I enjoyed your review of Fussell, and wrote a response, here: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/whats-the-status-of-status TLDR, I'm not sure why we should care so much about status as a heuristic, except insofar as it 1) makes an argument that meritocracy is a construct of the middle and upper middle class and 2) it demonstrates that envy and inequality won't be solved through economics.
I read your response, and I think you may have missed some key points about status. You contrasted upper and middle classes, but I think the more important distinction is between working class and middle class (see the comment about two "ladders"). There is basically a working class ladder (based largely on money) and a middle class ladder (based largely on prestige). Both of these are forms of status. I think you are right that recognition is more important than wealth. Recognition is the point of both ladders. We are striving to find some kind of social validation. In my view it is important to understand status because I think to be happy we actually do need to be climbing the ladder, but we also need to be able to put it in context, and see the ladder as a part of something more important, like a game we play.
Fussell wrote about three ladders- working class to upper working class about money, but also about building skills and achievements until you make good money and also have developed the skills to make physical things you want. Middle class to upper middle about money, but also about having impressive knowledge, connections and status. Upper to top out of sight about already having money and doing what you want and bragging that you don't care about status. He's worth reading because he was a good writer who has absorbed the old 'Harvard Three Foot Shelf' and automatically uses the thoughts and phrases of American high literary culture.
Is the upper class a ladder? I ask honestly because I haven't read the book and I am not really sure about my own opinion. On the one hand, the "nothing to prove" mentality seems consistent with the (quite rare) interactions I have had with the upper class. Is the upper class a social backwater where nothing really happens? Or is there really some kind of intense competition going on?
It's a good book, worth reading. I think the upper class is a ladder from 'Look I Made it' to 'nothing to prove'. But I don't know anyone Top Out of Sight. I know top working class and upper middles and Fussell is right about them.
The responses to your GOP post on twitter were fascinating. Snarky rose emoji urbanists who mainly discuss philosophy, politics and transit really *really* don't like to be considered high class.
Fussell-Scott's theory of class is ar least based on observations of modern society. So what is incorrect in it.
Note that the purely economic and highly-Germanised (in that the thinking is clearly German, with the obvious choice of gewalt for power with its emphasis on force and making not ability) class analysis of Marx seems to have regularly failed it's own internal tests (indeed it even fails the tests when applied to historical societies about which Marx wrote). So this does not seem to be a basis on which to critique other analyses of class.
I think Scott's writings about upper class =/= wealth is absolutely correct, and I think to most people outside of the US that's fairly obvious. The failure to understand the nature of class is particularly pervasive in the US, maybe because America was steeped in the blood of the nobility. They think they've entirely rid themselves the concept of nobility. Their failure to understand the upper class as a birthright feature is in their national DNA.
I'd like to highlight the argument that several people there are making, which is that Trump can't be low class because he has gold plated toilets. I'm not really sure there's anything lower class than that
Electroplating is so good that you can get gold plating pretty cheap. And it looks good, and lasts. I have a gold plated knife two forks two spoons set for twenty bucks from Amazon.
Class has a lot to do with status. A starving PhD generally has more status than a waste collector raking in 100k+ (at least they can earn that much in my city).
A starving PhD has less status than a well-paid garbageman, just more status anxiety. I'd like to own the means of production myself, but it would be a hassle to get. And the connections a garbageman gets from his union beat starving PhD's like a drum.
In our current system yes. But does that tell you anything about class even in a Marxist analysis? Let's compare me and an Indian textile worker in Bihar. I own one gold item, a wedding ring, which is a marker of a significant and one-off (hopefully) event in my life. The textile worker likely owns multiple times as much gold as me because it is used as a store of value and a status marker. So by your implied analysis that the fact gold is expensive makes it a marker of class, I am probably lower class than a poor Bihari factory worker. Which is odd, as I'm solidly bourgeoise.
Note I doubt Marx would have made this mistake. Neither my wedding ring nor the hypothetical Indian's jewelry is a means of production in itself despite being relatively expensive. Your argument here does is a serious oversimplification of Marx. Arguing possessions determine Marxist status rather than control of means of production and the labour of others is the level of thinking through surface markers that gives so many twentieth-century Marxist movements such poor outcomes, and their detractors such easy rhetorical ammunition.
I forwarded it to a conservative guy I know. He said he agreed with basically all of it except he wants to keep using the term "culture war" because, quote, "'class' makes people think of commies".
Yeah, but the flip side is that I think a lot of moderates and liberals have "class" as a thing they realize they should sort of be concerned about, and so using the word helps them draw the connection that they should be concerned about the sort of things the Republicans are talking about.
I am very sceptical about this working, because I think for a narrative about "class" as opposed to "culture" to work, there needs to be an obvious ordering on the two classes.
Economic class clearly has that, but it can't fit into your narrative - the average Republican voter is (slightly) richer than the average Democratic voter; it wouldn't surprise me if that stopped being true if you restricted to white voters, but at that point you attract the obvious retort "why are you choosing a form of analysis that discounts nonwhite voters?"
I think that you have correctly identified a cultural split in American, but when one side contains lumber barons and the other contains schoolteachers, I think that calling the two sides "lower" and "upper", and try and claim underdog points for the former, is (a little, but not wholly") misleading as a form of analysis and (very) unlikely to work as a political tactic.
If I were trying to make the case for that ordering, there are two things I might try. One would be talk about "social status". But the problem with that is that, unlike wealth, social status isn't rigorously measurable, and arguing that a school teacher has more of it than a lumber baron still looks deeply dodgy - you risk ending up using it as a synonym for "respect from the blue tribe".
And the other would be to talk about "control of institutions", which is where I think you have your strongest case - blue-tribe-controlled institutions (academia, a bit more than 50% of the media by influence, the arts, and HR departments) look to me more significant than red-tribe-controlled institutions (the police, a large minority of the media, the military (but decreasingly among officers) and a bit more than 50% of the rest of business).
But trying to go from "social class that has more influence in more/less institutions" to "upper/lower class" when there's this really obvious economic axis challenging those labels pretty hard strikes me as questionable.
I would agree, and suggest further that all in the upper class go to college. (I started reading "The Bell Curve, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" today... I didn't realize it was such a tome.)
"Monopoly" isn't right, or close to being, and while I'm sure you don't intend it literally, I worry about the cumulative effect of that kind of rhetorical flourish.
Caring about proper use of dining utensils is totally low class.
No offense meant! lol. I'm not saying it's good or bad to be high/low class or to care about dinner table manners or not. I'm just reporting that anecdotally, in my own life, the biggest sticklers about dinner table manners were all very working class.
I got "this is what the Republicans are already doing", "the Republicans would never do this in a million years", "everyone already agrees this is obviously true and you're wasting my time", "everyone can easily see this is obvious garbage so you're wasting my time", "you're just trying to transform the Republicans into the Democrats", "you're proving you were never a real Democrat because no Democrat would say something like this", etc.
The last post I got that kind of response on was my Conflict Vs. Mistake one, which I still feel good about, so I'm hopeful that I feel okay about this one in a few years.
The "this is what the Republicans are already doing" replies boggled my mind. The post clearly said the proposal was for them to "use the word class." They aren't doing that now!
I think people got very confused because a large portion of the post was describing Republican positions and how they tie into the narrative of class. So in their minds they saw those positions as things Republicans already do and thought that Scott was telling them to adopt those positions, when the post was telling them that the positions they already hold are actually about class so they should talk about class.
There were some folks on the thread that claimed that Scott was basically describing Tucker Carlson schtick, which sounded pretty accurate from me. These were folks who liked Carlson and were glad Scott was saying similar things.
While I don't think Carlson represents the entire Republican party, I think you could be forgiven for conflating him with mainstream Republican (or at least Trump voter) beliefs.
I also don't think Scott's exclusive point was to use the word "class" but instead to target specific class markers (e.g. college degrees) with legislation and rhetoric.
Given that this is an odd numbered thread, I'm not sure how much more this conversation can continue before it crosses a line. (Or perhaps I need to check over my shoulder?)
As someone who made that point (heatedly, probably unhelpfully), let me try to restate:
Republicans don't explicitly use the word 'class', but they espouse a functionally identical concept to the cultural definition which Scott Alexander pushes. Words matter, but if find a new provocative term for, I don't know, 'praxis' and then reveal it with fanfare as a new strategy for the far left, I imagine a few eyerolls. It is unusual to see Rush Limbaugh make SA's argument better and, I think, sufficiently noteworthy to point out; to take one example from his decade-long corpus:
“The Democratic Party is a closed clique. They are not the best and brightest. They're not the smartest. They haven't had to prove themselves in the market in many of these peoples' cases, the career politicians. This is the establishment. This is the elites. Their concerns just have very little in common. Illegal immigration, to complain about it is so, so uninformed and so small-minded. They never encounter, they never face the consequences of their own laws. They don't face the consequences of their own directives or actions.”
It is a little odd that someone presumably attuned to political dialogue would miss the constant drumbeat on the right, claiming the left is foremost, a cultural other threatening the values, the esthetics, of mainstream America? Again, let me good ol' Rush say it just as well:
They 'live their lives that way'. How far off do you genuinely think RL's message is, from SA's thesis? I would argue there is almost no daylight between the two visions.
The main reason I feel compelled to react, is that it is a little, itty-bitty step from there, to framing policy initiatives as cultural warfare. Within that culture-first framework, it becomes trivially easy to credibly reframe, say 'access to contraception' as a technocratic euphemism the Other's culture of permissive sexuality. Rush, again:
"What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. (interruption) The johns? We would be the johns? No! We're not the johns. (interruption) Yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word. Okay, so she's not a slut. She's "round heeled". I take it back."
Culture, culture, culture. I value Scott's writing in many regards, and would like a good explanation of the difference between what SA wants, and what Rush did. I'm not asking for someone saying Rush is wrong, I don't even think you need to think that. I am just saying he was First, and he won.
I guess the central question here is whether what's going on is better modelled as a clash between classes or a clash between cultures.
Maybe it's just a function of the people I hang out with, but my stereotypical "Republican" isn't an unemployed plumber with a wife-beater and a very large truck covered with bumper stickers. My stereotypical "Republican" still looks a bit more like Thurston Howell III, driving his Lexus down to the country club in the morning for a quick round of golf before going sailing in the afternoon. We can argue about the exact prevalence of the two groups, but the latter is, I think, still a pretty significant fraction of the Republican Party; I mean, who else is the consistuency for the Republican tax cut agenda?
If you go around telling Thurston Howell III that some obese, nose-ringed Gawker journalist living in a rat-infested San Francisco apartment and subsisting off ramen and ironically-purchased frappuccinos is his class superior, he's going to rightly laugh at you. And this isn't a misunderstanding of social vs economic class, it's just an acknowledgment that the vast majority of journalists etc are not very high up the class pyramid.
Now, my Thurston Howell and your unemployed plumber don't have much in common in terms of class, they would have trouble eating at the same table or having a basic conversation on most topics, but they are both Republicans and do share many of the same enemies. Trying to shoehorn it into a class struggle, though, just doesn't seem to work.
I think we probably agree. The republican party is a coalition of different people (much the same can probably be said about any successful political movement in the US). The strategy of keeping them on a united front by leveraging cultural concerns framing liberals as cultural vandals is not new (see Rush Limbaugh's entire career). It was also extremely successful starting in 2010, and I would argue that it has culminated in Trumpism.
I guess I am arguing there is almost no difference between the way Republican opinion leaders frame the Democrats, and how SA says they should. The only difference is the use of the word class, coerced to signify almost exactly what Republicans have been claiming all along. What's extremely odd to me is that people are finding this novel, or indeed any different from what we're used to.
It's all the weirder to me, because I find this to be a classist argument from Scott: red tribe should keep doing what it's doing, but make this slight language adjustment on the advice of a grey tribe outsider that, I have to imagine, is not exactly in touch with what Republicans want or how they use language.
From that point on in the reasoning, I worry that I am getting uncharitable, so I hope someone can tell me I'm taking this way too far:
I think it's *very* classist of Scott to suggest that red tribe rephrase their existing core argument with a slightly grey tribe twist, based on a version of the word 'class' very much unlike current parlance (especially in the Republican party), but which happens to be a flavor-of-the-month meme in grey tribe.
It is doubly classist to package this fairly superficial advice as if it is a new strategy. Like, hey red tribe, we in SF are the class of people with the good ideas, let me re-explain your strategy to you, but with my own words.
I think it is triply classist (please someone tell me I'm just out of my mind) to package this advice together with a random policy prescription, which has no cultural import in red tribe, currently. Scott's inclusion of this policy is deeply ironic, if, like me, you think the SF-elite constitute a very credible class, with its own objectives and cultural signifiers, one that is about as alien to red or blue tribe (or high and low class, whatever), as they are to each other. If you agree on this point, I think the optics obviously become just grey tribe telling red tribe to care more about grey tribe things.
Finally, what's unsaid I think reinforces the last point. No mention of god, abortion, or tradcon issues like sexual mores. I think they are so conspicuously absent from Scott's proposed platform, that the entire advice can be almost-charitably restated as 'hey red tribe, keep your strategy basically the same, but take on slightly more grey tribe language, forget about those pesky conservative positions, and start caring about Grey Tribe policy ideas. Sounds good?'
The Blue Tribe has a narrative of "the Republican party stands for nothing except hate". The less legible Republican platforms are to the Blue and Grey Tribe, the more that narrative will stick and the higher Democrat turnout will be (turnout being driven mostly by fear rather than appreciation, and we all fear what we don't understand). Ergo, the Republicans should make at least some effort to make their platform make sense to the Blue and Grey Tribe, so that the Grey Tribe stops voting Democrat and the Blue Tribe vote Democrat less.
There is still one giant hole in this argument, which is that because of the fragmentation of US media the Blue Tribe are well-insulated from anything the Republicans actually say. But it can probably kill Grey Tribe turnout dead, even without any policy changes.
"My stereotypical 'Republican' still looks a bit more like Thurston Howell III, driving his Lexus down to the country club in the morning for a quick round of golf before going sailing in the afternoon."
This is strange because, as a matter of practical fact, Thurston Howell III is far more likely to be a registered Democrat.
I know people that are active in SF politics and the blue tribe characteristics (including the fact that they look down on heartland Americans) was dead on to me.
