll bring you one more drink and then it's time to sleep!" Or "I"ll help you get to the bathroom, but then it's lights out!" My kids were (are) masters at figuring out what I would respond to.
I can imagine a version of myself in which I got caught up in a concern loop about this. "My kid seems really thirsty at bedtime! I'd better ask the pediatrician about this!" I do, and the pediatrician says "Let's keep an eye on this, but I don't think there's anything physically wrong here." But I'm suspicious - my kid is still crying out for water every evening! I start to mistrust the pediatrician.
Eventually I'm sending the pediatrician messages every night, and asking preschool teachers to monitor water intake. But no one is taking me seriously! This only makes me more concerned. I switch pediatricians. I switch schools...
*This* is the dynamic I'm referring to with Eve and Adam.
It's important to believe true things and not false things, of course.
At the same time ... I remember being a kid and not having the language to express what made school so horrible. If I'd come home and told my parents, "today every kid in my grade took turns beating me up", it would have been more accurate to my subjective experience of school than any true thing I could have said.
That's why I think allowing kids (and people in general) to leave situations they don't like is so much more important than being "tough on bullies" or any punitive approach. Was Eve really beaten up by Steve, or is she just using any tactic she can to avoid being put back in a classroom with Steve? Is /she/ abusing /him/? It doesn't matter as much if you just let her leave.
Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
> Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
I am definitely not trying to say this! I'm saying we should apply our *usual* amount of skepticism to *really outrageous* claims.
Finally started reading Yudkowsky and while he is mostly ok I wish he hadn't blocked me on twitter because I mostly want to yell at him about lesser problems
Yes. Obviously you can't literally tell at someone through Twitter, which should have, with other context cues, indicated that I did not literally mean I was going to yell at him but instead that I was going to raise criticisms and felt like self deprecating exaggerating the nature of this.
No one thinks you wanted to literally yell at him through twitter. They are reacting to your choice of verb. Actually, no one even called you abusive. They are pointing out that blocking people who say they want to yell at you on twitter is a good method for preventing abuse. No comment on your particular case.
I have a general take that blue checks shouldn't be able to block people from seeing their content (just mute them and ban them from responding, at most).
I'm still surprised Eliezer is a bluecheck. It's not that he's not famous, it's just...he doesn't seem like a bluecheck kind of guy. And I feel like even asking for a bluecheck signals something at this point, and it's not the kind of thing Eliezer would usually signal.
I think he got it because at some point there actually were some people impersonating him and making various claims about cryptocurrency on Twitter in his name
I want to raise certain criticisms about what I have read in Rationality AI to Zombies so far, none of which as of yet psychologize or are directed to the person of Yudkowsky.
All (most?) of the content of "Rationality: AI to Zombies" comes from posts on LessWrong and you're free to comment there with any criticisms you have.
You're giving off a strong impression about _why_ Eliezer would _want_ to block you in these comments.
Is there some specific reason why he should be open to _your_ criticisms of all people?
I'm seeing lots of reports on my internet radar of a red-hot housing market, especially for suburban single-family homes. Houses receiving multiple bids soon after being listed, historically low inventory, etc. What's most notable is the rapid price inflation in sunbelt cities like Phoenix, Orlando, Charlotte, and Dallas, such that these cities are no longer cheaper than many traditional northern cities.
I have also read anecdotes of relaxing lending standards. Can anyone in the know confirm or deny this part?
I am starting to get the heeby-jeebies that we are at the start of a new housing mania.
I think covid has done weird stuff to the housing market, but it seems like the shortage finally tipping over from a largely NY/bay area problem to a national one, which is boosting prices everywhere.
I assume it will get better as the vaccine rolls out. If I were trying to sell a house right now, I would definitely be putting it off until it was less of a hassle.
It's ok to have heebie jeebies about people making decisions they later regret, but don't let that bleed over into blaming a decade of slow growth, high unemployment and maybe DJT on the housing market. It was the Fed.
I live in a small city in Michigan and even 5 years ago, we had to put an offer on our house the day it came available to get it. Now 5 years later we are refinancing and expecting its appraisal to go from 155 to 215.
I don't know about lending standards, as I think I'm pretty safe to lend a lot of money to, but Quicken has been calling me about twice a day, and my wife seconds after calling me, to try and get us to refinance. It's comical to see. I ignore the call and my wife gets a call from the exact same number immediately after. And it's every single day once at the beginning and once at the end. This is clearly automated and they're never going to stop and I'm probably going to just actually refinance at some point. Honestly, I'm consider jettisoning the phone number I've had for the past 15 years and just starting from scratch with a new one I never give out to any business.
This is actually a bad financial decision - a company like this gives better rates to people it cold-calls than it does to people who call them. Negotiation can get rid of the difference, but only if you are pretty good at it.
Standard argument: Just get multiple quotes. No important financial decision should be made on raw heuristics. Easy to get 3-5 quotes and pick the best.
Can add it's not just refinancing, either, although at least in that case I know who is bugging. I get text messages and voice mails several times a day from investors looking to buy houses, both the one I live in and other properties I own but rent out. This has been happening since about last August or so. I started out blocking every number that sent me a text like this, but it was quickly obvious that was pointless and I probably just need a phone number. It's always some template variation on "Hi, I'm X and heard you're looking to unload your property in city Y." I'm not and they definitely did not actually hear that anywhere, but yeah, small time operations seem to have popped up all over the place with the purpose of buying houses.
I'm actually pretty sure what happened is I finally got a Texas driver's license in order to be able to vote. From what my wife tells me, the state of Texas sells your contact info to marketers.
I can imagine single-family homes being red-hot after covid, alright. After spending the whole year +/- inside an apartment, having an actual home with a yard sounds really good.
Other than that, the European rental market is in slow freefall, the property market is confused because rent ROI just vanished but there's nothing worth investing in anyway, so people escape from fiat into real estate. No idea about other parts of the world, but it might be universal in the kind of Schroedringer's crisis that we live in.
I recommend following Calculated Risk Blog (https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/) if you're interested in the housing market. McBride recently noted that housing inventory was at record lows, down 53% YoY from last year. It sounds like housing building just kind-of stopped in 2015, and has only recently resumed, so the inventory is quite reduced.
in our ex-urb outside Baltimore, houses are are going the next day with bidding wars. The sweet spot is plenty of space, high-speed internet, good schools, no crime, and you don't have to drive to work so who cares how far work is. Houses are up like 25%, but I am sure the more expensive ones closer to the city are not
I live less than half a mile from the city line and houses in my neighborhood are selling fast at inflated prices. It's not a very expensive area but the schools are ok and there isn't that much crime. I bought my house @ 150k five years ago and I could probably get 210-230k for it now (though I did put a little bit of work into it). But anything in the County that has a backyard is doing well at this point.
I think the people who can sell for 200 or 300 can bid up a 400 house up here, still way cheaper than the county, and similar or better houses. With interest rates, that extra 40 k to get the house you want doesn’t hurt.
I don’t know about lending standards l, but only because I can’t even get to the point of finding out about lending standards before the houses are gone.
I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone reading this who's suffered from severe depression before about whether they noticed any change in their their subjective visual perception.
Also, I think I feel like colors are brighter when I'm happy, or I notice the bright colors more, is that a universal feeling or am I just making it up?
Hospitalized twice, undergone ECT, etc: I haven't ever noticed any visual changes during depressive episodes.
On the other hand, I'm quite colour-blind and already experience the world pretty much exclusively in shades of brown and blue.
(Also, 2 months in the hospital during covid was even less fun than you would expect; I drew a great deal of strength from your posts during that time, so, thank you)
Still alive, haven't gone mad, still capable of knowing intellectually that things could get better; that's about as okay as can be expected given the circumstances. <3
(do not take this as a reason to not answer Scott's question; episodes and circumstances can be worse or better than this and still be considered “severe”)
I often "look without seeing" when depressed and the world seems flat and empty because I'm not actually paying attention to what's in my field of vision. Tends to happen if I'm derealizing. I can force myself back by forcing myself to really see what I'm looking at, and that does tend to give me a few minutes where things (including color) seem more vivid/novel.
I have vividly experienced this on multiple occasions during and after depressive episodes. The difference in colors for me between a depressive episode and a normal or happy spell is the difference between desaturated colors and a Technicolor rainbow.
I had a pretty dramatic change in visual perception the first time I took an antidepressant (bupropion). I called it my graphics card upgrade. I weirded people out by talking a lot about how, like, I really *got* the concept of metallic things suddenly. Also depth perception. Prior to treatment I had been mildly to severely depressed from a very young age.
Severe depression here, I've never noticed any changes in color perception with changing mood. I do have moderate visual snow which I did not have when I was younger and less depressed.
I think you see it too; you just haven't noticed before. Stare at a blank white wall under low light conditions (so not under broad daylight). You'll notice the visual snow.
I don't think everyone sees it, and I'm fairly sure I didn't as a child, I did a fair bit of staring at blank walls. I believe it's probably a mild form of HPPD, the timing is just right.
I do, and always have. When I was a little kid I used to think I was seeing the air. Doesn't seem to be associated with anything negative for me; it's just how my vision works.
I'd say the vision turns more symbolic (seeing your perceptual shorthand for "tree" rather than a thing with branches and leaves and texture) than less colorful, per se, and that effect is at least an order of magnitude stronger.
There is definitely a feeling of watching the world through a dimming glass of some sort, but I'm not sure how well it maps to color saturation. Hard to figure this out without dedicated testing. Cf. seasonal affective disorder and grayed out colors in winter - maybe we just associate bleak colors with depression because they tend to coexist?
I suffered from rather severe depression for about 10 years, and have not had any serious symptoms of depression for about 6 years. I have absolutely not noticed any noticeable difference in visual perception between then and now.
Perhaps a more interesting result is that while I was depressed I participated in a study evaluating the efficacy of rTMS on severe, treatment-resistant depression. After a session, I would have maybe an hour or two of exceptionally clear and vivid colors. This is commonly reported with rTMS, but I don't know if it's a matter of depressed people temporarily seeing with the vividness that normal people always experience, or if it's just a general side-effect of rTMS for anybody.
Interesting, I also have had an rTMS depression protocol. I didn't notice changes in the appearance of my vision after sessions, definitely some strange effects on perception overall, kind of hard to put a finger on it, they were maybe attentional in nature. Also it did not help my depression.
I had off effects on my perception as well in addition to the vivid colors - the best way that I can describe it is that it gave me the impression of the framerate of reality having been temporarily increased.
How long ago did you complete your protocol? I thought it was a very interesting experience, and have spent years wondering if rTMS actually helped me or not. Although I did not notice many positive acute effects at the time, things definitely got better over time.
If rTMS works, it probably does so by increasing coordination in areas of the brain responsible for executive functioning, allowing the recipient an increased ability to evaluate and respond to sources of stress, negative thoughts, or emotions. If this is true, I wouldn't necessarily expect to feel any effects, but I might expect to, over the course of time, slowly develop better habits as it pertains to how I interact with my thoughts and feelings.
At the end of the day, this leaves me with effectively no reliable data on whether or not it helped me, so I suppose I will continue to wonder. I would be interested to know if Scott has had any experience with it in his practice.
I think my last treatment was in August or September of 2020. The experience was interesting to say the least, effects were numerous and not at all subtle though I think they've pretty much subsided now. I had a very consistent post-session state of mind, a quieting of thoughts, kind of Zen. Increased frame-rate is not how I'd describe it but it's in the same ballpark. This would only last a few hours though and then I would get... something else, it wasn't predictable and changed throughout the treatment period. My executive function was at various times better in some ways and worse in others, for a while I was doing a lot of long term planning and committing to some semi large life decisions, I don't regret anything but this is totally out of character for me. At the same time I was way less able to care about my day job and giving myself a lot of slack. I'm talking about calling in not sick, reading the internet, and spacing off during meetings. The other big thing was that, for a couple of weeks, I was speaking with much more fluency and ease, whereas I usually trip over my words a lot or freeze up when generating language in real time. Weirdly, I don't think this transferred over to writing, I continued to agonize over my written words as usual. There's more, if I ever get around to it I'll write it all out in r/rtms (which I moderate now), but at no point during or after the treatment did I feel less depressed.
I've done a lot of reading about the technology, and my impression is that currently available protocols are quite primitive and basically a crap shoot. If you've read about the SAINT protocol, they get miraculous response rates, and there are a handful of surrounding studies that back up the basic idea, which is that parts of the DLPFC are functionally anti-correlated to the scACC, that quieting that little bastard down is the real goal, and that it's impossible to do so reliably with the 5.5cm rule or even with MRI positioning, due to variations in brain anatomy and the particulars of the underlying circuitry.
BTW, it's awesome that you managed to beat or at least tame the depression, that's not an easy feat. If it wasn't the TMS what would you attribute that to?
Can anyone suggest a good book on neoliberalism, in the sense of "the particular set of reforms that happened in the US in the 1970s and 1980s"? I'm most interested in what the reforms were, what the arguments for and against were, and how they developed over time.
Neoliberalism wasn't specific to the U.S. Thatcher arguably had a bigger effect than Reagan. Prior to the Great Recession diverting Scott Sumner, he had been researching that period and wrote the paper "The Great Danes", which as you might guess has a title inspired by much reform there was in Scandinavia: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1629940
The Role of Monetary Policy is a primary document of the era (https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/AEA-AER_03_01_1968.pdf) In it Friedman states that using growth in the money supply to decrease the unemployment rate only works in the short term, and predicts stagflation before it became apparent. This spelled the end of the postwar Keynesian model that believed inflation and recession were mutually exclusive because of an interpretation of the Phillips curve that proved incorrect in the long term.
But you have to go into the comments for his note about how the RBC approach displaced the Friedman/Lucas Chicago school approach which still used sticky wages/prices (and hence the monetary non-neutrality that made for "monetarism").
"Can anyone suggest a good book on neoliberalism, in the sense of "the particular set of reforms that happened in the US in the 1970s and 1980s"?"
Way too limited view; neoliberalism from the 1970s to 1990s dominated thinking from Indonesia to New Zealand. U.S. had some banking and schooling deregulation in the 1990s and some transportation deregulation in the 1970s; that was roughly it.
I think that neoliberalism is less a real ideology, than a backlash against the consequences of social-democratic policies, as well as a reflection of changes in the voters of labor parties, who had increasingly become PMCs rather than the working class. As a result, their class interests became more aligned with economic liberalism than a very strong welfare state. So they mostly became classical libertarians on economic issue. They distinguished themselves from the parties that housed the classical libertarians by being more socially progressive, as the classical libertarians tend to form parties with mild conservatives and were also far less interventionist/authoritarian.
Tony Blair justified this change in politics as follows: "My kind of socialism is a set of values based around notions of social justice. [...] Socialism as a rigid form of economic determinism has ended, and rightly"
Note that this social justice is not (yet) Social Justice. It's more of a 'White man's burden' belief that the privileged can and need to help the downtrodden, rather than the idea that the white man is keeping others down.
The most common term for this change in the labor parties (and the left in general) is 'Third way' politics. I see the use of the term 'neoliberalism' as a red flag that people don't understand what happened.
----
Some of the main policies of Third way politicians:
1. Reduce the welfare state. As the welfare state expanded, it caused more and more bad side effects. Professional unemployed people, who simply refused to work as they were perfectly content with the generous welfare. Professional students, who loved student life and didn't bother to get a move on, being a student for a decade, even though their study was supposed to be done in 4 years. Etc. Third way politicians reduced the benefits and made more demands of people in return for welfare.
2. Privatize. The great expansion of government services had resulted in a lot of poorly functioning government organizations, that couldn't match the quality of the private sector. The Third way solution was to (semi-)privatize many of these organizations. Have companies bid for government contracts, competing with each other to offer the best deal, rather than have the government do it themselves.
3. Fight crime. There was a huge spike in crime in the 60's-80's. Third way politicians were much less soft on crime than their predecessors.
The book you are looking for is Quinn Slobodian's "Globalists", published a few years ago, which is an exhaustive history of the theory and practice of neoliberalism from the 1920s onwards, starting in Europe. It's particularly good on the contrast between the strong state which the theorists wanted in order to protect contracts and to enforce free competition (no trades unions, for example), and the weak state they wanted for all other purposes except the protection of property.
My wife worked at a day care center many years ago and I assisted one of the County subsidized families -- two children, tiny apartment both parents working at low wage jobs -- with tax preparation and was appalled at how much tax they paid!
You mean state tax, or what? Social security? About 50% of people don't pay any federal income tax and I would assume they are included in that figure.
At least some, if not most, of the people not paying any income tax aren't required to file and aren't seeking out tax preparation services thanks to that.
In 1999, Ray Kurzweil made a bunch of predictions about what technology, life, and politics would be like in 2019. In this series of recent blog posts, the accuracy of those predictions is assessed:
I feel that the approach to grading these predictions isn't really appropriate to the subject material. Kurzweil was selling a holistic vision of the future, not a series of highly specific, concrete predictions, and that holistic vision was obviously *way* more advanced than 2019 turned out to be. Pokemon Go doesn't even partially salvage the idea that we would all be immersed in augmented reality with omnipresent AR glasses and contact lenses.
I appreciate the desire to be generous in one's critique, but here I think it misleads.
My basic read through Kurzweil's 2009 is that it's a mixed bag of predictions... for the year 2021. Like, some of the stuff still seems a bit in the future, some of it is, like, slightly askew from how technology was actually used, but technically possible, lots of it is right-on (for 2021), a few are wacky and clearly wrong.
So I'd call Kurzweil probably about... 12-15 years optimistic on his 2009 predictions. My guess is that his 2019 predictions will be fairly good by the 2040s.
Whereas Armstrong attempts to put numbers to the actual accuracy of Kurzweil's predictions overall, Militant Futurist instead chooses to go into detail explaining why several of the predictions have turned out true or false. I've found both approaches to this issue interesting.
That's interesting! Ray Kurzweil seems to have completely missed the mark on the vast majority of predictions.
I shared this with a friend and he pointed out that this is also the case for the vast majority of predictions in George Friedman's The Next 100 Years [1] - the predictions are not only wrong, but overall comically wrong. Furthermore, this seems to be the case for everyone that tries to make actual brave, falsifiable predictions for more than a decade into the future.
If anyone knows of any counter-examples, I'd be happy to hear!
Lots of people make lots of accurate predictions for more than a decade out -- they just usually aren't that interesting, so they don't end up giving you a career in Futurism. "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is a provocative, exciting title. "The Age of Cell Phones Have Big Touch Screens And You Can Call A Taxi On Them" is not.
There's like this no-man's land in futurism at 1-4 decades out. It's far enough away that you can't make highly accurate predictions based on what's sort of "just around the corner," so accuracy suffers, but close enough that, realistically, not actually all that much is going to change. If you want an exciting book or blog post or whatever, you have to bias towards saying that change is going to happen much faster than is realistic. But beyond 40 or so years, when there's enough time for really significant change, people kinda lose interest in speculative non-fiction. It's like, okay, but I'll be dead or at least really old by then.
There's been some reasonably decent sci-fi. Aside from the obvious Jules Verne basically calling submarines, I think the space odyssey series got it about right. We're obviously not actually taking any manned trips to Jupiter, but that's lack of desire, not that the technology doesn't exist. And HAL9000 is about what a real AI control system could accomplish (though Alexa clearly has no fear of death). I suspect the Expanse series is probably pretty close to what 200 years from now will be like, minus the discovery of history changing alien tech.
Meh – the Expanse universe is based on some kind of crazy drive whereby every spaceship, including the cheap junkers, can run their rockets continuously throughout an entire voyage in the solar system (and then perform effectively a 'suicide burn' at the _halfway point_). That's a fairly subtle 'magic technology', tho there is a (brief) vivid description of the drive's first test. That's a _huge_ difference between our world and the books/show.
AT&T's "you wlll" ads were from 1993 and had tons of accurate predictions about 20 or so years in the future, except that the company that brought them wasn't AT&T.
I wrote an overly long post on some thoughts I had about Scott's ConTracked idea and the general concept of using betting markets to make short-term decisions, Would appreciate any thoughts people have
I'll take this opportunity to hijack your thread - I thought up ConTracked as part of a sci-fi short story I'm trying to write. The idea is that instead of getting a singleton AI, we get a big prediction market, with lots of AI algorithmic traders, that might as well be a singleton - ie it has unified "beliefs" in the sense of a probability about which specific things will happen. In the story, this prediction market gradually becomes sentient and starts killing its enemies. So the question is: how would a sentient prediction market assassinate people?
It could just boringly hire contract killers like everyone else. But I wanted to see if I could have some kind of analogy to active inference in the brain, where it essentially acts by artificially skewing predictions and letting the world bring them back in line again.
The best I can think of is something like ConTracked - it creates assassination markets, sells YES shares at a fixed artificially-low price, and then whoever buys them has an incentive to assassinate the target. But this creates a lot of coordination problems - if you think other people will assassinate the target, you should just buy shares and sit on them. I'm still not sure what a really elegant solution would be.
I challenge you to go through the situation in discrete steps to actually bring about the contradiction you’re worried about—I don’t think you can.
As a simplifying assumption, imagine there is only one assassin in the world (who never fails), the market question is “will the assassin kill the target?”, and the target has zero risk of other causes of death.
Market participants have a probabilistic understanding of at what point it becomes profitable for the assassin to start working *and this is priced in*. For example, maybe they know that there is a 50% chance that it will be worth it for the assassin to kill if he can buy YES for $.05. Well, in a properly functioning market, the expected value of YES and NO is equal. So the price can never reach $.05, because that would have expected values of YES (50% * ($1 -$.05)) != NO (50% * ($1 - $.95)). Instead, the price YES of would be pushed up from $.05 as long as market participants had capital available. The trick that gives the assassin an edge is that she has information everyone else doesn’t—she knows at which price she will perform the assassination. Instead of having to use a fuzzy uncertainty distribution over market prices to determine expected value, she has a step function that’s 0% before the price and 100% beyond it.
So, to cause an assassination, all you need to do is push the price of YES arbitrarily low so that the assassin’s payoff approaches infinity. The obstacle to this is the available capital of the other market participants, though of course if you are running the market you can just cheat and sell YESs without matching NOs and move the price arbitrarily. Although you’re still on the hook for paying out on all the YESs you’ve issued unless you want a very angry assassin on your hands...
Suppose this is a normal market run by non-murderous people. The mere existence of a prediction market on assassination should equally incentivize assassination vs. protection, since there will be people on both sides, but probably won't incentivize either very hard. It will stabilize at more or less whatever the real percent of some third party assassinating the guy is.
Now suppose I'm some manipulator trying to use the market to assassinate someone. I bid down the price of "will get assassinated" until it's unnaturally low. But then the normal prediction market mechanism kicks in - normal non-assassin investors see that it's underpriced and bid it back up to its correct price again. I've wasted my money and nobody is especially incentivized to assassinate the guy.
1. there is no price that will incentivize anyone to perform the assassination
2. if there is a price, it's not possible to move the market to reach that price
My previous comment is trying to address 1 and establish why the assassin has an investing edge over people who just "think [someone else] will assassinate the target".
For 2, the fact is that "normal non-assassin investors" have a finite amount of capital to buy YES, and if you have more than that you can move the market. This is easier the smaller the participation in the market is. The limit case where the assassin and the manipulator are the only ones is equivalent to just paying directly. In your story, likely the AIs have become so good at prediction markets that they control most of the capital participating in them and have the ability to significantly move the markets. After all, this is necessary for them to push normal markets towards the right prediction despite all the stupid humans playing too.
PS: the existence of a market actually incentivizes the less-likely outcome more, because it provides a better ROI. Of course, there must still be non-market factors affecting the outcome, otherwise the market equilibrium would be 50%.
1) You open a market, "Will POTUS be assassinated in March"
2) Market settles at a whatever equilibrium
3) You sell 10 million YES shares at 50 cents, each paying 1$ if the president is in fact assassinated
3a) if the market ends up buying all or most of them, an assassin has no incentive to step in and actually do the job; you get $5 million profit
3b) an assassin sees the offer, decides it's worth it, buys all the shares you offered at once, goes and does the job, then collects his $10 million from you (for $5 million profit)
3c) the assassin sees the offer, buys all the shares, fails - you get $5 million for having your time wasted.
There is no need to manipulate markets, since it's not necessary that the shares you offer are actually settled. You just make a sell bid at price that is ridiculously unattractive to anyone but an assassin that can pull it off.
I feel like the entire reasoning that @boog laid out is deeply flawed.
1) the market is really the order book, not just the last price
2) if you want someone dead, you should invest in their assassination market regardless of what you think the outcome will be
I don't think anything I said was strictly wrong, but you're correct that you don't need to move the price before the assassin makes their order. However, your offer does put an artificial ceiling at 50 cents—if the order book was deep enough to allow the assassin to execute (hah) their order without your offer they would have already done so.
Some things I haven't thought all the way through:
- What if the assassin makes their own out-of-the-money buy offer?
- How does the market itself react to these blatantly suspicious outstanding orders?
Ooh, that's a good one, since it prices out the background risk. It's probably a bad idea as stated, because that warns the victim which day to hide, but maybe something else specific like "assassinated with a certain kind of bullet".
In order not to warn the victim, your bid is encrypted, and you provide the key when you come to collect on your prediction. Or just post the hash of a long text which includes somewhere the day you are bidding on. Then post the plaintext to be checked against the hash when you collect.
Imagine a market in securities on when some event will happen. The objective is to generate information, so you want insiders to bid, but you know that insiders will be reluctant to reveal their information in their bid. So you allow people to offer bids with the date represented by a hash of a message containing the date. When the event happens, anyone who claims to have correctly predicted it submits the message, you hash it, if that matches the hash that was posted that person collects, everyone else pays.
The post calls them "Fixed-point problems" (my brain corrupted this to "fixed-point effects", which caused me to have a bit of trouble re-finding it). Personally I avoid this family of issues by not p̶r̶e̶d̶i̶c̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶k̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶s̶i̶t̶u̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶p̶p̶e̶n̶ participating in prediction markets*.
*Do Substack comments support Markdown? I feel like Substack comments should support Markdown. (I used some website I found on a search engine to strikethrough my text in its presumed absence.)
I've been glad to see your recent posts on unpacking what's going on inside 'depression', but I feel like they're going in a direction that doesn't ring true to me. In case it is interesting or useful I'd like to present an alternate take from my experience with the condition. Of course this is based only on my anecdotal evidence as a person who has been very depressed in their life. (Also, of course there are a bunch of things that are lumped into the word 'depression', and I can only speak to the version I've experienced.) Sorry if this is all obvious, or if it's just obviously wrong to someone with more expertise on the subject, but it seems to do a good job of explaining things that I see in the world so feels worth sharing.
Suppose we model the way the brain works as a processor that runs a certain program that deals with sensory data and internal stimuli, and produces thoughts and behaviors. The model presented in "The Precision Of Sensory Evidence" is that the processor is running a program which overweights priors and down-weights sensory evidence, and thus produces a person who acts depressed. Another explanation of depression is the old "chemical imbalance" pseudo-explanation, which says that the processor itself isn't working correctly in some way. I think each of these addresses aspects of the disease but not really the whole thing, and my justification for that claim is that I think I can describe the disease in a way that implies each of these.
A 'healthy' mental program, in a non-depressed person, would have this behavior: in response to [the internal and external inputs I receive], and according to [my rough model of who I am and what I ought to be doing in the world], it produces [behaviors and thoughts that keep me happy and productive]. Critically, it is both a good program on its own, and it is good when run against the reality of their life. Where would they get such a program? Well, they have constructed it throughout their life, and, after whatever course they took through life, they have ended up with a program that is relatively effective in the situation they end up in.
I believe that (my / some others') depression results from the lack of a well-adapted program of this sort. There is just no good model of "what you ought to be doing" or "who you ought to be" that is consistent with the program you have thus written in your life. Maybe because things keep going badly -- social interactions don't produce the positive results they're supposed to, so you've downweighted seeking them out; striving for goals hasn't produced results, so you've downweighted trying. Traumatic experiences, maybe, cause your brain to modify its program to avoid certain behaviors or downweight evidence to avoid thinking of them. And the thoughts and behaviors you fall back to, for lack of _good_ ones, have negative side effects that put you in a worse position to improve the situation.
I'm hand-waving the mechanisms, of course, but the details aren't important so much as the idea that: depression is "having a bad program". I'm guessing that the symptoms of depression follow from a running a cognitive program that just doesn't have anything useful to do, so it falls back to either nothing or the most simple behaviors, such as ingrained habits and responding to inputs. Or it gets caught up on what strong signals it does have, like anxieties, because it doesn't have a more useful strong impulse to do anything.
The critical point here is that fixing depression ought to require a _constructive_ treatment: rather than "fixing the processor", like patching a pothole, it's "getting a better program". Which is necessarily hard, because you may have to _build_ something. I just have trouble believing that everyone's brains "aren't working right, at a chemical level" and that's why we have an epidemic of depression; I think it's more likely that they're working mostly right, they're just doing something ineffective.
This, imo, is why therapy is so important compared to medication. Medication can sometimes patch up the processor to, say, lessen the strength of negative signals, but constructive effort is required to _write a new program_ that is more well-adjusted to the world, such that you don't regress into this maladjusted state. But therapy helps because it directly attacks the problem of your program not working against your environment.
I expect that the way behavior works is that you have a built-in model of what kind of person you are, and what kinds of things that person would do, and predictive-processing produces what your actual ideas of behavior. 'Self-concept' therapy addresses that your model is broken, so predicts bad behaviors. CBT addresses the program that you run on sensory inputs that produces bad results. Etc. Or sometimes the best therapy is just going to be "switching environments" -- maybe your program is fine, for where you grew up, but it can't handle a toxic workplace, or living in a place where you don't really know how to comfortably socialize. Or maybe you just need someone to encourage you to go try some ways of interacting with the world (a new hobby or social group or something), and once you do and you get some positive feedback from that, you find yourself on the path back to being reasonably well-adjusted, and your brain starts working again.
I suspect that the brain was never really supposed to be able to end up in situations that it had no effective behaviors in. Maybe this is a modern problem: in the distant past you had to feed yourself and find shelter and other more basic needs, or you lived in some tribal society where your behavior was strongly dictated for you. But with those needs removed, you need to derive purpose from somewhere else -- maybe a strongly-held identity, or maybe a relationship with society or some abstract goal in life. And if you don't have _those_, your brain kinda breaks down because it doesn't know what to do with itself.
The brain seems to fix itself when placed in a new environment and forced into new activities (behavioral activation therapy).
In my experience, there's a healthy brain underneath the depressive process but it's overwhelmed by the broken "narration" / toxic thought loops. In an actual, biological crisis situation you can actually feel better because the adrenalin temporarily overrides the depressive habits. For me it would be impossible to think myself out of depression, while keeping myself busy to just starve it out of mental resources works really well. I think the better "program" just builds itself subconsciously as the previous one is decaying.
I feel like this is a look purely from the psychotherapy side of things. Certainly what you're saying, I suspect, often matches the subjective experience of depression, and fixing these problems ("getting a better program") is what therapy is supposed to do. This works (kind of), so there's probably some truth in what you're saying.
But, you know, it sure is suspicious that some people who take what you're saying as a given try all sorts of mechanisms to fix themselves (therapy, self-help, etc.) with little to no success, and then finally get prescribed SSRIs or something and suddenly all of these problems disappear like smoke and the program miraculously fixes itself without any conscious intervention.
(of course, there are surely people with the opposite kinds of experience - "antidepressants did nothing for me, but then I read this awesome book and it totally changed my life." I'm just saying that both exist.)
I think you're seriously wrong when you say that your explanation implies predictive processing or chemical imbalances, and that therapy attacks the cause and medication attacks the effects. Personally, well, I wouldn't quite say that it's the other way around because the brain is very complicated and it's almost certain that cause and effect run both ways here, but my intuition is that conscious experience is unreliable as evidence for reasoning about the brain. Reductionism also seems to imply (I think?) that lower-level processes should have a much easier time influencing higher-level ones than the other way around.
It would be more exact to say that the causality *can* work both ways. As stated, there are people who are majorly helped by drugs and not by work on their minds, and there are people like Julian Simon who cured his depression by pretty much inventing cognitive therapy.
So I was recently diagnosed as autistic in my thirties. Have had mental health issues (depression) since I was a teenager, started seeing a new therapist, new therapist thinks I have autism. It does make a lot of sense--I, at the very least, have what Scott refers to as "quirky engineer" traits, and I have sensory issues.
I mentioned this to my parents, and they were having none of it. Apparently my quirkiness had been noted early and I had been given a general assessment, which said I was gifted. They gave me links to some 'traits of gifted people' resources, and I was very surprised: a lot of the stuff labeled 'traits of gifted people' also happen to be just straight up the traits of 'high functioning autistic people', including things like sensory problems that I wouldn't have expected to be there ("sensual over-excitability" is the unfortunate term in the gifted literature, apparently).
I'm aware there's lots of chatter about how some things we term mental illness may be adaptive mechanisms in other contexts, but I've never seen two disciplines describing exactly the same thing in very different contexts (or at least, something that appeared that way to me as a layperson). I'm curious if anyone knows if there's anything else out there like this.
Not sure this qualifies, but I’ve noticed that at first blush autism and trauma symptoms have some substantial overlap. Failure to react appropriately to social cues and overexcitability come to mind. Likewise it can be difficult for practitioners to distinguish between bipolar and BPD.
For many years I thought I was mildly autistic, but eventually figured out that complex PTSD tracked better with my deficits. One imagines there might be a causal relationship there for some - being autistic seems at least mildly traumatic.
My therapist girlfriend comments that disambiguating personality disorders is generally difficult. Also social anxiety can kind of read like autism in the first session or two. Are you missing all of these social cues because you can’t see them, because you don’t care, or because it’s too stressful to generate an appropriate response? Come back next week so I can find out!
Yes, that has been my experience as well! Across three therapists, I have six diagnoses, and my mental health issues are relatively mild--enough for me to seek out help, but not enough that I am disabled by them, like some are. Yet it seems to be a giant puzzle.
As we get better at figuring out what's going on in the brain, I imagine psychology will radically change. I imagine we're eventually going to find out that there are lots of subtle ways for the brain to malfunction, and our current labels are too coarse-grained and too symptom-oriented.
In the book Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children by James T. Webb et al., the authors discuss the similarities and differences between Asperger's disorder and giftedness at great length. The authors give three disambiguating characteristics:
1. The social inability in children with Asperger's disorder is stable when they interact with a wide range of peers, while gifted children without Asperger's disorder can have very good social interaction with a certain set of peers (who share their interests and/or are on their cognitive level)
2. Gifted children without Asperger's have good insight in their social condition and understand when they are seen as outsiders (=they demonstrate at least some theory of mind), while children with Asperger's do not.
3. Gifted children without Asperger's show asynchronous development, but they don't have areas where their development is years behind their age (e.g. enjoying kid's TV shows while being intellectually ahead in other areas). This happens in gifted children with Asperger's (serious issues in social development while taking college classes).
[Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, James T. Webb et al., 2016 p. 143f]
I am not completely sure what the current understanding of Asperger's and autism is, but the book probably has a much stricter understanding of Asperger's disease than the popular understanding. In popular understanding and activism, it often seens that the definition of autism has been extended so much that it often envelops any quirky behaviour. So it is definitely very interesting that giftedness can present as something similar.
So I don't really think this film series will go over here but I still want to recommend it. Adam Curtis has put out a new series of videos on the BBC called "I Can't Get You Out of My Head."
If you aren't in the UK that link will be no good for you. The first three are viewable here. I think they are pirated but I can't imagine Curtis cares:
So, I am, apparently, late to Curtis, who is well known among those I consider to be my cohort. This is the first of his films I've seen and I've yet to watch the last, 2 hour long installment. But I have watched the first 5 and taken copious notes.
By episode four, I think, he makes an especially damning case about how the viewpoint of society changed in a way that made it very difficult for politicians to be anything but toadies. While I don't really consider myself to be a rationalist exactly I like you guys and I think you all have the potential to undergird some politicians who could be strong.
You need to watch all the films before 4 I think to get it but in 4 it really comes home why they are all so weak now and the roll they serve as punching bags standing in front of the monied interests.
Aesthetically, Curtis is a very interesting filmmaker, a sort of essayist who writes in archival footage. He describes himself, however, merely as a political journalist, but one who understands better how to use music to set a mood and keep people interested better than his peers.
I think Curtis’s work makes more sense seen as provocative art than political journalism. He has a talent for finding truly *incredible* archive footage, and his editing is masterful — I find the films hypnotic and sometimes really beautiful. I honestly could watch his stuff indefinitely, it’s so strangely pleasurable.
And his broad political point - that currently the world is lacking a compelling, non-discredited political ideology that can bring people together for a common purpose - is one I have some sympathy with.
But in terms of an actual historical argument, I think it’s weak, sometimes deceptive, and regularly outright laughable (how many times over the years has he declared things like “Meanwhile, in the United States of America, all positive visions of the future had died”?)
This latest series, to me, suffered from those issues even more than usual. There also seemed to be a kind of defensiveness in it this time around. I think Curtis talking directly about conspiracy theories comes a bit close to home. His style had always played with conspiracy tropes (though, to his credit, the various elites moulding society are never portrayed as evil, usually as deluded but more or less good-faith) - he’s knitting complex, geographically disparate, decades-long historical movements into a simple story, using narrative techniques shared by YouTube truthers. But when the actual theme of the series is conspiracy theories, to me there seemed to be a (justified) anxiety there that it’s too hard to distinguish sophisticated self-conscious “playing with the form” from the form itself.
For anyone who has any feelings whatsoever about Dostoyevsky, here's a piece of modern Russian counter-culture where Dostoyevsky comes back to life (kind of).
It's called "Idiot". The main character is Dostoyevsky; the woman's online nick is "Marmeladka", after Sonya Marmeladova from "Crime and Punishment".
It's watchable without understanding the background song, although the song is a part of it.
If you opt for checking out the Russian version, Russian lyrics for the song are, for example, at https://text-pesni.com/xyrj . Google translate does an amazingly decent job of dealing with them, so I recommend just pasting them in.
Starting from 1:56 and to the end, the only words are the repeating "Idiot", "without a homeland".
Russian signs in the video:
0:08: on the left screen - "Novel", over the keyboard - "Macintosh"
0:10: on the center screen - "Preparing to copy" (in old Russian orthography)
0:16: "Detected creation of harmful content"
0:17: flashing sign - "destroy"
0:26: "Copy 100% completed"
1:15: "Wanted: replicant"
1:36: "Project Rebirth archive" (in old orthography)
1:38: bottom of the screen, "lyubo: 1821" (obsolete word I'm not sure of the meaning of in this context),"start of the project #Rebirth"
1:40: "lyubo: 1881" (see 1:38), "enclaves are ready #Rebirth"
Exciting! It wasn't clear why the futuristic aero-jet-ski flies straight into St. Isaak Cathedral's dome on 1:28 but out of Kazan Cathedral (3/4 of a mile away) at 2:04. Other than that, the rest of the flick is genuine Fyodor Mikhailovich. :)
That's a great catch. Thank you! My only excuse for not noticing this is that I'm not from St. Petersburg, but the buildings do look completely different in the video.
Thanks. As you guessed, I am; long ago but not much changed for the last 40 years. Dostoevskij was born in 1821 (hence, the reference) and died in 1881 (the next slide 1:39. Also, Nastasya (2:22) is the reference to Nastasya Filipovna, the heroine of The Idiot.
You might also enjoy a modern parody on the Idiot, the movie Down House (2001) if you haven't seen it.
Reading "The Pacific War: 1931-1945" by Saburo Ienaga. Also tried out the Wubi input method for Chinese today (I am trying to learn Chinese); seems pretty interesting, but requires knowledge of character stroke orders.
Interesting take on the tax prep post about the Obamacare penalty. My understanding (maybe wrong?) was it was never high enough to pay for the subsidies, and was also low enough that young healthy people with income weren't incentivized to buy insurance.
But looks like it still managed to screw some low income people. Congress should have waived the penalty for them. But I'd still like the current congress to raise it to $1 just to make the SCOTUS case trickier. I believe they could do that with 51 votes.
(Disclaimer: I am on Obamacare and otherwise support it - I'm not eligible for anything else).
A lot of low income people got hit with the penalty. Many working class families that could have qualified for a subsidy still saw it as a poor deal. If you could get a $100/m Obamacare subsidy based on your income and the price of the plan dropped from $300 to $200/m, it still was not worth it to them. We know these families do not have enough cash on hand to pay a single small car repair so they do not have an excess $200/month to pay for health insurance; especially if they are otherwise healthy and have not been to a doctor or hospital in years. The additional utility of the insurance is not seen as beneficial. That $200 is better used towards food and it's not hard to see why they went that route. Since the penalty is only applied at the end of the year during tax time it is just taken out of any refund they would have received. Penalizing low and middle income families with a penalty always seemed like an ill advised idea.
That was our experience for a while. My wife was on Obamacare for a few years, but realized that she spent more in premiums than the total cost of the actual services (by a lot!). When she switched to self pay/cash it also turned out that a lot of the doctors charged a small fraction (10-30%) of their normal costs if you paid cash. It was definitely worth it to pay the penalty at the end of the year. Between paying cash instead of signing up for Obamacare and the end of year penalty, the law became quite unpopular in our house.
Isn't this exactly what you would expect with any insurance? And exactly the argument for the mandate and penalty? Just evidence that the penalty was too small. Most of the time insurance should be cost ineffective.
I agree of course that service providers charging more to insured users creates bad incentives, but I don't see the connection to Obamacare since that happens with other insurance.
The question is when individuals compare their own needs verses the cost. For my wife, relatively young and healthy, the costs outweighed the benefit by thousands of dollars a year (she never end met the deductible). For the same cost, a person with much greater needs would find far more value in the same plan.
Averaged out between someone like my wife with low needs and someone with much higher needs (or across the aggregate), the plans made sense. But in our case, the plan most certainly did not. I suppose you could have raised the penalty to the point that it would have incentivized us to continue paying for a plan we didn't need. That penalty would have needed to be upwards of $5,000 in our case. That number is still less than the premiums + deductible we were paying.
That is how most insurance *should* operate. The fact that many people see it as a savings account they need to get their money back out from is a problem.
Except this isn't intended to be a regular insurance product that people can _choose_ to purchase.
The whole mandate is bullshit – understandable given the CBO bullshit involved in passing Obamacare, but still bullshit.
If the _point_ of the whole thing was to provide insurance to some people, they should have just raised taxes (or added new ones) to pay for it. They didn't because of other political 'constraints' and, predictably, a lot of people are stuck choosing among several options that aren't great for them.
> relatively young and healthy, the costs outweighed the benefit by thousands of dollars a year (she never end met the deductible).
Do you have a good estimate for the expected value of the cost of the treatments you need? The main point of having insurance is in case you have some serious disease or accident that costs $100000.
Yes, we understood that, and I sought a different job that had family coverage insurance partly for that reason.
We would have been perfectly happy with a much cheaper catastrophic plan that had a high deductible but low premium. That isn't an option through Obamacare, so we ended up with a high premium plan that also had a pretty high deductible.
Man, you say that, but I was "young and healthy" until I wasn't and suddenly needed three spine surgeries in the span of 16 months. United sent me statements of what the providers and hospitals charged them and it was well in excess of two million dollars. I'm glad as hell I had insurance.
Of course, health insurance isn't really "insurance" in the traditional sense. Unless you die young, you're almost guaranteed to become expensive to serve at some point, and much of the point in pooling expenses is for the young to subsidize the old, knowing that someday they too will be old.
Ok, but what do you do in the "hit by a bus" situation? Call up an insurer in the ER to sign up while you are bleeding out? I've been in the ER a few times and I definitely did _not_ see it coming. And for most people, ER costs, without insurance, will be life-changing debt.
Life-changing debt? I'm skeptical. Medical bills aren't student loans – you can escape them via bankruptcy, which sucks, but isn't a permanent obstacle to accessing credit in the future.
And also, add on to that group the other group of people who would be financially better off getting Obamacare, but can't figure out the forms to sign up or get the executive function to fill them out. The insurance signup process isn't the easiest thing, and apparently there're unexpected pitfalls - I know someone who qualified for the a subsidized plan but apparently missed some box so didn't get the subsidy for her first month and had to wait on the phone a couple hours to get it for subsequent months. I expect some of the people who find tax forms so difficult will find this also difficult, and some of them will put it off just like the people who come into VITA asking if we can do their last four years' worth of taxes.
The US health insurance market isn't insurance. I don't know what to call it, but it's not like any other insurance market in the world. I'm not in the business any more, but I used to work a bit for an auto insurance company and a lot of our effort was trying to better model risk than our competitors so that we could poach their customers by offering lower premiums while still making a profit. (Things like "how can we better differentiate whether someone made a claim because they are actually a bad driver and likely to make another claim versus someone who was just unlucky?) But health insurers aren't allowed to evaluate risk *at all*, they are required to offer the same premium to everybody who applies. Which creates the problem that the customers know their risk level way better than the insurance company does, or at least is allowed to account for. The result is that relatively healthy people will rationally decline to buy insurance. Which explains the need for a strict penalty - if you allow people to decline to buy insurance, the only people left in the market will be the sick and the premiums would be astronomical. What I find interesting is that this creates a HUGE incentive among the companies to cherry-pick their customers - the reason your companies health policy offers a subsidized gym membership isn't because working out makes you healthier and less like to make claims (though that may be a very small effect), it's because the types of people who will find such a benefit valuable are more likely to be healthy otherwise. In the auto industry we want to advertise how easy our claims are - we want our prospective customers to know we won't make it difficult to make a claim. But health insurers have the exact opposite incentive - they certainly don't want to make a big deal about how easy claims are, and in fact may subtly want to get the word out that claims are *difficult*, because the healthy people they are trying to attract are less likely to be worried about their limited interaction with the medical system and the people most likely to be dissuaded by challenging paperwork are the ones with the most experience as a patient.
Most other health insurance markets, where they exist even nominally, are fairly similar, i.e. 'distorted'. The U.S. is somewhat of an outlier in being particularly complex and burdened with various path-dependent vestigial legacies.
But where in the world is health insurance "the primary source of healthcare"? Do you mean the primary payment/finance option for healthcare? Or are you thinking of something like an HMO on steroids (e.g. where the insurance company runs or is partnered with specific clinics, hospitals, etc.)?
I mean that many developed countries have healthcare funding systems that are referred to as "insurance" in some way (e.g. the broad category of "social health insurance"). I agree that these systems are certainly not free markets (although I think some of the private health insurance markets in countries that aren't the US might be).
Words mean what we want them to mean, but I think it is unhelpfully confusing to say as John above does that something is only "insurance" if it is traded in a free market, given that that's not how most people use the word in this context.
The point is that "the US doesn't have a free market in health insurance" isn't a good explanation for why the US healthcare system is dysfunctional in many ways relative to those of other countries, because the other countries don't either.
I think John's point, which I also share, is that there is a specific financial product once known as 'insurance', and it, e.g. works in a specific way, has particular 'failure modes', etc., and that 'social insurance' and the like are very different. I didn't interpret John as claiming that 'insurance' (in the original sense) can only exist in a (perfectly?) 'free market'; just that the various government funding systems around the world aren't the same thing, and are in fact very different.
Complaining about language drift is very much like yelling at clouds and yet some of us are bothered by the difficulty of now referring to 'OG insurance'.
I think "the US doesn't have a free market in health insurance" _is_ a pretty good explanation for a lot of our dysfunction – as good as most 'social science' explanations. The U.S. (in a very poetic sense) both 'wants' a free market in health insurance and also a fully socialized non-market in health care services – the tension between the two conflicting desires _is_ I think a very good explanation for our dysfunction. I think we'd be much less dysfunctional were we to commit to either option fully. Alas, neither seems likely any time soon.
As far as I can tell, U.S. healthcare is dysfunctional relative to that of other countries only in its cost. I have an old blog post looking at the WHO study that is often cited as showing the inferiority of American health care, and except for cost it doesn't.
I agree that US healthcare isn't obvious worse than comparable countries in some cost-independent measure of quality of treatment, and is quite probably better in some aspects (I don't think overall judgements are really possible because of the many confounders and disagreement over metric).
But total spending being very high is not exactly a small issue, and there seem to be a lot of other problems to do with costs as well (people suddenly facing extremely high costs for treatment, prices often being irrational/random/fake, choices about jobs etc. being made based on access to healthcare in ways that don't happen in other countries, and so on).
I agree. IME, people do gripe about elements other than cost/price, but overall it seems roughly just as effective (and definitely better in some areas) as any other system.
Really, it seems like people generally would prefer to just not have to think about (let alone manage) the cost of health care. I'm sympathetic! A previously-libertarian-ish friend of mine has pulled me more towards sanguine acceptance of a future 'socialization' of healthcare in the U.S.. I anticipate any such implementation being bad in the standard ways we're bad at such things, and I'm skeptical that it's likely anyways, let alone 'inevitable'. But I'm much less worried about the consequences regardless. Hanson (and others) have convinced me that most healthcare is more about 'care' than 'health'.
(Personally, I'd still prefer to at least have the option to access a 'real' free market in healthcare products and services.)
Two thoughts relative to Covid that I have not seen elsewhere ...
1. Perhaps the 30% of the population that has been infected counts more towards herd immunity since they are likely the least covid-careful persons? Behavior is not homogenous and the disease selects for bad behavior. This might help explain the dramatic covid reduction the past few weeks. Perhaps our “total risk pool” has shrunk non-linearly?
2. I’ve seen Dr. Fauci analyzed as a tension between “do real medicine” and “ serve the political masters”. Perhaps his role also includes “do whatever will cause the population to collectively behave in a beneficial manner”. Of course he could not admit or discuss such a role.
I think for the non-homogeneity of the population, it matters a lot whether there are two separate sub-populations with different risk behavior, or if there is one overall population with high-risk connectors and low-risk branches. In the latter case, once the high-risk people are immune, the branches have fewer risky contacts. But in the former case, once the high-risk population is burned out, the low-risk population is still totally connected. It's definitely true that the threshold for "herd immunity" in the situation where the high-risk people are the connectors is lower than in the homogeneous population, but I'm not sure if it might actually need a higher threshold for herd immunity in the two separate sub-population case.
1) is likely. During the summer, some overoptimistic epidemologists were predicting there would barely be a second wave in NW Europe. Karl Friston's model was slightly different but came to similar conclusions. This explains why observed herd immunity thresholds (without vaccination) in the past have been significantly lower than what you'd naively predict given R0.
1. agree - also, the official count is measuring CONFIRMED cases, and leaving out many asymptomatic people or mildly symptomatic people who don't bother getting tested. By vaccinating the oldest/most fragile people first, we reduce confirmed cases more quickly than we reduce total cases. (Because the elderly/sick are more likely to develop symptoms and get tested.)
2. I think all official recommendations, including Fauci's, falls under 'do what's best to collectively make people behave in a beneficial manner without provoking open revolt'. I've heard so much 'official' advice along the lines of "don't visit vaccinated grandparents unless it's outside, masked six feet apart until cases are way way down" ==> well, sure, I guess that is theoretically the safest, but it's absurd to me given how well Pfizer reduces the risk of severe disease (99.9%+) and the cost of not having normal human interactions with your family for a period of what will likely be years
To your #2, I have to say that I've been very frustrated with the lack of consideration for human needs. The number of suicides due to COVID haven't gone up higher than the number of COVID deaths prevented, but it's still really worth considering how miserable we make people beyond the sheer number that kill themselves over it.
"Of course he could not admit or discuss such a role."
Surprisingly, he can and he has. Never quite in the moment, but there have been a few interviews where he straightforwardly admits things like "Yeah, that thing about achieving herd immunity? I was just saying what people would respond to and I've been nudging the numbers up as their willingness shifts." Then he'll go on to talk about vaccine policy as though he didn't just admit to being a liar, and because only a few thousand people worldwide care enough to read Fauci interviews and everyone's more interested in bureaucracy games than actually solving problems, so his frankness doesn't seem to get him in any trouble.
I've been commenting on this for a while now on my blog and FB. In the short run, the noble lie seems like the right thing to do, both because other people are not always rational and because even if they are, the actions that are best for each individual to take in his own interests are not always the actions it is better or all of us to take in our interest — the problem of market failure. So it's tempting, if you are, like Fauci, in a position where people will listen to you, to tell them what you think it is best for them to believe, not what you think is true.
But in the long run, doing this means that people correctly conclude that they cannot trust what they are told by purportedly expert and authoritative sources such as Fauci or the NYT. I think that helps explain the willingness of a lot of people to believe that Trump really won the election. They are not themselves in a position to see the evidence that his claims are false and they have little reason to believe the purportedly objective sources of information that report that evidence, which makes it easy to believe what they want to believe.
I know right-wing people who stopped taking any covid precautions because of that interview. There are certain quarters where it received a great deal of attention.
Re: 1. I've long thought along those lines and think that is part of it. One other nuance is that risky/careful are not discrete groups that were locked in place. There are plenty of people who were covid-careful in May who got comfortable and became covid-risky in the winter due to impatience or a false sense of security. I think the last wave may be helping us now but the general trend will be for the population to drift away from vigilance.
With herd immunity there is an opposite issue with vaccinations, isn't there? Most countries vaccinate the oldest people first, who are less like to work, and generally have less contact. So vaccination is likely to achieve herd immunity somewhat later than the raw percentage of vaccinated people would suggest.
Yes! If I were trying to stop a pandemic I would vaccinate the likely vectors first. Folks working indoors would be a great first step, e.g., fast food workers, grocery workers. I suspect that would save lives but it would not be popular.
At the moment, my state is compromising between "more likely to die if they get it" and "more likely to spread it if they get it" - they started with medical workers, who are both more likely to get it and more likely to spread it (modulo precautions, but they are physically close to lots of vulnerable people regularly), went on to people old enough they had a high chance of death if they got it, and are now moving on to "essential workers" which includes everyone working in food, agriculture, education, and emergency services. Presumably after that they will get people with medical conditions that make them more likely to die if they get it, but it feels as if they're already compromising between "vaccinate the likely vectors" and "vaccinate those most likely to die if they get it." I don't know that much about the rest of the world, but aren't most states doing the same?
If this is sufficiently open to ask others for links rather than providing them, I recall recently reading a post about Robert Moses. Specifically how he ascended to power by being a mix of cynical enough to use it better than an actual idealist, but with the apparent idealism necessary to get so much more support than someone who was just in it for corrupt self-enrichment (it was pointed out that his pay wasn't large, and he really was more into power than money). Unfortunately, I can't remember where I read it and my attempts with search engines haven't worked. I'm guessing other folks in this space also read it, possibly from the same link I found it from (not that I can remember where that was either).
Greg Cochran would try to define both by referring to Darwinian fitness, but that's not what basically anyone in medicine uses (which to him is proof of that field's deep-seated problems).
Darwinian fitness seems like a very bad match to what we consider "healthy" in either case. The most obvious reason being that most people over 40 contribute far less to Darwinian fitness at the same time they start to experience significantly increased [physical] health issues.
Also, is it really mentally healthy to be having sex with a bunch of random people and getting pregnant once a year? That seems to be pretty maximal for Darwinian purposes. At the very least, the two concepts are not very closely aligned.
"Having sex with a bunch of random people" could be risky to your physical health due to disease (diseases that can cause sterility, specifically). Why wouldn't it be "mentally healthy"?
Animal breeders know that pregnancies can have an interval which is too short, but this again is an idea that can be expressed in terms of Darwinian fitness.
In reading your reply I see I skipped a few steps in reasoning. Sufficive to say, my experience with people (male or female) who have had multiple children to multiple partners in a short period of time are frequently unstable mentally. I do not know if the mental instability was cause or effect.
It can't possibly be Darwinian fitness. Individuals with no known relatives who can't breed for whatever reason can still be otherwise healthy. Or, for a more extreme example, if every human on the planet except me died, I'd think there is still some coherent way of thinking of myself as more or less healthy depending on purely internal bodily conditions.
I think it matters what the "whatever reason" is. Every human on the planet dying would be a case where there isn't any problem with you specifically, other scenarios would differ.
I would say that points much more clearly to human evolutionary biology's deep-seated problems than to medicine. Not to defend medicine, which has a long history of being goofily evolution-agnostic, but the notion that having high fitness is likely to be a good experience seems like it's mostly wishcasting.
I was being provocative when I brought up Cochran's ideas, but if we're going to compare evolutionary biology with medicine I'll say for myself that he's dead right about one thing: the long history of medicine mostly consists of being useless at best and frequently harmful. It passed the break even point to be actually helpful on net during the 20th century when they started taking germ theory more seriously, but it's still woefully unscientific. We've recently seen supposed public health experts declare that masks, travel bans & quarantines couldn't be effective against COVID-19 based on basically nothing at all, and fortunately for the Chinese they didn't listen to any of that. Doctors are notorious for failing to take into account base rates to apply Bayes rule about evaluating the results of a test. When it comes to "mental health" things are even worse. People aren't even attempting to figure out the etiology of many "mental illnesses", and homosexuality can get classified or declassified in the DSM as political winds shift. Robyn Dawes revealed in "House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth" that his examples of people failing to understand probability in his earlier "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World" all came from his colleagues.
As for whether connection between "having a good experience" and Darwinian fitness, evolutionary psychiatry would say they are linked. We evolved to have subjective experiences to give us cues of the sort that guided our ancestors toward fitness. Put your hand in a fire, and it should hurt. If it doesn't, that's very good evidence that something has gone wrong with you.
I don't disagree with you that the latter paragraph is what EvoPsych *says*. I just don't think that this is useful if true (because, as you say, the only thing about the ancestral environment that we really know is that it was very different), and I don't really think that there is any path toward demonstrating that it is true (because to do that we would have to have a remarkably granular knowledge of the ancestral environment which we simply don't have, and that is an oversimplification because of course there wasn't an ancestral environment, yadayada).
I disagree about how little we know about the ancestral environment. We've found ancient skeletons that give us information about what kind of lives they lived, ancient artifacts which tell us what kind of tools they had, we're now getting DNA so we can more directly see processes of selection, and anthropologists have looked at pre-industrial people in the present to tell us about their lifestyles. Since "yvain" started out as a commenter on Less Wrong, it seems appropriate here to link this from Eliezer Yudkowsky:
The only part of this that I am well-equiped to evaluate is the DNA side (I'm a population geneticist), so I'll do that.
I'm gonna use this paper as an examplar for ancient human genetics, because it is pretty recent, has good methods and very cool data, is in Science, and I *think* is open access:
They used whole ancient genomes collected from 15 fossils, in combination with whole genomes from 378 modern individuals and a complicated SNP reference panel, all to reconstruct the patterns of human dispersal in the Americas in the last ~20,000 years. It's a very cool study that helps us figure out the broad-scale movements of humans in the Americas.
What it struggles to do is produce the sort of information you would want to know in order to parameterize evolutionary psychology models. The closest they get is in the SI, figure S72 (!). Here they give the effective population sizes of the ancestors of the fossil genomes (and modern ones) between 5000-500,000 years ago. It's worth checking out the figure: at 50 kya, you get variations in effective population size estimates that have ranges of 3-4000 or 2-9000 depending on the data set; this probably isn't because they have different ancestral population sizes at 50 kya, since migration into NA doesn't start until ~20 kya, most likely this represents sampling variability (and they don't give any idea of the error for individual estimates, just have point estimates).
This is pretty standard for ancient human pop-gen. It's really strong at identifying macro-scale trends along the lines of "and then a bunch of Goths went to Sicily"; it is not so hot at answering questions like "how many Goths went to Sicily" to much more than order-of-magnitude precision.
And ancestral effective population sizes are the lowest-hanging possible fruit for pop-gen. It is the easiest to calculated and model, by design: "effective population size" is not "population size", it's a pop-gen proxy that correlates with population size, but also correlates with population structure, sex ratio, etc, and averages over time in strange and unintuitive ways. We calculate it because it is possible to get it from genetic data, not because it is especially useful in helping us understand the world.
And effective population size is not actually what we want to know to help us to evo-psych modelling. What we want is much finer-scale dynamics--of those 3-4000 Effective Population Members, how many actual members did they have? how many groups were they divided into? What was the size distribution? How often did they come in contact with each other? How often did groups split or fuse or die out? These are questions that you can, in theory, try to model with pop-gen data, but you are unlikely to get posterior distributions that are any different from your priors, because there are just so many different scenarios that could produce the data left to us today.
So it's all well and good to talk about DNA, but as a practicality, we can't actually use it to do much in the way of narrowing the range of possible ancestral demographies. That means that an enormous range of ancestral demographies are still on the table, which means that using fitness models to test various theories about how X could evolve is gonna be tough. What you'll probably find is, "well, in some demographic scenarios, X was favored, and some it was disfavored, and here's a landscape plot that shows that, and if we only know where our ancestors actually were on that landscape, we would know whether my hypothesis about X is supported or not" (I've seen a number of these presentations in my day).
Now, maybe I'm in a sort of reverse-Gell-Mann amnesia where the DNA evidence is particularly bad and useless compared to the other lines of evidence, and I am inappropriately sneering at them because I only know the DNA side. It's possible. But there are good reasons to think the opposite is true: that the DNA evidence comprises by far the largest data set and has an enormous amount of grant and venture-capital money (think 23andme) thrown at understanding it, so for now I'm comfortable being pessimistic about the whole project based on my knowledge of the DNA side.
Having sex is clearly a good experience for most people that do it voluntarily, but that seems largely orthogonal to whatever evolutionary purpose having sex originally served. Surely, doing it with a condom on, while taking birth control, after having a vasectomy, sticking with gay sex, sticking with anal, whatever, is just as good an experience and doesn't make you less healthy. If anything, getting pregnant is quite unhealthy and had a decent chance of killing you for most of human history. Seemingly, from the male side, optimal Darwinian behavior is rape as many barely past puberty women as possible and break into sperm banks to replace the sperm they collected with your own, but I think we would consider anyone who did either of those things less mentally healthy, not more.
Or go outside of humans. Take our best friends, cats. When we take them in as pets, we tend to spay and neuter them, bringing their Darwinian fitness down to zero, but they live much longer and happier lives than feral cats out producing litter after litter. Surely, they're healthier than their brethren with 1/6 the average lifespan out there starving to death and dodging cars even though those brethren are reproducing but they're not.
However, barely past puberty might not be the best bet-- I believe that makes a successful pregnancy less likely.
Also, there are a *few* men who do seem to want abstract fertility. Some of them own fertility clinics and substitute their own sperm*. Some of them donate sperm frequently enough that there's a (noticeable?) risk of their children having children with each other.
The thing is, there's no sex involved. No raising the children. No passing on of memes. Just descendants.
Sure, there are plenty of men who explicitly want lots of descendants, but I don't think there is any convincing way to claim they're healthier because of that.
"Having sex is clearly a good experience for most people that do it voluntarily, but that seems largely orthogonal to whatever evolutionary purpose having sex originally served."
There's a divergence, but I wouldn't quite say it's "orthogonal".
"just as good an experience and doesn't make you less healthy"
One of the possibilities you listed, anal, is much riskier than the others.
"If anything, getting pregnant is quite unhealthy and had a decent chance of killing you for most of human history."
One truism to understand genetics & evolution is "Your genes did not evolve to kill you". The child mortality rate was FAR higher in the distant past. Maternal mortality rates were higher, but not nearly as high as when doctors got involved and started spreading disease everywhere.
"Seemingly, from the male side, optimal Darwinian behavior is rape as many barely past puberty women as possible"
In orangutans, there is actually a "rape morph" for adult males enabling them to chase females who don't want to mate with them. That's viable because they're solitary and don't form long-term pair bonds. Humans are social animals and will punish that behavior if caught, which is why it's not optimal behavior (though it might be the most viable strategy for some).
"I think we would consider anyone who did either of those things less mentally healthy"
A person who commits crimes isn't necessarily insane, even if some might try to pathologize all deviant behavior. The temptation to do harks back to Szasz's account of psychiatrists as "soul doctors". Nancy Lebowitz brought up the real examples of people who've taken the more unusual strategy, and I have no reaon to think of those people as being crazy. They're just egregious violators of our norms.
"they live much longer and happier lives than feral cats out producing litter after litter"
We can verify "longer", but "happier" is another story. Most humans would hate being confined to a bubble that maximally extends their life.
Darwinian fitness is a very bad match to what humans want. Practically nobody I know is acting to maximize the number of copies of his genes in future generations. If we did act that way, sperm banks would be able to charge a significant price to donors.
The male children of those who donate to sperm banks will be more likely to donate to sperm banks themselves. In the distant future, the desire to donate to sperm banks should approximate the current desire to have sex. Then it will be costly to give to such banks, and there will be such concern that the sperm is legitimately used that the only way to assure it may be to... have sex. But achieving an orgasm at that point may require reading through literature about sperm bank donation.
I'm not going to be more specific about the cause, but I went through a period of being distracted and obsessed. I didn't have my color vision tested, but I didn't notice color except for brief periods when the distracted/obsession lifted.
Massive protests in Myanmar after the military took power in a coup, in the aftermath of an election the military claims is fraudulent. 3 protesters and 1 police officer have died. A nationwide strike is planned. According to Freedom House, worldwide democracy has been in decline for the 14th consecutive year. Myanmar seems to be part of this trend away from democracy and toward an unknown future.
Remember when Aung Sung Suu Kyi indulged the military and defended their actions wrt the Rohingya? I wish someone would write a detailed analysis of how power corrupted her or whatever was going on in her head..
Why do you assume she was corrupted by power? I don't know a lot about her, but there is no inconsistency between wanting democracy and freedom for the ingroup you identify with and being happy to drive out the outgroup you don't. For all I know that could have been her position before she got any power.
I consider standing by or defending the persecution of any group of people an abuse of power. Perhaps she always was like that. But at least at some previous point she sprouted other ideals.
If by "sprouted other ideals" you mean saying all the nice approved human-rights platitudes when she was seeking Western help for the poor oppressed Burmese people, then obviously. Any competent politician seeking help for oppressed non-white people is going to do that. But they'll do that whether their real goal is "liberate all the oppressed peoples of the world, with me focusing on the oppressed people closest to me because that's where I can do the most good" or "absolute supremacy for my ethnic group, which is presently oppressed so my using liberate-the-oppressed rhetoric is for the moment the most effective tactic", or anything in between.
So, yeah, maybe she always was like that, a hardcore Ethnic Burmese Supremacist. Or maybe she was an honest human-rights campaigner corrupted by power. Or something else. But her having used the standard human rights rhetoric when that was obviously the right tactic for almost any relevant goal, is not good evidence of anything but basic political eptitude.
Over the past two weeks, I read Houghton’s Global Warming: The Complete Briefing and Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster (a dissent to the CO2-Warming link).
I have been troubled by the attention that the mainstream CO2 theory is getting, how the IPCC has been working to ensure that other theories are quickly disregarded (their response is eerily similar: “careful computer modeling shows that the minor adjustments pointed out by [dissenter] did not affect the overall conclusions”), the pointed urgency with which governments are moving to spend on a problem whose existence is suspect, and the “here comes a conspiracy theorist / climate change denier” outlook when one tries to talk to other people about these concerns (I tried and failed to get 2 friends to consider the dissent seriously, I know that the sample size is exceedingly small and shows nothing)
I fear that the urgency is clouding the efforts to use government spending to lift people out of relative poverty (i.e. something like: rather than spending on coal fired plants, a robust electrical grid and LPG lines, investment goes to solar panels and “biofuel” based stoves, in an effort to reduce emissions)
I haven't read that book. What puzzles me is the lack of any serious consideration of the balance between costs of AGW and benefits. Everyone talks of increased mortality due to hotter summers, nobody of decreased mortality due to milder winters, although there is reason to expect the latter to be much larger than the former (details available if people are curious). Everyone talks about entirely hypothetical reductions in crop production due to changes in climate pattern, almost nobody about the well established increase in crop yields due to more CO2 in the atmosphere. Everyone talks about the loss of useful land due to sea level rise, mostly ignoring that the magnitude projected by the IPCC for the end of the century is less than the usual difference between high tide and low. Almost nobody talks about the increase in useful land area, a couple of orders of magnitude larger, as the habitable zones spread towards the poles.
We not only don't have good reason to be confident that the consequences will be catastrophic, we don't even have good reason to believe that they will be on net negative.
Isn't the point that we have rolled the dice and come up with a four. Well if we roll again we might get a six. Or we might not. So assuming getting a 1 means the planet is screwed - do you roll again? (BTW the very next post to this is about another episode in my podcast on which you very graciously appeared in a previous episode. Legal Systems Very Different from Ours still one of my favourite books and indeed episodes!)
You need way to distinguish the proposition that the putative positive effects aren't even being considered from the claim that they have been considered and found to be lacking
The displacement of people is an obvious short-term negative, even if we gain habitable land on the net. And the fact that the developing countries will get hit harder than developed ones will make mitigation a lot more difficult - imagine the Syrian migrant crisis, multiplied by two orders of magnitude.
Also, ecosystems don't care about new niches opening elsewhere - those will start to get filled in a few hundred years, finish in a few thousand, while a lot of species just die off having nowhere they can move.
There isn't suppression of facts or even disagreement about facts. It's just that climate change is not going to be positive for everybody, so the disagreement is about how whether everybody matters equally.
Actually, you just demonstrated exactly what is the problem. There is plenty of disagreement about facts. It's just that somehow the repetition of the claim that there's no disagreement made it true - very few high-status people, and no high-status media will touch this subject (perhaps because high-status people like remaining employed and not otherwise blacklisted). Low-status sites like American Thinker might feature hundreds of devastating exposes of data manipulation and other scientific malpractice, but it does not matter to anyone because they are not NYT. If the likes of NYT don't want to talk about something, mentioning it makes you a lowly conspiracy theorist.
This has been happening to way too many other topics lately, too.
But how could we know whether the fat tailed risks are comparatively worse _if_ we somehow manage to slow the increase, or even decrease, CO2 emissions? The planet has been much warmer before and seems to periodically endure 'short' ice ages. I'd imagine a new ice age might very reasonably be much worse than even the most catastrophic warming scenarios.
'Invisible' unbounded risk could be anywhere – we can't know until we can 'see' them. The status quo (or the recent past) might be the most dangerous state to maintain long-term!
Sparta is a really interesting subject not least to alt right types. And the film 300 is a surprisingly faithful rendering of a lot of Spartan ideology. Tom Holland is an extremely amusing and learned British historian. I did a podcast with him the other day where he talked about all this. He was on excellent form - if you haven’t got time for the whole thing his opening 20 minutes are great! We also talked about Hero because Tom decided that this was the Persian equivalent of 300! https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7797244-tom-holland-scores-300
On the other hand, Bret Devereaux - who seems to be an expert in the field and a pretty entertaining writer - rips the Spartans a new one in his series ( https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/ ), claiming that pop-culture Sparta such as 300 glosses over the extreme dysfunction of their society that caused a whole lot of suffering without meaningfully improving military strength.
Yes! And my very next podcast is with Bret! I am just editing it now. I do reference Bret's blog in this podcast too and I can assure you the, er, problematic nature of Sparta and indeed the film is very much not glossed over. Anyway I hope you give it a listen and let me know what you think. If you do listen and want to give me some honest feedback I'm at hoggdotrussellatgmaildotcom
I consider 300 to be the most Nazi movie I've seen, much more so than the actual Nazi propaganda movie: Triumph of the Will. In 300, they show that the one handicapped person that is not murdered as a baby sells Sparta out to the enemy. Not very subtle. In Triumph of the Will, things are kept much more abstract, where the theme of purification could at the time easily be interpreted as merely a removal of Jews and such from power, rather than eliminating them from society altogether.
I always thought of it as the propaganda movie Sparta would have made if they had the technology, which sounds similar to what Tom Holland thinks as well. It certainly was not designed to be a Nazi movie, so
The similarities between Spartan and nazi ideology are interesting, and not coincidental. It does not take much research to find many examples of the Nazis praising Sparta. Wikipedia alone has Hitler admiring them killing the weak and ordering officers to treat the Slavs like the Spartans treated the Helots.
Yes. It really is an extraordinary film. The closest I can thing is Starship Troopers but that pretty clearly is intended as a satire on fascism - this one is the real deal. When I asked Tom to mark it out of 10 he split his marks and gave it 1 for moral worth. If you get a chance to listen to the podcast I'll be interested in your views. I am new to podcasting so any feedback is welcome.
We very much agree with that analysis and the Triumph of the Will gets a mention. I think you will enjoy the podcast! I personally thought that the Ephors was an antisemitic dogwhistle but the others took it as anti catholic/anti religious. If you have time to listen to the podcast or at least the first bit I'll be very interested in your views.
I can't stress enough how great Tony MacNamara's The Great is. A Dostoyevskian cross between Deadwood and Veep, it's the smartest, funniest, and most incisive piece of media of the 2020s to date. It is also visually beautiful. If you're looking for end-of-the-day entertainment that inspires, move this to the top of your list. Sorry for the evangelizing versus providing a review, but the review would need to be book-length to do the work justice.
I really liked the grey and grey morality of it. It would have been so easy for them to make the bad guys pure bad and the good guys pure good, but they didn't and it is to their credit. The only issue I had with it was the idiot ball that was carried in the finale.
This post might solve the pandemic. Or it might not. I need someone smarter to check my work, so I’m posting it in public in the hopes that it will reach someone, who can check it.
The data shows that COVID-19 has seasonal and latitudinal variance, so we know that sunlight has something to do with it. Everyone knows that when sunlight hits your skin, you get Vitamin-D, so doctors started doing clinical trials on COVID patients involving Vitamin-D.
Preliminary results are in and it seems like there is no signal in the noise. Vitamin-D does not seem to be the important factor here. But sunlight clearly is.
That seemed like an interesting problem to work on (instead of actual work) so I started looking into it.
I think I can explain the seasonal and latitudinal variance of COVID-19 without Vitamin-D. My hypothesis can be tested for cheap and with zero risk to human health. And I can explain the full biochemical pathway of this effect.
Vitamin-D is not the only molecule produced by sunlight acting on the skin.
There is another one, much more important, but very few people know about it, because it was discovered by Russian scientists in the 1990s and not widely studied outside Russia. (Based on the name of the chief scientist, who discovered this effect, she’s probably Estonian.)
If you put your hand in front of a bright white light, what do you see? You see that only red light penetrates through the thinner parts of your hand. This implies that red light goes very deep in your body. A centimeter at least.