Two things I would have written differently:
The descriptions of schools they graduate from is overly restrictive. The UT Austins and Michigans of the world are churning these types of people out.
I don't know about your group of friends, but ironically eating fast food every now and then is definitely a thing.
I think the core issue with Scott's post is that it's a bunch of coherent policy positions Republicans could take to attract the vote of Scott-like people. The problem is that Scott-like people are a tiny sliver of the American population, so even if those policies attract 100% of Scott-like people, they might drive away 1% of everyone else, which results in the GOP losing out on net votes. Probably even worse, when you consider where Scott-like people are distributed geographically (e.g. the Bay Area).
Hi there, I've discovered this blog after the entire NYT incident, and SSC and ACX have been a godsend. I'm sure the entire period was less than ideal for a lot of people in the community, but as brand new member i just wanted to express my deepest gratitude to scott and the entire community for just existing.
I was going to suggest that maybe that was real Josh Hawley posting as troll Josh Hawley, much like Picasso's quote about how he paints his own fakes. But then it turns out that Picasso's "I paint fakes, too" quote is itself a fake. How's that for meta?
Have you considered writing a review of Carl Hart's new book, or a blog post that examines his ideas re: drug use and addiction? I don't know if it interests you, but it seems like the kind of thing that would be up your alley.
I'm the person you failed to come to terms with, just because the terms were extremely poor. To make this bet work I think you need to offer better odds than just buying Opko stock (who own the only calcifediol formulation in the US). I don't get how you can think there's only a 25% chance that vitamin D works at all, but that there's a 50/50 chance that NICE would approve it by 3/1/21. If this offer is genuine than it seems that you must be more optimistic about vitamin D than you're letting on. Rootclaim would definitely offer better odds because they have quite a lot more money than me. :)
In the US the only approved calcifediol formulation is Rayaldee, there are other formulations which aren't patented so it's not a monopoly, but if that trial is successful you'd expect that stock to increase in value a lot.
This is also the subject of a totally fascinating shareholder fight with an activist investor basically accusing the CEO of slow playing the Rayaldee trial so that he can take the company private.
At a glance, they have a patent on *24-hour extended-release* vitamin D (US 8,778,373) which I don't think is terribly exciting given that 25-hydroxyvitamin D has a half-life of like two weeks.
There is a frame issue here. You assume the disease is classified and defined (it isn't) and treat pharmacological VitD (sun?) as the possible saviour. This is a mug's game. I posted a review on flu and don't wish to be boring but one could make a claim that Covid/Flu are just as easily characterised as functions of (seasonal) VitD metabolism. I am reminded of van Helmont's experiment that concluded that water was what caused trees to grow or worse, that killing virgins caused the sun to keep shining. Sorry but your knowledge is inadequate yet complacently so. There are few people who understand this virus/vitD dynamic and actually the evidence doesn't stack your way so your wager seems a little erm... naive? Some copernickanism and some empiricism is needed? Apols.
I agree. You don't. In a sense, you can't. Your frame is a clinical trial where none of your assumptions are valid and you discard unhelpful data to fulfill your normative desires. Your trial isn't valid. It's fine. I have no skin in the game but it isn't science. Carry on. Have fun.
Random question: so as a nutrient, "protein" breaks down as a bunch of different amino acids that aren't all biochemically interconvertible by humans and therefore you get a bunch of groups of them that are all each required in various amounts.
A thing I've wondered: how much tolerance is there for intakes that average out across time but at each point in time are heavily unbalanced? Like, say you alternated days where on odd days you consumed plenty of half of them but got very little of the other half, and on even days the other way around. Would this noticeably cause any nutrition problems? What if the alternation was over longer periods, like weeks, or months?
Longer time, definitely. To get an idea of what the shortest interval might be, look for the "leucine hypothesis" - the theory (currently rated at about 50-50 odds by top fitness experts) that you need am minimum amount of the leucine amino acid in your meal to trigger muscle buildup. So if this is even partially true, it means the amino acid distribution is important for intervals of around "one meal", so hours.
Nutrition problems - yes, like for a vegan diet, where you need supplementation long term. In that particular case it looks like it takes months for effects to be felt. But different amino acid profiles will probably be felt at different time scales.
I once asked this question. I didn't get a simple answer, and there may not be one, given the complexities of metabolism, but was told that there are proteins whose job is to store surplus amino acids for future use, and in principle, they can be stored indefinitely. I presume that, if the body is seriously short of protein, these proteins are drawn down and any surplus aminos excreted. This suggests that as long as you get enough protein overall and a little to spare, fluctuating amino acid intake is no big deal, and is easier to bear if you have more protein above the minimum, while if you are getting barely enough, it has to be evenly balanced. But that is my extrapolation from what the biochemist said, so draw your own conclusions.
Realistically it will take me weeks to read all the reviews and do anything with them and if you beg really hard I will probably let you slip in after the due date.
I sort of wish you hadn't said that - I've been working like a demon all day, am getting close to the end (because without a deadline I produce precisely nothing..) And now you've given me a sort of backsliders escape route!
Here's my compromise self-deadline - I'll have it done, dusted and on your desk by the end of the 1 March. And all will be well :)
I finished it and sent it off so I'm feeling rather chuffed with myself - who needs sleep eh? I feel like a student again!
If anyone is keeping tabs on what books have been reviewed, I took on The No Breakfast Fallacy by Tim Worstall. Part of me thinks it would be hilarious if 3 or 4 people also reviewed the same book. Unlikely, I know.
I just ordered the book I want to submit, but I'm planning on waiting to submit it for his second book review contest that I'm hoping he'll have. It's better to take your time with this.
Part of me agrees with you. Of course it never occurred to me that there might be a second review contest.
However, I gained a huge amount from trying to write something up in a couple of days (it had been percolating in my mind for months..)
My review might well have been better had it been given more time but I don't think there's much of a negative - Scott can skim read it and no-one else will have to suffer. And I can take a little more time with another review next time if there is one.
Have you reached out to rootclaim to see if they'd make the bet for a lower amount? It says on that page, "We are open to discussing lower or higher amounts, and the funds can be pooled from multiple sources.*"
Ok, any chance someone might help me understand why Bayes seems to play a prominent role in the “rationalist” worldview? Nothing I say here is in the slightest novel; I’m not saying that the community just failed to consider these amazing insights. I’m just curious what the basic take is on what I would guess are fairly stock concerns.
When I first encountered the Bayes theorem it was as a fairly unremarkable lemma in inductive logic. It wasn’t presented as any big deal in itself; it was a piece of a much larger puzzle about how to develop rigorous approaches to scientific and other empirical inferences. Yet it seems this particular theorem is sometimes conceptually isolated and treated almost as if it were a solution to the larger problem in itself. Isn’t the theorem just a transformation rule that doesn’t work unless you come in with a quantified antecedent probability, and unless you have some objective methodology for quantifying your initial likelihood then the theorem isn’t going to give you any more objective basis for any particular probability assessment in the face of new evidence? Second, even if you can somehow justify an antecedent probability, are there non-trivial real-world situations where we have grounds for discerning the requisite numerical inputs to apply the theorem to adjust that prior probability? Are there any real-world problems where the theorem has been used in a meaningful way to advance an argument, beyond simply using arbitrary numbers to illustrate the mundane idea that one should change beliefs to incorporate new evidence as it comes in? If not, in what sense is an emphasis on Bayes really helpful in the context of current, real-world problem solving over and above a generalized emphasis on being open to assimilate new evidence in an appropriate way, keeping in mind the totality of the evidence you had before the new discovery?
One thing I may have seen in the past (or may have imagined, or may be inadvertently caricaturing as I try to re-create it) is the idea that it is better to apply something like a quantitative assessment even if it involves making up arbitrary numbers, as a sort of discipline on your subjective guesswork. But it seems to me that if the inputs are all highly subjective guesses along a very wide range of potential numerical assessments, one may in many cases be likelier to do a much better job using subjective intuition on the whole problem at once—where one can at least think about the problem as a whole—than by trying to guess at each small part in isolation, which could often be harder to meaningfully assess in isolation. I would guess that in most complex situations where there is likely to be meaningful disagreement in the real world, numerical judgments are likely to be more accurate as applied to the totality of a problem than by “solving” a problem using a multiplicity of highly subjective guesses as to component numbers that preclude you from thinking about their interrelationships as you go along.
Hey, sorry if this is all wrong or seems hostile. I’m asking out of sincere curiosity.
Zooming way out, I think having a qualitative understanding of Bayes' Theorem is a major upgrade for your cognitive toolkit.
The equation says that P(A | B) isn't the same as P(B | A) - it's more complicated than that. If you're paying attention, you should sit bolt upright when you learn this. "Wait - maybe marijuana *isn't* a gateway to hard drugs! Maybe being raised in a house with lots of books doesn't guarantee good grades in school! Maybe every news story I've seen about longevity and food choice is mistold!"
A lot of my interest comes from the idea that the brain is explicitly approximating Bayes theorem, maybe so literally that different neurotransmitters represent different terms in the equation, and this explains a lot about thought. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/
Okay, something I've noticed during the pandemic is what I call lawyer vs. Bayesian (or at least what I think is Bayesian, other posters please correct me since I'm a bit of an outsider to the rationalist world). For one of many examples, should we stick to the recommended regimen for Pfizer/Moderna, or should we go with a "first doses first" strategy in which some people might wait a long time for a second dose.
- Lawyer: The clinical trials gave a second dose after 21 days. If we wait 22 days, we have no idea if the vaccine will work!
- Bayesian: We know from immunology that memory B-cells do not die off after 3.5 weeks. Normally boosters are given months after the original vaccine. Preliminary data from the clinical trial shows effectiveness from one dose even if we don't know how long.
I think Bayesian has done a lot better than Lawyer in this pandemic.
Similarly, we are hearing that we can't say with 100% certainty that a recovered or vaccinated person can't contract an asymptomatic case that is dangerously contagious to a non-vaccinated person. Is you 99% likely to spread the disease, or 1%? We have better than zero information on this, because throughout history people with natural or acquired immunity are clearly highly unlikely to be super-contagion sources--more like 1% than 99%. What should we conclude about how much sense it makes for recovered or vaccinated people to stay locked down or even wear masks or observe strict social distancing? Dr. Fauci now thinks two vaccinated people can relax with each other, but from a population and therefore public-point of view, the more sensible advice may be: If you're recovered or vaccinated, it's not worth sacrificing your ability to earn a living and provide essential services just for a vanishingly small risk that you'll help spread a disease that most people recover from.
Regarding vaccination schedules, you can also go one layer further and look at your necessary confidence level. I simultaneously believe that one-dose (or extended dosing interval) schedules are more likely than not to be fine *and* we should stick with the protocols studied in the Phase 3 trials.
In my view, once we have a validated treatment protocol it becomes the standard of care. We should only deviate from that standard -- especially at the population level -- with highly compelling evidence, not on the mere balance of probabilities.
To put it in another context, if "more likely than not" is sufficient to deviate from trial protocols now, then we should have issued emergency approvals for vulnerable populations alongside the stage 3 trial, when we knew with reasonable certainty after stage 2 that the vaccines were probably safe and had a good chance of being effective. "Wait until December for approval, but immediately depart from protocol" is not a self-consistent state of affairs.
Well, if you put it that way I'm on team "issue emergency approvals alongside the Stage 3 trial".
I'll never forget how the FDA slow-walked COVID-test applications throughout February. The worst pandemic in a hundred years was looming, the CDC test was defective, and they were telling applicants to FedEx printouts and memory sticks to Document Control. Rules that make sense in normal times stop making sense in time sensitive crises where wasted days kill lots of people.
In a crisis like this "will this probably save lives or probably cost lives" is a better standard than "are we 100% sure this will save lives, otherwise inaction."
a. Procedures that normally make sense but should be altered during a crisis.
or
b. Procedures that really never did make much sense, but their badness only became visible to people outside the system when they so visibly screwed the pooch with covid tests.
Probably some of both. A bias toward inaction and inertia makes some sense. You shouldn't be shaking stuff up all the time. That changes in a crisis.
There's some quote exchange in Chernow's biography of Grant where Grant made some decision and somebody asked "are you sure that's a good idea" and Grant was like "no, but in war the worst thing is inaction". Now, maybe that thing was attacking at Spotsylvania Courthouse, but generally it served him well.
The problem is that you can't make it possible to relax the rules within a crisis without making it possible to relax the rules when it isn't really a crisis but someone can plausibly claim that it is by enough to trigger the clause. And the combined effect of those things may be bad.
It's easy to say that looser rules would be better in the current situation, but you can't *make* rules that are looser only for the current situation.
This also applies to indirect methods of loosening the rules. If you can loosen the rules when it's a really important crisis instead of just a normal one, everyone will claim that every incident is really important. If you can loosen the rules when lives are involved, suddenly lives are involved constantly (you can make a connection between just about any policy and lives). If you can loosen the rules when the governor proclaims an emergency, guess what happens.
I think you're making an over-broad categorical claim here. Yes, a person at HHS or the FDA could have issued a memo or decision on Feb 1 basically saying "wave normal rules and expedite COVID test applications" and the result would not have been Rule by Emergency Decree. In fact, these rules did eventually get waived (as did the ridiculous rules about months-long approval process for building N95 factories), just a month too late.
Quebec decided on a "first vaccine first" strategy and has stuck to it. Will this lead to everyone injecting themselves with random drugs? I doubt it.
"Yes, a person at HHS or the FDA could have issued a memo or decision on Feb 1 basically saying "wave normal rules and expedite COVID test applications" and the result would not have been Rule by Emergency Decree."
What makes you think this? It is only feasible for someone to issue such a memo if the system allows it, and any system that allows it would also allow unlimited emergencies in normal times. Youi can't very well say "you can only issue emergency memos in *real emergencies*, not in fake ones".
The same is true if they can get a memo out after a few months of bureaucracy. The same system that forces them to go through months of bureaucracy in a real emergency also forces them to go through months of bureaucracy in a fake one, and that's how we prevent fake ones from being too disruptive.
-> Ok, any chance someone might help me understand why Bayes seems to play a prominent role in the “rationalist” worldview?
(I'm assuming there is no good way to do quotes or links yet?)
I believe the answer to your top level question is that LessWrong in general, and Elizier Yudkowsky in particular, have been strong proponents of Bayesian inference as a general model proper rational thought.
EY went so far as to proclaim that we should have priors, and thus initial estimates of probability about any possible question we contemplate, with, I believe, the specific example of a random, unknown interlocutor asking the question "What kind of tree can I see outside my window?" EY maintained that a rationalist should be willing to answer this question rather than say "I don't know". (Someone correct me if my memory is incorrect).
It currently supports text links like above, blockquotes beginning with ">", and italics with asterisks. (Though someone was having trouble with this feature where it removed all content, if you have this then disable the "Apply comment styling" option, stability fixes coming soon.)
There shouldn't be a gap before the italics in the blockquote, that's just substack's formatting having an unfortunate conflict with mine. Fix coming soon.
Ok, I'll play. I'm looking at the tree outside my window (well, to be honest, it's dark now, but I was legitimately looking at one earlier in the day). How many leaves are on it ?
AFAICT, Yudkowsky would answer something like "anywhere from 0 to 5M". This is a fine answer, and there's nothing technically wrong with it... but... how is it better, *in practice*, than "I don't know" ? If you wanted to bet real money on it, what number would you feel comfortable betting on ?
One thing you could do is maybe do some queries on Google to see how professional botanists have answered this question; or run a few back-of-the-envelope calculations; or maybe geolocate my IP to see if I live in New York (likely 0 leaves) or Los Angeles (likely the average number of leaves) or Magadan (0 leaves, lots of needles), and so on. But, at this point, you're no longer playing by original rules. You're trying to nail down an estimate, by starting with a prior that you've obtained by boring old frequentist methods, and then updating it via Bayes' Theorem (or whatever other methods you end up using). There's nothing wrong with that, but you're forced to tacitly admit that your original answer still was, "I don't know".
> Ok, I'll play. I'm looking at the tree outside my window (well, to be honest, it's dark now, but I was legitimately looking at one earlier in the day). How many leaves are on it ?
> You're trying to nail down an estimate, by starting with a prior that you've obtained by boring old frequentist methods, and then updating it via Bayes' Theorem (or whatever other methods you end up using).
I think that's the point? "Bayes thinking" tells you to begin with a prior, then update that prior with all available information to form a posterior with greater confidence. The prior is less important than the process, since "Bayes thinking" immediately turns my mind to the questions I'd need to answer to have a useful answer to your question.
But then, there's nothing special about Bayes; the real statement is, "try to quantify your guess". Until you do, your answer is still "I don't know", Bayes or no Bayes. And once you quantify it (probably using frequentist methods, such as estimating the average volume of a tree or whatnot), you could use Bayes to update on evidence, or you can use whatever other technique you want, and some will be better than others... But Bayes won't give you any special magical insights out of nowhere, like the Rationalist community appears to believe.
I don't think anybody is saying that "using frequentist methods" is mutually exclusive with "using Bayes' theorem".
Using frequentist methods "alone" would be appropriate for, say, guesstimating the average value of the next 10 rolls of a die whose outcomes you have already recorded for 1,000 rolls—the situation being predicted is functionally identical to the situation having been observed.
The reason rationalists love Bayes' theorem so much is that it allows them to guesstimate values about situations that *aren't* identical to situations already having been observed—rolling a different die that has a different number of faces that has never been rolled before, or rolling the same die on grass instead of a flat table, or dropping the die rather than rolling it, etc. etc. etc.—the answer is still equally "I don't know", but you can quantify it with more accuracy than if you hadn't observed outcomes of different-but-similar-in-some-ways situations before.
Rolling a die is not necessarily the best example because that can also be predicted using basic theoretical probabilities, but obviously Rationalists aren't nearly as interested in rolling standard dice as they are in, say, determining whether our universe is a simulation, or, choosing whether to endow with a mechanical arm an artificial intelligence that has only been observed in a simulated environment.
> rolling a different die that has a different number of faces that has never been rolled before ... —the answer is still equally "I don't know", but you can quantify it with more accuracy...
How so ? I just rolled a die with a certain fixed number of faces. Can you tell me what number came up ? How would you use Bayesian reasoning to improve your guess, given only the information that I just told you -- i.e., that I rolled a die, and that it has a number of faces ?
I would argue that the only reasonable answer is "I don't know"; or, if you prefer, "the number is likely somewhere between 0 and 500", which, in practice, is as useful as "I don't know"; and Bayesian reasoning does absolutely nothing to improve this situation for you. Yes, you could collect more data and use Bayesian reasoning to update your guess, but at that point there's nothing special about Bayes; in fact, in the case of dice, frequentist reasoning would probably work just as well (if not better).
Beliefs are probabilistic not 0 and 1 (this is the major one)
You should change your beliefs gradually when new evidence appears
How you should change your beliefs is precise.
Bayesians think that probabilities are fundamentally about quantifying personal uncertainty, So for many problems an objective probability doesn't exist
Also for making up numbers, one could appeal to the surprising level of quality one can get from fermi estimates.
Or the methods of super forecasters, or personal histories (eg calibration)
Bayes was a statistician, and multiple different things are named after him. In particular, I think you (and lots of other people) are using Bayes' Theorem interchangeably with Bayesian probability, which results in confusion.
Bayesianism is contrasted with Frequentism. Frequentism is a way of interpreting mathematical probabilities as claims about repeated experiments (flip a coin 100 times, get 50 heads), and cannot sensibly talk about individual non-repeatable events. Bayesianism is a way of interpreting mathematical probabilities as claims about knowledge (a single coin flip will definitely be either heads or tails, but my prediction about that event can be expressed as a percentage). Frequentism has the advantage of being very concrete and only making testable claims. Bayesianism has the advantage of being much more broadly applicable and matching an intuitive way to think about uncertainty (though its dependence on a priori "priors" reflects a real lack of mathematical rigor underlying the theory).
I think this dichotomy is a helpful way to think about what people mean when they say "Bayesian reasoning." Notably, Bayes' Theorem is also true in Frequentist probability. In the context of Bayesian reasoning, Bayes' Theorem becomes a formula for updating predictions based on new evidence. Without that context, it's a fairly mundane theorem which happens to be named after Bayes. I think advocates of Bayesian reasoning would be well served to mention the theorem less, but using the word "theorem" makes people feel like their philosophy has solid mathematical grounding.
Technically, Bayes wasn't a statistician, but a priest. It's probably easiest to understand his ideas and the contrast to alternatives within the context of statistics, but they've been central to thinking about reasoning in economics, psychology, and philosophy for about a century, while physicists (and L.J. Savage) brought the idea to statistics a bit later.
I think these are great questions. I'm not strictly qualified to answer them succinctly here, but I have some great ideas for further reading if you're curious --
First off, though I know you were looking to escape toy examples, it deserves mention in passing that when you ask rooms of trained medical professionals toy questions in their domain which would benefit from the application of the theorem, they often struggle: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4521525/
In non-toy domains, I think some of the best work on this is from Tetlock in Expert Political Judgment and maybe even moreso in Superforecasters. Lots of examples and methods for gauging how effective these tools are.
3Blue1Brown has an evangelic video on BT as well. I don't think 3b1b is uniquely tied to the rationalist community or anything, I think just a lot of people geek out about what a useful tool this can be:
He goes through the math which you know, but also talks about its use in finding shipwrecks and other domains, which you might find interesting.
You have a broader question about the usefulness of estimating priors vs. just a composite answer. Your take sounds reasonable, but I think there is good stuff suggesting that starting estimation on small components and building up is generally more powerful. Maybe from Harford or Weisenthal but... I'm not confident I have the best recommendations here so welcome any ideas from other readers.
Over-inflated sense of their own brilliance and uniqueness. There are plenty of other communities, academic and otherwise, who value logic and Bayesian thinking, without advertising that those are their underlying heuristics. The rationalist community is just particularly prone to self-congratulations.
I've been loosely in the rationalist community for about a decade (under various different names), starting on LW when it was more active. Honestly never really saw the fuss about bayes theorem, the main takeaway from it really seems to just be "take prior probability into account." I've found other concepts from rationalist sphere much more useful, like inferential distance, game theory stuff, non-central fallacy, ugh fields, etc.
Bayes seems to have become iconic as a symbolic thing more than anything else, as Eliezer wrote about the "Bayesian Conspiracy" and people made bayes t-shirts. Not because its something people actually use that much
Hi! I'm a grad student studying probabilistic ML (I like to call myself "a professional Bayesian"), and I've always been confused by this too.
I agree strongly with Oskar Mathiasen's comment above -- to me, "Bayesianism" refers to Bayesian epistemology. The core insight of Bayesianism is that it's possible to reason under uncertainty in a mathematically principled way. To do this, one uses probabilities to represent degrees of beliefs, and then updates those probabilities as new evidence is encountered. (Cox's theorem shows that probability theory is the only formalization of reasoning under uncertainty that satisfies desiderata, so the choice of using probability theory for all of this is not arbitrary.)
To me, the most important thing about Bayesianism is that it provides a theoretical framework for reasoning under uncertainty. Before Bayesian models of reasoning, people were using logical models of reasoning, where each belief had to be definitely true or definitely false. This is a very brittle reasoning system, and Bayesian reasoning presented a major advance over it.
Bayes' rule is an incredibly simple piece of mathematics, which hardly even needs a name because it is so easily derivable from other important formulas in probability theory. I don't understand why everyone is always poring over the math of Bayes' rule as if it contains some arcane secrets.
Yes, I understand that Bayes' rule provides a formula for updating one's beliefs in light of evidence. And yes, I understand that updating beliefs in light of evidence is important. But I think that's a much smaller insight than "we can represent degrees of belief as numbers and then use them to reason under uncertainty". And also, the math of Bayes' rule just isn't that interesting.
(As a final note, I don't think people are actually implementing full Bayesian updates in their brains. Bayesianism is useful as an idealization, and as a proof-of-concept that reasoning under uncertainty is possible, but it is completely intractable to do the full Bayesian update. So all practical Bayesian agents will have to be doing some approximation, and I suspect that they'll need to do so much approximation that their actual belief update won't actually look much like Bayes' rule.)
I come from a similar place, and I think you articulate this point really well. Bayesian statisticians are this band of mathematicians who like to use MCMC and hierarchical models, and rant about frequentists and their devilish pvalues (i think they’re a great bunch, but am forever biased by the fact that some of my kindest, most wonderful instructors were dedicated Bayesians). I wonder what someone like Andrew Gelman would say about this appropriation of ‘Bayesian’ by the rationalist community, as shorthand for ‘intellectually honest’. Speaking of, Andrew’s blog is phenomenal, but you might already know that.
For what it’s worth, I think Nate Silver applies the term fairly helpfully in lay discussions
Someone please correct me if I have this wrong, but I figured this approach was helpful for some concrete applications where frequentist stats isn't, like drawing conclusions from the experimental results from a dozen different clinical trials, all of which were done in a slightly different way. Or creating an AI that can learn from its environment. Eh?
Who here is currently applying Bayesian stats in their work? I'm curious to know how you do it.
People who apply this model to their own thought processes seem to be going for a greater awareness of their own uncertainty and a more careful consideration of all the variables influencing their expectations. That doesn't prevent anyone from thinking about interactions between variables.
If it all sounds very esoteric, here's a real-world example. At least one member of the fire department complained for years about the state of the under-maintained creek that runs through Talent, Oregon, pointing out that, in the unlikely event of a fire starting in the overgrown blackberries on a windy day, that fire would quickly become unstoppable and maybe even burn down our town. The city council did nothing on the basis of "not gonna happen, too expensive". And then we got a lot of dry weather, the whole west coast caught on fire including the blackberries along the creek that runs through Talent, Oregon, the wind happened to be blowing north that day, and half of Talent burned down. I know hindsight is 2020 and maybe I'm taking this a little too far, but I'd like to think that, if the city had started by considering the likelihood of a fire, and updated that likelihood based on the fires we've seen in the last few years, their decisions might have been better.
Dramatic hypotheticals aside, I figure the most fundamental benefit of the thought exercise is simply to allow for probability and uncertainty in your mode reasoning.
Bayesian modeling is a big deal in old-school machine learning, and there's a lot of data scientists/machine learning types in the original rationalist community; you can tell by the early focus on AI existential threats.
The uncharitable answer is: because the Rationalist Community is still a little too intellectually downstream of whatever random idiosyncratic things Eliezer Yudkowsky thought were particularly important when he was a teenager.
This terminological issue about making "Bayes" the name for this movement goes back many decades before Yudkowsky, and is common across academic disciplines.
This is an issue that philosophers of science worry about every once in a while - why do we use the name "Bayesian" when Bayes's Theorem is equally useful for alternative accounts of probability, and isn't that central to what's going on?
I believe the main reason is that Bayes proved his theorem in the middle of a paper where he wanted to infer the probability of some event that either did or did not occur in the past (in his case, something about someone throwing a billiard ball on a table with a particular spin, if I recall), and the point of the method is that one-off things like *that* can in fact have probabilities, and not just things that are elements of repeated trials.
If you have enough interest in the relevant aspects of philosophy of science, I think this is discussed quite well in John Earman's book, "Bayes or Bust?"
TBH this is one of the things that turned me off of the capital-R Rationalist community, as well. All the articles on Bayes' Theorem were very clear and definitely useful; but no theorem, no matter how useful, deserves to be worshiped. When I started reading claims like "all of modern physics could be developed in a few years if only the scientists were smart enough to use Bayes' Theorem", what I heard was, "Earn millions in your spare time by following this one simple rule". You can't get any useful insights out of purely arbitrary guesses, no matter which theorem you use.
> You can't get any useful insights out of purely arbitrary guesses, no matter which theorem you use.
Practically, that doesn't seem true at all – if you're iterating at all, i.e. actually looking at the results of having made "purely arbitrary guesses", and then even somewhat systematically varying one's 'arbitrary' guesses in subsequent 'trials'.
One big implication is that it _mostly_ doesn't matter what your initial guesses are. If you're committed to actually looking at the results and changing your mind (i.e. calculating posterior probabilities which become your new priors).
Well, no, it kind of does matter. In the real world, you don't have infinite evidence, so you are not guaranteed to have enough data points for your probability estimate to converge. To put it another way, if you wanted to discover all of modern physics in a decade, you still couldn't do it, because it would take you much longer than that just to collect the evidence.