Red light with a wavelength of about 810 nanometers is absorbed by an enzyme called "cytochrome c oxidase", which is part of the electron transport chain inside the mitochondria of every cell. The result of this is a photochemical reaction, which boosts intracellular ATP production. ATP is the "fuel" that cells use for most internal processes. When a muscle cell contracts, for example, it spends ATP.
With more ATP available, the cell can do more. Including repair. So your body recovers better and faster.
This effect is used by a "new" field of medicine, which has many names: "red light therapy", "photobiomodulation therapy", "low-level laser therapy", and even "cold laser therapy". The content is the same: intense red light is used to boost body's own healing mechanisms.
I put "new" in quotes, because red light therapy was a pseudoscience for 50 years until Russians figured out that it works by stimulating ATP production via the absorbtion of red light by cytochrome c oxidase.
It's not magic and it's not a super powerful effect unless you haven't gotten enough natural light. Based on the seasonal and latitudinal variance of COVID, however, it looks like red light therapy might be the key to solving this pandemic.
There might be a third light-based biochemical pathway besides Vitamin-D and cytochrome c oxidase that could instead be the key factor in explaining COVID’s seasonal and latitudinal variance, but I haven’t found one.
Here is a scientific overview of the history of red light therapy. How it went from pseudoscience to acceptable medical practice:
Quote from that article: “The work of Tiina Karu in Russia was instrumental in putting the mechanism on a sound footing by identifying cytochrome c oxidase in the mitochondrial respiratory chain as a primary chromophore, and it introduced the concept of “retrograde mitochondrial signalling” to explain how a single relatively brief exposure to light could have effects on the organism that lasted for hours, days or even weeks”
I searched on pubmed if any doctor has tried red light therapy on COVID patients and found two case studies, both showing remarkable improvement:
I also found a paper recommending that doctors try red light therapy for COVID: "Based on the clinical experience, peer-reviewed studies, and solid laboratory data in experimental animal models, LLLT attenuates cytokine storm at multiple levels and reduces the major inflammatory metabolites."
If I'm right and COVID's seasonal variance and latitudinal variance is mediated not via Vitamin-D, but via cytochrome c oxidase, then all you need to test this hypothesis is to get some suitable red light therapy LED panels and hang them above COVID patients.
I'm pretty sure you don't need to get an ethics board approval to change the lighting in a hospital room from white to red.
A statistically significant randomized trial could be done in any hospital for about $10k spent on lamps, with zero health risk and zero ethical considerations. Just keep doing what you're already doing, but randomly put half the patients under red lamps.
If it works, then soon we're all gonna have red lamps in our homes and we're gonna be so much healthier than before!
P.S: If I'm correct and this idea ends up solving this pandemic, then please send some ETH to my wallet at 0x4aD7690c3cCe53De570738dDE90B8D01027a0f84 It would be funny to say I got a car for solving the COVID pandemic 🙂
https://scite.ai/ is a nice tool to see which papers have been discredited and which have been confirmed. For example, the findings of the linked "seeing gray" paper seem to have been confirmed by 4 other papers and disputed by 1 (https://scite.ai/reports/seeing-gray-when-feeling-blue-rVaAZD). It's still missing some papers and the algorithm which flags citations is not perfect (as evident by the fact that the "disputing" citation is not actually disputing it), but it has been very useful for me so far.
I'm looking for a printer that's entry level and doesn't take up too much space. I expect to upgrade the print head and mainboard at some point and generally tinker with the printer over time. My plans are somewhere between functional printing and the decorative arts.
Also is there a better place to buy one in the uk than Farnell, which sells them for £191? (I think brexit has disrupted the supply chains)
My standard recommendation is a basic Ender 3, because the few extra features isn't worth the extra $100. If you want the extra features, you can buy them from 3rd party sellers for much cheaper and get to know your printer better installing them. Among cheaper printers, the Ender 3 is probably the best one, because there is a huge community behind modding it and it is very good quality.
If you're willing to pay for it, the Prusa i3 mk3+ is the gold standard for hobby printers.
Rob Wiblin wrote a Google Doc where he detailed his experience with Wellbutrin (active ingredient: Bupropion). He took it even though he only had mild depression symptoms and seems to have had a very positive experience.
I don't qualify as being even mildly depressed on the PHQ-9 questionnaire. On the other hand, I'm also not as happy as I think is realistically conceivable (which, I suspect, is true of most people). Hence, I'm pondering trying Wellbutrin, just to see whether it substantially raises my hedonic setpoint and what side effects I experience. If it seemed worth it, I could just continue taking it for much of my life, maybe seizing to take it when I need to take other serious medications (or when I do suddenly experience side effects).
Rob points out that the cost-benefit analysis here seems very positive:
Either you have a bad experience and stop taking it after a few weeks or months, or you are happier (and potentially more productive?) for much of the rest of your life.
My biggest concerns are long-term side-effects that no one knows of and withdrawal symptoms. Those could potentially ruin the expected value calculus laid out above. (Although Scott writes: "It is probably fair to say in a colloquial sense that Wellbutrin does not cause withdrawal." But probably the withdrawal effects after taking Wellbutrin for years or even decades are not well studied.)
Obviously I don't expect medical advice here, but I'd be curious to hear any thoughts generally, even more so if you've taken Bupropion yourself and even more so still if you've tried it with only very mild depression symptoms or none at all.
In case you're reading this Scott, it would of course be great to add your take on this issue to the Lorien Psychiatry post. Even if you are not in favour, it would be helpful if you made that explicit, though I understand you may not have an opinion and it may not be the highest priority for your patients. Either way, I think it's fantastic to have access to your analyses for free. Thanks so much for that!
I saw an article some time back about someone not depressed who took Wellbutrin to make himself happy, which raised some interesting questions about drug use. I discuss it in _Future Imperfect_: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect/Chapter16.html
Thanks for the pointer! I agree, there's lots of interesting questions about a potential future where everyone can medicate their way into desired feelings.
I would strongly advise against this. It's a great way to give yourself depression or mood instability. Reason being (and this is a generality) when you take a drug, your homeostatic setpoints tend to move in opposite action to the drug. Now, someone with depression, their homeostatic setpoint isn't quite working where we want it to be, so we don't really prioritize it. But someone who has good mood, that is a sign that they have good homeostasis. There is order, there is balance on the spectrum between mania and depression. When we start contaminating those systems with pharmacological interventions we can unintentionally cause that natural order to shift into unnatural disorder. So yes, you might have increased mood for a year or two. But then you might start feeling that it's not working as well, and have anhedonia, malaise, etc. as your neurons have adapted fully to the presence of the drug. And then the question becomes, how can you get off and restore the natural order you had before? Let's just say if you can answer that you'd make a lot of ex-opioid users very happy.
"how can you get off and restore the natural order you had before?" Hmm, if this is correct, you could logically take a drug that makes you feel *worse* and this would push your homeostatic happiness upward. You could then stop taking the drug right before a day when an upbeat attitude would really come in handy, like an important job interview. (Such drugs aren't readily available, I expect, because no one's looking for them.)
I suspect a similar phenomenon contributes to the effectiveness of naltrexone, i.e. upregulation of opioid receptors over time. Might be worth taking a look at the research there. I still wouldn't recommend anyone try to medicate their way into "happiness" though - a sauna is a better starting point.
Thanks for your reply! While I agree, this is a great cause of concern, I'm not sure it's a priori obvious that this should be equally true for all drugs. After all, withdrawal effects are worse for some drugs than for others. Maybe what you predict will happen to some degree, but not all the way. Exactly how much would make all the difference. However, even a relatively small probability of the magnitude of this effect being large might ruin the expected value, so maybe you're right in advising not to do this. I am still undecided. Thanks!
I was hoping that the co-author was faked by an AI.
The truth is less interesting. Some scientific papers have extra co-authors added, people who didn't have anything to do with the paper. This presumably an effort to steal prestige and/or to meet simple-minded metrics.
I've heard of plagiarism, but this is what? Reverse plagiarism?
I'm wondering whether there should be a chart of everything which could be faked in a scientific paper.
About 10 years ago my PhD supervisor shared an increasingly surreal correspondence he was having with someone who had submitted a paper to a journal he was editing. It was clearly woo-ish gibberish, talking about the cosmic balance to be found in colour and yoga and I don't remember, blah blah blah preserve the celestial harmonies or whatever. Since this was a straightforward vision science journal, my PI rejected it as irrelevant, and indeed the only reason he gave it more than five seconds' thought was because the co-authors included a reputable mathematical modeler of vision stuff (who I forget), and Ramachandran, one of the more influential modern neuroscientists (he wrote Phantoms In The Brain).
The submitter would not take the hint, and kept pestering my PI ("you don't understand how important this is to the development of the world, please call me and we can discuss how to make you see the light", etc etc etc). Finally my PI got annoyed and decided to contact the co-authors, both of whom he knew, because he just couldn't get the primary author to shut up. The math dude said that he certainly didn't know anything about the paper, and wasn't sure he'd ever spoken to the main author, while Ramachandran said that they had met and spoken once at a conference a few years previously and he'd never had anything to do with him since.
My PI relayed this information to the primary author, and told him that as a result he was ending their correspondence. The author explained that conversations he had had with the pair of them had revolutionized his thinking on these matters, and imagine his embarrassment if he published something of such importance without crediting those who really mattered to its development.
My PI did not respond. Within a week the author had written him again, with an entirely new paper, also unrelated to vision science.
A question about homeschooling (or no-schooling). Online I can find many delightful success stories of homeschooling, but no first-person accounts of it going wrong or not working well. I'ts probably survivor bias; I expect that home- and no-schooling can't work equally well for everyone. I cannot make up my mind if I and my kids are good homeschooler candidates if I have no information on the failure modes. Please share your stories of home- or no-schooling not working out, or perhaps argue why such stories don't exist.
Tara Westover wrote a memoir called "Educated." But I don't think this will be helpful to you. I suspect the most common failure mode for this involves it not working out in fairly mundane ways, and then the parents stopping.
It seems like a fairly common failure mode should be something like "kid spends years homeschooling without learning much, parents don't notice/don't consider it a problem, kid tries to get GED/college/whatever, fails horribly, goes off to flip burgers for the rest of his life".
In my social circles as a homeschooled kid, something similar happened with one person: she did decently well except in math, where she did poorly enough she didn't get into college. Her parents had been generally aware of her difficulties there, but they didn't realize it was that bad. Anyway, she's now happily married, so it turned out decently for her in the end.
(Possible confounder: It's quite possible the all-around-less-educated homeschoolers don't move in the same social circles as the rest of us.)
I know one person who was "successfully" homeschooled until 8th grade and then switched to the public school system. However, both he and his brother (also homeschooled) have chronic issues with motivation. They both tend to do the bare minimum and at the last moment. For example, with job applications, they'll send out only one or two a month, when most people in similar situations sent out many more and got accepted to jobs much sooner. With assignments in highschool and college my friend always would wait until Sunday evening to start a five page paper that was due on Monday morning, and then stay up late to finish it. Of course, we might say that the "default" public school behavior is the problematic one and my friends are better off (and they do seem to be quite happy with how they are), but it's a different behavior that you need to expect.
I also know some other people who were homeschooled (in a pretty restrictive Christian environment) and once they entered the "real world," they frequently wound up hating their parents for being overbearing and going extremely in the other direction. That can probably be solved by raising your kids in a way that's not as different from the rest of society.
I spent my entire educational career in the default public school system, and in no way did it cure me of the tendency to procrastinate that you attribute to home schooling.
I was homeschooled through tenth grade. In my junior and senior years, I was the person who started the papers early and such; my previously-public-schooled friends were the ones who waited till Sunday evening (in some cases, quite literally). I'd blame your friends' family environment before homeschooling.
A lot of my homeschool friends were raised in somewhat-restrictive Christian environments, too. In my experience, there's a decent number like you describe, but well under half.
Another counterexample here - I got the sense that a number of my (not homeschooled) peers in university seemed to do what you described, or just not do the readings, while I (homeschooled and unschooled) was mildly fanatical about doing all the readings, starting well in advance ("when they're assigned" is a good time to start, if you don't have more urgent homework, and if you always start readings when you're assigned you won't), and trying to get papers done at least a day in advance (though I did not always succeed). That said while I think of this as a benefit of homeschooling ("learning to manage my own workload") my parents are both conscientious, and I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so some of this may be genetic.
Thanks everyone for answers! I also don't think school is strictly necessary for developing conscientiousness - such personality traits are highly heritable. The extreme cases, ADD, do not really respond to 'learning better habits' very well .
I know of a few outright failures, and a number of moderately less successful cases. I can probably answer some follow up questions as well, but I'll give you the gist of it.
The "failures" that I am aware of were kids taken out of public school sometime between 8th and 12th grade because they were doing very poorly, in an attempt to correct their existing learning problems. It's very arguable if they were better off or worse off in their education, but they seemed to be on a better path with non-educational issues (fights in school, "bad path" stuff). Their trajectory after school wasn't good, but it's hard to say if it was worse because of the homeschooling.
As for the more typical issues with homeschooling, that depends greatly on the family in question. Obviously the parents need to understand the material enough to teach it and help with learning. This can result in gaps where the parents are themselves uncertain - which often comes up in Math and Science, but can affect other subjects as well. Some parents supplement with online education for certain subjects, but that tends to look more like cyber schooling than homeschooling. You would have to adjust for your own needs and experience.
For socialization I would highly recommend joining a support group with other homeschoolers. If not possible, getting the kids involved with sports or other group activities would be very helpful. It's not a good idea to have the kids home 24/7 with only limited interaction with other kids. Because other kids are often at school from early in the day until mid to late afternoon, your kids will likely find themselves spending a lot of time with only siblings and adults. That can be limiting in social growth, as there should be a difference between socialization with peers and non-peers.
I would consider the following characteristics important in determining good candidates:
-One or more dedicated parent-teacher(s) willing to put time and effort into ensuring the kids are educated.
-Those parents have enough content knowledge to teach a majority of classes through the expected length of homeschooling (often elementary school or into 7-8th grade, but sometimes through 12th).
-Support structures for teaching subjects that are more difficult and/or the parents do not personally know.
-Options for socialization that are healthy and consistent
Oh, for reference - I was homeschooled with my siblings from the time I was in 3rd grade through graduation. I was part of a homeschool support group that at times had upwards of 70 kids, and interacted with a regional homeschool network for a variety of reasons.
" Obviously the parents need to understand the material enough to teach it and help with learning. ... Some parents supplement with online education for certain subjects, but that tends to look more like cyber schooling than homeschooling. "
I would have said that because both books and online material exist, the parents do not have to understand material well enough to teach it. There is no reason why home schooling or home unschooling has to consist primarily of parents teaching kids things the parents know, when there is a whole world of materials out there for children to learn from. Ideally, what they are learning is not how to be taught but how to learn.
I would agree with that. We had high qualify text books and later on some early computer and internet sources. We were not bereft of options outside of direct parent involvement. I do believe strongly that you need someone guiding learning to some extent, and also someone to help when questions arise. Particularly intelligent children may only need a guide to find the sources themselves. Children with more normal intelligence will also need help understanding what they're studying and with questions. Certain subjects, like critical thinking, also benefit greatly from a teacher to help tease out the nuance.
Presumably at a young enough age, they need parental guidance, no? But seemingly any parent can teach how to spell your name and do basic integer arithmetic.
I sometimes wish I'd been able to do something like this as a kid. One of the greatest experiences I ever had in high school was a geography class I was allowed to take as a self-paced workbook/assignment independent studies thing and I finished the class in three weeks. Had the rest of the semester off. I guess I wouldn't have met the friends I met or been able to participate in varsity sports if I wasn't at an actual school, though. I remember having the opportunity to skip 6th grade and the school administration wouldn't let me because they thought it was a bad idea socially. I don't think I ever quite got over that. Felt like adults abusing their power and shitting on me. That very same year I won a television quiz show. School itself was so boring and unchallenging.
I skipped second grade and entered college at sixteen (my school combined 7th and 8th grade into one, giving everyone a one year advantage). I was intellectually precocious and socially retarded, but I don't think staying in high school another year or two would have helped, since I was socially retarded for my age as well as for my grade. Going to college young put me somewhere where I could interact with intellectual peers.
I had a friend who ended up behind academically from homeschooling, so her parents put her in public high school. Another family I know with two kids taught them well, but one of the kids decided she didn’t like the social environment and went to public high school, while the other stuck with homeschooling.
I would expect such stories to exist. My impression is that the main contraindication is "the parents don't get on with the kids or vice versa" - that is, if your personalities don't mesh homeschooling can make you both miserable, since it does nearly by definition involve the kids being around/interacting with the parents a lot. I can't remember whether I'm drawing that from actual examples, though; I was homeschooled but not in a homeschooling group, and don't know many other homeschooled kids. And obviously, I like how I turned out.
I was homeschooled through high school. It wasn't a failure in an obvious way: my parents are both highly educated and have teaching experience, I got along well with them, and I got into a good college. However, I ended up with self-discipline and time management issues (or, if you prefer, good old-fashioned laziness) that contributed to my eventual failure to graduate from that college. (I say "contributed," not "solely caused," because there were other things going on that I won't get into. I did get very good grades for my first two years or so of college, so it's not that I was incapable of doing the work.) My takeaway is that, while I would still consider homeschooling my kids if I had any, I would keep an eye out for signs that an environment of stricter discipline might be beneficial.
Interestingly, I'm still miffed that the public schools I attended didn't do a better job at training self-discipline and time management. And I was, e.g. the one of maybe two or three students in a class that would actually read assigned works.
IME, the _best_ students were nearly all just as guilty (if not more) at doing the minimum required, at the last minute, and with the least amount of actual learning involved.
This stops the insane refresh when you navigate back to an ACX tab.
Problems:
1. It's not straightforward to put this into ACX Tweaks, but it's do-able with work.
2. You have to do this on every ACX tab that you might go to.
3. It stops working if you reload the page. This is one reason I really like to never reload pages, searching for "n e w r e p l" to find new comments to load.
Are you going to be moving to using a domain you control at some point? Right now you're at the mercy of substack, and at such time in the future as you move away, you'll lose control of all these posts.
No plans for this right now, though at some point I might make a domain I own redirect there. Substack says I keep the right to export all my posts if I ever leave.
I suggest you make a regularly scheduled program to export it regularly, to a place you control. That way, you have their promise and you have a backup. You never know, it's possible for companies to lose data.
(Come to think of it, it may be recoverable from archive.org should that happen)
I notice that Astral Codex Ten has been publishing way more content than SSC did. Scott, Is this because you built up a big backlog for your Substack debut and when we burn through it in a few weeks we'll go back to the standard SSC schedule, or are you spending a bunch of hours each day writing this stuff and hoping to maintain roughly this pace indefinitely?
Sorry if you talked about this before, but can you at some point talk about the link between SSRI and lack of motivation, struggle to concentrate and other similar issues. There is a bit of litterature about this, but it seems like most people are unaware. I don't even think it says something about it in medication warning, and I was never told by my GP.
Seems to happen to about 20% of people. More common on Paxil (because it's anticholinergic), but happens on other SSRIs too. I don't think it's well-understood exactly why. Serotonin is sort of an all-purpose signaling chemical and seems to be involved in some aspects of cognition in ways we don't entirely understand. Some sources say the 5-HT7 receptor is involved in learning and memory, though pharma companies have an incentive to fake this (Trintellix is a 5-HT7-affecting drug being billed as helping cognition). Interested to hear what you learned looking at the literature.
Don't interpret my comment as medical advice for any specific case. In the general case, my current understanding after checking the evidence a few years ago not in too much depth is that SSRIs probably work for bipolar depression but do have a medium chance of causing severe mania. I would be very unlikely to start a patient with a history of severe mania on SSRIs without them being on mood stabilizers. There are other good treatments for bipolar depression, and if all else fails you can always use mood stabilizers before adding an SSRI. In fact, if a person has a history of severe mania, potentially they should be on mood stabilizers no matter what.
(again, I know nothing about specific cases, just giving general thoughts)
I know that bail reform is an issue that Scott/EA have been interested in before as a low-hanging fruit of criminal justice reform in the US. I've no idea if this is going to be old hat for everyone in who's interested in this as an issue, but I thought I'd share an explanation of the current English system in the hope that it helps. I apologise that this is going to be really long for uninterested people to have to scroll past!
At the first court hearing of anyone charged with a crime, as well as dealing with various preliminary matters the court assigns them one of three statuses:
Unconditional Bail
Conditional Bail
Remand in Custody
Unconditional bail is where the court just tells you the date of the next hearing and releases you. There's no amount of cash that you pay into the court, or will forfeit if you don't show up. You just go and come back next time, similar to a doctor's appointment. This is what happens to the clear majority of people in the magistrates' courts (non-jury trials, up to 6 months in prison) and about a third of people in the Crown Court (jury trials, up to life in prison). I'm aware in the US people talk about lots of complicated "Pre-trial Services" systems where you're supervised by probation. We don't have this, and it causes no problems. Just give people a date and send them home. If you don't show up, the police arrest you and bring you to court, and you get charged with failure to surrender (which is roughly equivalent in sentencing terms to having a small bag of cannabis for personal use, but goes on your criminal record, unless you manage to evade custody for several years which makes it more serious).
Conditional bail is where the court releases you, but imposes one or more conditions. If you breach a condition, you lose your right to bail (see below). These conditions are rom my rough experience of most common to least:
Residence (You have to live at a certain address)
Not to contact X (X is normally a witness/victim, occasionally a suspected criminal associate)
Curfew (you have to be home between certain hours - this is normally monitored by an ankle bracelet, but not always)
Report to a police station (you have to go to a police station once a week or once a month - this is the equivalent of a residence condition for homeless people, and is mostly so that if they abscond the police know and have an excuse to arrest them before they don't show up to their actual trial)
Not to enter Y (Y will be an area you're not allowed to go to, and varies from a person's house imposed along with a no contact condition, up to not being allowed into a certain county or (rarely) being excluded from everywhere in the universe other than one specific area where you live - the bigger the exclusion area, the more likely you are to have a GPS tag fitted, but this was rare until very recently)
Surety (someone who isn't you promises to pay the court money if you don't show up)
Security (you pay money into the court and lose it if you don't show up)
I would guess that surety applies in less than 0.01% of cases, and I've never seen security imposed for defendants awaiting trial. The exception to this is people awaiting extradition, where almost everyone has a surety or security or else they're remanded in custody.
Remand in custody is self-explanatory; you're kept in prison until your trial.
The law is that, at the start of proceedings, everyone who isn't charged with murder has a right to unconditional bail, unless the court thinks an "exception" applies. These are that the court thinks you are likely to:
Interfere with witnesses
Commit further offences
Fail to surrender (not show up to court next time)
[Various other rare circumstances that don't come up in practice]
If the court thinks your likely to do one of the above, they need to ask whether there are any conditions that mitigate the risk of it. For example, if you're charged with domestic violence you'll probably be given a condition to live somewhere else (rather than share a house with a prosecution witness), or if you're charged with committing burglaries at night you might be given a curfew. There's no risk matrix or anything like that, the judge or magistrates just make a decision about it. The big factor they'll look at is your criminal record, particularly if you've committed offences on bail before, or you've failed to surrender before. If there are no conditions which mitigate the risk, then the court will remand you in custody. You can apply for bail again (normally because you have a better address to stay at, but there are other reasons).
If you breach a bail condition or fail to surrender, then you lose your *right* to bail. However, the court can still bail you, and often will. In practice, they will consider the same exceptions as above, because that's how everyone's used to making the decision and is broadly the rational way to approach it. By and large, if you've interfered with a witness you won't get bail again; if you breached your curfew to go and buy cigarettes you won't.
If you're remanded in custody, there's a time limit of 3 or 6 months (this has been extended during the pandemic). If your trial hasn't started in that time and it's either your fault somehow, or the prosecution and court have both done the best they can but couldn't hear the case in time and you really shouldn't be released on bail, the time limit can be extended. Otherwise, you're eligible for release when the time limit runs out. The CPS (roughly the English DA) freaks out whenever this happens and various very senior people get raked over the coals by even more senior people (and are obligated to right them grovelling apology letters explaining why this happened and what they'll do to stop it happening again), so your trial will *probably* start before the time limit.
I can see loads of criticism of this system from a defendant's-rights perspective (who gets released is unscientific and depends a lot on who your judge is, the quality of your lawyer and how you come across). I mention it more in relation to the surprisingly inside-the-box thinking a lot of (liberal/pro-reform) American have about this, namely:
1. Cash bail, and any remnants of it, are completely pointless and don't need to be replaced by anything weird/expensive. Generally when people don't turn up to court it's a result of non-incentive-amenable fecklessness as opposed to an attempt to abscond.
2. The English police (who are generally fairly underwhelming) have almost no difficulty in arresting anyone they're told to within about 2 weeks. Bounty hunters are probably pointless (and I assume the comparatively saner states don't have them...?). I've no idea if the US being massive/federal would have an impact on this.
3. You can improve your current system without a fancy algorithm which you hand-wring about. I suspect in the US you'd see massive racial disparities in who gets bail and what their conditions are, but if your argument is that more black people should be in prison awaiting trial because the alternative is racist then... kudos for consistently prioritising a single terminal value?
4. We probably go too far on the time limits (I've seen the CPS drop cases because otherwise they'll breach the time limit), but if you want to speed things up then threatening to screw up the DA's career if things take too long is powerful weapon in your arsenal.
In general, the English criminal justice system is largely well-designed, but underfunded and takes the cult of amateurism slightly too far (aka is English). This is one of the areas where I think the US could improve by copying our homework without massive disruption.
Thank you very much - I knew nothing about this and it was really interesting.
I would worry a bit about the US being massive/federal causing problems - I know of one problem that happened because a case got transferred halfway through from the (competent) police of one city to the (less competent) police of the next city over, losing information along the way, after a jurisdictional confusion. But I haven't actually read up on the topic.
Can anyone recommend blogs focused on UK politics/society that is similar to Scott's writing, i.e. rational, epistemically charitable, and carefully considering all the evidence available, but also readable?
Are antihistamines (specifically, Citrezine, but in general is also interesting) thought to be associated with depression? I only found one 92-person study from 2014 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24673474/), but it’s paywalled and the abstract makes it sound like it was looking at too much stuff to be a reliable finding. I’m having mood issues shortly after starting 10mg/daily Citrezine and wondering whether that’s a thing.
I don't hear them mentioned as specifically causing depression, but they can make you tired and I can imagine that once that flows through the dynamical system (see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-34e ) that can look like depressed mood. Why don't you ask your doctor if you can switch to a different antihistamine, maybe one without drowsiness as a side effect?
Cetirizine crosses the blood-brain barrier at about 10% (contra 'superb second generation antihistaminic, no side effecs' marketing). The H1 receptor is involved in sleep regulation*, hence sleepiness from antihistaminics. If too much sleep is already part of your depression I can imagine the causation you ask be true.
* And other type of activation? Dimenhydrinate (used against motion sickness and nausea) has been used off-label against severe anxiety.
Re: the Bean post, "I am not sure why they weren't using exploding harpoons, which did exist." is my new favourite sentence and I think could be the basis for a whole philosophy of life
Why are people worried about running out of lithium? Lithium is 100% recyclable, so once a ton of lithium is extracted from a mine, it stays on the Earth's surface indefinitely and can be used to make car batteries forever. Sure, it's expensive to extract lithium from a spent battery and use it to make a new one, but the point is, it's available and doesn't get depleted.
There are 1.42 billion cars in the world, so all we need to do is slowly replace them, one at a time, with electric cars. Once all 1.42 billion cars are electric, we're set since we can do 1:1 recycling of the lithium batteries.
"Running out" of a resource almost never means that there is literally none of it left on earth. Running out of a resource means it's more expensive than we would like.
Nothing is "100% recyclable", and you should feel bad for saying so. It is true that lithium atoms are not literally transmuted into some other kind of atom in use. It is also true that people often throw lithium batteries into the trash, where they end up in landfills, from which the lithium atoms eventually leach out into the groundwater and wind up as part of the ~0.2 parts per million lithium concentration in the oceans, at which point it's gone because Bullseye is right that we're not going to sort through five million water molecules and a hundred thousand sodium and chlorine ions to find one crappy lithium atom any time soon.
Also, even when you specifically take a lithium battery to a lithium-battery recycling center and say "get every scrap of lithium out of this so we can reuse it", some of it *still* winds up as 0.2 ppm lithium in the ocean.
If you know how much lithium is lost in the process, both to inefficiencies in the recycling process and to people throwing their lithium batteries in the trash rather than taking them to the recycling center, then you can assess whether lithium recycling is sufficient to close the supply gap. If you're saying "100% recyclable!", and doubling down on that with absolutes like "forever!", then you don't know something important and you don't know that you don't know something important.
What percentage of non-obese middle-school boys can do a zero-pound squat? That is, go down to squat position and then stand up using only leg muscles?
I'm curious how you are using the term 'squat position' here. For those with a background in weight lifting, performing a squat involves lowing yourself to a position where your thighs and calves form a 90 degree angle, then raising your self back up. I suppose another definition of a 'squat' is lowering yourself all the way down, well below 90 degrees, almost in a 'Asian bathroom style' position. Which are you referring to? I would suggest the answer to the weight lifting type is almost certainly approaching 100% however I do not have as good a guess as to the 2nd variety.
It's not about leg muscles, it's more about balance and flexibility (I guess in the case of a middle school'er, flexibility is not the issue). So mainly an issue with knowing how to engage core muscles
In my experience, when I was completely untrained (albeit as an adult), doing a barbell squat with no plates on the bar, or a goblet squat with 10 kg was much easier than without anything. I couldn't do a zero-pound squat
I find it vanishingly unlikely that any person of that age who isn't disabled can't do a single unweighted squat. Sitting down and standing back up unassisted is a pretty fundamental human movement that we all get a lot of practice doing.
There are some people with very bad hip mobility who can't comfortably get to 90 degrees, but not being able to do it comfortably isn't the same as not being able to do it.
Is there a way to get a printed version of Unsong? I know you have plans to edit it significantly, but I'm a fan even of this first edition and would like to own a copy.
A question for experts in etymology and mythology: are there any names in any Western language that mean "bringer of order" or "from chaos to order" or something like that? Were there any polytheistic gods whose sole purpose was to turn disorder into order, or to fix damaged things?
Certainly not an expert, but my general impression is that Chaos, or Old Night, or such concepts were more Large Amorphous Primaeval Originators than the later generations of deities, so you have gods and demigods and culture heroes conquering and taming the personifications of chaos (like Marduk with Tiamat) but no "god of order" as such.
Egyptian mythology has the Ogdoad and Ennead, various deities representing things like darkness, space, etc. or arising out of the "primordial waters" and combining to produce the newer generation of gods who command more definite roles.
Greek mythology has Chaos which is the first, unordered state of the universe, and out of it arise/are born deities like Night and the Underworld, and then the usual process of producing the next generation of gods goes on.
General pattern of myths is along that line. You can find gods/heroes who are order-bearers or order-bringers, but one who is specifically tasked with 'god of order' is not one I recognise.
There are goddesses such as Astraea, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astraea but their purpose is more to symbolise the degeneration from the Golden to the Iron Age (the increasing wickedness of humanity, the gods becoming distant or fleeing, etc.)
Curiosity had the MARDI camera recording descent and landing at a few frames per second but this is the first ever proper video of a Mars landing. There were also cameras set up to capture the operation of the skycrane, both pointing up from the top of the rover and down from the crane.
Scott, it may be too late for you to even see it, but I'm curious on your perspective as a medical care provider yourself. People are mentioning some of the peculiarities of the US health insurance system and it's reminding me of when I was going through various orthopedic issues a few years back and at one point freaked out because a statement of benefits I received said my insurance had declined to pay a neurologist who consulted on one of my surgeries remotely because the way they coded the procedure didn't authorize that specific function. The guy had charged them $14,000 for two minutes of work done remotely via video.
It made me wonder how on earth pricing for this kind of thing is supposed to be remotely rational. First, I only personally found out about all of these various specialists that would be working on me as I was in the hospital, already hooked up to an IV, already drugged up, and nine providers all show up with paperwork for me to sign and God knows what I'm signing, possibly agreeing to go into debt for the rest of my life, but if I don't I might lose the ability to walk in a few more months.
But then I later asked an office manager at my main spine surgeon what was up with the ridiculous astronomical prices they charged because I honestly felt kind of sorry for the insurance companies and the guy told me they don't even know what the insurance will actually pay. They just know there is some amount, nobody has mutually agreed to it, and it might change on a whim, so they send a bill with some very big number on it hoping it will be bigger than the number the insurer is willing to actually pay, in order to get the highest price they possibly can. So rather than even bother trying to set an actual price, they just wait until after performing a compensable procedure, quote the highest price after the fact they can possibly think of, knowing they won't actually get paid that much, but hoping they'll get paid whatever the maximum price is the insurer is actually willing to pay.
What the hell, man? It's like Moloch intentionally designed the worst of all possible markets. Has this been your experience of medical billing?
I have deliberately avoided encountering medical billing - first I worked at a clinic that had billing specialists who handled all that for me, then I started a cash-only practice.
But yes, this is basically right. The reason goodrx.com lets you get drugs for 10-30% what you would pay out of pocket otherwise is because they've made the pharmacies agree not to do the thing you're talking about when you use their coupon.
Even with the "pull a number out of the air and hope", $14,000 sounds *ridiculous* for what you describe. I would have thought "eh, ask 'em for $2,000 and maybe they'll bump it down to $500" but how on earth do you decide "2 minutes of my valuable time, training and experience is definitely in the $14,000 range for guesstimation"? God help you if he'd done anything like assist in the operation, you'd be looking at a bill for $10 million!
The more I read about the American system the crazier it seems, and how the hell anyone can say with a straight face "let the market fix this" I have no idea. The market got its chance, and everyone involved immediately went straight to "let's fix this so we get the most money in and have to disgorge the least money out".
I'm pretty sure the person deciding whether to just cut a check for $14,000 so they can get out of the office and go have a nice lunch, doesn't know that the service provided was only a two-minute video chat.
I support Medicare For All or something akin to it, but I also can't help wondering if a functioning free market in healthcare would be better than what we have now. (A functioning market, to be clear, is one where a list of the services offered and the price for each one is given to you *before* you decide what services to purchase, and providers compete on both price and quality of service.) Unfortunately, the insurance system in its current form makes it impossible for such a market to exist, and there would be difficulties anyway arising from the nature of the field - some number of customers will unavoidably be wholly or partially incapacitated when they enter the market.
I live in Georgia-the-country and we have this. It is definitely better than what the US has from my perspective as a consumer of medical care, because prices are transparent and also much, much lower. Like, I had a tough case of pneumonia a couple of years back and they ordered a CT scan, which cost about $40, if I remember correctly. More recently I stayed overnight at a hospital, which included a bunch of medications and an x-ray, and it was something on the order of $100. A normal consultation with a GP or specialist will cost me between $20 and $30. Having a baby cost us about $300, but that was only because my wife opted for a private room and the most expensive doctor at the best clinic in the country.
Some of that is obviously that labor costs are lower here, but there is definitely competition at every level that prevents insane price gouging like what you see in the US. For instance if my doctor orders a test I can always choose which clinic to have the test done at. Also medications cost about five to ten times less than they do in the US, and we have imports from the EU, Turkey, Israel, India, and other places to choose from.
Of course the downside is that there are people in the country who are too poor to afford the type of medical care that I can get, and there is limited help for them. There is some limited government insurance program which has been slowly expanding over the last 8 or 9 years - at first it only covered children under 5, adults over 65, and pregnant women, but now I think they've implemented some kind of universal basic coverage - but it hasn't crowded out the free market as of yet. I suppose we'll see what happens. The way it generally works is that the state will fund the cheapest options for care at the cheapest clinics, but you can pay for an upgrade if you want.
When did the market 'get its chance'? Back in the 19th century? The whole thing, from top to bottom, is a dense web of incredibly over-regulated self-ruling guilds. There's a cap on the number of doctor residencies and (I think) even of slots in accredited medical schools! The PTs (or some of them) are apparently pushing to require that they all must (in the future of course) acquire a 'doctorate' level education to practice!
If there is anything like a healthcare 'market' in the U.S., it's whatever criminals use when they need to avoid being reported to the police after, e.g. being injured in the commission of a major crime.
I had a big wall o' text get eaten, so I'll resummarize and can go into more detail if you're interested.
I've spent a lot of my career in various aspects of medical billing issues in the US. We have a few conflicting key points.
1) We call Health Insurance "insurance", but it's not insurance because it's not really based on risk, and healthcare demand is rather inflexible for most, as it's a cost that everyone is expect to have.
2) Health Insurance companies have limited ability to charge high cost/low cost patients differently, and they're pretty much in the business of doing their best to not pay claims/pay the minimum on claims. You get cheap life insurance by proving your health or non-smoking status, but health insurance companies can't do similar things.
3) Hospitals are required to treat/stabilize anyone who shows up at the emergency room (which is often the most costly way to do it, and doesn't stop them from showing up two days later freshly unstabilized)
4) Hospitals are allowed to negotiate secret prices with insurance companies and then have unpublished obscene prices to balance the books against the costs of providing free maximally expensive care.