Let's use a trivial example, and say that you believe in ghosts to some degree. You turn your back for a moment, and a glass falls off your kitchen counter and shatters on the floor. What caused the fall: was it a ghost, or an earthquake (let's pretend like these are the only two choices) ? How many data points would you need to collect to conclude that it was an earthquake after all, if your P(ghost) = 0.999, as opposed to 0.001 ?
You're right – arbitrarily strong priors can be arbitrarily difficult to update and thus converge on the 'truth'.
I wasn't thinking of 'adversarial' examples like that.
But you claim that you read things like "all of modern physics could be developed in a few years if only the scientists were smart enough to use Bayes' Theorem" whereas I remember "the scientists were smart enough" as something more like 'if scientists were Bayesian superintelligences'.
But again, I wrote "If you're committed to actually looking at the results and changing your mind ..." which theoretically covers someone changing their mind even given an extremely strong prior about, e.g. the existence of ghosts.
In the real world, most people are not in fact either "committed to actually looking at the results" or even really open at all to changing their minds.
But also in the real world, people really can and _do_ change their minds, update on evidence, and even overcome extremely strong prior beliefs. The fact they don't do so for _every_ belief, or even that many at all, over the span of a lifetime, doesn't seem to detract from the point that doing so is in a very real sense a (good) model of rational thinking, i.e. believing true (and useful) things.
So, inflation. Top economists disagree on the topic. Naive arguments suggest there should obviously be inflation. Will there be? For anyone with savings, anyone nearing retirement or in retirement, this is probably the most important topic to get right at the moment.
I think no, and am implicitly betting on this with my asset allocations.
My model of inflation: inflation is determined by the interaction of "the total amount of goods produced and services rendered" and "the amount of money circulating." Most people only focus on the latter - if the former goes up, inflationary pressure is reduced.
Furthermore, most people (including top economists) neglect the fact that recessions (particularly ones with credit crunches) *destroy money*. There's more money-like instruments than you learned in Macro 101.
While I don't think it goes far enough, the U.S. Federal Reserve's recent adoption (last year) of an Average Inflation Targeting framework is a good development. If they follow it, they will not only try to prevent too much inflation from happening, but also if they mess up, push harder in the next period.
> What happens if goods and/or services go down while circulating money goes up. Prices of everything goes up I assume?
Yes - more money chasing after fewer goods and services -> prices get bid up.
> what does the economy look like if services go down while goods go up and credit goes down?
Depends on the balance!
There are ideas that say roughly what you did - that money going to different sectors out of proportion to their productivity (malinvestment) causes problems. But they are contentious.
I would say having one currency be half of every transaction allows for tradeoffs to be made between goods and services, and that this is beneficial.
I meant "having a single currency, i.e. the way things are now, is beneficial relative to a multiple-currencies-per-sector" approach. "One" was ambiguous!
I think a big part of the issue is a disagreement on what “inflation” even means at this point. Focusing on the US, let’s say things like food and consumer goods continue to be cheap, but land/home values (particularly in cities), stocks and other assets, as well as important necessities like healthcare costs continue to rise significantly. Is that inflation? The Consumer Price Index currently says “no”, but the average experience of someone on the ground could very well be “yes”, for example, if they’ve been saving up for their first home.
The question underlying a lot of this, IMO, is an argument as to whether the US government’s recent propensity for printing lots of money is the primary force behind the rise in these prices.
Think there is a pretty compelling argument that stocks and home prices are going up due to low interest rates and low bond yields (since money doesn't really have anywhere else to go). Doubt that has very much to do with healthcare costs though, costs there have been rising like crazy for decades and don't seem to care at all about what's going on in the rest of the economy.
I have read the theory that over the last two decades, there has been inflation in assets, goods and services that are not easily imported / are not subsidized (food). If you think about it, it somewhat makes sense. Housing, higher education, health care, professional services: all stuff that has gone up in price significantly.
Consumer goods (which are mainly made in Asia / Mexico), and food (which comes from Mexico or is subsidized) have not risen in price nearly as much.
The Federal Reserve preferred metric in measuring broad inflation is core Personal Consumption Expenditures which excludes food and energy. There has been notable deflation in the price of household goods that is likely the result of globalized supply chains which allow US-based consumers to access low cost manufacturing capacity outside the country (think TVs and cars). While the deflationary influence of goods has kept the core PCE within a tight and acceptable range since the mid-1990s, it's hard to argue that there has not been a significant reduction in purchasing power for many important things, like higher education, healthcare, financial assets and very recently lumber (https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/lumber-price?op=1).
Financial assets, in particular, have been supported by the low / zero interest rate policy enacted by the FED. That most of the developed world is pursuing a similar policy has kept the value of the USD reasonably stable (until recently) and maintained our relative purchasing power. Intermediate and long term interest rates, as represented by US Treasuries, have been rising recently (5, 10 and 30yr rates over 30 bps higher in a month). I believe the market has started discounting a removal of extraordinary fiscal stimulus, a normalization of the interest rate policy, and (just maybe this time) inflation. I believe that the debt load on corporations and the federal and state governments limits the degree to which the govt/treasury/fed can allow rates to rise as a large rise would make refinancing existing debt prohibitively expensive. Perhaps this is the mechanism that finally pushes inflation over 2% as the FED's usual tool to contain inflation is limited. However, these are all one-sided interpretations and there are plenty of good ones that suggest that sustained inflation is far off like capacity utilization and wage growth.
The US has not seen rising inflation in 40 years. There is even a relatively new ideology among macro economists called Modern Monetary Theory that (simplistically stated) posits that debt is inconsequential to the US as long as the US dollar remains the reserve currency of the world economy. Perhaps that's right, but it smells like "this time is different" to me and rationalization for continuing the credit and debt driven expansionary policies that have led to inflationary disasters in the past. My opinion is that the most important property of inflation is that it is a very non-linear process. The current mantra among FED governors is that they will allow inflation to run "hot" for a time, perhaps up to 2 years before deploying measures to contain it. I am fearful that the limitation on traditional inflation-fighting tools and their academic hubris will be insufficient to put the toothpaste back in the tube. My investments reflect my view in the form of cryptocurrencies, energy and uranium equities, and agricultural futures. I will buy precious metals if they find some stability.
"fed can allow rates to rise as a large rise would make refinancing existing debt prohibitively expensive."
The rate of inflation going from 2% to 4% would decrease the amount of debt in real terms and also substantially increase tax revenue. That's something to keep in mind. The Fed isn't going to raise rates for no reason. They are going to raise rates because the rate of inflation is increasing.
The CBO projects that net interest outlays to service the federal debt will more than double "from an estimated $290 billion in 2021 to $664 billion in 2030." (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56910).
The 2030 net interest outlays would climb by 35% by 2030 if borrowing costs rise by 10 bps every year for the next 10 years which, if inflation is running above 2% for some time, seems like it would be a pretty nice outcome. Would tax revenue also go up sufficiently to pay for a 3x increase in debt service costs in this scenario? If not, would the government reduce spending to accommodate the rising costs (ha!)?
If inflation was to rise to 4%, where are interest rates and how substantial is the tax revenue increase? The sensitivity of costs to just a mild rise in interest rates leads me to believe that the FED would under-react to a moderate to large inflationary rise which could lead to even more inflation.
(when people refer to the banks wanting low inflation what is meant is that this is what their most powerful clients want: yagaoMEGHIRU(ii) stood still .. looked intently into här radiating eyes: volcker's constituents, in this sense, are the institutional bond holders .. large fund distributors: they want low, stable inflation: the banks .. credit corporations, to varying degrees depending on their model, profit off of volatility: they don't care which way rates are moving, so long as they are moving: this is what pushes capital through the system .., in consequence, through the conduits: the derivatives constructed by the u_agents were self-adjusting hybrids with built in shock switches allowing for the propulsion flows of supply shocks to propagate in predetermined manner: these were what were referred to at the time as 'invisible distances', the channels through which unexpected flows would be transformed into expected flows): ((__)(criminal (re enron)) the u_agents operated according to the regulation of a modular guild of actor/agencies, without any centralized control: enforcement of guild protocol was implemented via fines or strictures in minor cases, or suspension or banishment in major ones: disputes were moderated via internal arbitration: banishment was enforced via lobotical procedures referred to as 'clipping': the megamen could be fairly called 'micromechanics' in the full let's-blow-everything-out sense of the word: they were, by dual mandate, agents for the management of approaches in .. around what get passed off as non-equilibrium systems, .. were responsible for the regulation of inter-coordinations between multiple of these systems with overlapping parameters: people are fond of referring to the emergence of 'the madness' in respect to the buildup to the financial crisis).
It's not a sure thing, but if anything has challenged my traditional Austrian economics (amateur status to be sure) worldview, it's glancing at a negative yield for 50 year Swiss debt.
I just checked out the real Josh Hawley's twitter, and after scrolling through several pages the only thing I found offensive was his support for an increased minimum wage. What am I missing?
Lately I've been playing a lot of Civilization 4 with the Fall from Heaven 2 mod. I know there's at least a couple of people here who are fans. I play with the More Naval AI mod personally.
What's everyone's favorite civilization? Of the ones I've tried, I've really like the Luchuirp and the Calabim, they've just got such fun mid-late game mechanics. I'm thinking of learning a civ with a great early game rush, anyone got a preference there? Hippus, Doviello or Grigori seem like good candidates.
Anyone have a good method for playing modded multiplayer Civ IV these days?
Amurites are fun in an OP kind of way; once you get Firebows it's almost too easy.
Illians are definitely their own thing. The mechanic centering around The Draw, where you sacrifice a lot of your productive capacity and make everyone declare war on you, in the hopes that if you survive long enough you can ascend Auric and become invincible, is a lot of fun. If you haven't played them yet I would recommend.
I have a soft spot for the Malakim - the most rationalist civ! They're also the most likely to get Chalid, who's one of the game's best heroes.
If you get the right modmods, you can play as the Mechanos and have ornithopters.
Some strategies I've had fun with: Lanun into Infernals. Go all out on science and summon Hyborem long before others can deal with him. Raze your way into overpowered specialist economy supercities and conquer the world.
Heroes to beeline with a variety of civs: Duin Halfmorn (pair with a dwarven civ for grabbing the excellent Dwarven Druids just one tech further). The three Giants from Pact of the Nilhorn. Chalid, as mentioned.
Luchiurp + Kilmorph makes gold a non-issue and you can expand Civ3 ICS style. And even your worker golems can end up throwing fireballs, it's just too easy.
Svartalfar + Fellowship is fun but the 'Hunting' knowledge path is hard to pursue. Nevertheless it's pretty cool to capture a bunch of animals and build zoos in every single city, sometimes from your own summons.
Balseraphs are pretty cool. For flavor points you *should* play with insanity, having three traits is worth it anyway.
Holy shit I can't believe other ACX people (including Scott!) are into FFH. I thought it was some forgotten mod from some forgotten game no one but me cared about.
I recommand Magister's ModMod, he's still making it 15 years later and it's imbued with flavor. It integrates more naval, bugfixes and more.
As far as balance is concerned it's pretty established the Doviello get the short end of the stick and the first civ to get Chalid Astrakein is guaranteed to win.
Yep was thinking the same. This seems like a perfect use-case for crowdfunding, via a smart contract or just, and probably easier at this point, some other plain crowdfunding platform
I have a friend in his mid 20s who thinks he might have had dyslexia his whole life but was never diagnosed because he was capable enough in other modes of thinking to work around it in several ways. I've seen him read aloud and he reads pretty slowly+haltingly, misreads a lot, has to go back, etc. You wouldn't know it unless you watched him read, though. He's a very successful computer programmer; when I asked whether he has issues reading his own code he said he mostly uses the indentation/shape of the code to figure out where he is.
He is hesitant to get a formal diagnosis for several reasons, but he is looking for advice. Does anyone have a suggestion for good resources he could use to learn more about whether he does have some kind of dyslexia, and if so, what he can do to improve his reading ability? Past the obvious results it's hard to know what to trust in google results. He is about to start graduate school where he will have to read a lot of papers and textbooks and is worried he won't be able to read quickly enough.
Many dyslexics find some fonts more readable than others. Strangely enough, many say that Comic Sans is the easiest to read. This probably doesn't apply much to papers and textbooks, but could come in handy for situations where the text is on a computer and the font can be changed.
My son is dyslexic. A laptop has been wonderful. There are many text to voice programmes out there. IMHO a dyslexia diagnosis is useful if you want to access support from institutions eg a reader/writer in an exam or a note-taker during lectures but not that useful for the person with dyslexia.
There are some forms of dyslexia that seem to be strictly physical - for that form of dyslexia, there are structures in the eye that are asymmetric in normal people, but more symmetric in dyslexics, which then frustrates the brain trying to synthesize the images into what you see and so on. Apparently that form of dyslexia is helped by closing one eye to eliminate the difficulty of choice issue the too-symmetric structure causes.
1. I'm interested in funding part of a Rootclaim bet (say, up to 25k) if the rest can be raised and terms agreed upon - probably give some share of winnings like 10-20% to the debater and the rest to the funders. Debater should probably have some stake in it as well.
2. There was a similar suggestion on Hacker News (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25587410) for the Rootclaim bet on their claim that COVID-19 originated in a lab. I might be interested in funding a team against that as well.
I'll check for sources in a bit, it's spread across several pages on the blog, but basically their terms are a 6+ hour debate that's judged by mutually agreeable people
I had to disable the ACX-tweaks chrome extension because it had the odd effect of hiding all of the comment text from most of the comments. I love the *format* it gives to comments but I'd kind of like to be able to read their *content* as well, so... :-(
Ah, sometimes it does that before everything loads? If it's still an issue, just disable the "Apply comment styling" option, which should fix it. (I'm working on overall stability fixes too.)
I offer to bet $100 that Vitamin D treats COVID as specified by Rootclaim against Scott. I think it's more likely than not that Vitamin D is reasonably effective. If Scott's not interested, I'll make the same bet once against anyone else I know personally.
I’m confused about Scott’s issue with betting against Rootclaim. If someone offers a certain specification for a bet, an offers to bet X units of currency in those conditions, isn’t it natural to say “I like that bet, but I’m only OK betting Y”?
Isn’t it a built-in feature of betting on *money* that you can pick the amount separate from the conditions and odds?
(Jason, that wasn’t really a question for you—though you’re welcome to enlighten me—I just piggy-backed on your comment since it was the first I noticed on that subject.)
Bottom line, the pattern of excess deaths in India (and many other countries) does not seem consistent with large numbers of unreported covid deaths. If do, the IFR has large geographic variation even above the effects of demographics. The reason Is not clear but the article does present evidence that some degree of prior immunity may be present (in Asia and Africa but not the Americas). In any case, the addition to your mistakes page may be premature.
It does. But this is not sufficient. Eg India’s population pyramid is similar to Mexico’s but reported IFR differs by an order of magnitude. One possible answer is that covid deaths have been undercounted but the excess death data (discussed in the article) does not seem consistent with this hypothesis. In which case IFR has large geographic variantion even beyond the effects of demographics
The big puzzle there IMO is that Indian immigrants to wealthy countries have an extremely high risk of Covid mortality. The same is true of basically every sunny equatorial country. Low risk in the home country, high risk for immigrants from that country to the North. This is the exact same ethnogeographic pattern as Ricketts.
Also schizophrenia. Black Africans have exactly normal rate, blacks in UK have about 10x normal rate. Usual explanation is racism but there's a substantial minority who think it's Vitamin D or some other sunlight-related issue.
MS is another one that follows this pattern. I think with schizophrenia there's a lot of plausible causal stories around racism, education, and how the condition manifests or is diagnosed in the different regions. It's much harder to find that with Covid because you would expect mortality rates in low and middle-income countries to be higher because of worse medical care and higher rates of diseases like HIV. The only three explanations that make any sense to me are vitamin D, Ivermectin use, or enormous undercounting of mortality in developing countries.
Yes. This is one of the strongest bits of (indirect) evidence for the vitamin D hypothesis. But of course it doesn’t have to be vitamin D, could be anything linked to sunlight. Eg I’ve seen speculation that it is actually melatonin
Yeah, or nitros oxide, the difference is that we have quite a lot of non-ecological evidence that vitamin D is involved in Covid. https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/
I thought the other most interesting hypothesis mentioned in that article is that while moderate overcrowding (many people to a home, with standard developed-world distances between homes) is extremely bad for covid (because people get really high viral doses if they share a bedroom with an infected person), the extreme overcrowding common in slums in Africa and India (many individual beds within a few feet of each other, in separate shanties, in a large slum) may actually be really good for covid (because people get really low viral doses from people sleeping nearby but separated by the outdoors from them).
"They found that the total number of “all cause” deaths reported between May and August almost doubled in India compared with the same period in each of the past five years."
Nope. If you read the next sentence they point out that the breakdown by age and sex doesn’t fit unreported covid deaths. Fits quite well to lockdown deaths (untreated other diseases, deprivation etc) but not Covid, which is the topic under discussion.
If you read the whole sentence instead of stopping after the first six words you will see that I spell out what I mean by lockdown deaths. Specifically, other diseases that go untreated because of lockdowns (the article specifically mentions untreated tuberculosis as a significant contributor to all cause mortality), deprivation (people that lose their livelihoods because of lockdown - note India did not have any trillion dollar bailouts) etc. That's twice in two comments that you've deliberately plucked quotes out of context to fit your narrative (but to make exactly the opposite point as the source material). That pattern, plus your profile picture, makes me think you are the same commenter as `Enopoletus' on DSL, whom I blocked after concluding he was not there in good faith. Since I don't want the aggravation of arguing with a presumed bad faith commenter, I'm going to take the same policy here, and will henceforth cease to engage with `Eharding'
It works as designed (ie. puts things near the top based on a combination of number of hearts, how recently it was post and black magic), it just doesn't work the way you would actually like it to work.
The hearts option for some reason makes me miss the lack of a downvote button more than I did on the old website (presumably because my brain goes into reddit mode more now), so I actually find it mildly annoying for that reason.
It reminded of Bryan Caplan's quote about Robin Hanson:
> When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is “Eh, maybe.” Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is “No way! Impossible!” Then I think about it for years.
Muraresku's theory: I'm doubtful! But I'll never think about stories of ancient rituals the same way.
Haven't read it, makes me wonder if this is like Robert Graves' "The White Goddess". Yes you can have an over-riding "one big idea" and string a lot of disparate elements together and be very convincing, but that doesn't make it right.
I think psychedelics/shamanism do have something to do with "varieties of religious experience" as the man said, but you can go too hard on that and end up with "all religion is mental disease, St Paul thought he was having a religious experience on the road to Damascus when it was just epilepsy" type conclusions. Or the opposite extreme, which is that everyone should get drunk/high and experience Cosmic Truth and that will somehow solve all the problems of society once we are all off our faces as many hours in the day as feasible.
Okay, please pardon the swearing, but I looked this up to see what it was about and what did I see as publisher's blurb? Oh holy fuck, here we go again:
"A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations."
Oh goody. Yet another one of these. Like Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" and the pseudo-history guff that was based on, or yet another Gnostic popularisation book put out by Bart Ehrman or Elaine Pagels.
Then I keep reading and see that the foreword is by Graham Hancock. Graham. Hancock. The pseudoarchaeology guy, the Erich von Daniken des nos jours. Well, that tells me what I need to know about the level of academic rigour and scholarship involved.
And then I see this pile of steaming crap that I can't even dignify as horse manure because at least horse manure can be used as fertiliser for the roses:
"There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist – the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found."
Hey guys, I have something else of that ilk for you. Did you know the bowl that Alexander allegedly drank wine from before his death has never been found? That means Alexander never existed! There is zero archaeological evidence for what cornflakes Rameses the Great ate for breakfast! As for the complete bollocks of theological understanding of what the Eucharist is - but I have said enough already. I don't know what the hell "archaeological evidence" for the Eucharist they expect, unless it's something like digging up a goblet neatly labelled "cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, signed Pontius Pilate". There are documents such as the Didache, from the first century, which give a description of basic Christian ceremonies and teachings, including the Eucharist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didache#Eucharist
I hope to Christ this is just the usual publisher's nonsense but if it's anything expressive of the contents of the book, then this is indeed The Usual Tripe.
I swear to God, if I had a tenner for every "This will shake the Church to its foundations" that I've seen, my bank balance would rival that of Jeff Bezos.
> There is zero archaeological evidence for what cornflakes Rameses the Great ate for breakfast!
WHAT YOU SAY !!! My life is a lie ! Heh.
That said though, admittedly I'm an atheist, but still: if a person told me that God spoke to him and literally ordered him to carry out some specific series of instructions, I'd assume that he was mentally ill, not holy. I have a feeling (though I could be wrong) that most Christians would make the same decision... but... why ? I know there are lots of explanations to the extent of "God used to talk to people in the past but doesn't anymore" or "actually God's voice is more like a feeling in your heart and not a literal audible voice", but... do Christians really find these extra-Biblical assumptions satisfying ?
On top of that, we don't have the Pharaohs' corn flakes, but we've got a lot more evidence for theirs and/or Alexander's existence than we do for pretty much any ancient religious figure (plus or minus Pythagoras). Obviously, if one has faith, that isn't an issue in any way, but can you really blame people for wanting more ?
Okay, I have two things here: the spiritual effects of the Eucharist, and the physical elements.
This guy is seemingly trying to push the notion that all (?) religions got started by the use and effects of drugs, in particular psychedelic drugs. That's not wholly incorrect; if we look at, for example, the ecstatic cult of Dionysus that involves the notion of intoxication and unity with the god. That's wine, though, and although there are apparently suggestions that "entheogens" were admixed, that's scholarly speculation (so "zero archaeological evidence", to quote the blurb above): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian_Mysteries#Role_of_wine
Now here is where I start swearing like a trooper again. That publisher's blurb about the wine used in the Eucharist is so mangled, I can only hope it is a poorly-understood paraphrase thrown together by an unpaid intern and not a direct quote:
"the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus"
I'm not going to go into the spiritual effects of the Eucharist, my quarrel here is with the nonsense regarding the physical elements.
(1) The Eucharistic elements are bread and wine, not wine alone
(2) The Eucharistic ritual is based loosely on the Passover seder, see the typical meal, and unless we're expected to indulge in some "nudge-nudge, wink-wink, bitter herbs, herbs = herbal medicine = drugs, Harold", I don't think there's much room there for "it wasn't wine they consumed"
(3) The implication or assumption or whatever the hell is going on here is that the Sabbath/Sunday gathering and ritual meal of the early Christians involved consumption of intoxicants in the setting. Well, the only intoxicant was wine in the meeting and they weren't glugging that down. In fact, some denominations are so anti-alcohol that they even replaced the wine with grape juice: https://www.umc.org/en/content/communion-and-welchs-grape-juice
(4) There *was* a separate meal later, the agape or love-meal, and yeah that did lead to problems at times; there are notes of criticism of people taking advantage, replicating social strata where all were supposed to be equal, and getting drunk/over-eating. The fact that getting drunk *was* rebuked shows that it was *not* part of the intention of the rite. From St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (they seem to have been the problem children of the early Church):
"20 When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. 21 For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. 22 What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not."
And straight after this, St. Paul describes what is the Lord's Supper/Eucharist:
"23 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for[f] you. Do this in remembrance of me.”[g] 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."
(5) In support of that, this excerpt from Pliny's letter of the first century asking for advice on what to do if he encounters Christians in his duties as governor:
"They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food--but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition."
So that's our "archaeological evidence", as far as it goes. If what the author or whoever threw this unholy mess together wants is some Indiana Jones type to dig up a wine vessel labelled "Communion wine for J. Christ and twelve others", they're out of luck. That's like asking for archaeological evidence of the wine I drank with Christmas dinner last December, that bottle has long since gone into the bottle bank and been recycled and I don't have photos, videos or anything but my bare word that yep, I drank wine with my dinner.
What this guy is doing is the equivalent of something I've run across before; do you know why Santa Claus is dressed in red and white? Because those are the colours of fly agaric mushrooms, used in shamanic rituals. That's why we associate flying reindeer with Santa Claus!
Except that the popular image of "Santa Claus" comes from the American poem in 1823, "'Twas the night before Christmas", where Santa is the jolly old elf dressed in red. So the entire line of 'reasoning', if we can use that word in association with what is going on here, falls completely flat. Unless, again, we want to assert that if you, Bugmaster, say you drank a can of Coke, what you really mean is that you did a line of cocaine.
*insert entire fecking string of eye-rolling emojis here*
Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending whatever cockamaime silliness that guy is pushing. I'm just saying that you can't blame people for thinking, "look, we all know that Jesus is our Lord, but wouldn't it be nice if there was as much evidence of him as there is of Alexander, Rameses, or heck even Hammurabi". The same goes for specific religious ceremonies.
But as I said, I'm staying away from the spiritual/religious angle and just concentrating on the physical elements. Now, I don't know what the kykeon in the Elusinian Mysteries was compounded of, nobody has the recipe book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kykeon
That it probably had something in it to get the participants high? Well, not impossible, we don't know. Our pal here would probably be very enthusiastic on that point about "see, see? proves my point!"
But what everyone *does* agree on is that it was a drink, usually barley-based (now I have the vision of people getting high on Robinson's Barley Water which is something else entirely). What that excerpt above is doing is like saying "nah nah bruh, it wasn't no drink, it was shrooms!" (or whatever).
You can make a definitive statement in response to that "you're full of it, mate", whether or not you believe in Kore and Demeter. The rationalising explanation of the longevity of religious beliefs is that they were based on ecstatic experiences which the participants took as evidence of the presence of the god or whatever the sacred doctrine was, because they had been transported out of themselves, and that this experience was drug-fuelled.
It could indeed be, but that doesn't take into account the altered state of mind that can be achieved without drugs when participating in rites structured to be impactful (I'm wincing at using that word, but however) and accompanied by genuine faith in what was happening. People can *theorise* that "it must be ergot, it must be psychedelics" but there is no actual *evidence* of the kind that they are touting above.
Reserving my right to comment that this is once again a theory based on a particular foundational assumption - people must have been experiencing a chemically-induced high - and is no more than that, and if the assumption is incorrect then so is the theory.
The traces of ergot-infected grains in the ritual spaces is certainly interesting and may be indicative, but given that one of the co-authors of the above, Albert Hofmann, is the one to synthesise LSD, it does seem like rather a hobbyhorse of the persons involved. Someone else might claim that the 'secret' of the Mysteries was sparkly unicorn dust, or glove puppets, or UFOs, or whatever *their* hobbyhorse might be.
It is probably rash and too far of me to claim I could link in leprechauns with the Mysteries, but once let me establish a linkage with the attendants of Hephaestus and I can leap off from there. Does that 'prove' that the secret of the Mysteries was small Irish shoemakers?
What do people do when they are feeling demotivated? What with the pandemic and everything work feels pointless and absurd in a kafkaesque sense. How does one make tasks feel meaningful without external sensory feedback?
This surely won't work for everyone, but I once heard somebody ask "Who says you have to feel like doing something to do it?" and it stuck with me.
Another, possibly better suggestion: do something you liked as a kid or teenager. My version of this: getting back into a style of music I really liked then.
I do things I don't feel like doing all the time, the problem is that it requires a lot of mental energy and effort, which limits how many tasks I can do.
Yes, this is about right. It is hard to muster up much concern about anything when the end result is that I will return to dust in 0-30 years. Yet, I persist in trying to raise my kids as kindly as I can, and treat others with courtesy. We may be all doomed but I'd rather be the musicians on the Titanic than the panicking masses.
I've always been a fan of Voltaire's Candide. Everything might be pointless, but I can work here, in this one small corner of the universe, and shape it to my liking.
Also--can you change jobs? Perhaps the reason your work feels pointless is because you need a change. Even looking around job sites might give you either a new appreciation for the job you have, or the impetus to start applying.
Limit the work done to the bare minimum so you don't get fired. Streamline it to be as efficient as possible (this makes it more interesting by itself), use spare time to do something more interesting. WFH makes this a lot easier than on-site work.
Alternatively, begin training/pivoting into a job that feels meaningful, possibly using time gained from #1.
There are a few things I do depending on the type of demotivation.