Because we have limitations and requirements that are expressly at odds with one another, we have a system that works in mysterious ways(tm) to shove square pegs into round holes.
So we get completely arbitrary (and mostly secret) pricing at hospitals to cover costs of providing expensive free care. Insurance that benefits by just not paying invoices and bills and making it as difficult as possible to successfully file claims. Patients that have no idea what things cost with an expectation that insurance "covers" it. All that opaqueness means that health insurance is just a huge arbitrage industry managing the cost of care both directly and indirectly that the government mandates, but does not pay for.
A book recommendation: Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age, by Stephen Platt. If you want to read something that explains how corn, opium, and Scottish liberals started the beginning of the end for the Qing dynasty, you should read this.
I was looking again at that trigger-warnings-don't-work study, and don't think it addresses its question very well at all [Jones et al. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620921341]. The TW they used was: "TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma." They checked whether the TW reduced readers' anxiety after reading violent passages from literature (e.g. the murder scene in Crime and Punishment), and it didn't. They checked whether it made participants with trauma view the trauma as more central to their identities, and it did. They also checked whether it made anybody drop out of the study after seeing it, and it didn't (only one person who saw it, and one person who didn't, dropped out).
Problems:
1. The TW they used was bizarre. A normal TW says like, "tw: incest" or "cw: rape" or whatever. Compared to the normal one, theirs doesn't even say what the trigger is; is way less concise and is written in a tone that feels more intense; and centers the reader's trauma history. Is it surprising that the readers then felt their trauma history was more central?
(They argued that a TW's centering of readers' trauma is implied whether or not it's explicit, since "Why else provide a warning?" - but there's plenty of reason to disclaim disturbing passages, as evidenced by earlier viewer discretion warnings. At most this is an argument for using "content warning" over "trigger warning", a subtle change that many blogs have already done. I might agree with this conclusion, even, but it's really not how they nor the media framed their study.)
2. The main point of TWs is so readers can decide when or whether to engage in material, a question which the study barely addresses. They suggest that their results show readers don't use TWs this way. But all they showed is that study participants, who've already invested a chunk of time in participating in the experiment, aren't *so* cautious after a content-ambiguous TW that they remember the sunk-cost fallacy is fallacious and drop out. Does this prove that people don't, say, "choose not to read a triggering blog post right now because they have work to do"? Of course not.
Beyond just criticisms, I am interested in how predictive-processing models of anxiety relate either to their results, or to TW effectiveness in general. Some thoughts:
1. One thing they mention that I agree is important is "anticipatory anxiety" vs. "response anxiety." I bet a TW that's presented too far ahead, without telling you when the trigger is coming, could definitely increase anticipatory anxiety (you know *that* you'll be blindsided, but not when). That's why e.g. when I recommended a fanfic to a partner which had a potentially-very triggering scene, I told them when and what it was, so they could tell when it was coming instead of just tensing up the whole time.
2. Not even knowing what kind of trigger is coming might make the anticipatory anxiety even worse, on top of meaning readers can't even properly decide whether to read it or not.
I bet uncertain vague predictions of distress at unexpected times, are more anxiety-inducing than concrete predictions of distress that you know when are coming; and I bet predictive processing approaches to this are of value. Possibly relevant papers: [Wilkinson et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01840; Peters et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2017.05.004]
Also, personal attack time—I think that the inadequacies of their study should have been obvious, and that if they were carrying it out in good faith (e.g. looking at how bloggers actually use TWs, looking at bloggers' discourse about how they should be used, including CW vs. TW), they might have changed their study design, and at least definitely would have changed their presentation.
So I don't think they're approaching this in good faith. I think that's also apparent in the smug title of their previous paper, "Trigger warning: empirical evidence ahead" [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2018.07.002], the implication being that those dumb sjws are dumb and don't care about empirical evidence, they're just virtue signaling, so much so that evidence would *trigger* them, not like us
I just got into an argument with someone who defends Amazon's decision to de-list a book critical of transgender ideology. She didn't defend it on the grounds that Amazon is a private company and this isn't censorship per se. She defended the exclusion because the book offends her, is "anti-science," and is against "trans rights."
The idea that books can offend her, and that the way to deal with them is to point out their fallacies, was offensive to her.
So, arguments for censorship from the left, but this time on the grounds of "We're right" and "this is an affront to society". I'm not surprised they are using the language of the censorship battles, but the historical irony that it is the same impulse as my conservative side (e.g. the Lady Chatterley case and "do you really want books with the word 'fuck' freely available to anyone who can just pick one up and read it? the corrosive effect on good society!"). We got well and truly lectured about "art" and "freedom", and now that their side won the battle, they're the ones picking and choosing about what goes on the Index.
The most enraging part was that the argument took place on a writer's chat board. It shocked me to see that a self-described writer agreed with the Amazon decision - and not only agreed, but with a sort of vicious sneering triumphalism. And - this is the modern left for you - sheltering under the arms of a plutocrat while proclaiming one's allegiance to "rights."
(Actually, the conservatives were morally right about Chatterley, even if I disagree with them on free speech grounds. Everything's a tradeoff. But that's a side issue.)
Freedom of speech being controlled by various companies is frightening to me. I'm not a supporter of our past president, and no matter how much Joe Rogan likes him, I'm changing channels if I hear Alex Jones.. but I think it was wrong to ban them. Along with freedom of speech goes the potential for suffering and harm.
This isn't "freedom of speech being controlled by various companies" - it's a vendor saying they won't sell something. Big difference. I don't like it. I disagree with Amazon's decision. But it's their decision to make. We can't compel them to sell a book they don't want to sell.
Hmm OK, 'cause I can go buy the book from someone else. Still selling a book is not like decorating a cake. I'm not asking Amazon to put the book in their window, just send it to me in a brown paper wrapper. Can FedEx say they won't deliver the book? At some point big tech starts to look like a utility to me.
I didn't say I like this - I don't. I hate it. But it's not censorship. Those of us who disagree with this have to build our own platforms and start selling. Amazon is in no way like a utility. It's a virtual warehouse.
I'm not a fan of book burning or whatever, but I'm pretty sure FedEx is allowed to not do business with anyone they don't want to do business with, just as nearly every private actor is. The actual utilities that are exceptions to that rule are providing critical infrastructure with government-protected monopolies. If you want to set up your own book distributor, you're unlikely to able to compete with Amazon, but nothing is stopping you from trying. If you wanted to build your own city reservoir and run alternative water mains, I don't think you could, and thus the water company is not allowed to refuse to sell to you.
At least I think that's true, isn't it? You can't be deplatformed by your gas, sewage, water, and electricity providers, but book sellers are definitely not in that category and are free to blackball you for any reason they want. Freedom of speech doesn't mean other private actors are required to give you an audience for that speech.
I wrote the following CSS and put it on the discord that makes the comment stacking a bit easier to read, and widens the whole site. I'm not sure if this is what you referring to, but in case it is, here it is. It's a pretty quick attempt cause frontend isn't my specialty.
In Studies on Slack, Scott made an analogy to Sid Meier's Civilization, discussing the comparative merits of choosing to focus on early attacks vs. economic development/scientific research. If, say, two civilizations are in the Old World and have to focus on fighting each other, they're easy prey later in the game to the civilization with the New World all to itself which can vault over them in terms of wealth/tech. He then makes the point that real history is often more complicated, and a certain degree of conflict can be a spur to innovation, as per the famous Third Man quote about Italy vs. Switzerland.
I realized recently that this is in fact also true in Civilization, and resembles at least some scholars' theories about real history. At least in Civ III and IV (the ones I'm familiar with), while you might think that having a nice comfortable spawn location to yourself, far away from those pesky warmonger AIs, would be a huge benefit to your civilization, it's actually usually a devastating disadvantage. The reason being that you miss out on (voluntary or coercive) technology trading, which has multiplicative benefits. (I.e., not only can you not trade for techs researched by your neighboring civ, but you can't trade for techs that their neighbor on the other side traded to them, and so on.) So, while an isolated start is less precarious/nerve-racking, even if you get an entire continent to peacefully develop yourself it typically makes it extremely challenging, if not impossible, on mid-high difficulty levels to win the game, because you'll be very far behind in tech as it progresses. No matter what path towards victory you want to take---conquest, science, diplomacy, culture---you need to have at least some proximity to the most core meeting (and usually clash) of civilizations in the world, to benefit from the ensuing spread of technology...
Which I recently realized is remarkably contiguous with Ian Morris' argument in his great book War! What is it Good For? about why Eurasian civilizations, and within it European ones, conquered outward rather than vice versa. Morris claims, drawing on Jared Diamond's argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that the major Eurasian agricultural civilizations---around the Mediterranean, in the modern Middle East, in India, and in China---developed within a set of "lucky latitudes" that made the movement of people, goods, and ideas easier than in the Americas, Africa, and Australasia. I'd known that major inventions had spread from China to Europe, but I hadn't realized how *fast* they'd done so:
"In 1326—less than forty years after the first definite example of a Chinese gun, and thirty years before the first definite Korean case—two officials in Florence, five thousand miles to the west, were already being ordered to obtain guns and ammunition. The next year, an illustrator in Oxford painted a picture of a small cannon in a manuscript. No invention had ever spread so quickly."
And then, Morris argues, features of European geography created a good amount of mid-sized states who had to fight a lot of siege warfare against each other, which increased the pressures towards military innovation as compared to the larger empires of the Islamic world, India, and China. (I believe a similar argument is made in Walter Scheidel's book Escape From Rome, but I haven't yet read it.) So, when European explorers, merchants, and soldiers discovered the New World, Australia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, they found the natives far behind in technology...
...much as, in Civ, when you start getting into the early modern era and exploring the world, you find far less advanced AI civilizations stuck on remote islands and smaller continents. I don't know if this was intentional on the developers' part or just convergent evolution, but I find it interesting/amusing either way.
(Two random footnotes: the Civ model isn't entirely accurate, because there was, at least in the read of the evidence that I find most convincing, a very high degree of warfare and consequent violent mortality even among non-Eurasian core, non-agricultural tribes---see Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization and Mark Allen and Terry Jones' Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers. Also, I think that Orson Welles quote is only partly right: in addition to the many other virtues of the Swiss, as David Landes argued in Revolution in Time, the development of accurate mechanical clocks was ackshually a very important process in economic history. Furthermore, as one interesting writer has observed, Italy's level of cultural/scientific etc. contributions, as per e.g. notable figures listed in Human Achievement, seems to have dropped considerably following the early 17th Century unpleasantness with Galileo. I don't know, did they have less terror, murder, and bloodshed following then? Possibly.)
Why is it so hard to accept that maybe it's all random? It sure sounds like the most parsimonious null hypothesis. Maybe if we replayed the tape of history the Mayas would end up dominating half of Europe devising theories about the inferior IQ of white people, who knows?
(Human Achievement is a joke, btw - the methodology (counting dictionary entries) is so laughably absurd you'd first think it was a parody)
'Dissatisfaction with the null hypothesis' is a decent description of the very idea of curiosity. "What matters?" "Nothing matters." Not a very good answer.
(And reminder that attributing outcomes to racial IQ is more or less the *antithesis* of this sort of historical materialism. If you're bringing it up to mock the dumb association, then I'd still rather you didn't.)
What's stopping your unbothered monolithic civilization from developing just as much tech as all the warring civs put together? Tech cost scaling? That's not a thing in the real world, the population and the overall conditions for tech development is all that matters.
I think, in real life, it's something like: My civilization has the right conditions for developing technologies A, B, and C. Yours has the right conditions for developing C, D, and E.
Lack of incentive, or in some cases positive disincentive. New technologies disrupt existing power structures, and the people who had power under the old order might not have power under the new one. If the currently-powerful people have power over your whole monolithic civilization, well, their police have been able to keep them solidly in power with revolvers and shotguns, submachine guns *might* give the edge to gangsters and revolutionaries, so just quietly get rid of any damn fool who tries to invent a machine gun. But if you're facing war with a rival neighbor every generation or two, then you can't be sure the other guys won't invent the machine gun so you have to do so as well.
It's not just weapons, either. Even unambiguously productive technologies disrupt cozy monopolies, so if the monopoly is civilization-wide the disruptive technology can be squashed everywhere. And even if it isn't actively squashed, the people best positioned to develop and introduce a new productive technology are the people who have already won the zero-sum status game under the old rules, so why do they want to change anything?
Does anyone have experience using Anki or similar spaced-repetition software for various long-term tasks (memorizing stuff for one's job, language learning, etc.)? I'm interested to know your usecase, daily routine, what happens when you mess things up or miss a day of reps or something, and what you got out of it in your long-term goals/productivity increases
I had a similar experience to your Chinese and German one but with Japanese. I learned lots of vocab abstractly (as opposed to learning what I needed in situations). It was fun at the beginning but my workload also got steadily heavier until a year and a half in I missed a week or two, tried to get back into it then burned out and now, a couple of years later, after all that time learning the Kanji I can no longer recognize much. I've never been to Japan nor had any plans to live there. I think Anki would be great if you were really immersed in the language every day but if you're learning for fun you might burn out like me. I had read about burning out and though "no way that will happen to me with my dedication and love of the Japanese language". But it did.
One positive hangover is that my general recall memory improved massively during and after Anki - words, names, movie stars, things like that were instantly available to my mind but I can feel this super-memory effect tailing off now.
I've primarily used it for language learning, and in particular for increasing and maintaining vocabulary.
Spaced repetition works better for me than other choices, and I was happy to get rid of the paper flash cards, and be able to have individual repetition patterns for each "card".
It's absolutely not enough on its own. All it helps with is basic memory work. You need to also work with the language (e.g. read it, speak it, attempt to translate it). But it helps, and will help you retain your progress when you don't have time to learn more - if you stick with it.
My routine is to go through all the cards it says are due, every day, except that I (a) regularly miss a day or 3 due to competing priorities and (b) have had several long periods (months) where I wasn't reviewing at all, and huge numbers of cards became due. That was bad; don't do it ;-(
When the number of new cards drops to zero, and the number of cards being reviewed each day drops to doesn't-feel-like-a-huge-amount-of-work, I add more cards, generally by doing yet another lesson (from a text book, or DuoLingo, or whatever) and adding whatever vocabulary it introduces; sometimes I simply fish in a dictionary for words I'd like to know. _If_ I didn't have days when I miss review, or do only part of it, and kept on top of "leeches" (see below), I could simply add more cards just as I run out of new ones, which would be about once a week.
I don't find missing a day here or there, or doing only half the assigned cards is a biggie - unless it happens frequently (several times a month), or multiple day stretches in a row. It degrades learning a bit, but not enough to be a problem. But long gaps - which I've had too many of - are hell.
Beware of what Anki calls "leeches" - specific cards you fail repeatedly, that end up becoming most of your drill, because their interval regularly drops way down when you forget them yet again. Revise them, delete them, or put them on hold - looking at them every day will just make you frustrated.
I also briefly used it to learn definitions and basic facts found in assigned reading, in advance of class discussion. That was a huge help for making the class more understandable, provided I got the new material onto cards early enough. So I overall got much more out of the class. And a few of the definitions I'd memorized also gave me a leg up on the final exam/preparation for it. But I haven't looked at those cards in almost 2 decades; I doubt I remember anything from them. (And ditto for the language I dropped completely - I still have the deck I built, but I'd be better off starting over.)
I have experience with attempting to use it for functional knowledge (mostly biochemistry, preparing for exams) and failing terribly. On the other hand, building a personal knowledge base in Obsidian works like a charm.
I also witnessed my father attempting to teach himself English via thousands of hours spent in SuperMemo, and not really getting anywhere - I'm pretty sure all the English he can speak came from contact with actual, living text and speech.
I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than languages, and maybe not even languages.
Back at the prior blog, someone said "I use it for anything that is worth remembering." If there is something that happens at work or at home and I say "I should remember this," into a card it goes.
When I fight to learn something at work and finally figure out the answer, I try to dedicate a tiny fraction of that time to making sure I remember the answer. (This could technically be done with a KB or text file, too, that is an external brain.)
Also, I'm experimenting with using Anki to track math concepts for my son. He knows how to multiply negatives by negatives, but if he goes for too long without it, it disappears from his mind. I won't really know if this works for a year or two, though.
I've been learning poems recently and I'm looking for my next one. I don't really have a pattern for them, so far I know Invictus, The Stolen Child, and If. Does anyone have recommendations on poems that would be good to memorise? I am vaguely interested in ones that are important or significant in some way, and only plan on learning rhyming poems.
The Second Coming? Recessional? (That's less known, but a favorite of mine.) Ozymandias? (Very well known, but IMO quite good.) Honestly, most of Kipling is good. I also really like Lepanto (Chesterton).
Another good GKC poem is "The Last Hero." And I enjoy his doggerel, such as "The Horrible History of Jones." Lepanto and The Ballad of the White Horse may be the best. The latter is a bit long to memorize, but my son is working on the project.
For pure metrical skill, it's hard to beat Tolkien's Errantry (later adapted with less nonsense as Earendil the Mariner). Chesterton's Lepanto, about the Holy League's fleet defeating the Ottomans, is beautiful and very rhythmic but a bit long. Also thematically a bit dated, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for you (or me). Historically interesting because of its popularity with WWI troops.
"The pilot project - shrouded in secrecy - is likely to roll out in just weeks in a valley in the MacGillycuddy's Reeks near Killarney.
Musk, the founder of SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla, is deploying "showers" of satellites into space to provide cheap and fast broadband connection for remote rural locations.
Strict non-disclosure agreements surround the approach in December by Musk's SpaceX Starlink representatives to Kerry County Council.
However, sources have confirmed Musk's small antennae are likely to operate from the remote Black Valley, which is 20 miles from Killarney."
He really does plan for global coverage, doesn't he? I had imagined he'd be concentrating on sites in the US, but testing small out of the way places in Europe does indicate he means *everyone* will get it.
The satellites are orbiting relatively low above the earth, not in GEO. So once he has a given latitude covered, it's covered in all countries at that latitude.
I just put down a deposit for the service Saturday and it told me I could expect to receive an actual satellite at some point in the next six months. In Dallas, TX. So pretty far south of Ireland. About equal to Casablanca and Tripoli. The initial plan is to cover most of the northern hemisphere.
Obviously, I'm not rural. Just really fed up with Spectrum and have had literally zero other broadband options since moving here 7 years ago.
Well darn it Elon Musk, what kind of crummy third-rate service are you running when you can't give each of your subscribers their very own satellite! 😀 I saw this described as an "antenna" in reports, so let us know if it's a satellite dish or some kind of fancy 21st century space-age aerial once you get it!
My parents and sister, who all live together in San Diego, got it three weeks ago. They said they were exposed from my other sister's husband when they came to visit just before my niece had to go back to school (U of Oregon). Not sure how he got it, but they live just outside of LA, so the overall culprit there seems to be interregional travel.
In New York State, it would seem that 74% of them are contracting it at household social gatherings. Presumably in places with less strict lockdown policies, some of that is shifted to social gatherings outside the home, but good luck getting consistent data across jurisdictions.
My wife got by working at the local Canadian Superstore. She was one of 9 employees or so to get Covid in the space of two weeks at the end of November, even as the store flouted capacity limits. I got a test, which turned out negative, two days after her positive test, and later got a fever and mild cold-like symptoms, which I'm calling Covid (I didn't get a second test, but we were in isolation at the time. By the way, I did my best to stay over six feet away from her, wash hands, etc. but was not really aggressive about isolation, thinking that infection was very likely regardless and that my best bet was to minimize initial viral load. I'm happy with the results, but YMMV.)
Problem: high-status media outlets (NYT, NPR, MSNBC, etc) pick a side on some politically-charged topic (e.g. climate change).
Since all high-status sources are in agreement, clearly any disagreement is a crazy conspiracy theory. Any outlet that disagrees has the perception of it reinforced as being low status, and any person who disagrees is perceived as a conspiracy theorist (all the educated and smart people agree, what are you, on the side of Fox News?).
How do we get out of this loop? How can we ever find out the truth about something if whatever NYT et al. pick automatically becomes the truth?
Insofar as there is a solution, it is to develop the skill of judging sources of information on internal evidence. Does this news story/blog post/whatever sound as though it is written by someone being careful that what he says is true, or by someone who wants to persuade you of a conclusion he already holds? It helps if there is some overlap with something you already know, so you can judge it in part by that.
I guess my question was worded badly. My question is, really, how do you make most people consider anything other than the official version of reality? It doesn't seem as if there currently is a way.
See this example: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims . The facts here, unlike with issues that need some understanding of statistics or technology, are really simple. Does anybody who didn't go specifically looking for this know or care?
> My question is, really, how do you make most people consider anything other than the official version of reality?
Answering that question is basically the whole purpose of science (not "Science!") as an enterprise, and the rough outline so far seems to be:
1. It can take an arbitrarily long amount of time. Think marathon not sprint. (And pack some snacks for the ride.)
2. 'Funerals' help, i.e. the turnover in the personnel of 'official' bodies.
Beyond that, any sufficiently effective general persuasion technique is _inevitably_ going to be used for all kinds of malicious reasons, so there's no way to 'override' the "official version of reality" beyond (slowly) replacing or updating the official version, or somehow destroying the 'official' status of that current version.
I remember reading a rationalist-type piece a few years back venturing the hypothesis that, 'Humans schedule their reproduction based on the time they instinctively expect to live. Because people are unprecedentedly safe in modern Western countries, there is a superstimulus affecting their expectation. This could be resulting in women subconsciously estimating that they will be alive and healthy for 150 or 200 years, and ending up never having children.'
This is only what I remember, more or less. I am not saying myself that such a superstimulus would only impact women.
Does anyone know where I can find this piece? I haven't managed to find it with Google. It might possibly have been posted on LessWrong.
Over the weekend I wrote "ACX Simple," a browser plugin trying to be a dead simple interface to read and reply to comments on ACX. Instead of digging through all the Substack cruft and trying to dynamically disable whatever is making everything suck, I'm just starting from scratch (aside from the CSS) and doing a new interface.
It's "good enough" now to ask for more public comments, but I'm purposefully doing this on the week-old OT instead of the current one, because I know there are going to be problems. You also need to know how to grab the git repository and install an unpacked extension in a Chrome-based browser -- I'll make standalone plugins later as this gets more stable.
Take a look at the README to see what limitations it has and problems I need help with.
You should post these on DSL as an effort post!
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/board,1.0.html
Fascinating, thank you.
This is indeed very interesting, not least because so it is both a dessert topping and a floor wax? 😀
Are you figuring the cost of tools into this? Or assuming they can be rented or borrowed? For all I know, even buying tools might be worth it since they can be used in multiple projects.
Obviously, we just discovered the translation of the word "koldgeon" from the game Gostak! (If you've never seen the game, give the webpage at https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=w5s3sv43s3p98v45 a few seconds of your time. It's a text adventure, and it's fantastic.)
From the dictionary at http://www.plover.net/~davidw/gostak.html (warning, minor spoilers):
"pogrifon n. ? [Made of sindish and koldgeon. Since sindish is what the morleon's walls and ceiling are made of, and koldgeon is edible and hurts to look at, a pogrifon is something rather odd by our standards, like marble-and-marmalade, chocolate-and-gold, or drywall-and-cheese."
This is very interesting. Is there any information on modern attempts to update lac production?
"chatoyancy" – now there's a word!
That seems entirely sensible on the part of the YouTube ad market!
Just wanted to say I'm really happy to see you back online and blogging. Take good care and good luck with your other work!
Am I the only one who misses the "Links" posts? The ones not specific about coronavirus. Is there any chance they'll come back, Scott?
Love those posts! It takes me days to get through all of them, so I can only imagine how long it must take to compile them. Then again, I’m slowing down in my old age.
One of my favorite SSC features.
I've been doing links posts cross-posted to LW and FB, latest was at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d65NWwGFYvBtnWGeD/links-for-january-2021
I would assume people who enjoyed Scott's links posts would probably like mine, although I tend to have more links with shorter descriptions.
Yes! The main delays are:
1. I have six months of links saved up and I've got to figure out which ones are obsolete and how to splice the rest into bite-sized chunks.
2. I have lots of other posts from six months saved up, some of them are gradually going obsolete as conditions change, others I'm really interested in seeing what people think and want to get them out as soon as possible - and so the links are sitting on the back burner for now.
Glad to hear that! I'm loving the steady flow of meaty posts from the backlog!
(And thanks also for the shoutout about the DataSecretsLox effortpost contest.)
We're keeping up the tradition over at DSL!
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2609.msg
Candidate concept handle: Hippocratic Pareto Dominance
* for doctors: primum non nocere (first do no harm)
* for dieting: first do not gain
* for holes: if you find yourself in one, stop digging
Anything else?
Ah, thank you for helping add to this collection! The one about not throwing away the old bucket is perfect. I'm not sure about the others. I just now realized that another way to express the common theme -- maybe a better concept handle for this -- is Ratcheting. You want to make forward progress on something without risking any backward progress.
(You want to improve your water fetching with a fancier bucket but be ready to fall back to your current bucket in case the new one is worse.)
Would "Don't burn your bridges" fit the ratcheting concept? Don't ruin your old network as you progress because you might need to fall back on it.
I think so! The only thing it's _maybe_ missing is the idea of attempted progress backfiring. Like bridge-burning may just be a stupid thing people do out of anger that they may regret. Like if it's just "don't be rash" then that feels too general. But if it's like "don't alienate your current friends in your social-climbing attempts" then that would fit perfectly.
(The common theme being "we'd like to improve something but not risk making it worse")
Frog tape, good brushes to cut in (Purdy), if you are strong a massive roller, or you could get a paint sprayer. Buy good paint - BM Natura is 0 VOC. It's worth it.
Glad to see you mention taping. Frog tape = essential. Not the dollar store cheap version but real Frog tape. I've had good luck with Benjamin Moore's Emerald line, it is forgiving of bad technique and covers beautifully.
I've been there. You are a better handy-person than I am. I painted several coats over the window & frame, several coats. Like a plaster cast, but stupider.
For wisdom: First, don't be stupid ?
Ha! But I think that's too passive to count. Maybe "for wisdom: first, don't read/watch stuff that actively makes you stupider"?
My first draft was 'For wisdom: First don't say anything stupid" But I think you have to say and think very, very stupid things from time to time to figure out what's smart. What is smart is not always intuitive, so, you have to have the freedom to fumble about.
Beware of 'si tacuisses…' situations, though.
BTW, you provided another argument for me why I think a total post-privacy world would be a huge negative.
Ha, yeah, I've heard this as "better to remain silent and thought foolish than to open your mouth and remove all doubt". :) This totally fits the Hippocratic pattern! (But also, yes, it's usually bad advice!)
being stupid is very much an activity in my experience
For sales people: first, do know charm.
Gaining weight is an entirely valid and common goal of dieting.
I was imprecise there. I meant for weight loss, first don't ever let your weight go up. I realize that the question of whether decreasing scale is a rational goal is a whole can of worms
*scale weight
This wouldn't be a good idea for women who gain water weight from their periods.
Super fair. I'd probably say one should get empirical about that and apply it as a principled exception.
Perhaps "common" as an absolute number, but certainly not as a fraction of those who say they are dieting...
I thought of another one, thanks to another Scott:
* for bullies/assholes: it's often hard to beat a strategy of utterly ignoring them
I thought of this name for it when talking to other-Scott: Primum non Streisandum
For the internet: do not feed the trolls.
Counterexample: The route from no business with 0 dollars to a sucessful one with missions of dollars often involves passing through a state of being indebted (having negative dollars). To get to your goal, you have to start by moving away from it.
True! This kind of Hippocratic advice is definitely the kind you sometimes should reverse!
Measure twice; cut once?
Thanks! I can't decide if it fits the pattern but it's a good pearl of wisdom regardless! If I had to contort it into this Hippocratic pattern, maybe: "(for sewing) measure tentatively all you like but never cut tentatively"?
If you'll pardon a mildly lewd example, "don't stick your dick in crazy" seems to fit the pattern.
Also, reddit's cardinal rule on being attractive: "first, don't be unattractive." Maybe there's an 80/20 insight here. Like the most failure in a given domain e.g. attraction is caused by a few, pretty easily identifiable mistakes.
For software development: don't push to master.
Hmm, I can't decide if this fits the pattern. If it's just of the form "don't do this dangerous thing that might break stuff or that you might regret" then that seems too general. But something like "for coding: keep your experimental features in a separate branch" does sound like it could fit. Thanks for adding this!
Prioritizing not introducing new bugs over introducing new features fits the pattern better, but sadly does not seem to fit the actual priorities of any real software company.
Ha, yes! I hadn't mentioned this for fear of sounding self-promotional but we call this the Pareto Dominance Principle: https://blog.beeminder.com/pdp/
(I'm not even claiming we're a counterexample to your "any real software company" claim, but, um, at least we talk the talk?)
In general for games: "instead of trying to win, try not to lose." Maybe another way of putting this is: "no unforced errors."
I think the common thread of these is an insight that "inverted" recommendations [i.e. don't try to x, try not to -x] are often more concrete and helpful than positive recommendations because they avoid making the assumption that we know how to get to the positive state in the first place. If we knew how to get to the positive state and wanted to be there, we probably wouldn't need advice.
This kind of thinking also implies that "wins" in general may be better off pursued "indirectly," since if you pursue them directly, you will likely make the overconfidence/ignorance mistake referenced above. Far easier to try to eliminate the errors with the end in mind, than to rush straight for the end.
In other words maybe all the statements of the form "primum non nocere" imply that end goals cannot be pursued directly, but instead must ensue. Interested if anyone has thoughts here.
Redundancy is your friend.
Smart! I can't decide if it fits the pattern exactly. See also the other comment I just now added in reply to CYOA. I think the common theme can be characterized by a ratchet: making forward progress without risking backward progress. I think you're right that there are various ways redundancy can be integral to that.
This occurred to me too late to post on either of the *Cult of Smart* theads, so I'll put it here:
We ought to take some school horror stories with a grain of salt. My partner, who teaches young kids, regularly encounters parents who are a little too credulous w.r.t. stories their kids tell them.
There was a father who was convinced that his son was being systematically starved at lunch time (there have been several of these, actually). There was a mother who fervently believed that a [much younger child in a different class] was physically abusing her [older, larger child] every day at recess. They called at nights and on weekends and demanded to know why their concerns weren't being taken seriously.
From the outside, it was clear what was going on: the kids determined that their parents were sensitive to stories about X, so they supplied them with stories about X. Sometimes there was a kernel of truth: "Mr. Smith, Eve is right: we did tell her she couldn't have any strawberries. That was because the snack today was blueberries. She ate lots of those." But sometimes they were just totally made up: "Mrs. Jones, I know Adam said that Steve punched him at recess today. But Steve's family has been out of the country since Christmas."
This doesn't invalidate anybody's first-person experiences, and doesn't mean that terrible abuses are impossible. Indeed, I witnessed some bad stuff at school when I was a kid. But we should apply our usual amount of skepticism to really outrageous claims.
Wrong. Abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with. False positives may be annoying, but training skepticism towards abuse survivors can only tend to increase cases of actual abuse.
All absolutes are false.
Good, then this one is too
Except that one!
Serious question: would you contend that we in the 2020s are too quick to dismiss the claims of Satanic ritual abuse from the 1980s and 1990s?
No, butt legal evidence is supposed to be a higher standard than whether you investigate something in the first place.
If abuse expands to fill the space it can get away with, so does fraud. Training credulous acceptance of anything said by someone who claims to be an abuse survivor can only tend to increase cases of fraud.
No, we definitely shouldn't dismiss claims of abuse. Eve and Adam's parents (in the examples) were absolutely right to press the school (though it seems like they went overboard on the wrong means). But if they tell us outsiders on the internet, we have no call to just swallow all their claims.
OP was saying specifically that parents should be less credulous.
And at the end he was saying "But we should apply our usual amount of skepticism" - i.e. talking about us outsiders on the internet. But you gave a fair corrective to the first view, and now this situation's making me remember https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/ .
I don't agree with your reading
All neurotypical kids occasionally lie to adults, it's a natural part of childhood development. Using the theory of mind to manipulate an outcome is AMAZING to little people who otherwise have no power.
My particular parents *should* have been less credulous about a lot of stuff I had to say as a child, including times I cast myself as a victim to manipulate the outcome I wanted. I was a self-centered, often self-righteous kid and if truthfully arguing for something didn't work, I'd go to the next option of exaggerating or outright lying.
And I had absolutely ZERO guilt or regret about doing so. ZERO. From my point of view, my parents had infinitely more power than me and I didn't feel the slightest moral qualm about using every tool at my disposal to "fight back" for whatever I thought I deserved.
In fact, you know that thing in popular media where an adult telling a child, "I'm very disappointed in you" is supposed to be the very worst kind of emotional consequence of bad behavior?
As a kid I was deeply confused and contemptuous of the trope. What kind of gullible chump kid would fall for that emotional manipulation? Who cares what an adult feels, as long as they don't take away TV time or cancel your social engagements?
And I had and still have a great relationship with my parents! That's why I felt so secure in lying to them, or even risking their "disappointment!"
Human beings lie all the time. That's incompatible with believing all anything.
YES, thank you. "OK [adult], what magic words do I have to say to get my Game Gear back" was always on my mind.
I've been thinking lately about people who want to make their parents proud of them. It seems like a pattern that can work very well indeed if the parent's ambition for the child is appropriate and the parent doesn't withhold approval.
Why are some children are strongly motivated by their parents' approval and others are not? I have no idea.
Holy crap. I guess I was your polar opposite. I told the truth, never manipulated - couldn't, can't, don't understand how other people work well enough.
Makes sense!
Although I don't know if we were actually polar opposites! We might actually be closer together than you think.
I was fine with lying about facts to mislead a parent/adult during an argument and/or interrogation. And to some degree, I was willing to say magic words like "I'm sorry" and "I won't do it again" to avoid a punishment.
But there were kinds of emotional manipulation I wasn't willing to engage in. By maybe 10 years old, I had a obscure sense of personal honor about not crying literal tears or expressing vulnerable emotions during an argument. It somehow felt like "cheating," and I avoided doing it even when it arguably would have been normal and appropriate.
So the only theory of mind I was engaging in was, "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Whereas my younger brother (like lots of kids), was doing both "will this person believe this untrue thing I'm telling them?" AND "what does this person feel now, and how can I get them to *FEEL* what I want them to feel about the untrue thing I'm telling them?"
Which is why my younger brother was my matriarch grandmother's favorite kid; he had no personal honor about weeping crocodile tears into her shoulder whenever he wanted her to do something for him. He admitted to using the tactic as a kid and still admits to it today.
He had way higher emotional intelligence than even I did. You, me, and him are all on different parts of that spectrum, I think!
Hmm, I don't think that's a fair summary. I hedged a lot! I said some parents are a *little* too credulous, and that outsiders ought to apply our *usual* skepticism to *outrageous* claims.
Goes both ways though. We can apply scepticism to people's claims that they enjoyed school.
Maybe students and teachers who like school really just have some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
People tend to see more value in their education as an adult than as a child, while suffering that is in the past and that has no obvious after-effects, tends to feel less bad than when it happened to you.
So I suspect that people become more positive as they age.
This is a great point. I was specifically talking about being skeptical of outrageous stories, but surely there are plenty of kids who tell their parents by saying "Oh yes, I really love school! Teacher X is so nice" because over-the-top enthusiasm about school gets a good reaction.
As a parent I can say there have been times when I found out something negative had happened at school. Sometimes I found it out from my kid, sometimes from a teacher or aide, sometimes from the principal. I will say that without spending serious time on it - at least half an hour - I never got anything close to the complete story, from any of those reporters. Even after spending time on it, sometimes important details would only surface later.
I did however encounter the perspective you describe: the school employee/teacher/principal attributing motive to the kid. When I look back, there is only a little correlation between stuff the kids knew I might react to, and what they said. Some of the things that happened were totally unexpected to me and also were corroborated by the school.
Other times, the kids were not telling me things that I probably would have reacted to, and when I found out later I freaked out (the daycare where the kids had to watch soap operas, for example)
So I submit that the match between what kids think the parents will react to, and what they actually react to, is not perfect. Also not good enough to fully explain these parents.
Also, I have never met a parent who did Not have a story of something important that happened at school, which no one told them about until long after the fact - not the kid, not the teacher, not the principal. A bad (or good) grade? A punch? A discipline procedure or reprimand?
The communication channels are all imperfect. And the trust is sometimes not very good. Unfortunately when the educators wrap it all up and attribute it solely to the prevaricating little darlings, that's when I know someone's not paying attention.
Educators (and daycare providers) do say that to each other a lot, though. I've certainly heard it a lot. It buffers the teachers against the fear and mistrust from the parents; it buffers the teachers against the conflicts among the students; and it buffers them against conflict with each other (when a student says teacher X did something, that student must be lying, so the teacher doesn't have to investigate further.) So it's a very useful perspective.
Kids' communication can be a little or a lot jumbled. They don't have the norms down yet. But there is very often truth in the emotion (in my limited experience). Eve is upset about the berries? That is, Eve is upset, and Eve spoke about berries. Is Eve "upset about the berries" or is it the emotion sourced to something else, perhaps related to the teacher, perhaps related to something else? Maybe what Eve really wants to say is she's lonely at school, the teacher spends more time talking to other little girls, and the teacher didn't explain what snack was, so Eve was embarrassed asking for the wrong thing, et cetera. The upsetness has an origin even if the details are skewed, and sometimes the details aren't skewed. Kids are also learning to discern the motives of unfamiliar adults, and they're not perfect at that.) One or two adults in a room with twenty-plus children are not able to track every interaction. Yet in order to feel comfortable with the level of responsibility they have, they attribute greater success to themselves than they should. I'm sure that fallacy has a name. It helps the teachers form a bloc, they never have to check the story with each other, if they already know the answer is "The kid is lying or wrong or both."