If I am lacking motivation to work on something that I want to work on, meaning I want to have the motivation to do it because it is something I like doing, I will try to think about what my future self wishes I had done. If I find it hard to do the work out of anxiety I will try to break the task into the easiest pieces. If I find it hard to do the work because it is boring I will challenge my self to do a small piece of it and often tell my self things like "I can do anything for 5 minutes". This often works well for endurance/aerobic exercise, though is less useful for work or academic pursuits.
I also have tried somethings from Acceptance Commitment Therapy. Particularly, writing out what I want my future life to look like (in relation to the task I am demotivated to do or similar tasks) and then reread that desired future many times. This helps visualize the positive things about task and reinforce the behaviors that I desire.
I also will take a more heavy handed/mean approach with myself. I may think to myself about how much of a loser I am for not doing something, or how I will be a failure if I dont do something. I am proven to depress so this is not a good tactic in the long run. but I have found it very effective at getting me out of bed in the morning to exercise.
If you are not motivated because you see no purpose to the activity things are a bit harder. I would focus on the task, not as "work" with an overarching purpose, but as work that can be mastered or done well. If you have to write an email, just thing about how you can best write that email and ignore the larger context. Or if you have to schedule a meeting, just think about that single meeting and nothing else, not even the content of the meeting. If you do small things really well, your general mood and outlook towards these tasks is likely to improve and you may be more motivated to do them in the future.
Regarding the Covid-19 death toll and comparisons:
1. Cutting through the hyperbolic/jingoistic hyperbole from so many sources, one fact remains clear: the differences in national outcomes is the key point. Why the shocking disparities? e.g. USA and UK (and other advanced nations) at one end of the spectrum, with Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, at the other.
Some countries lie, others lack the means for accurate tallies, a few tell the truth. That's why the Spanish Flu of 1918-21 mortality ranged from guesses of from 50 - 100 million. The same is true for this outbreak. We might never know because of the duplicity of China, Russia, and perhaps India.
2. Leadership. It's all about leadership. Clowns like Xi, Trump, and Boris are amongst the greatest mass murderers of the 21st century. History will not remember them kindly. Leadership counts.
3. So let's stop focusing on meaningless mass comparisons. Focus on the individual losses. I know. My 34 year old daughter was one of the casualties.
Re: #3 - that's terrible to hear. What an awful thing to have to go through!
Re: #1 and #2 - I think most people are underweighting the effect of random chance. When I was a kid my home town got hit by a tornado. A street where my friend lived had houses on one side totally destroyed and houses on the other side untouched. We can imagine them asking, "What did the north side of the street do differently?!"
Suppose someone with a job at nursing home took a COVID test, got a negative, and went to work. But the negative was a false negative, and they wind up infecting many residents. This person acted responsibly, but random chance wound up taking hundreds of lives. The exponential nature of the virus's spread means that random events get amplified to terrible proportions.
This is not to say there weren't policy and leadership failures - I am livid about them! But again, I think the effect of chance is underrated.
On #1 it's less random chance and more just a conscious and dichotomous choice. Among first-world economies, the countries whose leadership made the decision to eliminate the virus all eventually eliminated the virus, while all those who didn't make a decision to eliminate the virus have all continued to suffer ongoing waves of it, all with roughly similar results.
Luck did play a role in the early days of the pandemic in determining which countries had an easy path towards elimination and which ones had a difficult path. New Zealand was playing the game on easy mode, not just because it was isolated with a small population, but because the first stage of the pandemic took place during summer so there were still very few cases in late March when the country took the decision to eliminate through lockdown.
Did Canada and Germany make different decisions than Australia on this, or did they just exist in situations where they couldn't succeed in eliminating? They seem to have done quite a bit better than most of their neighbors nevertheless.
In deaths per million terms, Germany has 842 compared to 1323 for France or 1157 for Poland; a bit better but less than a factor of two.
Canada has done the best out of the major rich countries that didn't actively attempt to eliminate it, with 579, nearly a factor of three better than their only neighbour the USA. Still, it's a big gap between there and the successes of the "eliminationist" countries, the worst off of which is Japan with 62.
Xi? Rly? China's death toll has been ~5K, and there's no reason to doubt that. The government didn't react as quickly as it could have, but it was tough to know how deadly the virus would be in January. Replace Xi with Putin; Russia and probably Belarus' have the highest COVID deaths as a percentage of the population in the world.
I hope to read more of Scott's writing on Effective Altruism-adjacent topics. One topic in particular: how did the economic fall out of the pandemic affected the world's poorest people, and what changes to charity donations should be made based on this.
Dr. Jason Fung articulates the science behind intermittent fasting pretty well. It is based on the hormonal theory of obesity.
Other than his hugely popular books on that and diabetes, he's also written a book called "The longevity solution", in which the chapter on salt says something controversial. It says that decreasing salt intake to keep blood pressure under check is unnecessary and possibly even harmful to health!
In my view, he implies that the recommendation to reduce salt that cardiologists make (for hypertension), is a confusion about the data.
Would love your opinion on that. A relevant article :
The field of nutrition has problematic evidentiary standards.
The field of nutrition as expressed by random doctors (especially doctors who feel the need to tell you that they are doctors) selling diet books is pretty much safe to disregard in its entirety. If they are ever correct, it will be by accident.
Another good heuristic is that an article entitled "The Truth About X" is many orders of magnitude less likely to be true than an article just entitled "X"
Dr. Fung seems pretty hood with data. He is simply explaining different studies out there. I could not fo that for myself, as I don't have a background in biology. So I'd not be good at judging studies in it.
Dr. Fung's main focus is helping obese patients with diabetes or at risk for diabetes, lose weight.
Any diet works, as long as you stick to it. IF (perhaps surprisingly) does a good job controlling hunger, so it has a decent success rate that can be explained for that reason alone.
However, my experience trying IF is that it is terrible for athletic performance: I lost lots of strength, and when I went off the diet to regain strength, I gained back *all* the weight I lost. So it was a complete failure for improving my composition.
I had much better results simply by eating nutritious, satiating foods on a normal schedule: lean meats, vegetables, fruits, whole grains.
As for the salt question: I've read other articles calling into question whether low-salt actually improves health outcomes for patients with high blood pressure. I feel like it's fair to be skeptical of the low-salt intake recommendations.
" when I went off the diet to regain strength, I gained back *all* the weight I lost"
That's the problem with every diet out there. It's not too hard to go on a diet and lose weight, but sticking to the diet is hard, and once you fall off any bit, then all the weight (plus some bonus) gets packed back on. Get sick or injured, can't stick to the diet and exercise regime? Hello again, fatness my old friend! Fall off the wagon of individually counting out grapes as you are carb controlling? Welcome back, pounds!
I think part of the problem is time scale. Do we expect something you put effort into to last forever with no effort afterwards?
I lost 24 lbs in 7 months dieting (but not so much it was painful) and weight lifting (and this doesn't count the pounds I turned from fat to muscle).
I spent another ~6 months or so loosely counting calories and exercising about 1/3rd as much and didn't gain any weight back.
I spent another 19 months not exercising and not counting calories and I've gained back 19 of the 24 pounds. (we intentionally went back to old lifestyle during my wife's pregnancy and the infant period)
I don't think those 7 months were wasted or useless in any way. I'm very interested if restarting the diet will take as much time and effort as the first time.
I neglected to mention this in my previous comment, but the high-protein/high-fiber diet actually did succeed in improving my composition over long-term, even after re-bulking to get back lost strength. I'm just an N=1 sample, but I definitely felt like intermittent fasting was a bad tradeoff for fat loss vs health.
Achieving weight loss is trivially easy. *Maintaining* weight loss is the holy grail of obesity research. No one has found it yet.
This guy seems like a sham. He seems to serially oversell his results based on small observational interventions. He might be right, but he isn't putting up the science to prove he is. This is unfortunately very common in the obesity sector--bad science in service of selling books and consultation services.
There has been some push-back on the salt and blood pressure recommendation. I remember the Healthcare Triage youtube channel did a couple videos on it a while back, saying that the amount of sodium most folks consume (3000-4000 mg/day) is probably okay, and the evidence that reducing it to 2000 or even 1500 mg/day is good for blood pressure and your heart is not strong.
IF has a load of studies behind it. At least some effects of it (autophagy) are pretty much scientific consensus. No idea about the particular regimen peddled by the book, though.
I wouldn't risk too much salt if I had hypertension, but it seems safe otherwise.
My own experience with intermittent fasting — 16 hours between the last food of the evening and the first food of the morning — is that it makes it easier to hold down my weight for behavioral reasons, whether or not it does it for biological reasons. Having committed myself to that policy, I don't nibble in the late evening or eat an early breakfast.
When people send you book reviews, have you been replying to confirm you got them? No worries if not (or if you're behind in doing so), I just don't want to discover that through some quirk of email you didn't get mine.
I've been inconsistent about checking/responding to these, but I actually don't think I got yours (unless it was under an unexpected name). Try sending again to scott@slatestarcodex.com
I sent it from the email account linked with my real-world name, since that's the one I actually regularly check; the subject line was "Book review contest submission - "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow"
If you happen to spot that subject line, feel free to let me know? Otherwise, I'll probably resend sometime tonight. Thanks.
I'm not Scott, but I assume that at some point he will say "if I didn't confirm that I got yours, please send it again" and give you a chance to do so. He already mentioned upthread that the deadline is a soft one, at least if you're nice about it. So I wouldn't be too nervous if I were you (or Evan Þ).
Note, I don't have skin in the game here as I'm not participating in the contest (but am eager to read all your book reviews).
Whoever recommended the video game Outer Wilds a while back - thank you. I finished it months ago, but I still find myself regularly thinking about it from time to time.
Yeah, I also was confused as to why it got such high praise for the first little while, but it certainly picks up as you gain a better understanding of what's going on and how to go about doing things.
I mean, it never picks up in any meaningful way; outside of a few isolated sections it's a pretty sedate experience. But your understanding of the space really starts to expand. By the end of the game it really gives you a feeling of mastery over the whole system in a way that I found pretty impressive and empowering.
In Scott’s “Still Alive” post, he mentions a woman telling him that SSC was her favorite postpartum reading and hoped the blog would be back before she had another baby. My husband thought this was me, but no!
I did spend a lot of long nights rocking a sleeping newborn while reading SSC, and I’m glad to have ACX in time for our second kid to arrive. I’d love to know how many other moms with little kids are reading the blog.
Neat- I figured I couldn’t be the only one. My husband and I find ourselves using this blog’s idiom a lot when talking about our kid, so I’m always interested when other parents chime in on relevant posts. I kind of wonder where a conversation with a bunch of ACX-reading moms would go.
If any of you are in Philadelphia, let me know and I’ll drop you a line once I start hosting meetups again.
Cons: it concentrates heavily on religious topics because that's where a lot of atheist pop-history misconceptions arise. This might be boring/not my area of interest/are you trying to stealth-convert me? for some people
Pros: it's not stealth-conversion (or any kind of conversion)! it's fun, educational and I find it very informative. Give it a go!
I don't think he's active on Quora anymore, but the guy who is making the channel (Tim O'Neill) wrote a lot of very interesting response-essays debunking myths on various topics about ancient Christianity, the Middle Ages, etc.
Definitely. He's honest which is a great plus. He's upfront about not believing and about not being an apologist for things that happened within and throughout Christianity, but if someone is spouting nonsense, he goes "ah for feck's sake" and dives into the history. He wants the historical facts to be kept straight and anyone and everyone should appreciate that.
Thanks for the recommendation- reading his blog really scratched an itch for me, as an atheist who is often annoyed by the way atheist evangelists seem to prioritize their anti-religion message over the facts. Their behavior only reinforces the stigma that atheists are angry assholes who don't understand religion very well, and it's nice to see them corrected by an atheist.
He's good, he explains things well and being Australian of Irish descent, I can get where he's coming from. He has a little running feud with Richard Carrier and it's great sport when he gets stuck into him over on his blog 😀 https://historyforatheists.com/
This is unrelated but I gotta say, of everyone I met while working in Oz, the Irish Australians were the most hospitable to an American far from home. Had multiple offers of "you can sleep on my couch if you need a place to stay", one of which I accepted and it was a great time. Is this common or did I just happen to run across a couple really generous ones?
Thank you again, Scott, for restarting (reinventing?) your blog. I didn't realize how much I looked forward to your posts, and to reading and participating in the comments section, until they were gone. :)
I'm not really online - the toxicity of the internet has driven me away from everything except your blog and one video game board that does its best to stay non-political (sigh, 46 with three kids and still reading about video games) - and when you shut down I really felt the loss. Here's hoping that the excellent community transfers to Substack. Seems to working well so far. :)
So I promised myself I'd participate more than I used to. My first question to throw out to the group:
What was so awful about Henry VI?
I've been listening to Mike Duncan's Tides of History podcast. He did a great series of episodes on the War of the Roses, a topic I only have a vague grasp of. He lays the genesis of the war more or less at Henry VI's feet, which is unusual for Mike Duncan, who isn't a big proponent of the "great men" approach to history.
If I'm understanding Mike correctly, he believes that Henry V handed his infant son a stable, powerful England, and that because of Henry VI's misrule after he came to majority, everything more or less fell to pieces. But Mike's complaint about Henry VI seems to be solely that he was indecisive and timid. Which fine, not good qualities for a (nation? empire?) that usually had bloody and battle-hardened rulers, but these don't seem like capital offenses. I mean, the Roman Empire survived Caligula in pretty good shape, right? Henry was the 16th in a direct line of succession from William the Conqueror. It seems strange to me that such a mild defect could throw the who shebang off like that.
So what about Henry VI's indecisiveness proved so deadly? Or am I (and maybe Mike Duncan, if I'm interpreting him right) laying too much blame on him?
I think you're thinking of Patrick Wyman - he's the guy who does Tides of History. Duncan is Revolutions.
It was more about the fact that Henry VI simply could not exercise even the basic functions of Kingship, in a system that needed that to function properly. He didn't even need to really be good at it - just being competent enough to make appointments, etc would do it.
It didn't really eradicate Kingship, either. The monarchy survived - it's just that the person who eventually stabilized things was a usurper with a very weak claim to the throne in bloodline terms.
That seems to be in line with what Wyman (sorry! I can't believe I screwed that up) was saying.
But he would have had to have been UNIQUELY indecisive, no? That's where I'm getting hung up. Are there outrageous examples of him refusing to do simple things?