I'm not sure what collective strategy teachers in a large school *should* use to buffer themselves, if not the "kids lie" strategy. The kids are the least powerful party and least able to defend themselves. If teachers say "We might be wrong," one out of a hundred parents will beat them with that admission and totally overdo it, or kids will tear down all their authority. If a principal says, "Maybe my teacher is a tyrant, maybe Billy really is stalking Jimmy, let me see," that undermines morale. It's very delicate and the individual kid is not usually the most valued unit. I have not yet seen this balance maintained consistently, although lots of people try.
Did your kids ever stall bed time? Mine did (currently do). Every week I'd find myself saying, "OK, I'll bring you one more drink and then it's time to sleep!" Or "I"ll help you get to the bathroom, but then it's lights out!" My kids were (are) masters at figuring out what I would respond to.
I can imagine a version of myself in which I got caught up in a concern loop about this. "My kid seems really thirsty at bedtime! I'd better ask the pediatrician about this!" I do, and the pediatrician says "Let's keep an eye on this, but I don't think there's anything physically wrong here." But I'm suspicious - my kid is still crying out for water every evening! I start to mistrust the pediatrician.
Eventually I'm sending the pediatrician messages every night, and asking preschool teachers to monitor water intake. But no one is taking me seriously! This only makes me more concerned. I switch pediatricians. I switch schools...
*This* is the dynamic I'm referring to with Eve and Adam.
For stalling bedtime, my kids know it's science-y questions. I can not resist answering them....
One could view that as your manipulating them into talking about science.
It's important to believe true things and not false things, of course.
At the same time ... I remember being a kid and not having the language to express what made school so horrible. If I'd come home and told my parents, "today every kid in my grade took turns beating me up", it would have been more accurate to my subjective experience of school than any true thing I could have said.
That's why I think allowing kids (and people in general) to leave situations they don't like is so much more important than being "tough on bullies" or any punitive approach. Was Eve really beaten up by Steve, or is she just using any tactic she can to avoid being put back in a classroom with Steve? Is /she/ abusing /him/? It doesn't matter as much if you just let her leave.
Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
> Also, it sounds like you're saying "we should be more skeptical about adults' stories of abuse they experienced as a child, because children lie", which doesn't follow.
I am definitely not trying to say this! I'm saying we should apply our *usual* amount of skepticism to *really outrageous* claims.
Finally started reading Yudkowsky and while he is mostly ok I wish he hadn't blocked me on twitter because I mostly want to yell at him about lesser problems
Perhaps he has reason to, you know, limit the space that abuse has to grow into…
noise
9 plus people think I am abusive on zero basis. Interesting.
Does it count as zero basis when you're specifically complaining about the inability to yell at someone?
Yes. Obviously you can't literally tell at someone through Twitter, which should have, with other context cues, indicated that I did not literally mean I was going to yell at him but instead that I was going to raise criticisms and felt like self deprecating exaggerating the nature of this.
No one thinks you wanted to literally yell at him through twitter. They are reacting to your choice of verb. Actually, no one even called you abusive. They are pointing out that blocking people who say they want to yell at you on twitter is a good method for preventing abuse. No comment on your particular case.
I have a general take that blue checks shouldn't be able to block people from seeing their content (just mute them and ban them from responding, at most).
I'm still surprised Eliezer is a bluecheck. It's not that he's not famous, it's just...he doesn't seem like a bluecheck kind of guy. And I feel like even asking for a bluecheck signals something at this point, and it's not the kind of thing Eliezer would usually signal.
I think he got it because at some point there actually were some people impersonating him and making various claims about cryptocurrency on Twitter in his name
That sounds like one of the better reasons to get a blue check. Do you remember about how long ago that was?
A few years, but I don't remember exactly when. Probably sometime between 2016 and 2018.
My org has a blue check on Twitter, but didn’t request it.
Perhaps he doesn't want to be yelled at.
I didn't mean literally yelled.
Did you want to tell him off about those problems?
I want to raise certain criticisms about what I have read in Rationality AI to Zombies so far, none of which as of yet psychologize or are directed to the person of Yudkowsky.
Do you think it would be worth your while to post your criticisms here?
All (most?) of the content of "Rationality: AI to Zombies" comes from posts on LessWrong and you're free to comment there with any criticisms you have.
You're giving off a strong impression about _why_ Eliezer would _want_ to block you in these comments.
Is there some specific reason why he should be open to _your_ criticisms of all people?
Can you explain your intuition in a non circular fashion?
I'm seeing lots of reports on my internet radar of a red-hot housing market, especially for suburban single-family homes. Houses receiving multiple bids soon after being listed, historically low inventory, etc. What's most notable is the rapid price inflation in sunbelt cities like Phoenix, Orlando, Charlotte, and Dallas, such that these cities are no longer cheaper than many traditional northern cities.
I have also read anecdotes of relaxing lending standards. Can anyone in the know confirm or deny this part?
I am starting to get the heeby-jeebies that we are at the start of a new housing mania.
I think covid has done weird stuff to the housing market, but it seems like the shortage finally tipping over from a largely NY/bay area problem to a national one, which is boosting prices everywhere.
I assume it will get better as the vaccine rolls out. If I were trying to sell a house right now, I would definitely be putting it off until it was less of a hassle.
It's ok to have heebie jeebies about people making decisions they later regret, but don't let that bleed over into blaming a decade of slow growth, high unemployment and maybe DJT on the housing market. It was the Fed.
I live in a small city in Michigan and even 5 years ago, we had to put an offer on our house the day it came available to get it. Now 5 years later we are refinancing and expecting its appraisal to go from 155 to 215.
I don't know about lending standards, as I think I'm pretty safe to lend a lot of money to, but Quicken has been calling me about twice a day, and my wife seconds after calling me, to try and get us to refinance. It's comical to see. I ignore the call and my wife gets a call from the exact same number immediately after. And it's every single day once at the beginning and once at the end. This is clearly automated and they're never going to stop and I'm probably going to just actually refinance at some point. Honestly, I'm consider jettisoning the phone number I've had for the past 15 years and just starting from scratch with a new one I never give out to any business.
If you refinance, please do it with some company other than the one that keeps calling you like that, in order to punish them.
This is actually a bad financial decision - a company like this gives better rates to people it cold-calls than it does to people who call them. Negotiation can get rid of the difference, but only if you are pretty good at it.
Standard argument: Just get multiple quotes. No important financial decision should be made on raw heuristics. Easy to get 3-5 quotes and pick the best.
Can add it's not just refinancing, either, although at least in that case I know who is bugging. I get text messages and voice mails several times a day from investors looking to buy houses, both the one I live in and other properties I own but rent out. This has been happening since about last August or so. I started out blocking every number that sent me a text like this, but it was quickly obvious that was pointless and I probably just need a phone number. It's always some template variation on "Hi, I'm X and heard you're looking to unload your property in city Y." I'm not and they definitely did not actually hear that anywhere, but yeah, small time operations seem to have popped up all over the place with the purpose of buying houses.
I'm actually pretty sure what happened is I finally got a Texas driver's license in order to be able to vote. From what my wife tells me, the state of Texas sells your contact info to marketers.
I get cold called by recruiters based on my Texas HVAC license, so yeah, that's definitely a thing that happens.
I can imagine single-family homes being red-hot after covid, alright. After spending the whole year +/- inside an apartment, having an actual home with a yard sounds really good.
Other than that, the European rental market is in slow freefall, the property market is confused because rent ROI just vanished but there's nothing worth investing in anyway, so people escape from fiat into real estate. No idea about other parts of the world, but it might be universal in the kind of Schroedringer's crisis that we live in.
I recommend following Calculated Risk Blog (https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/) if you're interested in the housing market. McBride recently noted that housing inventory was at record lows, down 53% YoY from last year. It sounds like housing building just kind-of stopped in 2015, and has only recently resumed, so the inventory is quite reduced.
in our ex-urb outside Baltimore, houses are are going the next day with bidding wars. The sweet spot is plenty of space, high-speed internet, good schools, no crime, and you don't have to drive to work so who cares how far work is. Houses are up like 25%, but I am sure the more expensive ones closer to the city are not
I live less than half a mile from the city line and houses in my neighborhood are selling fast at inflated prices. It's not a very expensive area but the schools are ok and there isn't that much crime. I bought my house @ 150k five years ago and I could probably get 210-230k for it now (though I did put a little bit of work into it). But anything in the County that has a backyard is doing well at this point.
I think the people who can sell for 200 or 300 can bid up a 400 house up here, still way cheaper than the county, and similar or better houses. With interest rates, that extra 40 k to get the house you want doesn’t hurt.
I don’t know about lending standards l, but only because I can’t even get to the point of finding out about lending standards before the houses are gone.
This paper by Chaz Firestone and Brian Scholl http://perception.yale.edu/papers/16-Firestone-Scholl-BBS.pdf debunks a lot of the literature on purported effects like that being depressed makes things look darker (some of their experiments are on that effect in particular, see experiment 4 of https://perception.jhu.edu/files/PDFs/14_El_Greco_Experiments/Firestone_Scholl_2014_Psychological_Science_Top-down_effects_where_none_should_be_found_The_El_Greco_fallacy_in_perception_research.pdf). They also make a general a theoretical case that convinces me that these claimed phenomena are not genuine.
Thanks, I'll take a look.
I'd also be interested in hearing from anyone reading this who's suffered from severe depression before about whether they noticed any change in their their subjective visual perception.
Also, I think I feel like colors are brighter when I'm happy, or I notice the bright colors more, is that a universal feeling or am I just making it up?
Hospitalized twice, undergone ECT, etc: I haven't ever noticed any visual changes during depressive episodes.
On the other hand, I'm quite colour-blind and already experience the world pretty much exclusively in shades of brown and blue.
(Also, 2 months in the hospital during covid was even less fun than you would expect; I drew a great deal of strength from your posts during that time, so, thank you)
:( Hope you're okay.
Still alive, haven't gone mad, still capable of knowing intellectually that things could get better; that's about as okay as can be expected given the circumstances. <3
(do not take this as a reason to not answer Scott's question; episodes and circumstances can be worse or better than this and still be considered “severe”)
I often "look without seeing" when depressed and the world seems flat and empty because I'm not actually paying attention to what's in my field of vision. Tends to happen if I'm derealizing. I can force myself back by forcing myself to really see what I'm looking at, and that does tend to give me a few minutes where things (including color) seem more vivid/novel.
I have vividly experienced this on multiple occasions during and after depressive episodes. The difference in colors for me between a depressive episode and a normal or happy spell is the difference between desaturated colors and a Technicolor rainbow.
I had a pretty dramatic change in visual perception the first time I took an antidepressant (bupropion). I called it my graphics card upgrade. I weirded people out by talking a lot about how, like, I really *got* the concept of metallic things suddenly. Also depth perception. Prior to treatment I had been mildly to severely depressed from a very young age.
Severe depression here, I've never noticed any changes in color perception with changing mood. I do have moderate visual snow which I did not have when I was younger and less depressed.
Visual snow? Like, static on a tv? Weird!
I think you see it too; you just haven't noticed before. Stare at a blank white wall under low light conditions (so not under broad daylight). You'll notice the visual snow.
I don't think everyone sees it, and I'm fairly sure I didn't as a child, I did a fair bit of staring at blank walls. I believe it's probably a mild form of HPPD, the timing is just right.
I do, and always have. When I was a little kid I used to think I was seeing the air. Doesn't seem to be associated with anything negative for me; it's just how my vision works.
I'd say the vision turns more symbolic (seeing your perceptual shorthand for "tree" rather than a thing with branches and leaves and texture) than less colorful, per se, and that effect is at least an order of magnitude stronger.
There is definitely a feeling of watching the world through a dimming glass of some sort, but I'm not sure how well it maps to color saturation. Hard to figure this out without dedicated testing. Cf. seasonal affective disorder and grayed out colors in winter - maybe we just associate bleak colors with depression because they tend to coexist?
I suffered from rather severe depression for about 10 years, and have not had any serious symptoms of depression for about 6 years. I have absolutely not noticed any noticeable difference in visual perception between then and now.
Perhaps a more interesting result is that while I was depressed I participated in a study evaluating the efficacy of rTMS on severe, treatment-resistant depression. After a session, I would have maybe an hour or two of exceptionally clear and vivid colors. This is commonly reported with rTMS, but I don't know if it's a matter of depressed people temporarily seeing with the vividness that normal people always experience, or if it's just a general side-effect of rTMS for anybody.
Interesting, I also have had an rTMS depression protocol. I didn't notice changes in the appearance of my vision after sessions, definitely some strange effects on perception overall, kind of hard to put a finger on it, they were maybe attentional in nature. Also it did not help my depression.
I had off effects on my perception as well in addition to the vivid colors - the best way that I can describe it is that it gave me the impression of the framerate of reality having been temporarily increased.
How long ago did you complete your protocol? I thought it was a very interesting experience, and have spent years wondering if rTMS actually helped me or not. Although I did not notice many positive acute effects at the time, things definitely got better over time.
If rTMS works, it probably does so by increasing coordination in areas of the brain responsible for executive functioning, allowing the recipient an increased ability to evaluate and respond to sources of stress, negative thoughts, or emotions. If this is true, I wouldn't necessarily expect to feel any effects, but I might expect to, over the course of time, slowly develop better habits as it pertains to how I interact with my thoughts and feelings.
At the end of the day, this leaves me with effectively no reliable data on whether or not it helped me, so I suppose I will continue to wonder. I would be interested to know if Scott has had any experience with it in his practice.
I think my last treatment was in August or September of 2020. The experience was interesting to say the least, effects were numerous and not at all subtle though I think they've pretty much subsided now. I had a very consistent post-session state of mind, a quieting of thoughts, kind of Zen. Increased frame-rate is not how I'd describe it but it's in the same ballpark. This would only last a few hours though and then I would get... something else, it wasn't predictable and changed throughout the treatment period. My executive function was at various times better in some ways and worse in others, for a while I was doing a lot of long term planning and committing to some semi large life decisions, I don't regret anything but this is totally out of character for me. At the same time I was way less able to care about my day job and giving myself a lot of slack. I'm talking about calling in not sick, reading the internet, and spacing off during meetings. The other big thing was that, for a couple of weeks, I was speaking with much more fluency and ease, whereas I usually trip over my words a lot or freeze up when generating language in real time. Weirdly, I don't think this transferred over to writing, I continued to agonize over my written words as usual. There's more, if I ever get around to it I'll write it all out in r/rtms (which I moderate now), but at no point during or after the treatment did I feel less depressed.
I've done a lot of reading about the technology, and my impression is that currently available protocols are quite primitive and basically a crap shoot. If you've read about the SAINT protocol, they get miraculous response rates, and there are a handful of surrounding studies that back up the basic idea, which is that parts of the DLPFC are functionally anti-correlated to the scACC, that quieting that little bastard down is the real goal, and that it's impossible to do so reliably with the 5.5cm rule or even with MRI positioning, due to variations in brain anatomy and the particulars of the underlying circuitry.
BTW, it's awesome that you managed to beat or at least tame the depression, that's not an easy feat. If it wasn't the TMS what would you attribute that to?
I can confirm that, for me anyways, my subjective visual perception is different (e.g. 'gray') during depressive episodes.
Can anyone suggest a good book on neoliberalism, in the sense of "the particular set of reforms that happened in the US in the 1970s and 1980s"? I'm most interested in what the reforms were, what the arguments for and against were, and how they developed over time.
The author takes an adversarial stance, but A Brief History of Neoliberalism (https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Neoliberalism-David-Harvey/dp/0199283273) is a decent primer, and a quick read.
There are some bits in the *Concise Encyclopedia of Economics* on some consequential de-regulatory policies:
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/SurfaceFreightTransportationDeregulation.html
Neoliberalism wasn't specific to the U.S. Thatcher arguably had a bigger effect than Reagan. Prior to the Great Recession diverting Scott Sumner, he had been researching that period and wrote the paper "The Great Danes", which as you might guess has a title inspired by much reform there was in Scandinavia: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1629940
The Role of Monetary Policy is a primary document of the era (https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/AEA-AER_03_01_1968.pdf) In it Friedman states that using growth in the money supply to decrease the unemployment rate only works in the short term, and predicts stagflation before it became apparent. This spelled the end of the postwar Keynesian model that believed inflation and recession were mutually exclusive because of an interpretation of the Phillips curve that proved incorrect in the long term.
Sumner again has a useful rewind on what happened: https://www.econlib.org/if-it-aint-broke/
But you have to go into the comments for his note about how the RBC approach displaced the Friedman/Lucas Chicago school approach which still used sticky wages/prices (and hence the monetary non-neutrality that made for "monetarism").
"Can anyone suggest a good book on neoliberalism, in the sense of "the particular set of reforms that happened in the US in the 1970s and 1980s"?"
Way too limited view; neoliberalism from the 1970s to 1990s dominated thinking from Indonesia to New Zealand. U.S. had some banking and schooling deregulation in the 1990s and some transportation deregulation in the 1970s; that was roughly it.
Not a book, but a Yale professor taught a course called "Power and Politics in Today's World". The videos are on YouTube. Lectures 5-9 are all about neoliberalism, especially Lecture 5, "The Resurgent Right in the West": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q53DF6ySOZg&list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68jkgEi4y6doNZy&index=5
I think that neoliberalism is less a real ideology, than a backlash against the consequences of social-democratic policies, as well as a reflection of changes in the voters of labor parties, who had increasingly become PMCs rather than the working class. As a result, their class interests became more aligned with economic liberalism than a very strong welfare state. So they mostly became classical libertarians on economic issue. They distinguished themselves from the parties that housed the classical libertarians by being more socially progressive, as the classical libertarians tend to form parties with mild conservatives and were also far less interventionist/authoritarian.
Tony Blair justified this change in politics as follows: "My kind of socialism is a set of values based around notions of social justice. [...] Socialism as a rigid form of economic determinism has ended, and rightly"
Note that this social justice is not (yet) Social Justice. It's more of a 'White man's burden' belief that the privileged can and need to help the downtrodden, rather than the idea that the white man is keeping others down.
The most common term for this change in the labor parties (and the left in general) is 'Third way' politics. I see the use of the term 'neoliberalism' as a red flag that people don't understand what happened.
----
Some of the main policies of Third way politicians:
1. Reduce the welfare state. As the welfare state expanded, it caused more and more bad side effects. Professional unemployed people, who simply refused to work as they were perfectly content with the generous welfare. Professional students, who loved student life and didn't bother to get a move on, being a student for a decade, even though their study was supposed to be done in 4 years. Etc. Third way politicians reduced the benefits and made more demands of people in return for welfare.
2. Privatize. The great expansion of government services had resulted in a lot of poorly functioning government organizations, that couldn't match the quality of the private sector. The Third way solution was to (semi-)privatize many of these organizations. Have companies bid for government contracts, competing with each other to offer the best deal, rather than have the government do it themselves.
3. Fight crime. There was a huge spike in crime in the 60's-80's. Third way politicians were much less soft on crime than their predecessors.
PMCs?
I assume you're not talking about Private Military Contractors.
Professional-managerial class.
The book you are looking for is Quinn Slobodian's "Globalists", published a few years ago, which is an exhaustive history of the theory and practice of neoliberalism from the 1920s onwards, starting in Europe. It's particularly good on the contrast between the strong state which the theorists wanted in order to protect contracts and to enforce free competition (no trades unions, for example), and the weak state they wanted for all other purposes except the protection of property.
My wife worked at a day care center many years ago and I assisted one of the County subsidized families -- two children, tiny apartment both parents working at low wage jobs -- with tax preparation and was appalled at how much tax they paid!
You mean state tax, or what? Social security? About 50% of people don't pay any federal income tax and I would assume they are included in that figure.
It was a number of years ago and it is likely that zero rates for federal income taxes are higher now. But the wage tax is maybe a little larger now.
At least some, if not most, of the people not paying any income tax aren't required to file and aren't seeking out tax preparation services thanks to that.
In 1999, Ray Kurzweil made a bunch of predictions about what technology, life, and politics would be like in 2019. In this series of recent blog posts, the accuracy of those predictions is assessed:
https://www.militantfuturist.com/how-ray-kurzweils-2019-predictions-are-faring-pt-1/
https://www.militantfuturist.com/how-ray-kurzweils-2019-predictions-are-faring-pt-2/
https://www.militantfuturist.com/how-ray-kurzweils-2019-predictions-are-faring-pt-3/
https://www.militantfuturist.com/how-ray-kurzweils-2019-predictions-are-faring-pt-4/
I read those a while ago. Are you the author?
I feel that the approach to grading these predictions isn't really appropriate to the subject material. Kurzweil was selling a holistic vision of the future, not a series of highly specific, concrete predictions, and that holistic vision was obviously *way* more advanced than 2019 turned out to be. Pokemon Go doesn't even partially salvage the idea that we would all be immersed in augmented reality with omnipresent AR glasses and contact lenses.
I appreciate the desire to be generous in one's critique, but here I think it misleads.
I grabbed the results from the 2009 set of predictions and put them here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12pPGKMocsP9dmfY07zX-EUiKSeFs89-v/view?usp=sharing
My basic read through Kurzweil's 2009 is that it's a mixed bag of predictions... for the year 2021. Like, some of the stuff still seems a bit in the future, some of it is, like, slightly askew from how technology was actually used, but technically possible, lots of it is right-on (for 2021), a few are wacky and clearly wrong.
So I'd call Kurzweil probably about... 12-15 years optimistic on his 2009 predictions. My guess is that his 2019 predictions will be fairly good by the 2040s.
And extrapolating from that, his estimate of the Singularity in 2045 would be more likely near the end of the century..
Stuart Armstrong argues that using a single assessor may be unreliable, so when he tried assessing the accuracy of Kurzweil's predictions, he did so using multiple independent assessors (including myself) and averaged the results. This was done in both 2013 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kbA6T3xpxtko36GgP/assessing-kurzweil-the-results) and more recently in 2020 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NcGBmDEe5qXB7dFBF/assessing-kurzweil-predictions-about-2019-the-results).
Whereas Armstrong attempts to put numbers to the actual accuracy of Kurzweil's predictions overall, Militant Futurist instead chooses to go into detail explaining why several of the predictions have turned out true or false. I've found both approaches to this issue interesting.
Many of these assessments are pretty generous. He missed the mark on almost everything that wasn't already obvious by 1999.
That's interesting! Ray Kurzweil seems to have completely missed the mark on the vast majority of predictions.
I shared this with a friend and he pointed out that this is also the case for the vast majority of predictions in George Friedman's The Next 100 Years [1] - the predictions are not only wrong, but overall comically wrong. Furthermore, this seems to be the case for everyone that tries to make actual brave, falsifiable predictions for more than a decade into the future.
If anyone knows of any counter-examples, I'd be happy to hear!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_100_Years:_A_Forecast_for_the_21st_Century
Lots of people make lots of accurate predictions for more than a decade out -- they just usually aren't that interesting, so they don't end up giving you a career in Futurism. "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is a provocative, exciting title. "The Age of Cell Phones Have Big Touch Screens And You Can Call A Taxi On Them" is not.
There's like this no-man's land in futurism at 1-4 decades out. It's far enough away that you can't make highly accurate predictions based on what's sort of "just around the corner," so accuracy suffers, but close enough that, realistically, not actually all that much is going to change. If you want an exciting book or blog post or whatever, you have to bias towards saying that change is going to happen much faster than is realistic. But beyond 40 or so years, when there's enough time for really significant change, people kinda lose interest in speculative non-fiction. It's like, okay, but I'll be dead or at least really old by then.
There's been some reasonably decent sci-fi. Aside from the obvious Jules Verne basically calling submarines, I think the space odyssey series got it about right. We're obviously not actually taking any manned trips to Jupiter, but that's lack of desire, not that the technology doesn't exist. And HAL9000 is about what a real AI control system could accomplish (though Alexa clearly has no fear of death). I suspect the Expanse series is probably pretty close to what 200 years from now will be like, minus the discovery of history changing alien tech.
Meh – the Expanse universe is based on some kind of crazy drive whereby every spaceship, including the cheap junkers, can run their rockets continuously throughout an entire voyage in the solar system (and then perform effectively a 'suicide burn' at the _halfway point_). That's a fairly subtle 'magic technology', tho there is a (brief) vivid description of the drive's first test. That's a _huge_ difference between our world and the books/show.
AT&T's "you wlll" ads were from 1993 and had tons of accurate predictions about 20 or so years in the future, except that the company that brought them wasn't AT&T.
Naval Gazing links post:
The big effort recently has been a look at the various means of propelling warships that have been developed since WWII:
Diesels: https://www.navalgazing.net/Modern-Propulsion-Part-1
Gas Turbines: https://www.navalgazing.net/Modern-Propulsion-Part-2
Combination Plants: https://www.navalgazing.net/Modern-Propulsion-Part-3
Nuclear: https://www.navalgazing.net/Modern-Propulsion-Part-4
I've also taken a look at the sometimes-silly way that militaries name things: https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Designation-Follies
Thoughts on this new paper about BDNF and depression? https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00077-5 The authors claim to have found a unified way that antidepressants work.
Commentary by Derek Lowe here: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/19/how-antidepressants-work-at-last
Here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-look-down-track-b
Wow, either you were already writing this when I posted the comment, or you truly have superpowers
Why not both?
I wrote an overly long post on some thoughts I had about Scott's ConTracked idea and the general concept of using betting markets to make short-term decisions, Would appreciate any thoughts people have
https://shakeddown.wordpress.com/2021/02/19/using-betting-markets-to-make-decisions/
I think Robin Hanson scooped you on the first part - it's the idea of conditional prediction markets, and it's a good idea. See eg https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5127/if-at-least-one-human-challenge-trial-is-run-for-covid-19-before-february-5-2021-how-many-total-deaths-in-the-us-will-be-directly-attributed-to-covid-19-in-2021/
I'll take this opportunity to hijack your thread - I thought up ConTracked as part of a sci-fi short story I'm trying to write. The idea is that instead of getting a singleton AI, we get a big prediction market, with lots of AI algorithmic traders, that might as well be a singleton - ie it has unified "beliefs" in the sense of a probability about which specific things will happen. In the story, this prediction market gradually becomes sentient and starts killing its enemies. So the question is: how would a sentient prediction market assassinate people?
It could just boringly hire contract killers like everyone else. But I wanted to see if I could have some kind of analogy to active inference in the brain, where it essentially acts by artificially skewing predictions and letting the world bring them back in line again.
The best I can think of is something like ConTracked - it creates assassination markets, sells YES shares at a fixed artificially-low price, and then whoever buys them has an incentive to assassinate the target. But this creates a lot of coordination problems - if you think other people will assassinate the target, you should just buy shares and sit on them. I'm still not sure what a really elegant solution would be.
I challenge you to go through the situation in discrete steps to actually bring about the contradiction you’re worried about—I don’t think you can.
As a simplifying assumption, imagine there is only one assassin in the world (who never fails), the market question is “will the assassin kill the target?”, and the target has zero risk of other causes of death.
Market participants have a probabilistic understanding of at what point it becomes profitable for the assassin to start working *and this is priced in*. For example, maybe they know that there is a 50% chance that it will be worth it for the assassin to kill if he can buy YES for $.05. Well, in a properly functioning market, the expected value of YES and NO is equal. So the price can never reach $.05, because that would have expected values of YES (50% * ($1 -$.05)) != NO (50% * ($1 - $.95)). Instead, the price YES of would be pushed up from $.05 as long as market participants had capital available. The trick that gives the assassin an edge is that she has information everyone else doesn’t—she knows at which price she will perform the assassination. Instead of having to use a fuzzy uncertainty distribution over market prices to determine expected value, she has a step function that’s 0% before the price and 100% beyond it.
So, to cause an assassination, all you need to do is push the price of YES arbitrarily low so that the assassin’s payoff approaches infinity. The obstacle to this is the available capital of the other market participants, though of course if you are running the market you can just cheat and sell YESs without matching NOs and move the price arbitrarily. Although you’re still on the hook for paying out on all the YESs you’ve issued unless you want a very angry assassin on your hands...
I'm confused.
Suppose this is a normal market run by non-murderous people. The mere existence of a prediction market on assassination should equally incentivize assassination vs. protection, since there will be people on both sides, but probably won't incentivize either very hard. It will stabilize at more or less whatever the real percent of some third party assassinating the guy is.
Now suppose I'm some manipulator trying to use the market to assassinate someone. I bid down the price of "will get assassinated" until it's unnaturally low. But then the normal prediction market mechanism kicks in - normal non-assassin investors see that it's underpriced and bid it back up to its correct price again. I've wasted my money and nobody is especially incentivized to assassinate the guy.
To break the concern into two parts:
1. there is no price that will incentivize anyone to perform the assassination
2. if there is a price, it's not possible to move the market to reach that price
My previous comment is trying to address 1 and establish why the assassin has an investing edge over people who just "think [someone else] will assassinate the target".
For 2, the fact is that "normal non-assassin investors" have a finite amount of capital to buy YES, and if you have more than that you can move the market. This is easier the smaller the participation in the market is. The limit case where the assassin and the manipulator are the only ones is equivalent to just paying directly. In your story, likely the AIs have become so good at prediction markets that they control most of the capital participating in them and have the ability to significantly move the markets. After all, this is necessary for them to push normal markets towards the right prediction despite all the stupid humans playing too.
PS: the existence of a market actually incentivizes the less-likely outcome more, because it provides a better ROI. Of course, there must still be non-market factors affecting the outcome, otherwise the market equilibrium would be 50%.
1) You open a market, "Will POTUS be assassinated in March"
2) Market settles at a whatever equilibrium
3) You sell 10 million YES shares at 50 cents, each paying 1$ if the president is in fact assassinated
3a) if the market ends up buying all or most of them, an assassin has no incentive to step in and actually do the job; you get $5 million profit
3b) an assassin sees the offer, decides it's worth it, buys all the shares you offered at once, goes and does the job, then collects his $10 million from you (for $5 million profit)
3c) the assassin sees the offer, buys all the shares, fails - you get $5 million for having your time wasted.
There is no need to manipulate markets, since it's not necessary that the shares you offer are actually settled. You just make a sell bid at price that is ridiculously unattractive to anyone but an assassin that can pull it off.
I feel like the entire reasoning that @boog laid out is deeply flawed.
You make two good points:
1) the market is really the order book, not just the last price
2) if you want someone dead, you should invest in their assassination market regardless of what you think the outcome will be
I don't think anything I said was strictly wrong, but you're correct that you don't need to move the price before the assassin makes their order. However, your offer does put an artificial ceiling at 50 cents—if the order book was deep enough to allow the assassin to execute (hah) their order without your offer they would have already done so.
Some things I haven't thought all the way through:
- What if the assassin makes their own out-of-the-money buy offer?
- How does the market itself react to these blatantly suspicious outstanding orders?
I recall prior work on that topic where potential assassins bet on prediction of the target dying on a specific day.
Also, googling this too much may put you on a watchlist (but if you're not on any watchlists yet, what are you doing with your life?).
Ooh, that's a good one, since it prices out the background risk. It's probably a bad idea as stated, because that warns the victim which day to hide, but maybe something else specific like "assassinated with a certain kind of bullet".
In order not to warn the victim, your bid is encrypted, and you provide the key when you come to collect on your prediction. Or just post the hash of a long text which includes somewhere the day you are bidding on. Then post the plaintext to be checked against the hash when you collect.
How do you make a prediction market on encrypted bids? This sounds more like an assassination auction.
Imagine a market in securities on when some event will happen. The objective is to generate information, so you want insiders to bid, but you know that insiders will be reluctant to reveal their information in their bid. So you allow people to offer bids with the date represented by a hash of a message containing the date. When the event happens, anyone who claims to have correctly predicted it submits the message, you hash it, if that matches the hash that was posted that person collects, everyone else pays.
Relevant LessWrong post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6bSjRezJDxR2omHKE/real-life-examples-of-prediction-systems-interfering-with
The post calls them "Fixed-point problems" (my brain corrupted this to "fixed-point effects", which caused me to have a bit of trouble re-finding it). Personally I avoid this family of issues by not p̶r̶e̶d̶i̶c̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶k̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶s̶i̶t̶u̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶p̶p̶e̶n̶ participating in prediction markets*.
*Do Substack comments support Markdown? I feel like Substack comments should support Markdown. (I used some website I found on a search engine to strikethrough my text in its presumed absence.)
AI prediction system creating a global assassination market is the plot of season 3 of Westworld.
I've been glad to see your recent posts on unpacking what's going on inside 'depression', but I feel like they're going in a direction that doesn't ring true to me. In case it is interesting or useful I'd like to present an alternate take from my experience with the condition. Of course this is based only on my anecdotal evidence as a person who has been very depressed in their life. (Also, of course there are a bunch of things that are lumped into the word 'depression', and I can only speak to the version I've experienced.) Sorry if this is all obvious, or if it's just obviously wrong to someone with more expertise on the subject, but it seems to do a good job of explaining things that I see in the world so feels worth sharing.
Suppose we model the way the brain works as a processor that runs a certain program that deals with sensory data and internal stimuli, and produces thoughts and behaviors. The model presented in "The Precision Of Sensory Evidence" is that the processor is running a program which overweights priors and down-weights sensory evidence, and thus produces a person who acts depressed. Another explanation of depression is the old "chemical imbalance" pseudo-explanation, which says that the processor itself isn't working correctly in some way. I think each of these addresses aspects of the disease but not really the whole thing, and my justification for that claim is that I think I can describe the disease in a way that implies each of these.
A 'healthy' mental program, in a non-depressed person, would have this behavior: in response to [the internal and external inputs I receive], and according to [my rough model of who I am and what I ought to be doing in the world], it produces [behaviors and thoughts that keep me happy and productive]. Critically, it is both a good program on its own, and it is good when run against the reality of their life. Where would they get such a program? Well, they have constructed it throughout their life, and, after whatever course they took through life, they have ended up with a program that is relatively effective in the situation they end up in.
I believe that (my / some others') depression results from the lack of a well-adapted program of this sort. There is just no good model of "what you ought to be doing" or "who you ought to be" that is consistent with the program you have thus written in your life. Maybe because things keep going badly -- social interactions don't produce the positive results they're supposed to, so you've downweighted seeking them out; striving for goals hasn't produced results, so you've downweighted trying. Traumatic experiences, maybe, cause your brain to modify its program to avoid certain behaviors or downweight evidence to avoid thinking of them. And the thoughts and behaviors you fall back to, for lack of _good_ ones, have negative side effects that put you in a worse position to improve the situation.
I'm hand-waving the mechanisms, of course, but the details aren't important so much as the idea that: depression is "having a bad program". I'm guessing that the symptoms of depression follow from a running a cognitive program that just doesn't have anything useful to do, so it falls back to either nothing or the most simple behaviors, such as ingrained habits and responding to inputs. Or it gets caught up on what strong signals it does have, like anxieties, because it doesn't have a more useful strong impulse to do anything.
The critical point here is that fixing depression ought to require a _constructive_ treatment: rather than "fixing the processor", like patching a pothole, it's "getting a better program". Which is necessarily hard, because you may have to _build_ something. I just have trouble believing that everyone's brains "aren't working right, at a chemical level" and that's why we have an epidemic of depression; I think it's more likely that they're working mostly right, they're just doing something ineffective.
This, imo, is why therapy is so important compared to medication. Medication can sometimes patch up the processor to, say, lessen the strength of negative signals, but constructive effort is required to _write a new program_ that is more well-adjusted to the world, such that you don't regress into this maladjusted state. But therapy helps because it directly attacks the problem of your program not working against your environment.
I expect that the way behavior works is that you have a built-in model of what kind of person you are, and what kinds of things that person would do, and predictive-processing produces what your actual ideas of behavior. 'Self-concept' therapy addresses that your model is broken, so predicts bad behaviors. CBT addresses the program that you run on sensory inputs that produces bad results. Etc. Or sometimes the best therapy is just going to be "switching environments" -- maybe your program is fine, for where you grew up, but it can't handle a toxic workplace, or living in a place where you don't really know how to comfortably socialize. Or maybe you just need someone to encourage you to go try some ways of interacting with the world (a new hobby or social group or something), and once you do and you get some positive feedback from that, you find yourself on the path back to being reasonably well-adjusted, and your brain starts working again.
I suspect that the brain was never really supposed to be able to end up in situations that it had no effective behaviors in. Maybe this is a modern problem: in the distant past you had to feed yourself and find shelter and other more basic needs, or you lived in some tribal society where your behavior was strongly dictated for you. But with those needs removed, you need to derive purpose from somewhere else -- maybe a strongly-held identity, or maybe a relationship with society or some abstract goal in life. And if you don't have _those_, your brain kinda breaks down because it doesn't know what to do with itself.
The brain seems to fix itself when placed in a new environment and forced into new activities (behavioral activation therapy).
In my experience, there's a healthy brain underneath the depressive process but it's overwhelmed by the broken "narration" / toxic thought loops. In an actual, biological crisis situation you can actually feel better because the adrenalin temporarily overrides the depressive habits. For me it would be impossible to think myself out of depression, while keeping myself busy to just starve it out of mental resources works really well. I think the better "program" just builds itself subconsciously as the previous one is decaying.
I feel like this is a look purely from the psychotherapy side of things. Certainly what you're saying, I suspect, often matches the subjective experience of depression, and fixing these problems ("getting a better program") is what therapy is supposed to do. This works (kind of), so there's probably some truth in what you're saying.
But, you know, it sure is suspicious that some people who take what you're saying as a given try all sorts of mechanisms to fix themselves (therapy, self-help, etc.) with little to no success, and then finally get prescribed SSRIs or something and suddenly all of these problems disappear like smoke and the program miraculously fixes itself without any conscious intervention.
(of course, there are surely people with the opposite kinds of experience - "antidepressants did nothing for me, but then I read this awesome book and it totally changed my life." I'm just saying that both exist.)
I think you're seriously wrong when you say that your explanation implies predictive processing or chemical imbalances, and that therapy attacks the cause and medication attacks the effects. Personally, well, I wouldn't quite say that it's the other way around because the brain is very complicated and it's almost certain that cause and effect run both ways here, but my intuition is that conscious experience is unreliable as evidence for reasoning about the brain. Reductionism also seems to imply (I think?) that lower-level processes should have a much easier time influencing higher-level ones than the other way around.
As far as I can tell, the causality works both ways-- thoughts affect emotions/the brain, and the brain/emotions pull thoughts to match the emotions.
It would be more exact to say that the causality *can* work both ways. As stated, there are people who are majorly helped by drugs and not by work on their minds, and there are people like Julian Simon who cured his depression by pretty much inventing cognitive therapy.
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Good_Mood/epilogue.html
So I was recently diagnosed as autistic in my thirties. Have had mental health issues (depression) since I was a teenager, started seeing a new therapist, new therapist thinks I have autism. It does make a lot of sense--I, at the very least, have what Scott refers to as "quirky engineer" traits, and I have sensory issues.
I mentioned this to my parents, and they were having none of it. Apparently my quirkiness had been noted early and I had been given a general assessment, which said I was gifted. They gave me links to some 'traits of gifted people' resources, and I was very surprised: a lot of the stuff labeled 'traits of gifted people' also happen to be just straight up the traits of 'high functioning autistic people', including things like sensory problems that I wouldn't have expected to be there ("sensual over-excitability" is the unfortunate term in the gifted literature, apparently).
I'm aware there's lots of chatter about how some things we term mental illness may be adaptive mechanisms in other contexts, but I've never seen two disciplines describing exactly the same thing in very different contexts (or at least, something that appeared that way to me as a layperson). I'm curious if anyone knows if there's anything else out there like this.
Not sure this qualifies, but I’ve noticed that at first blush autism and trauma symptoms have some substantial overlap. Failure to react appropriately to social cues and overexcitability come to mind. Likewise it can be difficult for practitioners to distinguish between bipolar and BPD.
For many years I thought I was mildly autistic, but eventually figured out that complex PTSD tracked better with my deficits. One imagines there might be a causal relationship there for some - being autistic seems at least mildly traumatic.
My therapist girlfriend comments that disambiguating personality disorders is generally difficult. Also social anxiety can kind of read like autism in the first session or two. Are you missing all of these social cues because you can’t see them, because you don’t care, or because it’s too stressful to generate an appropriate response? Come back next week so I can find out!
Yes, that has been my experience as well! Across three therapists, I have six diagnoses, and my mental health issues are relatively mild--enough for me to seek out help, but not enough that I am disabled by them, like some are. Yet it seems to be a giant puzzle.
As we get better at figuring out what's going on in the brain, I imagine psychology will radically change. I imagine we're eventually going to find out that there are lots of subtle ways for the brain to malfunction, and our current labels are too coarse-grained and too symptom-oriented.
In the book Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children by James T. Webb et al., the authors discuss the similarities and differences between Asperger's disorder and giftedness at great length. The authors give three disambiguating characteristics:
1. The social inability in children with Asperger's disorder is stable when they interact with a wide range of peers, while gifted children without Asperger's disorder can have very good social interaction with a certain set of peers (who share their interests and/or are on their cognitive level)
2. Gifted children without Asperger's have good insight in their social condition and understand when they are seen as outsiders (=they demonstrate at least some theory of mind), while children with Asperger's do not.
3. Gifted children without Asperger's show asynchronous development, but they don't have areas where their development is years behind their age (e.g. enjoying kid's TV shows while being intellectually ahead in other areas). This happens in gifted children with Asperger's (serious issues in social development while taking college classes).
[Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, James T. Webb et al., 2016 p. 143f]
I am not completely sure what the current understanding of Asperger's and autism is, but the book probably has a much stricter understanding of Asperger's disease than the popular understanding. In popular understanding and activism, it often seens that the definition of autism has been extended so much that it often envelops any quirky behaviour. So it is definitely very interesting that giftedness can present as something similar.
Oh cool, I'll have to take a look at that book. I'd found one on "dual diagnosis" on Amazon, but it seemed a bit too full of woo to me. Thanks!
So I don't really think this film series will go over here but I still want to recommend it. Adam Curtis has put out a new series of videos on the BBC called "I Can't Get You Out of My Head."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p093wp6h
If you aren't in the UK that link will be no good for you. The first three are viewable here. I think they are pirated but I can't imagine Curtis cares:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrhIAj0ME
So, I am, apparently, late to Curtis, who is well known among those I consider to be my cohort. This is the first of his films I've seen and I've yet to watch the last, 2 hour long installment. But I have watched the first 5 and taken copious notes.
By episode four, I think, he makes an especially damning case about how the viewpoint of society changed in a way that made it very difficult for politicians to be anything but toadies. While I don't really consider myself to be a rationalist exactly I like you guys and I think you all have the potential to undergird some politicians who could be strong.
You need to watch all the films before 4 I think to get it but in 4 it really comes home why they are all so weak now and the roll they serve as punching bags standing in front of the monied interests.
Aesthetically, Curtis is a very interesting filmmaker, a sort of essayist who writes in archival footage. He describes himself, however, merely as a political journalist, but one who understands better how to use music to set a mood and keep people interested better than his peers.
I think Curtis’s work makes more sense seen as provocative art than political journalism. He has a talent for finding truly *incredible* archive footage, and his editing is masterful — I find the films hypnotic and sometimes really beautiful. I honestly could watch his stuff indefinitely, it’s so strangely pleasurable.
And his broad political point - that currently the world is lacking a compelling, non-discredited political ideology that can bring people together for a common purpose - is one I have some sympathy with.
But in terms of an actual historical argument, I think it’s weak, sometimes deceptive, and regularly outright laughable (how many times over the years has he declared things like “Meanwhile, in the United States of America, all positive visions of the future had died”?)
This latest series, to me, suffered from those issues even more than usual. There also seemed to be a kind of defensiveness in it this time around. I think Curtis talking directly about conspiracy theories comes a bit close to home. His style had always played with conspiracy tropes (though, to his credit, the various elites moulding society are never portrayed as evil, usually as deluded but more or less good-faith) - he’s knitting complex, geographically disparate, decades-long historical movements into a simple story, using narrative techniques shared by YouTube truthers. But when the actual theme of the series is conspiracy theories, to me there seemed to be a (justified) anxiety there that it’s too hard to distinguish sophisticated self-conscious “playing with the form” from the form itself.
I had a very similar reaction to his conspiracy theory series! And I've only watched a few trailers or snippets.
My problem with his conspiracy theory series is similar to my problem with media generally – they're all 'conspiracy theories' to some extent.
For anyone who has any feelings whatsoever about Dostoyevsky, here's a piece of modern Russian counter-culture where Dostoyevsky comes back to life (kind of).
It's called "Idiot". The main character is Dostoyevsky; the woman's online nick is "Marmeladka", after Sonya Marmeladova from "Crime and Punishment".
It's watchable without understanding the background song, although the song is a part of it.
Original Russian version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvK7EcuptiY
English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH8KSNZ5d4I (I find the words hard to hear, and the lyrics are inferior)
If you opt for checking out the Russian version, Russian lyrics for the song are, for example, at https://text-pesni.com/xyrj . Google translate does an amazingly decent job of dealing with them, so I recommend just pasting them in.
Starting from 1:56 and to the end, the only words are the repeating "Idiot", "without a homeland".
Russian signs in the video:
0:08: on the left screen - "Novel", over the keyboard - "Macintosh"
0:10: on the center screen - "Preparing to copy" (in old Russian orthography)
0:16: "Detected creation of harmful content"
0:17: flashing sign - "destroy"
0:26: "Copy 100% completed"
1:15: "Wanted: replicant"
1:36: "Project Rebirth archive" (in old orthography)
1:38: bottom of the screen, "lyubo: 1821" (obsolete word I'm not sure of the meaning of in this context),"start of the project #Rebirth"
1:40: "lyubo: 1881" (see 1:38), "enclaves are ready #Rebirth"
1:43: "Project Rebirth", "Collected works", "Replicant 01 A.S. Pushkin", "Loading data"
1:51: "Not enough memory! Free space to continue!"
1:54: sign "Do not enter"
2:22: food stand sign "Nastasya Shawarma", "93 rubl"
2:25: trolley destination "Idiot"
Exciting! It wasn't clear why the futuristic aero-jet-ski flies straight into St. Isaak Cathedral's dome on 1:28 but out of Kazan Cathedral (3/4 of a mile away) at 2:04. Other than that, the rest of the flick is genuine Fyodor Mikhailovich. :)
That's a great catch. Thank you! My only excuse for not noticing this is that I'm not from St. Petersburg, but the buildings do look completely different in the video.
Thanks. As you guessed, I am; long ago but not much changed for the last 40 years. Dostoevskij was born in 1821 (hence, the reference) and died in 1881 (the next slide 1:39. Also, Nastasya (2:22) is the reference to Nastasya Filipovna, the heroine of The Idiot.
You might also enjoy a modern parody on the Idiot, the movie Down House (2001) if you haven't seen it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_House_(film)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhvBzs9c1U (Russian only)
Reading "The Pacific War: 1931-1945" by Saburo Ienaga. Also tried out the Wubi input method for Chinese today (I am trying to learn Chinese); seems pretty interesting, but requires knowledge of character stroke orders.
Interesting take on the tax prep post about the Obamacare penalty. My understanding (maybe wrong?) was it was never high enough to pay for the subsidies, and was also low enough that young healthy people with income weren't incentivized to buy insurance.
But looks like it still managed to screw some low income people. Congress should have waived the penalty for them. But I'd still like the current congress to raise it to $1 just to make the SCOTUS case trickier. I believe they could do that with 51 votes.
(Disclaimer: I am on Obamacare and otherwise support it - I'm not eligible for anything else).
A lot of low income people got hit with the penalty. Many working class families that could have qualified for a subsidy still saw it as a poor deal. If you could get a $100/m Obamacare subsidy based on your income and the price of the plan dropped from $300 to $200/m, it still was not worth it to them. We know these families do not have enough cash on hand to pay a single small car repair so they do not have an excess $200/month to pay for health insurance; especially if they are otherwise healthy and have not been to a doctor or hospital in years. The additional utility of the insurance is not seen as beneficial. That $200 is better used towards food and it's not hard to see why they went that route. Since the penalty is only applied at the end of the year during tax time it is just taken out of any refund they would have received. Penalizing low and middle income families with a penalty always seemed like an ill advised idea.
That was our experience for a while. My wife was on Obamacare for a few years, but realized that she spent more in premiums than the total cost of the actual services (by a lot!). When she switched to self pay/cash it also turned out that a lot of the doctors charged a small fraction (10-30%) of their normal costs if you paid cash. It was definitely worth it to pay the penalty at the end of the year. Between paying cash instead of signing up for Obamacare and the end of year penalty, the law became quite unpopular in our house.
Isn't this exactly what you would expect with any insurance? And exactly the argument for the mandate and penalty? Just evidence that the penalty was too small. Most of the time insurance should be cost ineffective.
I agree of course that service providers charging more to insured users creates bad incentives, but I don't see the connection to Obamacare since that happens with other insurance.
The question is when individuals compare their own needs verses the cost. For my wife, relatively young and healthy, the costs outweighed the benefit by thousands of dollars a year (she never end met the deductible). For the same cost, a person with much greater needs would find far more value in the same plan.
Averaged out between someone like my wife with low needs and someone with much higher needs (or across the aggregate), the plans made sense. But in our case, the plan most certainly did not. I suppose you could have raised the penalty to the point that it would have incentivized us to continue paying for a plan we didn't need. That penalty would have needed to be upwards of $5,000 in our case. That number is still less than the premiums + deductible we were paying.
That is how most insurance *should* operate. The fact that many people see it as a savings account they need to get their money back out from is a problem.
Except this isn't intended to be a regular insurance product that people can _choose_ to purchase.
The whole mandate is bullshit – understandable given the CBO bullshit involved in passing Obamacare, but still bullshit.
If the _point_ of the whole thing was to provide insurance to some people, they should have just raised taxes (or added new ones) to pay for it. They didn't because of other political 'constraints' and, predictably, a lot of people are stuck choosing among several options that aren't great for them.
> relatively young and healthy, the costs outweighed the benefit by thousands of dollars a year (she never end met the deductible).
Do you have a good estimate for the expected value of the cost of the treatments you need? The main point of having insurance is in case you have some serious disease or accident that costs $100000.
Yes, we understood that, and I sought a different job that had family coverage insurance partly for that reason.
We would have been perfectly happy with a much cheaper catastrophic plan that had a high deductible but low premium. That isn't an option through Obamacare, so we ended up with a high premium plan that also had a pretty high deductible.
Man, you say that, but I was "young and healthy" until I wasn't and suddenly needed three spine surgeries in the span of 16 months. United sent me statements of what the providers and hospitals charged them and it was well in excess of two million dollars. I'm glad as hell I had insurance.
Of course, health insurance isn't really "insurance" in the traditional sense. Unless you die young, you're almost guaranteed to become expensive to serve at some point, and much of the point in pooling expenses is for the young to subsidize the old, knowing that someday they too will be old.
Ok, but what do you do in the "hit by a bus" situation? Call up an insurer in the ER to sign up while you are bleeding out? I've been in the ER a few times and I definitely did _not_ see it coming. And for most people, ER costs, without insurance, will be life-changing debt.
Life-changing debt? I'm skeptical. Medical bills aren't student loans – you can escape them via bankruptcy, which sucks, but isn't a permanent obstacle to accessing credit in the future.
What MJ says.
And also, add on to that group the other group of people who would be financially better off getting Obamacare, but can't figure out the forms to sign up or get the executive function to fill them out. The insurance signup process isn't the easiest thing, and apparently there're unexpected pitfalls - I know someone who qualified for the a subsidized plan but apparently missed some box so didn't get the subsidy for her first month and had to wait on the phone a couple hours to get it for subsequent months. I expect some of the people who find tax forms so difficult will find this also difficult, and some of them will put it off just like the people who come into VITA asking if we can do their last four years' worth of taxes.
The US health insurance market isn't insurance. I don't know what to call it, but it's not like any other insurance market in the world. I'm not in the business any more, but I used to work a bit for an auto insurance company and a lot of our effort was trying to better model risk than our competitors so that we could poach their customers by offering lower premiums while still making a profit. (Things like "how can we better differentiate whether someone made a claim because they are actually a bad driver and likely to make another claim versus someone who was just unlucky?) But health insurers aren't allowed to evaluate risk *at all*, they are required to offer the same premium to everybody who applies. Which creates the problem that the customers know their risk level way better than the insurance company does, or at least is allowed to account for. The result is that relatively healthy people will rationally decline to buy insurance. Which explains the need for a strict penalty - if you allow people to decline to buy insurance, the only people left in the market will be the sick and the premiums would be astronomical. What I find interesting is that this creates a HUGE incentive among the companies to cherry-pick their customers - the reason your companies health policy offers a subsidized gym membership isn't because working out makes you healthier and less like to make claims (though that may be a very small effect), it's because the types of people who will find such a benefit valuable are more likely to be healthy otherwise. In the auto industry we want to advertise how easy our claims are - we want our prospective customers to know we won't make it difficult to make a claim. But health insurers have the exact opposite incentive - they certainly don't want to make a big deal about how easy claims are, and in fact may subtly want to get the word out that claims are *difficult*, because the healthy people they are trying to attract are less likely to be worried about their limited interaction with the medical system and the people most likely to be dissuaded by challenging paperwork are the ones with the most experience as a patient.
Are you aware of how health insurance works in other developed countries where it is the primary source of healthcare?
Most other health insurance markets, where they exist even nominally, are fairly similar, i.e. 'distorted'. The U.S. is somewhat of an outlier in being particularly complex and burdened with various path-dependent vestigial legacies.
But where in the world is health insurance "the primary source of healthcare"? Do you mean the primary payment/finance option for healthcare? Or are you thinking of something like an HMO on steroids (e.g. where the insurance company runs or is partnered with specific clinics, hospitals, etc.)?
I mean that many developed countries have healthcare funding systems that are referred to as "insurance" in some way (e.g. the broad category of "social health insurance"). I agree that these systems are certainly not free markets (although I think some of the private health insurance markets in countries that aren't the US might be).
Words mean what we want them to mean, but I think it is unhelpfully confusing to say as John above does that something is only "insurance" if it is traded in a free market, given that that's not how most people use the word in this context.
The point is that "the US doesn't have a free market in health insurance" isn't a good explanation for why the US healthcare system is dysfunctional in many ways relative to those of other countries, because the other countries don't either.
I think John's point, which I also share, is that there is a specific financial product once known as 'insurance', and it, e.g. works in a specific way, has particular 'failure modes', etc., and that 'social insurance' and the like are very different. I didn't interpret John as claiming that 'insurance' (in the original sense) can only exist in a (perfectly?) 'free market'; just that the various government funding systems around the world aren't the same thing, and are in fact very different.
Complaining about language drift is very much like yelling at clouds and yet some of us are bothered by the difficulty of now referring to 'OG insurance'.
I think "the US doesn't have a free market in health insurance" _is_ a pretty good explanation for a lot of our dysfunction – as good as most 'social science' explanations. The U.S. (in a very poetic sense) both 'wants' a free market in health insurance and also a fully socialized non-market in health care services – the tension between the two conflicting desires _is_ I think a very good explanation for our dysfunction. I think we'd be much less dysfunctional were we to commit to either option fully. Alas, neither seems likely any time soon.
As far as I can tell, U.S. healthcare is dysfunctional relative to that of other countries only in its cost. I have an old blog post looking at the WHO study that is often cited as showing the inferiority of American health care, and except for cost it doesn't.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2009/09/international-health-care-comparisons.html
I agree that US healthcare isn't obvious worse than comparable countries in some cost-independent measure of quality of treatment, and is quite probably better in some aspects (I don't think overall judgements are really possible because of the many confounders and disagreement over metric).
But total spending being very high is not exactly a small issue, and there seem to be a lot of other problems to do with costs as well (people suddenly facing extremely high costs for treatment, prices often being irrational/random/fake, choices about jobs etc. being made based on access to healthcare in ways that don't happen in other countries, and so on).
I agree. IME, people do gripe about elements other than cost/price, but overall it seems roughly just as effective (and definitely better in some areas) as any other system.
Really, it seems like people generally would prefer to just not have to think about (let alone manage) the cost of health care. I'm sympathetic! A previously-libertarian-ish friend of mine has pulled me more towards sanguine acceptance of a future 'socialization' of healthcare in the U.S.. I anticipate any such implementation being bad in the standard ways we're bad at such things, and I'm skeptical that it's likely anyways, let alone 'inevitable'. But I'm much less worried about the consequences regardless. Hanson (and others) have convinced me that most healthcare is more about 'care' than 'health'.
(Personally, I'd still prefer to at least have the option to access a 'real' free market in healthcare products and services.)
Hello. First time caller. Oh, sorry. That was a different context!
For people interested in Universal Basic Income I and a few others are developing a Master Directory to UBI. Currently it has:
20 sections (B, K, N, O, Q unused)
163 total topics
72 benefit topics
22 additional top-level links
360 author links (approx.)
8 universal systems
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EolCJhXWflnhaCocKsSKL08_ag2PfJT0hrvxBkMd5UY/
Currently the content is hosted in Google Drive pages. We are working to convert to static web pages.
Two thoughts relative to Covid that I have not seen elsewhere ...
1. Perhaps the 30% of the population that has been infected counts more towards herd immunity since they are likely the least covid-careful persons? Behavior is not homogenous and the disease selects for bad behavior. This might help explain the dramatic covid reduction the past few weeks. Perhaps our “total risk pool” has shrunk non-linearly?
2. I’ve seen Dr. Fauci analyzed as a tension between “do real medicine” and “ serve the political masters”. Perhaps his role also includes “do whatever will cause the population to collectively behave in a beneficial manner”. Of course he could not admit or discuss such a role.
"Perhaps his role also includes “do whatever will cause the population to collectively behave in a beneficial manner”."
Right.
https://www.today.com/video/dr-fauci-on-coronavirus-fears-no-need-to-change-lifestyle-yet-79684677616
https://www.golocalprov.com/news/fauci-gives-ok-to-tinder-in-coronavirus-crisis-if-youre-willing-to-take-ris
I think for the non-homogeneity of the population, it matters a lot whether there are two separate sub-populations with different risk behavior, or if there is one overall population with high-risk connectors and low-risk branches. In the latter case, once the high-risk people are immune, the branches have fewer risky contacts. But in the former case, once the high-risk population is burned out, the low-risk population is still totally connected. It's definitely true that the threshold for "herd immunity" in the situation where the high-risk people are the connectors is lower than in the homogeneous population, but I'm not sure if it might actually need a higher threshold for herd immunity in the two separate sub-population case.
1) is likely. During the summer, some overoptimistic epidemologists were predicting there would barely be a second wave in NW Europe. Karl Friston's model was slightly different but came to similar conclusions. This explains why observed herd immunity thresholds (without vaccination) in the past have been significantly lower than what you'd naively predict given R0.
1. agree - also, the official count is measuring CONFIRMED cases, and leaving out many asymptomatic people or mildly symptomatic people who don't bother getting tested. By vaccinating the oldest/most fragile people first, we reduce confirmed cases more quickly than we reduce total cases. (Because the elderly/sick are more likely to develop symptoms and get tested.)
2. I think all official recommendations, including Fauci's, falls under 'do what's best to collectively make people behave in a beneficial manner without provoking open revolt'. I've heard so much 'official' advice along the lines of "don't visit vaccinated grandparents unless it's outside, masked six feet apart until cases are way way down" ==> well, sure, I guess that is theoretically the safest, but it's absurd to me given how well Pfizer reduces the risk of severe disease (99.9%+) and the cost of not having normal human interactions with your family for a period of what will likely be years
To your #2, I have to say that I've been very frustrated with the lack of consideration for human needs. The number of suicides due to COVID haven't gone up higher than the number of COVID deaths prevented, but it's still really worth considering how miserable we make people beyond the sheer number that kill themselves over it.
"Of course he could not admit or discuss such a role."
Surprisingly, he can and he has. Never quite in the moment, but there have been a few interviews where he straightforwardly admits things like "Yeah, that thing about achieving herd immunity? I was just saying what people would respond to and I've been nudging the numbers up as their willingness shifts." Then he'll go on to talk about vaccine policy as though he didn't just admit to being a liar, and because only a few thousand people worldwide care enough to read Fauci interviews and everyone's more interested in bureaucracy games than actually solving problems, so his frankness doesn't seem to get him in any trouble.
I've been commenting on this for a while now on my blog and FB. In the short run, the noble lie seems like the right thing to do, both because other people are not always rational and because even if they are, the actions that are best for each individual to take in his own interests are not always the actions it is better or all of us to take in our interest — the problem of market failure. So it's tempting, if you are, like Fauci, in a position where people will listen to you, to tell them what you think it is best for them to believe, not what you think is true.
But in the long run, doing this means that people correctly conclude that they cannot trust what they are told by purportedly expert and authoritative sources such as Fauci or the NYT. I think that helps explain the willingness of a lot of people to believe that Trump really won the election. They are not themselves in a position to see the evidence that his claims are false and they have little reason to believe the purportedly objective sources of information that report that evidence, which makes it easy to believe what they want to believe.
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2021/01/fauci-lying-greyhound-racing-and-trump.html
I know right-wing people who stopped taking any covid precautions because of that interview. There are certain quarters where it received a great deal of attention.
Re: 1. I've long thought along those lines and think that is part of it. One other nuance is that risky/careful are not discrete groups that were locked in place. There are plenty of people who were covid-careful in May who got comfortable and became covid-risky in the winter due to impatience or a false sense of security. I think the last wave may be helping us now but the general trend will be for the population to drift away from vigilance.
With herd immunity there is an opposite issue with vaccinations, isn't there? Most countries vaccinate the oldest people first, who are less like to work, and generally have less contact. So vaccination is likely to achieve herd immunity somewhat later than the raw percentage of vaccinated people would suggest.
Yes! If I were trying to stop a pandemic I would vaccinate the likely vectors first. Folks working indoors would be a great first step, e.g., fast food workers, grocery workers. I suspect that would save lives but it would not be popular.
At the moment, my state is compromising between "more likely to die if they get it" and "more likely to spread it if they get it" - they started with medical workers, who are both more likely to get it and more likely to spread it (modulo precautions, but they are physically close to lots of vulnerable people regularly), went on to people old enough they had a high chance of death if they got it, and are now moving on to "essential workers" which includes everyone working in food, agriculture, education, and emergency services. Presumably after that they will get people with medical conditions that make them more likely to die if they get it, but it feels as if they're already compromising between "vaccinate the likely vectors" and "vaccinate those most likely to die if they get it." I don't know that much about the rest of the world, but aren't most states doing the same?
If this is sufficiently open to ask others for links rather than providing them, I recall recently reading a post about Robert Moses. Specifically how he ascended to power by being a mix of cynical enough to use it better than an actual idealist, but with the apparent idealism necessary to get so much more support than someone who was just in it for corrupt self-enrichment (it was pointed out that his pay wasn't large, and he really was more into power than money). Unfortunately, I can't remember where I read it and my attempts with search engines haven't worked. I'm guessing other folks in this space also read it, possibly from the same link I found it from (not that I can remember where that was either).
Was it this? http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/bob-the-builder-and-the-neo-puritan-deal/
Yes, thank you!
Is there an accepted definition of what "good mental health" is? Is at nebulous and hard define as "good physical health"?
Greg Cochran would try to define both by referring to Darwinian fitness, but that's not what basically anyone in medicine uses (which to him is proof of that field's deep-seated problems).
Darwinian fitness seems like a very bad match to what we consider "healthy" in either case. The most obvious reason being that most people over 40 contribute far less to Darwinian fitness at the same time they start to experience significantly increased [physical] health issues.
Also, is it really mentally healthy to be having sex with a bunch of random people and getting pregnant once a year? That seems to be pretty maximal for Darwinian purposes. At the very least, the two concepts are not very closely aligned.
Aren't you supposed to be maximizing number of grandchildren, not number of children?
That's fine, and really still works okay. Grandkids don't normally come so late in life as to make that a significantly different consideration.
"Having sex with a bunch of random people" could be risky to your physical health due to disease (diseases that can cause sterility, specifically). Why wouldn't it be "mentally healthy"?
Animal breeders know that pregnancies can have an interval which is too short, but this again is an idea that can be expressed in terms of Darwinian fitness.
In reading your reply I see I skipped a few steps in reasoning. Sufficive to say, my experience with people (male or female) who have had multiple children to multiple partners in a short period of time are frequently unstable mentally. I do not know if the mental instability was cause or effect.
Perhaps, but you could also think of them as following a different strategy.
It can't possibly be Darwinian fitness. Individuals with no known relatives who can't breed for whatever reason can still be otherwise healthy. Or, for a more extreme example, if every human on the planet except me died, I'd think there is still some coherent way of thinking of myself as more or less healthy depending on purely internal bodily conditions.
I think it matters what the "whatever reason" is. Every human on the planet dying would be a case where there isn't any problem with you specifically, other scenarios would differ.
I would say that points much more clearly to human evolutionary biology's deep-seated problems than to medicine. Not to defend medicine, which has a long history of being goofily evolution-agnostic, but the notion that having high fitness is likely to be a good experience seems like it's mostly wishcasting.
I'd cut it the other way-- "Darwinian fitness" is such an abstract idea that it's too easy to ignore quality of life. What are we trying to optimize?
I was being provocative when I brought up Cochran's ideas, but if we're going to compare evolutionary biology with medicine I'll say for myself that he's dead right about one thing: the long history of medicine mostly consists of being useless at best and frequently harmful. It passed the break even point to be actually helpful on net during the 20th century when they started taking germ theory more seriously, but it's still woefully unscientific. We've recently seen supposed public health experts declare that masks, travel bans & quarantines couldn't be effective against COVID-19 based on basically nothing at all, and fortunately for the Chinese they didn't listen to any of that. Doctors are notorious for failing to take into account base rates to apply Bayes rule about evaluating the results of a test. When it comes to "mental health" things are even worse. People aren't even attempting to figure out the etiology of many "mental illnesses", and homosexuality can get classified or declassified in the DSM as political winds shift. Robyn Dawes revealed in "House of Cards: Psychology and Psychotherapy Built on Myth" that his examples of people failing to understand probability in his earlier "Rational Choice in an Uncertain World" all came from his colleagues.
As for whether connection between "having a good experience" and Darwinian fitness, evolutionary psychiatry would say they are linked. We evolved to have subjective experiences to give us cues of the sort that guided our ancestors toward fitness. Put your hand in a fire, and it should hurt. If it doesn't, that's very good evidence that something has gone wrong with you.
I don't disagree with you that the latter paragraph is what EvoPsych *says*. I just don't think that this is useful if true (because, as you say, the only thing about the ancestral environment that we really know is that it was very different), and I don't really think that there is any path toward demonstrating that it is true (because to do that we would have to have a remarkably granular knowledge of the ancestral environment which we simply don't have, and that is an oversimplification because of course there wasn't an ancestral environment, yadayada).
I disagree about how little we know about the ancestral environment. We've found ancient skeletons that give us information about what kind of lives they lived, ancient artifacts which tell us what kind of tools they had, we're now getting DNA so we can more directly see processes of selection, and anthropologists have looked at pre-industrial people in the present to tell us about their lifestyles. Since "yvain" started out as a commenter on Less Wrong, it seems appropriate here to link this from Eliezer Yudkowsky:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/elegant-evpsych.html
The only part of this that I am well-equiped to evaluate is the DNA side (I'm a population geneticist), so I'll do that.
I'm gonna use this paper as an examplar for ancient human genetics, because it is pretty recent, has good methods and very cool data, is in Science, and I *think* is open access:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/eaav2621
Supplementary Info:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2018/11/07/science.aav2621.DC1/aav2621-Moreno-Mayar-SM.pdf
They used whole ancient genomes collected from 15 fossils, in combination with whole genomes from 378 modern individuals and a complicated SNP reference panel, all to reconstruct the patterns of human dispersal in the Americas in the last ~20,000 years. It's a very cool study that helps us figure out the broad-scale movements of humans in the Americas.
What it struggles to do is produce the sort of information you would want to know in order to parameterize evolutionary psychology models. The closest they get is in the SI, figure S72 (!). Here they give the effective population sizes of the ancestors of the fossil genomes (and modern ones) between 5000-500,000 years ago. It's worth checking out the figure: at 50 kya, you get variations in effective population size estimates that have ranges of 3-4000 or 2-9000 depending on the data set; this probably isn't because they have different ancestral population sizes at 50 kya, since migration into NA doesn't start until ~20 kya, most likely this represents sampling variability (and they don't give any idea of the error for individual estimates, just have point estimates).
This is pretty standard for ancient human pop-gen. It's really strong at identifying macro-scale trends along the lines of "and then a bunch of Goths went to Sicily"; it is not so hot at answering questions like "how many Goths went to Sicily" to much more than order-of-magnitude precision.
And ancestral effective population sizes are the lowest-hanging possible fruit for pop-gen. It is the easiest to calculated and model, by design: "effective population size" is not "population size", it's a pop-gen proxy that correlates with population size, but also correlates with population structure, sex ratio, etc, and averages over time in strange and unintuitive ways. We calculate it because it is possible to get it from genetic data, not because it is especially useful in helping us understand the world.
And effective population size is not actually what we want to know to help us to evo-psych modelling. What we want is much finer-scale dynamics--of those 3-4000 Effective Population Members, how many actual members did they have? how many groups were they divided into? What was the size distribution? How often did they come in contact with each other? How often did groups split or fuse or die out? These are questions that you can, in theory, try to model with pop-gen data, but you are unlikely to get posterior distributions that are any different from your priors, because there are just so many different scenarios that could produce the data left to us today.
So it's all well and good to talk about DNA, but as a practicality, we can't actually use it to do much in the way of narrowing the range of possible ancestral demographies. That means that an enormous range of ancestral demographies are still on the table, which means that using fitness models to test various theories about how X could evolve is gonna be tough. What you'll probably find is, "well, in some demographic scenarios, X was favored, and some it was disfavored, and here's a landscape plot that shows that, and if we only know where our ancestors actually were on that landscape, we would know whether my hypothesis about X is supported or not" (I've seen a number of these presentations in my day).
Now, maybe I'm in a sort of reverse-Gell-Mann amnesia where the DNA evidence is particularly bad and useless compared to the other lines of evidence, and I am inappropriately sneering at them because I only know the DNA side. It's possible. But there are good reasons to think the opposite is true: that the DNA evidence comprises by far the largest data set and has an enormous amount of grant and venture-capital money (think 23andme) thrown at understanding it, so for now I'm comfortable being pessimistic about the whole project based on my knowledge of the DNA side.
Having sex is clearly a good experience for most people that do it voluntarily, but that seems largely orthogonal to whatever evolutionary purpose having sex originally served. Surely, doing it with a condom on, while taking birth control, after having a vasectomy, sticking with gay sex, sticking with anal, whatever, is just as good an experience and doesn't make you less healthy. If anything, getting pregnant is quite unhealthy and had a decent chance of killing you for most of human history. Seemingly, from the male side, optimal Darwinian behavior is rape as many barely past puberty women as possible and break into sperm banks to replace the sperm they collected with your own, but I think we would consider anyone who did either of those things less mentally healthy, not more.
Or go outside of humans. Take our best friends, cats. When we take them in as pets, we tend to spay and neuter them, bringing their Darwinian fitness down to zero, but they live much longer and happier lives than feral cats out producing litter after litter. Surely, they're healthier than their brethren with 1/6 the average lifespan out there starving to death and dodging cars even though those brethren are reproducing but they're not.
I agree with your general point.
However, barely past puberty might not be the best bet-- I believe that makes a successful pregnancy less likely.
Also, there are a *few* men who do seem to want abstract fertility. Some of them own fertility clinics and substitute their own sperm*. Some of them donate sperm frequently enough that there's a (noticeable?) risk of their children having children with each other.
The thing is, there's no sex involved. No raising the children. No passing on of memes. Just descendants.
*They don't need to break into sperm banks.
Sure, there are plenty of men who explicitly want lots of descendants, but I don't think there is any convincing way to claim they're healthier because of that.
"Having sex is clearly a good experience for most people that do it voluntarily, but that seems largely orthogonal to whatever evolutionary purpose having sex originally served."
There's a divergence, but I wouldn't quite say it's "orthogonal".
"just as good an experience and doesn't make you less healthy"
One of the possibilities you listed, anal, is much riskier than the others.
"If anything, getting pregnant is quite unhealthy and had a decent chance of killing you for most of human history."
One truism to understand genetics & evolution is "Your genes did not evolve to kill you". The child mortality rate was FAR higher in the distant past. Maternal mortality rates were higher, but not nearly as high as when doctors got involved and started spreading disease everywhere.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/the-breeders-equation/#comment-14508
"Seemingly, from the male side, optimal Darwinian behavior is rape as many barely past puberty women as possible"
In orangutans, there is actually a "rape morph" for adult males enabling them to chase females who don't want to mate with them. That's viable because they're solitary and don't form long-term pair bonds. Humans are social animals and will punish that behavior if caught, which is why it's not optimal behavior (though it might be the most viable strategy for some).
"I think we would consider anyone who did either of those things less mentally healthy"
A person who commits crimes isn't necessarily insane, even if some might try to pathologize all deviant behavior. The temptation to do harks back to Szasz's account of psychiatrists as "soul doctors". Nancy Lebowitz brought up the real examples of people who've taken the more unusual strategy, and I have no reaon to think of those people as being crazy. They're just egregious violators of our norms.
"they live much longer and happier lives than feral cats out producing litter after litter"
We can verify "longer", but "happier" is another story. Most humans would hate being confined to a bubble that maximally extends their life.
Darwinian fitness is a very bad match to what humans want. Practically nobody I know is acting to maximize the number of copies of his genes in future generations. If we did act that way, sperm banks would be able to charge a significant price to donors.
Yeah, we're not optimized for our current environment so we're not acting like creatures would who were.