Yeah, I remembered the episode but not whether it was him or not. I had to look it up. It's interesting that a similar thing had happened to France the king before, when Henry V was rampaging around. And for that matter, if Richard the Lion doesn't get himself killed and replaced with his brother, maybe Phillip Augustus never conquers the Angevin empire in the first place.
It really seems like if England could have managed a good run of a few kings in a row, they're might not be a modern France, but rather a Greater UK with smaller states on its periphery. Of course, managing a few good ones in a row is a trick that no one really seemed to figure out, hence the whole thing going out of fashion.
I don't know much about the early Henries, but I think part of the problem was that Edward III had too many kids and in turn they had too many kids (look at John of Gaunt, fourth child and third surviving son of Edward, three wives and a mistress, fourteen kids of whom eight survived). Henry's grandfather rebels and usurps the throne from his cousin, which is not a great precedent for stability. You have all these royal cousins running around considering they have as good a right to the throne, then you have Henry VI who succeeds to the throne when he's not even one year old, has a gaggle of relatives acting as regents, is reputedly a timid and modest guy (no wonder), and when he is finally old enough to take over the reign for himself, hello an economic depression and something Wikipedia tells me is "the Great Bullion Famine" when Europe somehow managed to run out of silver and gold, on top of the French slowly but surely driving back English dominion in France.
You have a hawk faction at court pushing for "war, war" with France; internal tensions when *that* gets sorted out between the king and queen's faction and that supporting other family members; a small popular rebellion that does get crushed but is a sign of how the wind is blowing. Guy has a nervous breakdown and once he gets over that, they then sail into the Wars of the Roses.
A very strong, confident, charismatic character *might* have prevented the Wars of the Roses, but realistically the best way to do that was to cold-blooded murder any potential troublemakers, mostly your own relatives. Henry was not that guy.
Even in the reign of Henry VIII, the Plantagenet descendants were still trouble - the Pole family were seen as a threat as having as good - or even better - right to the throne as Henry (being cousins of his) and his marital troubles, lack of an heir, and religious realignment meant that they were suspected of constant scheming (to be fair, they were doing some scheming but so was everyone else in or around the Tudor court). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Pole,_Countess_of_Salisbury
"look at John of Gaunt, fourth child and third surviving son of Edward, three wives and a mistress, fourteen kids of whom eight survived)."
While doing genealogical research I found a possible line of connection in which I am a direct descendent of John of Gaunt, and thus of Edward III. I was mildly excited, though I have since discovered that it is quite probably that every person with British ancestry is a descendent of Edward III.
Yep, Eddie seems to have been the English version of Genghis Khan 😀 It's rather ironic, in view of how a few generations down the line the Tudors who had displaced the Plantagenets (using their share of Plantagenet blood as basis for the claim on the throne) ran into the problem of "oh drat I can't manage to father any living sons".
This certainly makes sense to me. Wyman really seemed to argue, though, that the norms of the English government at the time were so strong that these sort of things weren't putting much pressure on it, and that had Henry VI not been such an invertebrate, everyone would have fallen in line.
If I'm getting it correctly, he argues that the way government was structured, it required that the king (nobody else, just the king) be a very active decision-maker. That it didn't matter THAT much if the decisions were bad, just that they were made. If the king abdicated those responsibilities, two things happened: first, there was nobody else to take over. There was no bureaucracy to keep functioning without order from the king; it wasn't the Roman empire. Everything ground to a halt.
Second, there really wasn't anything in place that allowed power to devolve to someone else. Yes, sure, during his minority everyone accepted the rule of the regent, but as soon as majority was reached there was no way for anyone else in the entire country to claim authority (and hence all the rest of the royal blood running around didn't much matter).
So you have Henry VI, who (apparently) wasn't simply indecisive, he seemed to be allergic to making even the smallest decision on anything whatsoever. So zero was getting done. Wyman doesn't really provide examples, though, and I feel like I'm reading between the lines.
I thought it was interesting. The theory certainly doesn't fit with any other moment in history I can think of.
Again, I don't know that much about Henry VI but recent reading of biographies of Henry VIII and figures in his court informed me that one of the big things that Thomas Cromwell did was provide the beginning of this kind of government structure - a proto-civil service and laying out what Parliament could and couldn't do.
Henry VI's problems seem to be that (a) he was a dove in a time of hawks (b) he didn't want to aggravate anyone so tried compromise but everyone wanted him to come down on their side so this wasn't popular with anyone (c) a lot of relatives buzzing around who were sure they could wield power better (d) an economic slump on top of constantly losing the war with France over British claims to sovereignty in France on top of a Europe-wide crisis due to a shortage of precious metals which badly hit the currencies (d) those same ambitious relatives making shapes to lead rebellions and seize the throne which eventually broke out in the Wars of the Roses (e) perennial accusations of corruption, undue influence, etc. about figures at court (as every court since time immemorial has had) (f) Henry's own mental problems which are diagnosed as ranging from nervous breakdowns to insanity.
So Wyman has a point that a strong, decisive king may have averted what happened, but some things genuinely weren't Henry's fault (he didn't have anything to do with the European economic crisis) and that the people making the decisions (because as he says, if the king isn't doing it, *someone* will step up to do it) were struggling amongst themselves - this took the form of Henry's queen, Margaret, versus first the earls of Suffolk and Somerset, and second versus the duke of York.
The strong, decisive king would have imprisoned or executed most of his relatives because they were the main troublemakers. Victory in France would also have helped, but this was really a lost cause and dragged on into the reign of Henry VIII. Henry was not the guy to kill people, and even though his successors were, they too had trouble during their reigns - Henry was succeeded (and some claim murdered) by Edward IV, succeeded in turn by his minor son whose uncle then seized the throne as Richard III who was in turn defeated in battle and succeeded by Henry Tudor, Henry VII.
Henry does seem to have been a weak king who allowed factions to grow at court, but one can't lay all the blame on him. The Wars of the Roses *might* have been avoided by a ruthless, harder king who purged the court and disposed in whatever manner of his rivals who were also his family, but that's not a certainty.
I do think under a better king the relatives might not have need to be killed or imprisoned, because they may not have been troublemakers without the cipher on the throne.
So, I listened to Dan Jones' (where does that apostrophe go anyway?) The Wars of the Roses a while back, and a couple of other things around this era. I am by no means anything like an expert, but rather a pop history hobbyist.
That said, my understanding is more or less the same as Mike's, and seems to be the consensus in the stuff that I read. But . . .
I would dispute the bit about Henry V's realm being stable. The English had just spent decades conquering (back) the portions of the Plantagenet patrimony that John Lackland had lost, and when they came, they brought English armies of conquest. Which means that the English had just spent a couple of generations conquering, losing, and reconquering large chunks of the country, and as a consequence those chunks of the country did not care for the English. I've seen the Hundred Years' War credited with the genesis of French nationalism on this account. So yes, Henry V's realm was powerful, but I don't think stable is fair. The French king still wanted his land back and was still fighting for it, and a lot of the people on the land wanted Henry's troops out. (Also it turned out that God was on the French side, which is inconvenient if you're on the other side of a war.)
That said, his long minority meant a long regency, with a lot of powerful magnates vying for authority. For the last ten years of his minority, they were vying for authority while losing a war they thought they'd won and blaming each other and trying to figure out what to do. By the time the English were driven back to Calais (and lost Gascony!), you have a lot of very powerful figures who just lost a ton of territory and wealth and are looking to blame each other and retrench their influence. And then it turns out you have poor Henry on the throne. Maybe a strong king could have managed it, or even managed to retain Normandy and Gascony, but not him.
Maybe if the realm really was stable things it could have weathered a weak king. Or, for a different counterfactual, maybe with one dominant regent and/or favorite it might have been manageable.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I was surprised that Patrick (as Brett points out below, the podcast host is Patrick Wyman, not Mike Duncan) didn't focus on the extended regency. But he genuinely seemed to believe that the English system was so stable that, had Henry VI not been so incompetent, that there wouldn't have been conflict between former regents and the king after is majority. Which seems counterintuitive to me (and to you, I think :)).
I THINK it's "Dan Jonses's", but I'm always uncomfortable with adding the apostrophe-S thing to a name ending in S too
The system was not stable, or rather, it would have been stable without so many strong characters all trying to grab a slice of the pie.
Let's jump ahead a couple of generations to see what happens. Henry VI is out of the way, he is succeeded by Edward IV. Edward dies and leaves a minor son behind. A Royal Council to act as the regency is formed, but because the Woodvilles - the family of the mother of the young king - are suspected of trying to gain too much influence, the Council petitions the king's uncle to be Protector in their place.
Richard III (for this will be he) happily takes on the job. First thing he does? BAM! arrests members of the Woodville family, has two of them executed. POW! has a guy who was an opponent of the Woodvilles and recommended Richard for the job beheaded (because he's too politically powerful and will be a blockade on Dicky's road to power) ZAP! has all his brother's kids declared illegitimate KA-POW! has himself declared king of England (his young nephews disappear and nothing more is ever known of them).
That's pretty decisive action. It doesn't save Richard, as discontent is simmering and those pesky rival relatives haven't gone away and oh look they're raising armies. Cue (eventually) the Battle of Bosworth Field, the victory of Henry Tudor, and Richard's body being found under a carpark five hundred years later.
Stable, yes, with a strong and ruthless king to crush any opposition before it had a chance to get started *or* a mild king but no ambitious types who are pushing for war, influence, and a chance to sit on the throne themselves.
I'd briefly like to put a friend's speculative evolution project into the spotlight, here, by linking to a recent post about chimera-genetic plants (by which I mean plants possessing more than one genome in their cell nuclei) native to the world he's been designing from the ground up, because I think this is the sort of world-building some people here might appreciate: https://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?s=0f448d599b7f2b514ad1cc016cf55560&showtopic=2786&st=90&#entry35434
Be sure to check out the rest of that thread for context if that post piques your curiosity!
As far as I know that site still works -- I just logged in to check. However, a bunch of recommended people on it don't have their location set, so they show up at the bottom and are missing from region searches. This includes the guy I recommended. Not sure what happened there (maybe that field was added later?)
Anyone else who subscribes via RSS and is seeing stub posts show up with contents of "null"?
I assume this is because they're Patreon posts that I'm not allowed to see. But IIRC, Substack promised Scott these wouldn't get in the way for regular non-Patreon readers, so I'm kind of annoyed that this is happening.
Is the rationalist community aware of this recent 3Blue1Brown video? It explains an amazing new way to look at Baye's Theorem (using odds instead of percentages) that I've never heard before in all my reading of Lesswrong and SSC. (maybe I just haven't read enough?)
You linked to an old bayes video, not the recent one.
Anyway, I think I've seen that most people in this community who are familiar with Bayes' theorem are familiar with the odds form (and use it, since it's easier to do updates than with probabilities).
The odds form really caught me off guard. I guess I've been living under a rock because I'd never seen it presented like that until I watched that video.
I started being able to see it (and others similar to it) after meditating a lot, though I'm sure it's possible to notice it if you just focus on visual field for too long. My current best guess is that everyone "sees" this but it's ignored subconsciously because it's not really useful in daily life.
Rootclaim here - We are very open to discussing lower amounts if we believe it will promote rational thinking, probabilistic inference and elevate public debate. Feel free to contact me to discuss.
Does anyone know how the Substack API works? They don't publish specs.
I'm looking at a sample way of pulling comments, and I can't figure out what "last_comment_at" means. I set it to be a month in the past, or a month in the future, and I still get all the comments.
There seems to be some hidden variable that keeps track of the most-recently-sent comment. If I could understand that variable, I could cache comments and load them a lot faster. . .
Why? Is it because democracy looks less appealing now than it did in the 1990s, when the West decisively won the Cold War and a new age of freedom seemed to be dawning? Is the reason for democratic backsliding the same in immature democracies like Mali or Burma as it is in established democracies like the USA? In the US, income and wealth inequality are skyrocketing. Is it possible that any large group's political power must be proportional to its economic power in order for society to be stable, and that with increasing inequality, the elite will demand (and successfully obtain) increasing power over the middle class, thus eliminating democracy in favor of oligarchy?
There's a whole thread with dozens of replies (including some from Scott) that's just as much about politics as my post. I'm talking about the one that starts with "The responses to your GOP post on twitter were fascinating." I'm trying to follow the rules, but if everyone is interpreting the rules loosely, I'm going to interpret them loosely too.
14 years is way too short to draw any kind of conclusion that's likely to distinguish itself from contingent noise. In 1815 it seemed the treaty of Paris had sealed all hopes of a more democratic Europe for quite a few decades and yet
If you go to the bottom of the summary page you linked, you'll see that there's going to be a report launch later on in March where they'll talk over the findings of the report and host some discussions around the implications of these erosions.
And the event is only open to members of the media. Maybe I'm cynical, but it seems kinda off to host an event about the retrenchment of liberty and then only open it up to a specific class of people.
Off the top of my head, China's successful rise as a major economic and military power offers an alternative model to capitalism+liberal democracy, and it's probably a model that a lot of powerful people all over the world feel much more comfortable with than capitalism+liberal democracy.
Is an open thread like a bleg? Since you know a lot about psychoactive substances, maybe you can post sometime about substance addiction among the most highly creative people. It seems to me there is a very high correlation. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Jimi Hendrix - the list is long. 3 possibilities (not mutually exclusive): 1. There is no correlation once we take into account other variables. 2. Narcotics/psychedelic enhance creativity. 3. Creative people are more drawn to narcotics/psychedelics (availability or personality) but they don't impact their creativity, at least not positively.
Here's Miles Davis in his autobio: "Then the idea was going around that to use heroin might make you play as great as Bird. A lot of musicians did it for that. I guess I might have been just waiting for his genius to hit me. Getting into all that shit, though, was a very bad mistake."
There is a high correlation among jazz musicians in the period ~1940-1990. The correlation among other highly creative people seems rather less clear to me.
Given those examples, I'd replace "highly creative people" with "musicians". My opinion is that a big factor is the stress of living on the road while touring.
I've read in the Dutch novel "De ontdekking van de hemel" (chapter 26) that Dickens used to host a Christmas dinner every year for his friends, and that he always hired somebody to stand outside under the window in the snowstorm and shout: "Oooh, it's so cold!" all the time, so they could even better enjoy the warmth inside, and the goose.