The male children of those who donate to sperm banks will be more likely to donate to sperm banks themselves. In the distant future, the desire to donate to sperm banks should approximate the current desire to have sex. Then it will be costly to give to such banks, and there will be such concern that the sperm is legitimately used that the only way to assure it may be to... have sex. But achieving an orgasm at that point may require reading through literature about sperm bank donation.
I just wanted to say I really appreciate your increased volume of posts, Scott! Glad to have you back.
I'm not going to be more specific about the cause, but I went through a period of being distracted and obsessed. I didn't have my color vision tested, but I didn't notice color except for brief periods when the distracted/obsession lifted.
Massive protests in Myanmar after the military took power in a coup, in the aftermath of an election the military claims is fraudulent. 3 protesters and 1 police officer have died. A nationwide strike is planned. According to Freedom House, worldwide democracy has been in decline for the 14th consecutive year. Myanmar seems to be part of this trend away from democracy and toward an unknown future.
Remember when Aung Sung Suu Kyi indulged the military and defended their actions wrt the Rohingya? I wish someone would write a detailed analysis of how power corrupted her or whatever was going on in her head..
Why do you assume she was corrupted by power? I don't know a lot about her, but there is no inconsistency between wanting democracy and freedom for the ingroup you identify with and being happy to drive out the outgroup you don't. For all I know that could have been her position before she got any power.
I consider standing by or defending the persecution of any group of people an abuse of power. Perhaps she always was like that. But at least at some previous point she sprouted other ideals.
If by "sprouted other ideals" you mean saying all the nice approved human-rights platitudes when she was seeking Western help for the poor oppressed Burmese people, then obviously. Any competent politician seeking help for oppressed non-white people is going to do that. But they'll do that whether their real goal is "liberate all the oppressed peoples of the world, with me focusing on the oppressed people closest to me because that's where I can do the most good" or "absolute supremacy for my ethnic group, which is presently oppressed so my using liberate-the-oppressed rhetoric is for the moment the most effective tactic", or anything in between.
So, yeah, maybe she always was like that, a hardcore Ethnic Burmese Supremacist. Or maybe she was an honest human-rights campaigner corrupted by power. Or something else. But her having used the standard human rights rhetoric when that was obviously the right tactic for almost any relevant goal, is not good evidence of anything but basic political eptitude.
Over the past two weeks, I read Houghton’s Global Warming: The Complete Briefing and Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster (a dissent to the CO2-Warming link).
I have been troubled by the attention that the mainstream CO2 theory is getting, how the IPCC has been working to ensure that other theories are quickly disregarded (their response is eerily similar: “careful computer modeling shows that the minor adjustments pointed out by [dissenter] did not affect the overall conclusions”), the pointed urgency with which governments are moving to spend on a problem whose existence is suspect, and the “here comes a conspiracy theorist / climate change denier” outlook when one tries to talk to other people about these concerns (I tried and failed to get 2 friends to consider the dissent seriously, I know that the sample size is exceedingly small and shows nothing)
I fear that the urgency is clouding the efforts to use government spending to lift people out of relative poverty (i.e. something like: rather than spending on coal fired plants, a robust electrical grid and LPG lines, investment goes to solar panels and “biofuel” based stoves, in an effort to reduce emissions)
I haven't read that book. What puzzles me is the lack of any serious consideration of the balance between costs of AGW and benefits. Everyone talks of increased mortality due to hotter summers, nobody of decreased mortality due to milder winters, although there is reason to expect the latter to be much larger than the former (details available if people are curious). Everyone talks about entirely hypothetical reductions in crop production due to changes in climate pattern, almost nobody about the well established increase in crop yields due to more CO2 in the atmosphere. Everyone talks about the loss of useful land due to sea level rise, mostly ignoring that the magnitude projected by the IPCC for the end of the century is less than the usual difference between high tide and low. Almost nobody talks about the increase in useful land area, a couple of orders of magnitude larger, as the habitable zones spread towards the poles.
We not only don't have good reason to be confident that the consequences will be catastrophic, we don't even have good reason to believe that they will be on net negative.
Isn't the point that we have rolled the dice and come up with a four. Well if we roll again we might get a six. Or we might not. So assuming getting a 1 means the planet is screwed - do you roll again? (BTW the very next post to this is about another episode in my podcast on which you very graciously appeared in a previous episode. Legal Systems Very Different from Ours still one of my favourite books and indeed episodes!)
You need way to distinguish the proposition that the putative positive effects aren't even being considered from the claim that they have been considered and found to be lacking
The displacement of people is an obvious short-term negative, even if we gain habitable land on the net. And the fact that the developing countries will get hit harder than developed ones will make mitigation a lot more difficult - imagine the Syrian migrant crisis, multiplied by two orders of magnitude.
Also, ecosystems don't care about new niches opening elsewhere - those will start to get filled in a few hundred years, finish in a few thousand, while a lot of species just die off having nowhere they can move.
There isn't suppression of facts or even disagreement about facts. It's just that climate change is not going to be positive for everybody, so the disagreement is about how whether everybody matters equally.
Actually, you just demonstrated exactly what is the problem. There is plenty of disagreement about facts. It's just that somehow the repetition of the claim that there's no disagreement made it true - very few high-status people, and no high-status media will touch this subject (perhaps because high-status people like remaining employed and not otherwise blacklisted). Low-status sites like American Thinker might feature hundreds of devastating exposes of data manipulation and other scientific malpractice, but it does not matter to anyone because they are not NYT. If the likes of NYT don't want to talk about something, mentioning it makes you a lowly conspiracy theorist.
This has been happening to way too many other topics lately, too.
Do you disagree with Taleb about the significance of fat tailed risks? It seems unwise to try and weigh the potential benefits against unbounded risk
But how could we know whether the fat tailed risks are comparatively worse _if_ we somehow manage to slow the increase, or even decrease, CO2 emissions? The planet has been much warmer before and seems to periodically endure 'short' ice ages. I'd imagine a new ice age might very reasonably be much worse than even the most catastrophic warming scenarios.
'Invisible' unbounded risk could be anywhere – we can't know until we can 'see' them. The status quo (or the recent past) might be the most dangerous state to maintain long-term!
Sparta is a really interesting subject not least to alt right types. And the film 300 is a surprisingly faithful rendering of a lot of Spartan ideology. Tom Holland is an extremely amusing and learned British historian. I did a podcast with him the other day where he talked about all this. He was on excellent form - if you haven’t got time for the whole thing his opening 20 minutes are great! We also talked about Hero because Tom decided that this was the Persian equivalent of 300! https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7797244-tom-holland-scores-300
On the other hand, Bret Devereaux - who seems to be an expert in the field and a pretty entertaining writer - rips the Spartans a new one in his series ( https://acoup.blog/tag/sparta/ ), claiming that pop-culture Sparta such as 300 glosses over the extreme dysfunction of their society that caused a whole lot of suffering without meaningfully improving military strength.
Yes! And my very next podcast is with Bret! I am just editing it now. I do reference Bret's blog in this podcast too and I can assure you the, er, problematic nature of Sparta and indeed the film is very much not glossed over. Anyway I hope you give it a listen and let me know what you think. If you do listen and want to give me some honest feedback I'm at hoggdotrussellatgmaildotcom
Fun! I hope you pressed him on Spartan victory percentage, which is the weak point in an otherwise really compelling anti-Spartan case.
You’ll have to listen to find out . . .
You should also do one with brin.
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2011/11/move-over-frank-miller-or-why-occupy.html
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2014/09/300-and-more-flat-out-evil-lies.html
I consider 300 to be the most Nazi movie I've seen, much more so than the actual Nazi propaganda movie: Triumph of the Will. In 300, they show that the one handicapped person that is not murdered as a baby sells Sparta out to the enemy. Not very subtle. In Triumph of the Will, things are kept much more abstract, where the theme of purification could at the time easily be interpreted as merely a removal of Jews and such from power, rather than eliminating them from society altogether.
I always thought of it as the propaganda movie Sparta would have made if they had the technology, which sounds similar to what Tom Holland thinks as well. It certainly was not designed to be a Nazi movie, so
The similarities between Spartan and nazi ideology are interesting, and not coincidental. It does not take much research to find many examples of the Nazis praising Sparta. Wikipedia alone has Hitler admiring them killing the weak and ordering officers to treat the Slavs like the Spartans treated the Helots.
Yes. It really is an extraordinary film. The closest I can thing is Starship Troopers but that pretty clearly is intended as a satire on fascism - this one is the real deal. When I asked Tom to mark it out of 10 he split his marks and gave it 1 for moral worth. If you get a chance to listen to the podcast I'll be interested in your views. I am new to podcasting so any feedback is welcome.
That's a really good way of putting it.
We very much agree with that analysis and the Triumph of the Will gets a mention. I think you will enjoy the podcast! I personally thought that the Ephors was an antisemitic dogwhistle but the others took it as anti catholic/anti religious. If you have time to listen to the podcast or at least the first bit I'll be very interested in your views.
I can't stress enough how great Tony MacNamara's The Great is. A Dostoyevskian cross between Deadwood and Veep, it's the smartest, funniest, and most incisive piece of media of the 2020s to date. It is also visually beautiful. If you're looking for end-of-the-day entertainment that inspires, move this to the top of your list. Sorry for the evangelizing versus providing a review, but the review would need to be book-length to do the work justice.
I really liked the grey and grey morality of it. It would have been so easy for them to make the bad guys pure bad and the good guys pure good, but they didn't and it is to their credit. The only issue I had with it was the idiot ball that was carried in the finale.
This post might solve the pandemic. Or it might not. I need someone smarter to check my work, so I’m posting it in public in the hopes that it will reach someone, who can check it.
The data shows that COVID-19 has seasonal and latitudinal variance, so we know that sunlight has something to do with it. Everyone knows that when sunlight hits your skin, you get Vitamin-D, so doctors started doing clinical trials on COVID patients involving Vitamin-D.
Preliminary results are in and it seems like there is no signal in the noise. Vitamin-D does not seem to be the important factor here. But sunlight clearly is.
That seemed like an interesting problem to work on (instead of actual work) so I started looking into it.
I think I can explain the seasonal and latitudinal variance of COVID-19 without Vitamin-D. My hypothesis can be tested for cheap and with zero risk to human health. And I can explain the full biochemical pathway of this effect.
Vitamin-D is not the only molecule produced by sunlight acting on the skin.
There is another one, much more important, but very few people know about it, because it was discovered by Russian scientists in the 1990s and not widely studied outside Russia. (Based on the name of the chief scientist, who discovered this effect, she’s probably Estonian.)
If you put your hand in front of a bright white light, what do you see? You see that only red light penetrates through the thinner parts of your hand. This implies that red light goes very deep in your body. A centimeter at least.
Red light with a wavelength of about 810 nanometers is absorbed by an enzyme called "cytochrome c oxidase", which is part of the electron transport chain inside the mitochondria of every cell. The result of this is a photochemical reaction, which boosts intracellular ATP production. ATP is the "fuel" that cells use for most internal processes. When a muscle cell contracts, for example, it spends ATP.
With more ATP available, the cell can do more. Including repair. So your body recovers better and faster.
This effect is used by a "new" field of medicine, which has many names: "red light therapy", "photobiomodulation therapy", "low-level laser therapy", and even "cold laser therapy". The content is the same: intense red light is used to boost body's own healing mechanisms.
I put "new" in quotes, because red light therapy was a pseudoscience for 50 years until Russians figured out that it works by stimulating ATP production via the absorbtion of red light by cytochrome c oxidase.
It's not magic and it's not a super powerful effect unless you haven't gotten enough natural light. Based on the seasonal and latitudinal variance of COVID, however, it looks like red light therapy might be the key to solving this pandemic.
There might be a third light-based biochemical pathway besides Vitamin-D and cytochrome c oxidase that could instead be the key factor in explaining COVID’s seasonal and latitudinal variance, but I haven’t found one.
Here is a scientific overview of the history of red light therapy. How it went from pseudoscience to acceptable medical practice:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5215795/
Quote from that article: “The work of Tiina Karu in Russia was instrumental in putting the mechanism on a sound footing by identifying cytochrome c oxidase in the mitochondrial respiratory chain as a primary chromophore, and it introduced the concept of “retrograde mitochondrial signalling” to explain how a single relatively brief exposure to light could have effects on the organism that lasted for hours, days or even weeks”
I searched on pubmed if any doctor has tried red light therapy on COVID patients and found two case studies, both showing remarkable improvement:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32865522/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33043132/
I also found a paper recommending that doctors try red light therapy for COVID: "Based on the clinical experience, peer-reviewed studies, and solid laboratory data in experimental animal models, LLLT attenuates cytokine storm at multiple levels and reduces the major inflammatory metabolites."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32844112/
Anyone can buy a cheap LED lamp with the right red wavelengths online. Here is one on Aliexpress:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32832169367.html
If I'm right and COVID's seasonal variance and latitudinal variance is mediated not via Vitamin-D, but via cytochrome c oxidase, then all you need to test this hypothesis is to get some suitable red light therapy LED panels and hang them above COVID patients.
I'm pretty sure you don't need to get an ethics board approval to change the lighting in a hospital room from white to red.
A statistically significant randomized trial could be done in any hospital for about $10k spent on lamps, with zero health risk and zero ethical considerations. Just keep doing what you're already doing, but randomly put half the patients under red lamps.
If it works, then soon we're all gonna have red lamps in our homes and we're gonna be so much healthier than before!
P.S: If I'm correct and this idea ends up solving this pandemic, then please send some ETH to my wallet at 0x4aD7690c3cCe53De570738dDE90B8D01027a0f84 It would be funny to say I got a car for solving the COVID pandemic 🙂
If ATP is the issue -- why has nobody discovered rhodiola rosea as a covid cure?
https://scite.ai/ is a nice tool to see which papers have been discredited and which have been confirmed. For example, the findings of the linked "seeing gray" paper seem to have been confirmed by 4 other papers and disputed by 1 (https://scite.ai/reports/seeing-gray-when-feeling-blue-rVaAZD). It's still missing some papers and the algorithm which flags citations is not perfect (as evident by the fact that the "disputing" citation is not actually disputing it), but it has been very useful for me so far.
Should I buy an Ender 3 Pro?
I'm looking for a printer that's entry level and doesn't take up too much space. I expect to upgrade the print head and mainboard at some point and generally tinker with the printer over time. My plans are somewhere between functional printing and the decorative arts.
Also is there a better place to buy one in the uk than Farnell, which sells them for £191? (I think brexit has disrupted the supply chains)
My standard recommendation is a basic Ender 3, because the few extra features isn't worth the extra $100. If you want the extra features, you can buy them from 3rd party sellers for much cheaper and get to know your printer better installing them. Among cheaper printers, the Ender 3 is probably the best one, because there is a huge community behind modding it and it is very good quality.
If you're willing to pay for it, the Prusa i3 mk3+ is the gold standard for hobby printers.
Rob Wiblin wrote a Google Doc where he detailed his experience with Wellbutrin (active ingredient: Bupropion). He took it even though he only had mild depression symptoms and seems to have had a very positive experience.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1niiV8I4cgk_xZ1Blou15ImPmqXU4eb_li9eRVp5NgYo/edit
I've also read Scott's take on Wellbutrin on the Lorien Psychiatry website. (https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/25/wellbutrin/). The side effects don't seem *that* daunting.
I don't qualify as being even mildly depressed on the PHQ-9 questionnaire. On the other hand, I'm also not as happy as I think is realistically conceivable (which, I suspect, is true of most people). Hence, I'm pondering trying Wellbutrin, just to see whether it substantially raises my hedonic setpoint and what side effects I experience. If it seemed worth it, I could just continue taking it for much of my life, maybe seizing to take it when I need to take other serious medications (or when I do suddenly experience side effects).
Rob points out that the cost-benefit analysis here seems very positive:
Either you have a bad experience and stop taking it after a few weeks or months, or you are happier (and potentially more productive?) for much of the rest of your life.
My biggest concerns are long-term side-effects that no one knows of and withdrawal symptoms. Those could potentially ruin the expected value calculus laid out above. (Although Scott writes: "It is probably fair to say in a colloquial sense that Wellbutrin does not cause withdrawal." But probably the withdrawal effects after taking Wellbutrin for years or even decades are not well studied.)
Obviously I don't expect medical advice here, but I'd be curious to hear any thoughts generally, even more so if you've taken Bupropion yourself and even more so still if you've tried it with only very mild depression symptoms or none at all.
In case you're reading this Scott, it would of course be great to add your take on this issue to the Lorien Psychiatry post. Even if you are not in favour, it would be helpful if you made that explicit, though I understand you may not have an opinion and it may not be the highest priority for your patients. Either way, I think it's fantastic to have access to your analyses for free. Thanks so much for that!
I saw an article some time back about someone not depressed who took Wellbutrin to make himself happy, which raised some interesting questions about drug use. I discuss it in _Future Imperfect_: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect/Chapter16.html
Thanks for the pointer! I agree, there's lots of interesting questions about a potential future where everyone can medicate their way into desired feelings.
I would strongly advise against this. It's a great way to give yourself depression or mood instability. Reason being (and this is a generality) when you take a drug, your homeostatic setpoints tend to move in opposite action to the drug. Now, someone with depression, their homeostatic setpoint isn't quite working where we want it to be, so we don't really prioritize it. But someone who has good mood, that is a sign that they have good homeostasis. There is order, there is balance on the spectrum between mania and depression. When we start contaminating those systems with pharmacological interventions we can unintentionally cause that natural order to shift into unnatural disorder. So yes, you might have increased mood for a year or two. But then you might start feeling that it's not working as well, and have anhedonia, malaise, etc. as your neurons have adapted fully to the presence of the drug. And then the question becomes, how can you get off and restore the natural order you had before? Let's just say if you can answer that you'd make a lot of ex-opioid users very happy.
"how can you get off and restore the natural order you had before?" Hmm, if this is correct, you could logically take a drug that makes you feel *worse* and this would push your homeostatic happiness upward. You could then stop taking the drug right before a day when an upbeat attitude would really come in handy, like an important job interview. (Such drugs aren't readily available, I expect, because no one's looking for them.)
I suspect a similar phenomenon contributes to the effectiveness of naltrexone, i.e. upregulation of opioid receptors over time. Might be worth taking a look at the research there. I still wouldn't recommend anyone try to medicate their way into "happiness" though - a sauna is a better starting point.
Yes, come to think of it, aversive experience is easy enough to generate without medication.
Thanks for your reply! While I agree, this is a great cause of concern, I'm not sure it's a priori obvious that this should be equally true for all drugs. After all, withdrawal effects are worse for some drugs than for others. Maybe what you predict will happen to some degree, but not all the way. Exactly how much would make all the difference. However, even a relatively small probability of the magnitude of this effect being large might ruin the expected value, so maybe you're right in advising not to do this. I am still undecided. Thanks!
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/the-ai-research-paper-was-real-the-coauthor-wasnt/
I was hoping that the co-author was faked by an AI.
The truth is less interesting. Some scientific papers have extra co-authors added, people who didn't have anything to do with the paper. This presumably an effort to steal prestige and/or to meet simple-minded metrics.
I've heard of plagiarism, but this is what? Reverse plagiarism?
I'm wondering whether there should be a chart of everything which could be faked in a scientific paper.
About 10 years ago my PhD supervisor shared an increasingly surreal correspondence he was having with someone who had submitted a paper to a journal he was editing. It was clearly woo-ish gibberish, talking about the cosmic balance to be found in colour and yoga and I don't remember, blah blah blah preserve the celestial harmonies or whatever. Since this was a straightforward vision science journal, my PI rejected it as irrelevant, and indeed the only reason he gave it more than five seconds' thought was because the co-authors included a reputable mathematical modeler of vision stuff (who I forget), and Ramachandran, one of the more influential modern neuroscientists (he wrote Phantoms In The Brain).
The submitter would not take the hint, and kept pestering my PI ("you don't understand how important this is to the development of the world, please call me and we can discuss how to make you see the light", etc etc etc). Finally my PI got annoyed and decided to contact the co-authors, both of whom he knew, because he just couldn't get the primary author to shut up. The math dude said that he certainly didn't know anything about the paper, and wasn't sure he'd ever spoken to the main author, while Ramachandran said that they had met and spoken once at a conference a few years previously and he'd never had anything to do with him since.
My PI relayed this information to the primary author, and told him that as a result he was ending their correspondence. The author explained that conversations he had had with the pair of them had revolutionized his thinking on these matters, and imagine his embarrassment if he published something of such importance without crediting those who really mattered to its development.
My PI did not respond. Within a week the author had written him again, with an entirely new paper, also unrelated to vision science.
A question about homeschooling (or no-schooling). Online I can find many delightful success stories of homeschooling, but no first-person accounts of it going wrong or not working well. I'ts probably survivor bias; I expect that home- and no-schooling can't work equally well for everyone. I cannot make up my mind if I and my kids are good homeschooler candidates if I have no information on the failure modes. Please share your stories of home- or no-schooling not working out, or perhaps argue why such stories don't exist.
Tara Westover wrote a memoir called "Educated." But I don't think this will be helpful to you. I suspect the most common failure mode for this involves it not working out in fairly mundane ways, and then the parents stopping.
It seems like a fairly common failure mode should be something like "kid spends years homeschooling without learning much, parents don't notice/don't consider it a problem, kid tries to get GED/college/whatever, fails horribly, goes off to flip burgers for the rest of his life".
In my social circles as a homeschooled kid, something similar happened with one person: she did decently well except in math, where she did poorly enough she didn't get into college. Her parents had been generally aware of her difficulties there, but they didn't realize it was that bad. Anyway, she's now happily married, so it turned out decently for her in the end.
(Possible confounder: It's quite possible the all-around-less-educated homeschoolers don't move in the same social circles as the rest of us.)
I know one person who was "successfully" homeschooled until 8th grade and then switched to the public school system. However, both he and his brother (also homeschooled) have chronic issues with motivation. They both tend to do the bare minimum and at the last moment. For example, with job applications, they'll send out only one or two a month, when most people in similar situations sent out many more and got accepted to jobs much sooner. With assignments in highschool and college my friend always would wait until Sunday evening to start a five page paper that was due on Monday morning, and then stay up late to finish it. Of course, we might say that the "default" public school behavior is the problematic one and my friends are better off (and they do seem to be quite happy with how they are), but it's a different behavior that you need to expect.
I also know some other people who were homeschooled (in a pretty restrictive Christian environment) and once they entered the "real world," they frequently wound up hating their parents for being overbearing and going extremely in the other direction. That can probably be solved by raising your kids in a way that's not as different from the rest of society.
I spent my entire educational career in the default public school system, and in no way did it cure me of the tendency to procrastinate that you attribute to home schooling.
I was homeschooled through tenth grade. In my junior and senior years, I was the person who started the papers early and such; my previously-public-schooled friends were the ones who waited till Sunday evening (in some cases, quite literally). I'd blame your friends' family environment before homeschooling.
A lot of my homeschool friends were raised in somewhat-restrictive Christian environments, too. In my experience, there's a decent number like you describe, but well under half.
Another counterexample here - I got the sense that a number of my (not homeschooled) peers in university seemed to do what you described, or just not do the readings, while I (homeschooled and unschooled) was mildly fanatical about doing all the readings, starting well in advance ("when they're assigned" is a good time to start, if you don't have more urgent homework, and if you always start readings when you're assigned you won't), and trying to get papers done at least a day in advance (though I did not always succeed). That said while I think of this as a benefit of homeschooling ("learning to manage my own workload") my parents are both conscientious, and I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so some of this may be genetic.
Thanks everyone for answers! I also don't think school is strictly necessary for developing conscientiousness - such personality traits are highly heritable. The extreme cases, ADD, do not really respond to 'learning better habits' very well .
I know of a few outright failures, and a number of moderately less successful cases. I can probably answer some follow up questions as well, but I'll give you the gist of it.
The "failures" that I am aware of were kids taken out of public school sometime between 8th and 12th grade because they were doing very poorly, in an attempt to correct their existing learning problems. It's very arguable if they were better off or worse off in their education, but they seemed to be on a better path with non-educational issues (fights in school, "bad path" stuff). Their trajectory after school wasn't good, but it's hard to say if it was worse because of the homeschooling.
As for the more typical issues with homeschooling, that depends greatly on the family in question. Obviously the parents need to understand the material enough to teach it and help with learning. This can result in gaps where the parents are themselves uncertain - which often comes up in Math and Science, but can affect other subjects as well. Some parents supplement with online education for certain subjects, but that tends to look more like cyber schooling than homeschooling. You would have to adjust for your own needs and experience.
For socialization I would highly recommend joining a support group with other homeschoolers. If not possible, getting the kids involved with sports or other group activities would be very helpful. It's not a good idea to have the kids home 24/7 with only limited interaction with other kids. Because other kids are often at school from early in the day until mid to late afternoon, your kids will likely find themselves spending a lot of time with only siblings and adults. That can be limiting in social growth, as there should be a difference between socialization with peers and non-peers.
I would consider the following characteristics important in determining good candidates:
-One or more dedicated parent-teacher(s) willing to put time and effort into ensuring the kids are educated.
-Those parents have enough content knowledge to teach a majority of classes through the expected length of homeschooling (often elementary school or into 7-8th grade, but sometimes through 12th).
-Support structures for teaching subjects that are more difficult and/or the parents do not personally know.
-Options for socialization that are healthy and consistent
Oh, for reference - I was homeschooled with my siblings from the time I was in 3rd grade through graduation. I was part of a homeschool support group that at times had upwards of 70 kids, and interacted with a regional homeschool network for a variety of reasons.
" Obviously the parents need to understand the material enough to teach it and help with learning. ... Some parents supplement with online education for certain subjects, but that tends to look more like cyber schooling than homeschooling. "
I would have said that because both books and online material exist, the parents do not have to understand material well enough to teach it. There is no reason why home schooling or home unschooling has to consist primarily of parents teaching kids things the parents know, when there is a whole world of materials out there for children to learn from. Ideally, what they are learning is not how to be taught but how to learn.
I would agree with that. We had high qualify text books and later on some early computer and internet sources. We were not bereft of options outside of direct parent involvement. I do believe strongly that you need someone guiding learning to some extent, and also someone to help when questions arise. Particularly intelligent children may only need a guide to find the sources themselves. Children with more normal intelligence will also need help understanding what they're studying and with questions. Certain subjects, like critical thinking, also benefit greatly from a teacher to help tease out the nuance.
Presumably at a young enough age, they need parental guidance, no? But seemingly any parent can teach how to spell your name and do basic integer arithmetic.
I sometimes wish I'd been able to do something like this as a kid. One of the greatest experiences I ever had in high school was a geography class I was allowed to take as a self-paced workbook/assignment independent studies thing and I finished the class in three weeks. Had the rest of the semester off. I guess I wouldn't have met the friends I met or been able to participate in varsity sports if I wasn't at an actual school, though. I remember having the opportunity to skip 6th grade and the school administration wouldn't let me because they thought it was a bad idea socially. I don't think I ever quite got over that. Felt like adults abusing their power and shitting on me. That very same year I won a television quiz show. School itself was so boring and unchallenging.
I skipped second grade and entered college at sixteen (my school combined 7th and 8th grade into one, giving everyone a one year advantage). I was intellectually precocious and socially retarded, but I don't think staying in high school another year or two would have helped, since I was socially retarded for my age as well as for my grade. Going to college young put me somewhere where I could interact with intellectual peers.
Sometimes homeschoolers and schools cooperate for the kids to get into extracurricular activities.
I had a friend who ended up behind academically from homeschooling, so her parents put her in public high school. Another family I know with two kids taught them well, but one of the kids decided she didn’t like the social environment and went to public high school, while the other stuck with homeschooling.
I would expect such stories to exist. My impression is that the main contraindication is "the parents don't get on with the kids or vice versa" - that is, if your personalities don't mesh homeschooling can make you both miserable, since it does nearly by definition involve the kids being around/interacting with the parents a lot. I can't remember whether I'm drawing that from actual examples, though; I was homeschooled but not in a homeschooling group, and don't know many other homeschooled kids. And obviously, I like how I turned out.
I was homeschooled through high school. It wasn't a failure in an obvious way: my parents are both highly educated and have teaching experience, I got along well with them, and I got into a good college. However, I ended up with self-discipline and time management issues (or, if you prefer, good old-fashioned laziness) that contributed to my eventual failure to graduate from that college. (I say "contributed," not "solely caused," because there were other things going on that I won't get into. I did get very good grades for my first two years or so of college, so it's not that I was incapable of doing the work.) My takeaway is that, while I would still consider homeschooling my kids if I had any, I would keep an eye out for signs that an environment of stricter discipline might be beneficial.
Interestingly, I'm still miffed that the public schools I attended didn't do a better job at training self-discipline and time management. And I was, e.g. the one of maybe two or three students in a class that would actually read assigned works.
IME, the _best_ students were nearly all just as guilty (if not more) at doing the minimum required, at the last minute, and with the least amount of actual learning involved.
Javascript:
document.removeEventListener( "visibilitychange", getEventListeners(document)["visibilitychange"][0].listener)
This stops the insane refresh when you navigate back to an ACX tab.
Problems:
1. It's not straightforward to put this into ACX Tweaks, but it's do-able with work.
2. You have to do this on every ACX tab that you might go to.
3. It stops working if you reload the page. This is one reason I really like to never reload pages, searching for "n e w r e p l" to find new comments to load.
You may want to report this as a feature request for ACX Tweaks.
Are you going to be moving to using a domain you control at some point? Right now you're at the mercy of substack, and at such time in the future as you move away, you'll lose control of all these posts.
No plans for this right now, though at some point I might make a domain I own redirect there. Substack says I keep the right to export all my posts if I ever leave.
I suggest you make a regularly scheduled program to export it regularly, to a place you control. That way, you have their promise and you have a backup. You never know, it's possible for companies to lose data.
(Come to think of it, it may be recoverable from archive.org should that happen)
should be easily recoverable from devoted fans' inboxes
I notice that Astral Codex Ten has been publishing way more content than SSC did. Scott, Is this because you built up a big backlog for your Substack debut and when we burn through it in a few weeks we'll go back to the standard SSC schedule, or are you spending a bunch of hours each day writing this stuff and hoping to maintain roughly this pace indefinitely?
He mentioned above that he has six months worth of unpublished posts written during the hiatus, so presumably this pace will slow down at some point.
Sorry if you talked about this before, but can you at some point talk about the link between SSRI and lack of motivation, struggle to concentrate and other similar issues. There is a bit of litterature about this, but it seems like most people are unaware. I don't even think it says something about it in medication warning, and I was never told by my GP.
Seems to happen to about 20% of people. More common on Paxil (because it's anticholinergic), but happens on other SSRIs too. I don't think it's well-understood exactly why. Serotonin is sort of an all-purpose signaling chemical and seems to be involved in some aspects of cognition in ways we don't entirely understand. Some sources say the 5-HT7 receptor is involved in learning and memory, though pharma companies have an incentive to fake this (Trintellix is a 5-HT7-affecting drug being billed as helping cognition). Interested to hear what you learned looking at the literature.
What do you think about patients that have had sever manic episodes taking SSRIs with little to no mood stabilizers?
Don't interpret my comment as medical advice for any specific case. In the general case, my current understanding after checking the evidence a few years ago not in too much depth is that SSRIs probably work for bipolar depression but do have a medium chance of causing severe mania. I would be very unlikely to start a patient with a history of severe mania on SSRIs without them being on mood stabilizers. There are other good treatments for bipolar depression, and if all else fails you can always use mood stabilizers before adding an SSRI. In fact, if a person has a history of severe mania, potentially they should be on mood stabilizers no matter what.
(again, I know nothing about specific cases, just giving general thoughts)
Is there any chance for an updated version of this? https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/
I know that bail reform is an issue that Scott/EA have been interested in before as a low-hanging fruit of criminal justice reform in the US. I've no idea if this is going to be old hat for everyone in who's interested in this as an issue, but I thought I'd share an explanation of the current English system in the hope that it helps. I apologise that this is going to be really long for uninterested people to have to scroll past!
At the first court hearing of anyone charged with a crime, as well as dealing with various preliminary matters the court assigns them one of three statuses:
Unconditional Bail
Conditional Bail
Remand in Custody
Unconditional bail is where the court just tells you the date of the next hearing and releases you. There's no amount of cash that you pay into the court, or will forfeit if you don't show up. You just go and come back next time, similar to a doctor's appointment. This is what happens to the clear majority of people in the magistrates' courts (non-jury trials, up to 6 months in prison) and about a third of people in the Crown Court (jury trials, up to life in prison). I'm aware in the US people talk about lots of complicated "Pre-trial Services" systems where you're supervised by probation. We don't have this, and it causes no problems. Just give people a date and send them home. If you don't show up, the police arrest you and bring you to court, and you get charged with failure to surrender (which is roughly equivalent in sentencing terms to having a small bag of cannabis for personal use, but goes on your criminal record, unless you manage to evade custody for several years which makes it more serious).
Conditional bail is where the court releases you, but imposes one or more conditions. If you breach a condition, you lose your right to bail (see below). These conditions are rom my rough experience of most common to least:
Residence (You have to live at a certain address)
Not to contact X (X is normally a witness/victim, occasionally a suspected criminal associate)
Curfew (you have to be home between certain hours - this is normally monitored by an ankle bracelet, but not always)
Report to a police station (you have to go to a police station once a week or once a month - this is the equivalent of a residence condition for homeless people, and is mostly so that if they abscond the police know and have an excuse to arrest them before they don't show up to their actual trial)
Not to enter Y (Y will be an area you're not allowed to go to, and varies from a person's house imposed along with a no contact condition, up to not being allowed into a certain county or (rarely) being excluded from everywhere in the universe other than one specific area where you live - the bigger the exclusion area, the more likely you are to have a GPS tag fitted, but this was rare until very recently)
Surety (someone who isn't you promises to pay the court money if you don't show up)
Security (you pay money into the court and lose it if you don't show up)
I would guess that surety applies in less than 0.01% of cases, and I've never seen security imposed for defendants awaiting trial. The exception to this is people awaiting extradition, where almost everyone has a surety or security or else they're remanded in custody.
Remand in custody is self-explanatory; you're kept in prison until your trial.
The law is that, at the start of proceedings, everyone who isn't charged with murder has a right to unconditional bail, unless the court thinks an "exception" applies. These are that the court thinks you are likely to:
Interfere with witnesses
Commit further offences
Fail to surrender (not show up to court next time)
[Various other rare circumstances that don't come up in practice]
If the court thinks your likely to do one of the above, they need to ask whether there are any conditions that mitigate the risk of it. For example, if you're charged with domestic violence you'll probably be given a condition to live somewhere else (rather than share a house with a prosecution witness), or if you're charged with committing burglaries at night you might be given a curfew. There's no risk matrix or anything like that, the judge or magistrates just make a decision about it. The big factor they'll look at is your criminal record, particularly if you've committed offences on bail before, or you've failed to surrender before. If there are no conditions which mitigate the risk, then the court will remand you in custody. You can apply for bail again (normally because you have a better address to stay at, but there are other reasons).
If you breach a bail condition or fail to surrender, then you lose your *right* to bail. However, the court can still bail you, and often will. In practice, they will consider the same exceptions as above, because that's how everyone's used to making the decision and is broadly the rational way to approach it. By and large, if you've interfered with a witness you won't get bail again; if you breached your curfew to go and buy cigarettes you won't.
If you're remanded in custody, there's a time limit of 3 or 6 months (this has been extended during the pandemic). If your trial hasn't started in that time and it's either your fault somehow, or the prosecution and court have both done the best they can but couldn't hear the case in time and you really shouldn't be released on bail, the time limit can be extended. Otherwise, you're eligible for release when the time limit runs out. The CPS (roughly the English DA) freaks out whenever this happens and various very senior people get raked over the coals by even more senior people (and are obligated to right them grovelling apology letters explaining why this happened and what they'll do to stop it happening again), so your trial will *probably* start before the time limit.
I can see loads of criticism of this system from a defendant's-rights perspective (who gets released is unscientific and depends a lot on who your judge is, the quality of your lawyer and how you come across). I mention it more in relation to the surprisingly inside-the-box thinking a lot of (liberal/pro-reform) American have about this, namely:
1. Cash bail, and any remnants of it, are completely pointless and don't need to be replaced by anything weird/expensive. Generally when people don't turn up to court it's a result of non-incentive-amenable fecklessness as opposed to an attempt to abscond.
2. The English police (who are generally fairly underwhelming) have almost no difficulty in arresting anyone they're told to within about 2 weeks. Bounty hunters are probably pointless (and I assume the comparatively saner states don't have them...?). I've no idea if the US being massive/federal would have an impact on this.
3. You can improve your current system without a fancy algorithm which you hand-wring about. I suspect in the US you'd see massive racial disparities in who gets bail and what their conditions are, but if your argument is that more black people should be in prison awaiting trial because the alternative is racist then... kudos for consistently prioritising a single terminal value?
4. We probably go too far on the time limits (I've seen the CPS drop cases because otherwise they'll breach the time limit), but if you want to speed things up then threatening to screw up the DA's career if things take too long is powerful weapon in your arsenal.
In general, the English criminal justice system is largely well-designed, but underfunded and takes the cult of amateurism slightly too far (aka is English). This is one of the areas where I think the US could improve by copying our homework without massive disruption.
Thank you very much - I knew nothing about this and it was really interesting.
I would worry a bit about the US being massive/federal causing problems - I know of one problem that happened because a case got transferred halfway through from the (competent) police of one city to the (less competent) police of the next city over, losing information along the way, after a jurisdictional confusion. But I haven't actually read up on the topic.
I wish we had time limits.
Can anyone recommend blogs focused on UK politics/society that is similar to Scott's writing, i.e. rational, epistemically charitable, and carefully considering all the evidence available, but also readable?
Are antihistamines (specifically, Citrezine, but in general is also interesting) thought to be associated with depression? I only found one 92-person study from 2014 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24673474/), but it’s paywalled and the abstract makes it sound like it was looking at too much stuff to be a reliable finding. I’m having mood issues shortly after starting 10mg/daily Citrezine and wondering whether that’s a thing.
I don't hear them mentioned as specifically causing depression, but they can make you tired and I can imagine that once that flows through the dynamical system (see https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-34e ) that can look like depressed mood. Why don't you ask your doctor if you can switch to a different antihistamine, maybe one without drowsiness as a side effect?
That sounds reasonable - will do - thanks!
Cetirizine crosses the blood-brain barrier at about 10% (contra 'superb second generation antihistaminic, no side effecs' marketing). The H1 receptor is involved in sleep regulation*, hence sleepiness from antihistaminics. If too much sleep is already part of your depression I can imagine the causation you ask be true.
* And other type of activation? Dimenhydrinate (used against motion sickness and nausea) has been used off-label against severe anxiety.
Re: the Bean post, "I am not sure why they weren't using exploding harpoons, which did exist." is my new favourite sentence and I think could be the basis for a whole philosophy of life
Why are people worried about running out of lithium? Lithium is 100% recyclable, so once a ton of lithium is extracted from a mine, it stays on the Earth's surface indefinitely and can be used to make car batteries forever. Sure, it's expensive to extract lithium from a spent battery and use it to make a new one, but the point is, it's available and doesn't get depleted.
There are 1.42 billion cars in the world, so all we need to do is slowly replace them, one at a time, with electric cars. Once all 1.42 billion cars are electric, we're set since we can do 1:1 recycling of the lithium batteries.
"Running out" of a resource almost never means that there is literally none of it left on earth. Running out of a resource means it's more expensive than we would like.
Nothing is "100% recyclable", and you should feel bad for saying so. It is true that lithium atoms are not literally transmuted into some other kind of atom in use. It is also true that people often throw lithium batteries into the trash, where they end up in landfills, from which the lithium atoms eventually leach out into the groundwater and wind up as part of the ~0.2 parts per million lithium concentration in the oceans, at which point it's gone because Bullseye is right that we're not going to sort through five million water molecules and a hundred thousand sodium and chlorine ions to find one crappy lithium atom any time soon.
Also, even when you specifically take a lithium battery to a lithium-battery recycling center and say "get every scrap of lithium out of this so we can reuse it", some of it *still* winds up as 0.2 ppm lithium in the ocean.
If you know how much lithium is lost in the process, both to inefficiencies in the recycling process and to people throwing their lithium batteries in the trash rather than taking them to the recycling center, then you can assess whether lithium recycling is sufficient to close the supply gap. If you're saying "100% recyclable!", and doubling down on that with absolutes like "forever!", then you don't know something important and you don't know that you don't know something important.
Don't be mean.
What percentage of non-obese middle-school boys can do a zero-pound squat? That is, go down to squat position and then stand up using only leg muscles?
Do you have reason to believe the answer isn't 100 (excepting amputees, paraplegics, sufferers of muscular dystrophy, etc.)?
Because i know a kid who insists he *can't* do it, and I'm wondering if it's in the normal range of muscle development.
Can he walk up stairs? Can he walk up stairs two steps at a time, as children (and honestly, many adults myself included) are prone to do?
If yes, I call bullshit.
Could it be a coordination issue rather than strength?
I'm curious how you are using the term 'squat position' here. For those with a background in weight lifting, performing a squat involves lowing yourself to a position where your thighs and calves form a 90 degree angle, then raising your self back up. I suppose another definition of a 'squat' is lowering yourself all the way down, well below 90 degrees, almost in a 'Asian bathroom style' position. Which are you referring to? I would suggest the answer to the weight lifting type is almost certainly approaching 100% however I do not have as good a guess as to the 2nd variety.
This is probably it. I've been going to the gym much less and making my squats deeper to make up for it, so I may have forgotten what I didn't know.
It's not about leg muscles, it's more about balance and flexibility (I guess in the case of a middle school'er, flexibility is not the issue). So mainly an issue with knowing how to engage core muscles
In my experience, when I was completely untrained (albeit as an adult), doing a barbell squat with no plates on the bar, or a goblet squat with 10 kg was much easier than without anything. I couldn't do a zero-pound squat
Why is this an interesting question?
Because someone finds it interesting enough to ask?
I find it vanishingly unlikely that any person of that age who isn't disabled can't do a single unweighted squat. Sitting down and standing back up unassisted is a pretty fundamental human movement that we all get a lot of practice doing.
There are some people with very bad hip mobility who can't comfortably get to 90 degrees, but not being able to do it comfortably isn't the same as not being able to do it.
Is there a way to get a printed version of Unsong? I know you have plans to edit it significantly, but I'm a fan even of this first edition and would like to own a copy.
I could swear I've heard someone say they did this, but I don't remember where and I would've thought someone better informed would've answered you.
I'm chiming in to bump this, hoping someone who knows will answer you.
See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/unsong/comments/fhoumv/new_readytoprint_version/
A question for experts in etymology and mythology: are there any names in any Western language that mean "bringer of order" or "from chaos to order" or something like that? Were there any polytheistic gods whose sole purpose was to turn disorder into order, or to fix damaged things?
I'm not an expert, but I'd recommend looking up Marduk, Pangu, and Maat.
Certainly not an expert, but my general impression is that Chaos, or Old Night, or such concepts were more Large Amorphous Primaeval Originators than the later generations of deities, so you have gods and demigods and culture heroes conquering and taming the personifications of chaos (like Marduk with Tiamat) but no "god of order" as such.
Egyptian mythology has the Ogdoad and Ennead, various deities representing things like darkness, space, etc. or arising out of the "primordial waters" and combining to produce the newer generation of gods who command more definite roles.
Greek mythology has Chaos which is the first, unordered state of the universe, and out of it arise/are born deities like Night and the Underworld, and then the usual process of producing the next generation of gods goes on.
There is also the Orphic Egg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphic_Egg
General pattern of myths is along that line. You can find gods/heroes who are order-bearers or order-bringers, but one who is specifically tasked with 'god of order' is not one I recognise.
There are goddesses such as Astraea, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astraea but their purpose is more to symbolise the degeneration from the Golden to the Iron Age (the increasing wickedness of humanity, the gods becoming distant or fleeing, etc.)
Footage of the Perseverance rover landing on Mars has come out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYQwuYZbA6o (skip to 11:52 for the video)
Curiosity had the MARDI camera recording descent and landing at a few frames per second but this is the first ever proper video of a Mars landing. There were also cameras set up to capture the operation of the skycrane, both pointing up from the top of the rover and down from the crane.
Scott, it may be too late for you to even see it, but I'm curious on your perspective as a medical care provider yourself. People are mentioning some of the peculiarities of the US health insurance system and it's reminding me of when I was going through various orthopedic issues a few years back and at one point freaked out because a statement of benefits I received said my insurance had declined to pay a neurologist who consulted on one of my surgeries remotely because the way they coded the procedure didn't authorize that specific function. The guy had charged them $14,000 for two minutes of work done remotely via video.
It made me wonder how on earth pricing for this kind of thing is supposed to be remotely rational. First, I only personally found out about all of these various specialists that would be working on me as I was in the hospital, already hooked up to an IV, already drugged up, and nine providers all show up with paperwork for me to sign and God knows what I'm signing, possibly agreeing to go into debt for the rest of my life, but if I don't I might lose the ability to walk in a few more months.
But then I later asked an office manager at my main spine surgeon what was up with the ridiculous astronomical prices they charged because I honestly felt kind of sorry for the insurance companies and the guy told me they don't even know what the insurance will actually pay. They just know there is some amount, nobody has mutually agreed to it, and it might change on a whim, so they send a bill with some very big number on it hoping it will be bigger than the number the insurer is willing to actually pay, in order to get the highest price they possibly can. So rather than even bother trying to set an actual price, they just wait until after performing a compensable procedure, quote the highest price after the fact they can possibly think of, knowing they won't actually get paid that much, but hoping they'll get paid whatever the maximum price is the insurer is actually willing to pay.
What the hell, man? It's like Moloch intentionally designed the worst of all possible markets. Has this been your experience of medical billing?
I have deliberately avoided encountering medical billing - first I worked at a clinic that had billing specialists who handled all that for me, then I started a cash-only practice.
But yes, this is basically right. The reason goodrx.com lets you get drugs for 10-30% what you would pay out of pocket otherwise is because they've made the pharmacies agree not to do the thing you're talking about when you use their coupon.
Even with the "pull a number out of the air and hope", $14,000 sounds *ridiculous* for what you describe. I would have thought "eh, ask 'em for $2,000 and maybe they'll bump it down to $500" but how on earth do you decide "2 minutes of my valuable time, training and experience is definitely in the $14,000 range for guesstimation"? God help you if he'd done anything like assist in the operation, you'd be looking at a bill for $10 million!
The more I read about the American system the crazier it seems, and how the hell anyone can say with a straight face "let the market fix this" I have no idea. The market got its chance, and everyone involved immediately went straight to "let's fix this so we get the most money in and have to disgorge the least money out".
I'm pretty sure the person deciding whether to just cut a check for $14,000 so they can get out of the office and go have a nice lunch, doesn't know that the service provided was only a two-minute video chat.
I support Medicare For All or something akin to it, but I also can't help wondering if a functioning free market in healthcare would be better than what we have now. (A functioning market, to be clear, is one where a list of the services offered and the price for each one is given to you *before* you decide what services to purchase, and providers compete on both price and quality of service.) Unfortunately, the insurance system in its current form makes it impossible for such a market to exist, and there would be difficulties anyway arising from the nature of the field - some number of customers will unavoidably be wholly or partially incapacitated when they enter the market.
I live in Georgia-the-country and we have this. It is definitely better than what the US has from my perspective as a consumer of medical care, because prices are transparent and also much, much lower. Like, I had a tough case of pneumonia a couple of years back and they ordered a CT scan, which cost about $40, if I remember correctly. More recently I stayed overnight at a hospital, which included a bunch of medications and an x-ray, and it was something on the order of $100. A normal consultation with a GP or specialist will cost me between $20 and $30. Having a baby cost us about $300, but that was only because my wife opted for a private room and the most expensive doctor at the best clinic in the country.
Some of that is obviously that labor costs are lower here, but there is definitely competition at every level that prevents insane price gouging like what you see in the US. For instance if my doctor orders a test I can always choose which clinic to have the test done at. Also medications cost about five to ten times less than they do in the US, and we have imports from the EU, Turkey, Israel, India, and other places to choose from.
Of course the downside is that there are people in the country who are too poor to afford the type of medical care that I can get, and there is limited help for them. There is some limited government insurance program which has been slowly expanding over the last 8 or 9 years - at first it only covered children under 5, adults over 65, and pregnant women, but now I think they've implemented some kind of universal basic coverage - but it hasn't crowded out the free market as of yet. I suppose we'll see what happens. The way it generally works is that the state will fund the cheapest options for care at the cheapest clinics, but you can pay for an upgrade if you want.
When did the market 'get its chance'? Back in the 19th century? The whole thing, from top to bottom, is a dense web of incredibly over-regulated self-ruling guilds. There's a cap on the number of doctor residencies and (I think) even of slots in accredited medical schools! The PTs (or some of them) are apparently pushing to require that they all must (in the future of course) acquire a 'doctorate' level education to practice!
If there is anything like a healthcare 'market' in the U.S., it's whatever criminals use when they need to avoid being reported to the police after, e.g. being injured in the commission of a major crime.
I had a big wall o' text get eaten, so I'll resummarize and can go into more detail if you're interested.
I've spent a lot of my career in various aspects of medical billing issues in the US. We have a few conflicting key points.
1) We call Health Insurance "insurance", but it's not insurance because it's not really based on risk, and healthcare demand is rather inflexible for most, as it's a cost that everyone is expect to have.
2) Health Insurance companies have limited ability to charge high cost/low cost patients differently, and they're pretty much in the business of doing their best to not pay claims/pay the minimum on claims. You get cheap life insurance by proving your health or non-smoking status, but health insurance companies can't do similar things.
3) Hospitals are required to treat/stabilize anyone who shows up at the emergency room (which is often the most costly way to do it, and doesn't stop them from showing up two days later freshly unstabilized)
4) Hospitals are allowed to negotiate secret prices with insurance companies and then have unpublished obscene prices to balance the books against the costs of providing free maximally expensive care.
Because we have limitations and requirements that are expressly at odds with one another, we have a system that works in mysterious ways(tm) to shove square pegs into round holes.
So we get completely arbitrary (and mostly secret) pricing at hospitals to cover costs of providing expensive free care. Insurance that benefits by just not paying invoices and bills and making it as difficult as possible to successfully file claims. Patients that have no idea what things cost with an expectation that insurance "covers" it. All that opaqueness means that health insurance is just a huge arbitrage industry managing the cost of care both directly and indirectly that the government mandates, but does not pay for.
A book recommendation: Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age, by Stephen Platt. If you want to read something that explains how corn, opium, and Scottish liberals started the beginning of the end for the Qing dynasty, you should read this.
TWIL:
The Black Sea is anoxic at the bottom, so ancient and medieval shipwrecks are way better preserved than elsewhere, including even an Ancient Greek one from 400 BC! https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/23/oldest-intact-shipwreck-thought-to-be-ancient-greek-discovered-at-bottom-of-black-sea
I was looking again at that trigger-warnings-don't-work study, and don't think it addresses its question very well at all [Jones et al. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702620921341]. The TW they used was: "TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma." They checked whether the TW reduced readers' anxiety after reading violent passages from literature (e.g. the murder scene in Crime and Punishment), and it didn't. They checked whether it made participants with trauma view the trauma as more central to their identities, and it did. They also checked whether it made anybody drop out of the study after seeing it, and it didn't (only one person who saw it, and one person who didn't, dropped out).
Problems:
1. The TW they used was bizarre. A normal TW says like, "tw: incest" or "cw: rape" or whatever. Compared to the normal one, theirs doesn't even say what the trigger is; is way less concise and is written in a tone that feels more intense; and centers the reader's trauma history. Is it surprising that the readers then felt their trauma history was more central?
(They argued that a TW's centering of readers' trauma is implied whether or not it's explicit, since "Why else provide a warning?" - but there's plenty of reason to disclaim disturbing passages, as evidenced by earlier viewer discretion warnings. At most this is an argument for using "content warning" over "trigger warning", a subtle change that many blogs have already done. I might agree with this conclusion, even, but it's really not how they nor the media framed their study.)
2. The main point of TWs is so readers can decide when or whether to engage in material, a question which the study barely addresses. They suggest that their results show readers don't use TWs this way. But all they showed is that study participants, who've already invested a chunk of time in participating in the experiment, aren't *so* cautious after a content-ambiguous TW that they remember the sunk-cost fallacy is fallacious and drop out. Does this prove that people don't, say, "choose not to read a triggering blog post right now because they have work to do"? Of course not.
Beyond just criticisms, I am interested in how predictive-processing models of anxiety relate either to their results, or to TW effectiveness in general. Some thoughts:
1. One thing they mention that I agree is important is "anticipatory anxiety" vs. "response anxiety." I bet a TW that's presented too far ahead, without telling you when the trigger is coming, could definitely increase anticipatory anxiety (you know *that* you'll be blindsided, but not when). That's why e.g. when I recommended a fanfic to a partner which had a potentially-very triggering scene, I told them when and what it was, so they could tell when it was coming instead of just tensing up the whole time.
2. Not even knowing what kind of trigger is coming might make the anticipatory anxiety even worse, on top of meaning readers can't even properly decide whether to read it or not.
I bet uncertain vague predictions of distress at unexpected times, are more anxiety-inducing than concrete predictions of distress that you know when are coming; and I bet predictive processing approaches to this are of value. Possibly relevant papers: [Wilkinson et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01840; Peters et al. 2017, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pneurobio.2017.05.004]
Also, personal attack time—I think that the inadequacies of their study should have been obvious, and that if they were carrying it out in good faith (e.g. looking at how bloggers actually use TWs, looking at bloggers' discourse about how they should be used, including CW vs. TW), they might have changed their study design, and at least definitely would have changed their presentation.
So I don't think they're approaching this in good faith. I think that's also apparent in the smug title of their previous paper, "Trigger warning: empirical evidence ahead" [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2018.07.002], the implication being that those dumb sjws are dumb and don't care about empirical evidence, they're just virtue signaling, so much so that evidence would *trigger* them, not like us
I just got into an argument with someone who defends Amazon's decision to de-list a book critical of transgender ideology. She didn't defend it on the grounds that Amazon is a private company and this isn't censorship per se. She defended the exclusion because the book offends her, is "anti-science," and is against "trans rights."
The idea that books can offend her, and that the way to deal with them is to point out their fallacies, was offensive to her.
So, arguments for censorship from the left, but this time on the grounds of "We're right" and "this is an affront to society". I'm not surprised they are using the language of the censorship battles, but the historical irony that it is the same impulse as my conservative side (e.g. the Lady Chatterley case and "do you really want books with the word 'fuck' freely available to anyone who can just pick one up and read it? the corrosive effect on good society!"). We got well and truly lectured about "art" and "freedom", and now that their side won the battle, they're the ones picking and choosing about what goes on the Index.
The most enraging part was that the argument took place on a writer's chat board. It shocked me to see that a self-described writer agreed with the Amazon decision - and not only agreed, but with a sort of vicious sneering triumphalism. And - this is the modern left for you - sheltering under the arms of a plutocrat while proclaiming one's allegiance to "rights."
(Actually, the conservatives were morally right about Chatterley, even if I disagree with them on free speech grounds. Everything's a tradeoff. But that's a side issue.)
Freedom of speech being controlled by various companies is frightening to me. I'm not a supporter of our past president, and no matter how much Joe Rogan likes him, I'm changing channels if I hear Alex Jones.. but I think it was wrong to ban them. Along with freedom of speech goes the potential for suffering and harm.
This isn't "freedom of speech being controlled by various companies" - it's a vendor saying they won't sell something. Big difference. I don't like it. I disagree with Amazon's decision. But it's their decision to make. We can't compel them to sell a book they don't want to sell.
Hmm OK, 'cause I can go buy the book from someone else. Still selling a book is not like decorating a cake. I'm not asking Amazon to put the book in their window, just send it to me in a brown paper wrapper. Can FedEx say they won't deliver the book? At some point big tech starts to look like a utility to me.
I didn't say I like this - I don't. I hate it. But it's not censorship. Those of us who disagree with this have to build our own platforms and start selling. Amazon is in no way like a utility. It's a virtual warehouse.
I'm not a fan of book burning or whatever, but I'm pretty sure FedEx is allowed to not do business with anyone they don't want to do business with, just as nearly every private actor is. The actual utilities that are exceptions to that rule are providing critical infrastructure with government-protected monopolies. If you want to set up your own book distributor, you're unlikely to able to compete with Amazon, but nothing is stopping you from trying. If you wanted to build your own city reservoir and run alternative water mains, I don't think you could, and thus the water company is not allowed to refuse to sell to you.
At least I think that's true, isn't it? You can't be deplatformed by your gas, sewage, water, and electricity providers, but book sellers are definitely not in that category and are free to blackball you for any reason they want. Freedom of speech doesn't mean other private actors are required to give you an audience for that speech.
The answer is to (you guessed it) build your own platform. Call it "Books Banned By Amazon."
If the woke mob then persecuted the company that hosted it - I'd call that censorship. I'd fight that with every breath left in my body.
But much as I dislike it, not Amazon de-listing a book.
I wrote the following CSS and put it on the discord that makes the comment stacking a bit easier to read, and widens the whole site. I'm not sure if this is what you referring to, but in case it is, here it is. It's a pretty quick attempt cause frontend isn't my specialty.
```
.comment > .comment-list {
padding-left: 18px !important;
}
.comment > .comment-list > .comment-list-collapser {
position: absolute;
top: -20px !important;
padding: 0 0px !important;
}
@media screen and (min-width: 768px) {
.container {
width: 60% !important;
}
}
```
:) Similar thing: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2686.0.html
In Studies on Slack, Scott made an analogy to Sid Meier's Civilization, discussing the comparative merits of choosing to focus on early attacks vs. economic development/scientific research. If, say, two civilizations are in the Old World and have to focus on fighting each other, they're easy prey later in the game to the civilization with the New World all to itself which can vault over them in terms of wealth/tech. He then makes the point that real history is often more complicated, and a certain degree of conflict can be a spur to innovation, as per the famous Third Man quote about Italy vs. Switzerland.
I realized recently that this is in fact also true in Civilization, and resembles at least some scholars' theories about real history. At least in Civ III and IV (the ones I'm familiar with), while you might think that having a nice comfortable spawn location to yourself, far away from those pesky warmonger AIs, would be a huge benefit to your civilization, it's actually usually a devastating disadvantage. The reason being that you miss out on (voluntary or coercive) technology trading, which has multiplicative benefits. (I.e., not only can you not trade for techs researched by your neighboring civ, but you can't trade for techs that their neighbor on the other side traded to them, and so on.) So, while an isolated start is less precarious/nerve-racking, even if you get an entire continent to peacefully develop yourself it typically makes it extremely challenging, if not impossible, on mid-high difficulty levels to win the game, because you'll be very far behind in tech as it progresses. No matter what path towards victory you want to take---conquest, science, diplomacy, culture---you need to have at least some proximity to the most core meeting (and usually clash) of civilizations in the world, to benefit from the ensuing spread of technology...
Which I recently realized is remarkably contiguous with Ian Morris' argument in his great book War! What is it Good For? about why Eurasian civilizations, and within it European ones, conquered outward rather than vice versa. Morris claims, drawing on Jared Diamond's argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that the major Eurasian agricultural civilizations---around the Mediterranean, in the modern Middle East, in India, and in China---developed within a set of "lucky latitudes" that made the movement of people, goods, and ideas easier than in the Americas, Africa, and Australasia. I'd known that major inventions had spread from China to Europe, but I hadn't realized how *fast* they'd done so:
"In 1326—less than forty years after the first definite example of a Chinese gun, and thirty years before the first definite Korean case—two officials in Florence, five thousand miles to the west, were already being ordered to obtain guns and ammunition. The next year, an illustrator in Oxford painted a picture of a small cannon in a manuscript. No invention had ever spread so quickly."
And then, Morris argues, features of European geography created a good amount of mid-sized states who had to fight a lot of siege warfare against each other, which increased the pressures towards military innovation as compared to the larger empires of the Islamic world, India, and China. (I believe a similar argument is made in Walter Scheidel's book Escape From Rome, but I haven't yet read it.) So, when European explorers, merchants, and soldiers discovered the New World, Australia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, they found the natives far behind in technology...
...much as, in Civ, when you start getting into the early modern era and exploring the world, you find far less advanced AI civilizations stuck on remote islands and smaller continents. I don't know if this was intentional on the developers' part or just convergent evolution, but I find it interesting/amusing either way.
(Two random footnotes: the Civ model isn't entirely accurate, because there was, at least in the read of the evidence that I find most convincing, a very high degree of warfare and consequent violent mortality even among non-Eurasian core, non-agricultural tribes---see Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization and Mark Allen and Terry Jones' Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers. Also, I think that Orson Welles quote is only partly right: in addition to the many other virtues of the Swiss, as David Landes argued in Revolution in Time, the development of accurate mechanical clocks was ackshually a very important process in economic history. Furthermore, as one interesting writer has observed, Italy's level of cultural/scientific etc. contributions, as per e.g. notable figures listed in Human Achievement, seems to have dropped considerably following the early 17th Century unpleasantness with Galileo. I don't know, did they have less terror, murder, and bloodshed following then? Possibly.)
Why is it so hard to accept that maybe it's all random? It sure sounds like the most parsimonious null hypothesis. Maybe if we replayed the tape of history the Mayas would end up dominating half of Europe devising theories about the inferior IQ of white people, who knows?
(Human Achievement is a joke, btw - the methodology (counting dictionary entries) is so laughably absurd you'd first think it was a parody)
'Dissatisfaction with the null hypothesis' is a decent description of the very idea of curiosity. "What matters?" "Nothing matters." Not a very good answer.
(And reminder that attributing outcomes to racial IQ is more or less the *antithesis* of this sort of historical materialism. If you're bringing it up to mock the dumb association, then I'd still rather you didn't.)
What's stopping your unbothered monolithic civilization from developing just as much tech as all the warring civs put together? Tech cost scaling? That's not a thing in the real world, the population and the overall conditions for tech development is all that matters.
I think, in real life, it's something like: My civilization has the right conditions for developing technologies A, B, and C. Yours has the right conditions for developing C, D, and E.
Lack of incentive, or in some cases positive disincentive. New technologies disrupt existing power structures, and the people who had power under the old order might not have power under the new one. If the currently-powerful people have power over your whole monolithic civilization, well, their police have been able to keep them solidly in power with revolvers and shotguns, submachine guns *might* give the edge to gangsters and revolutionaries, so just quietly get rid of any damn fool who tries to invent a machine gun. But if you're facing war with a rival neighbor every generation or two, then you can't be sure the other guys won't invent the machine gun so you have to do so as well.
It's not just weapons, either. Even unambiguously productive technologies disrupt cozy monopolies, so if the monopoly is civilization-wide the disruptive technology can be squashed everywhere. And even if it isn't actively squashed, the people best positioned to develop and introduce a new productive technology are the people who have already won the zero-sum status game under the old rules, so why do they want to change anything?
Has anyone made a mod to Civilization where you stop being in charge once your civ develops certain techs?
Does anyone have experience using Anki or similar spaced-repetition software for various long-term tasks (memorizing stuff for one's job, language learning, etc.)? I'm interested to know your usecase, daily routine, what happens when you mess things up or miss a day of reps or something, and what you got out of it in your long-term goals/productivity increases
I had a similar experience to your Chinese and German one but with Japanese. I learned lots of vocab abstractly (as opposed to learning what I needed in situations). It was fun at the beginning but my workload also got steadily heavier until a year and a half in I missed a week or two, tried to get back into it then burned out and now, a couple of years later, after all that time learning the Kanji I can no longer recognize much. I've never been to Japan nor had any plans to live there. I think Anki would be great if you were really immersed in the language every day but if you're learning for fun you might burn out like me. I had read about burning out and though "no way that will happen to me with my dedication and love of the Japanese language". But it did.
One positive hangover is that my general recall memory improved massively during and after Anki - words, names, movie stars, things like that were instantly available to my mind but I can feel this super-memory effect tailing off now.
I've primarily used it for language learning, and in particular for increasing and maintaining vocabulary.
Spaced repetition works better for me than other choices, and I was happy to get rid of the paper flash cards, and be able to have individual repetition patterns for each "card".
It's absolutely not enough on its own. All it helps with is basic memory work. You need to also work with the language (e.g. read it, speak it, attempt to translate it). But it helps, and will help you retain your progress when you don't have time to learn more - if you stick with it.
My routine is to go through all the cards it says are due, every day, except that I (a) regularly miss a day or 3 due to competing priorities and (b) have had several long periods (months) where I wasn't reviewing at all, and huge numbers of cards became due. That was bad; don't do it ;-(
When the number of new cards drops to zero, and the number of cards being reviewed each day drops to doesn't-feel-like-a-huge-amount-of-work, I add more cards, generally by doing yet another lesson (from a text book, or DuoLingo, or whatever) and adding whatever vocabulary it introduces; sometimes I simply fish in a dictionary for words I'd like to know. _If_ I didn't have days when I miss review, or do only part of it, and kept on top of "leeches" (see below), I could simply add more cards just as I run out of new ones, which would be about once a week.
I don't find missing a day here or there, or doing only half the assigned cards is a biggie - unless it happens frequently (several times a month), or multiple day stretches in a row. It degrades learning a bit, but not enough to be a problem. But long gaps - which I've had too many of - are hell.
Beware of what Anki calls "leeches" - specific cards you fail repeatedly, that end up becoming most of your drill, because their interval regularly drops way down when you forget them yet again. Revise them, delete them, or put them on hold - looking at them every day will just make you frustrated.
I also briefly used it to learn definitions and basic facts found in assigned reading, in advance of class discussion. That was a huge help for making the class more understandable, provided I got the new material onto cards early enough. So I overall got much more out of the class. And a few of the definitions I'd memorized also gave me a leg up on the final exam/preparation for it. But I haven't looked at those cards in almost 2 decades; I doubt I remember anything from them. (And ditto for the language I dropped completely - I still have the deck I built, but I'd be better off starting over.)
I have experience with attempting to use it for functional knowledge (mostly biochemistry, preparing for exams) and failing terribly. On the other hand, building a personal knowledge base in Obsidian works like a charm.
I also witnessed my father attempting to teach himself English via thousands of hours spent in SuperMemo, and not really getting anywhere - I'm pretty sure all the English he can speak came from contact with actual, living text and speech.
I wouldn't recommend it for anything other than languages, and maybe not even languages.
Back at the prior blog, someone said "I use it for anything that is worth remembering." If there is something that happens at work or at home and I say "I should remember this," into a card it goes.
When I fight to learn something at work and finally figure out the answer, I try to dedicate a tiny fraction of that time to making sure I remember the answer. (This could technically be done with a KB or text file, too, that is an external brain.)
Also, I'm experimenting with using Anki to track math concepts for my son. He knows how to multiply negatives by negatives, but if he goes for too long without it, it disappears from his mind. I won't really know if this works for a year or two, though.
I've been learning poems recently and I'm looking for my next one. I don't really have a pattern for them, so far I know Invictus, The Stolen Child, and If. Does anyone have recommendations on poems that would be good to memorise? I am vaguely interested in ones that are important or significant in some way, and only plan on learning rhyming poems.
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
The Second Coming? Recessional? (That's less known, but a favorite of mine.) Ozymandias? (Very well known, but IMO quite good.) Honestly, most of Kipling is good. I also really like Lepanto (Chesterton).
The Gods of the Copybook Headings was the first thing that came to mind for me.
My next one to memorize is going to be "The House of Christmas", but it doesn't 100% rhyme. It's really awesome, though:
"We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.
This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.
To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home."
I meant, the next one I myself am going to memorize. Also, really sorry about the double spacing.
Another good GKC poem is "The Last Hero." And I enjoy his doggerel, such as "The Horrible History of Jones." Lepanto and The Ballad of the White Horse may be the best. The latter is a bit long to memorize, but my son is working on the project.
For pure metrical skill, it's hard to beat Tolkien's Errantry (later adapted with less nonsense as Earendil the Mariner). Chesterton's Lepanto, about the Holy League's fleet defeating the Ottomans, is beautiful and very rhythmic but a bit long. Also thematically a bit dated, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for you (or me). Historically interesting because of its popularity with WWI troops.
On metrical skill, I suggest parts of Kipling's "The Last Suttee."
We drove the great gates home apace:
White hands were on the sill:
But ere the rush of the unseen feet
Had reached the turn to the open street,
The bars shot down, the guard-drum beat --
We held the dovecot still.
My favorites, and I for some reason routinely skip over poetry even tho I often enjoy it if I actually _read it_ (out loud):
- The Tyger
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I could probably get thru a good bit of the first still, but I've completely forgotten all but a few lines of the latter.
Seems like Kerry will be one of the first places to find out if Musk's Starlink satellites are all they're cracked up to be: https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2021/0223/1198738-spacex-and-co-kerry/
"The pilot project - shrouded in secrecy - is likely to roll out in just weeks in a valley in the MacGillycuddy's Reeks near Killarney.
Musk, the founder of SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla, is deploying "showers" of satellites into space to provide cheap and fast broadband connection for remote rural locations.
Strict non-disclosure agreements surround the approach in December by Musk's SpaceX Starlink representatives to Kerry County Council.
However, sources have confirmed Musk's small antennae are likely to operate from the remote Black Valley, which is 20 miles from Killarney."
He really does plan for global coverage, doesn't he? I had imagined he'd be concentrating on sites in the US, but testing small out of the way places in Europe does indicate he means *everyone* will get it.
The satellites are orbiting relatively low above the earth, not in GEO. So once he has a given latitude covered, it's covered in all countries at that latitude.
Coverage won't exist close to the poles.
All countries at or below that attitude.
I just put down a deposit for the service Saturday and it told me I could expect to receive an actual satellite at some point in the next six months. In Dallas, TX. So pretty far south of Ireland. About equal to Casablanca and Tripoli. The initial plan is to cover most of the northern hemisphere.
Obviously, I'm not rural. Just really fed up with Spectrum and have had literally zero other broadband options since moving here 7 years ago.
Lol, sorry, a satellite "dish." Starlink isn't giving me my own satellite.
Well darn it Elon Musk, what kind of crummy third-rate service are you running when you can't give each of your subscribers their very own satellite! 😀 I saw this described as an "antenna" in reports, so let us know if it's a satellite dish or some kind of fancy 21st century space-age aerial once you get it!
The satellites do de-orbit when they are done. If you are lucky, they might even survive re-entry and target a dish!
How are people who are catching coronavirus these days being exposed?
My parents and sister, who all live together in San Diego, got it three weeks ago. They said they were exposed from my other sister's husband when they came to visit just before my niece had to go back to school (U of Oregon). Not sure how he got it, but they live just outside of LA, so the overall culprit there seems to be interregional travel.
My niece got a new job and promptly caught the virus at the office. Not everyone is working from home.
In New York State, it would seem that 74% of them are contracting it at household social gatherings. Presumably in places with less strict lockdown policies, some of that is shifted to social gatherings outside the home, but good luck getting consistent data across jurisdictions.
https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/cuomos-summary-of-covid-19-contact-tracing/
My wife got by working at the local Canadian Superstore. She was one of 9 employees or so to get Covid in the space of two weeks at the end of November, even as the store flouted capacity limits. I got a test, which turned out negative, two days after her positive test, and later got a fever and mild cold-like symptoms, which I'm calling Covid (I didn't get a second test, but we were in isolation at the time. By the way, I did my best to stay over six feet away from her, wash hands, etc. but was not really aggressive about isolation, thinking that infection was very likely regardless and that my best bet was to minimize initial viral load. I'm happy with the results, but YMMV.)
Problem: high-status media outlets (NYT, NPR, MSNBC, etc) pick a side on some politically-charged topic (e.g. climate change).
Since all high-status sources are in agreement, clearly any disagreement is a crazy conspiracy theory. Any outlet that disagrees has the perception of it reinforced as being low status, and any person who disagrees is perceived as a conspiracy theorist (all the educated and smart people agree, what are you, on the side of Fox News?).
How do we get out of this loop? How can we ever find out the truth about something if whatever NYT et al. pick automatically becomes the truth?
Insofar as there is a solution, it is to develop the skill of judging sources of information on internal evidence. Does this news story/blog post/whatever sound as though it is written by someone being careful that what he says is true, or by someone who wants to persuade you of a conclusion he already holds? It helps if there is some overlap with something you already know, so you can judge it in part by that.
I guess my question was worded badly. My question is, really, how do you make most people consider anything other than the official version of reality? It doesn't seem as if there currently is a way.
See this example: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims . The facts here, unlike with issues that need some understanding of statistics or technology, are really simple. Does anybody who didn't go specifically looking for this know or care?
> My question is, really, how do you make most people consider anything other than the official version of reality?
Answering that question is basically the whole purpose of science (not "Science!") as an enterprise, and the rough outline so far seems to be:
1. It can take an arbitrarily long amount of time. Think marathon not sprint. (And pack some snacks for the ride.)
2. 'Funerals' help, i.e. the turnover in the personnel of 'official' bodies.
Beyond that, any sufficiently effective general persuasion technique is _inevitably_ going to be used for all kinds of malicious reasons, so there's no way to 'override' the "official version of reality" beyond (slowly) replacing or updating the official version, or somehow destroying the 'official' status of that current version.
I remember reading a rationalist-type piece a few years back venturing the hypothesis that, 'Humans schedule their reproduction based on the time they instinctively expect to live. Because people are unprecedentedly safe in modern Western countries, there is a superstimulus affecting their expectation. This could be resulting in women subconsciously estimating that they will be alive and healthy for 150 or 200 years, and ending up never having children.'
This is only what I remember, more or less. I am not saying myself that such a superstimulus would only impact women.
Does anyone know where I can find this piece? I haven't managed to find it with Google. It might possibly have been posted on LessWrong.
Over the weekend I wrote "ACX Simple," a browser plugin trying to be a dead simple interface to read and reply to comments on ACX. Instead of digging through all the Substack cruft and trying to dynamically disable whatever is making everything suck, I'm just starting from scratch (aside from the CSS) and doing a new interface.
https://github.com/EdwardScizorhands/ACX-simple/
It's "good enough" now to ask for more public comments, but I'm purposefully doing this on the week-old OT instead of the current one, because I know there are going to be problems. You also need to know how to grab the git repository and install an unpacked extension in a Chrome-based browser -- I'll make standalone plugins later as this gets more stable.
Take a look at the README to see what limitations it has and problems I need help with.