A thought about heterogeneous treatment effects, and what it might mean.
In a clinical trial of some treatment (or any Randomized Controlled Trial) you can subtract the means of the two groups and get an estimate for the average treatment effect. Suppose it's positive. There could be multiple reasons for this effect:
1. The effect is positive for everyone, but there's noise (measurement error, other factors, ...) which make it necessary to have a large sample to see the effect which is true for everyone.
2. The effect is positive for some people, none for others, negative for yet others. But the positives outnumber (or outweigh) the negatives, so the average effect is positive. This is individual treatment effect heterogeneity.
We often interpret results as if they mean (1) is true. But if (2) is true, then it means for some people the treatment could have negative effects. If those effects are consistent for them, they should actually avoid the treatment. Even more alarming, there could be treatments with average negative effects which are positive for some people, and we might never know. If the individual treatment effect heterogeneity is quite large, there's a strong case for experimenting with many treatments individually to see what works for you.
We might even be able to study this to quantify which of (1) and (2) is true by:
A) Looking for treatment effect heterogeneity among some groups (e.g. it's positive for men but negative for women), or
B) Giving repeated treatments to the same people and seeing if there's a consistent effect for them, or if it's just noise and really (1) is true.
Can anyone with experience with a 'second brain', 'personal knowledge base', 'Zettelkasten' or whatever you call it (e.g. Roam, Obsidian, Zettel, paper notebook) share their experiences with it? How they got into it, what software they use and why, what they use it for (every trivial neat thing you learn? or only important stuff you want to put into serious writing later), and what they got out of it, professionally or as far as personal goals are concerned. If you started using one but abandoned it I'm also interested, and if you use one coupled with a spaced-repetition memorizing thing I'm particularly interested.
I see at least one person beat me to the punch but I'm willing to toss $100 into the Vitamin D challenge assuming Scott's not being inundated with bets. It will probably make me a lot more facile on the discussion than I would ever be otherwise which presumably would save me at least $100 in the long run either way..... as WSB would say, no way can this go (slurs) up?
I want to share a preprint link to this cool synesthesia article, where the authors describe a cognitive profile underlying synesthesia that has some common traits with autism.
In their model, synesthesia is a trait that emerges from this larger pool of people who are cognitively distinctive in a variety of other ways, including the non-synesthete relatives of synesthetes. They don't go into extensive detail but they do give an idea of what cognitive traits set the group apart, some of which are very common among autistic people, and they note that the incidence of synesthesia in the autistic population is higher. They hypothesize that synesthesia and autism may be two different outcomes of a distinct neurodevelopmental trajectory.
I found this article enlightening as a synesthete because I am definitely not autistic, but I have traits that resemble autism, and I seem to relate very well to autistic people. This model in this article allows for us to have common experiences without placing me on a spectrum for which I'm pretty sure I don't qualify.
I'm often privy to "I think she's on the spectrum" conversations, and I know a lot of people who put themselves there despite being so subtly different that I wonder if they're undermining the whole classification. This paper proposes a new way to think about it: as a larger category that includes autism, or a common neurodevelopmental pathway upstream of autism that produces different outcomes.
Since a lot of people on ssc are either on the autism spectrum or have spectrum traits, I want to ask: does anyone here have synesthesia? Do you see some of these other traits in yourself or your relatives? Does this re-frame how you think of yourself, or do you still find that the autism spectrum is the most appropriate model for you? https://psyarxiv.com/87fuj
Comes with a warning that people who are feeling emotionally fragile shouldn't read it.
An article addressed to the left, about the importance of acknowledging that there could be a very long term change for the worse in their own lives, and that many people have not yet done so. A defense of prepping. (Does it need a defense? Yes, in some social circles.)
An attack on tear-it-downism.
My comment on it, which siderea might not post:
I do think one of things legitimately shocking about this is that normal imagination about disasters at least includes the normal ability to gather for mutual aid, comfort, and pleasure. And yet, here we are.
I agree with the rest of your points. I hadn't thought about just how pathological left-wing anti-prepperism is. This doesn't mean I'm psychologically ready, though I can hope the taoist meditation I've been studying (the teacher's been talking a lot about accepting change) will help.
I'll add your points to my opposition to what I call tear-it-downism-- a viewpoint I see on both the left and the right-- the belief that things are so bad that tearing everything down can only lead to an improvement. They're obviously wrong, but it's nice to have clearer arguments. I'm interested in whatever you want to say about why tearitdownism is becoming more prevalent. Add tearitdownists to the list of disaster amplifiers.
I'm inclined to think that opposition to cars is partly opposition to people having extra capacity. I don't have a car. Having a car means more freedom of movement, move ability to store stuff for emergencies, and spare shelter. There are homeless people living in cars, and they're better off than homeless people without cars. This doesn't mean cars are great, but the anti-car ideology doesn't seem to include the drawbacks of not having a car. However, the idea seems to be that virtuous people have utter trust in the government to make things work. See also left-wing opposition to charter schools and home-schooling.
I could even say a few things about the idea that virtue is shown by driving your fat percentage as low as can theoretically be endured. The science doesn't take it that far (it just ignores what some people can endure), but the culture does.
"But when someone asks me when we'll be getting back to normal, my first, visceral response is to want to reply, incredulously, "Why? Was global warming canceled?""
Global warming isn't a sudden catastrophe; it's turning New York into South Carolina. Also, the poster doesn't reference anything suggesting weather-related damage as a percentage of GDP either has increased recently or will increase over the course of the twenty-first century.
I just read the article, and I get a lot of aspects of the general sentiment, but think the author is missing a big part of it.
For example, I'm not really sure why the author is so focused on climate change, and talks about it like it somehow will be the main cause of instability in the future. What the author is missing is that things have always kind of been on the razor's edge of stability on both the big and small scales throughout the entirety of human history. How many wars have we had in the last 100 years? how many earthquakes? tsunamis? pandemics? Hey, there was another bad pandemic only 100 years ago! on the smaller scale, how often has a loved one gotten a serious disease? gotten in an auto accident? something else?
In other words, things have always been very fragile. Humanity has not yet figured out how to create a truly antifragile society. And on the small scale, our health is vulnerable and we will inevitably age and die.
I think that the author is right in that people shy away from really looking at the reality that life and all the good things in it are very fragile. But I think the author misses that it's not like this special new thing that's being caused by climate change; it's the way things always have been.
She's talking about the progressive community she's familiar with, and a lot of that is people who've had pretty good physical safety for their whole lives-- maybe their parents did, too. Yes, there are accidents and aging, but the social structure was pretty good and fairly reliably helpful.
While it's true in general that life is fragile, how much you feel that is likely to be related to your actual circumstances.
Things have been fragile forever - apart from the lifespans of the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y/millennials. In the Anglosphere there were zero catastrophes that stressed the state to breaking point between 1945 and 2020 (there were some in continental Western Europe). There were a couple of things that looked like they could *become* catastrophes (most obviously the various Cold War near misses), but they didn't.
The Lancet preprint "Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes" which claimed 80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths was removed from The Lancet server and is under investigation. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3771318
"India’s case fatality rate is half the US’; if the same pattern holds among missed cases, " The fatality rate among the undiagnosed should be much lower than among the confirmed cases, because hospitalized cases are more likely to receive a positive swab result than the mild cases who recovered at home. On the other hand, I have seen non-scientific sources saying that in India the sick are less likely to seek hospital care, especially if they are poor, so the pattern may not hold.
The comments on that removed paper were precious. (Lancet does say that these preprints are not peer-reviewed, so presumably nobody read it before putting it up.)
"Although the paper claims it is a randomised study, it also says that all patients treated in 5 wards received calcifediol treatment, while all three of the other wards received no calcifediol. How this study can be considered randomised is therefore questionable (maybe the wards were randomised but that is a very poor level of randomisation)."
"Why did more patients treated with calcifediol die (36) then were admitted to ICU(30)? I would have thought that in general seriously ill patients would be admitted to the ICU where some fraction of the patients would die. Below are direct quotes from the report.
"Out of 551 patients treated with calcifediol (at admission), 30 (5.4%) required ICU,"
"out of 551 patients who received calcifediol at admission, 36 died (6.5%)""
Hi Scott - I think I'm the counterparty you've been looking for regarding this Vitamin D bet. I will bet any amount of your choosing. You name the amount and I'll match it. Just one request: If I win, you donate that amount to the Revolution Robotics Foundation. If you win, you can receive the money yourself, or have me donate the amount to a cause of your choosing. Deal?
Let's say that we have three languages, A, B and Z, where A and B are similar/related and Z is distinct from both of them. As an example, A could be English, B German and Z Japanese. Are there examples of a short paragraph, poem or sentence in A that is "better" translated to Z than it is to B? The trivial case would be if A has some technical word that just so happens to be missing in B and exist in Z, but that's boring. I'm thinking more of unexpected ways in which the "spirit" can be better kept in Z. This will of course be subjective but could still be fun to argue around.
Sadly me myself am lacking in knowledge of languages, so I can't try to find my own examples.
A while back I read about one of the last notable uses of "thou" in English. A prosecutor addressed the defendant as "thou" which was offensive and shocked the court. He doubled down with, "Yes, I thou thee, thou traitor!" The first "thou" in that sentence is a verb. All of this makes more sense in German than in present-day English.
Ever tried to translate your affection faithfully into another language (one you didn't grow up speaking)? God it's hard. You want to say something subtle and sexy, and your translation ends up sounding blunt and awkward.
Then again, badly-translated romance can be very endearing.
I think use of the familiar works better for that purpose in English because it is so rare. "Du" or "Tu" could be used for a friend or a servant, supposing anyone still had servants.
But I don't think "Du bist meine liebe" sounds particularly awkward.
Fair point about the familiar. I was thinking more along the lines of how words and phrases have romantic connotations that don't translate well. Like, when you want to tell a French woman she's heartbreakingly beautiful, but you end up telling her she's cute and it gives you chest pain.
Or, for that matter, trying to sound romantic when you're culturally expected to be subtle about romance, and you just can't pull it off.
I noticed this with my laughable attempts to relate to our newborn in a semi-bilingual way. I'm reasonably fluent in English but baby talk is much much harder.
Bullseye's comment made me think of this: some languages allow for grammatical constructs that others don't. Greek lets you turn nouns into verbs (say someone behaves like a goat- you might say he "goated"). We see this a little in English (pigging out, horsing around), but it's usually a playful exception to the rules. So if you want to sentence a passage by verbing some nouns, Greek would be a fair choice, even if it's not closely related to the language you're starting with.
1st evidential: Kucheto izyade ribata. “The dog ate the fish (I saw it happen).”
2nd: Kucheto e izyalo ribata. “The dog ate the fish (see, here is the evidence).”
3rd: Kucheto izyalo ribata. “(it is said that) the dog ate the fish.”
4th: Kucheto bilo izyalo ribata. “The dog (supposedly) ate the fish (but I wouldn’t count on it, buster).”
This comes from Turkic influence. So you can imagine many sentences like this where A = Bulgarian, B = Russian (a Slavic language without evidentiality), Z = some totally unrelated language with a similar form of evidentiality (probably there is an American one but I don't know which).
Epistemic status: not a linguist and catching up to thisheavenlyconjugation
How about rhyming?
You mentioned poetry. Some languages are much easier to rhyme in than others. Ever read an English translation of some old Latin poetry where the rhymes sounded really forced? English is much harder to rhyme in than Latin. So if you started with a poem written in a hard-to-rhyme language, you might have an easier time converting those rhymes into a more distant rhyme-able language than a close relative. I know this is more phonetic than conceptual, but stripping a poem of its rhymes can diminish the impact of the writing, so I do think keeping the rhymes would stay truer to the original spirit of the writing.
On the other hand, if the poetry contains a lot of word-play, choosing a more distant language would probably work against you.
How about he expression of politeness in language?
Some languages contain constructs to show you're being polite (like the Thai ending their sentences with "ka" or "kop"). Those constructs seem to be more cultural than practical. Perhaps, somewhere in the world, there's a politeness-obsessed language whose nearest neighbors are not politeness-obsessed, simply due to cultural differences. If you wanted to translate with the same degree of politeness, you'd have to look farther to find a good match.
I have no examples, but I'd really love for a linguist to chime in here.
Not meaning to drive this thread off-topic, but Hamlet in the original Klingon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Klingon_Hamlet) was great. Supposedly, it's the spirit of Shakespearean dramas, which fits the Klingon spirit near-perfectly, and then it's also the really concise language that doesn't let the text meander.
More on the topic of your thread, translations of poetry are a completely different animal from translations of prose. Many cases of fantastic translations of poems seem to be just the accident of a fantastic translator doing those translations.
Here's one of those examples for you, with A being German, Z being Russian, and B being English.
Boris Pasternak's Russian translation of "Faust" beats every English translation of "Faust" I've seen. There's no competition. (If you know of any, do tell!) Pasternak managed to preserve the crazy, panting rhythm of the original. The translated text seems to glow just like the original text. Pasternak was a fantastic poet, and this translation is easily one of his finest works.
There is another Russian translation of "Faust", by Lunacharsky, and it's by far not as spectacular. At least in this case, it really is about the translator, not about the language.
You're welcome, but it's not a particularly insightful example. Obviously, if the translator into one of the languages is aiming to translate just about every word precisely, and the translator into the other language is a poet who isn't very concerned with being as close to the text as possible and is more concerned with the feel of the entire thing, the poet wins, whatever the language.
While looking at this example, I discovered that the translation at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14591/14591-h/14591-h.htm is a lot better than I remembered and is really quite good, but I would say that Pasternak's Russian translation still wins.
There may also be non-technical words missing. E.g. if I translate "hunden är ju hungrig" from Swedish to Finnish (unrelated), I get "koirallahan on nälkä", where "-han" corresponds to "ju", but if I translate it to English (related), I get "the dog is hungry", with nothing corresponding to that particle, and the corresponding nuance getting lost in translation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-han describes that this particle "[expresses] a fact that the speaker either considers obvious, or at the very least known to both the speaker and the addressed, and worth reminding someone of", and I don't think I can give a much clearer explanation than that, except to those who know German, in which case "ja" has a similar meaning ("der Hund hat ja Hunger").
Different languages handle different kinds of poetry better, depending on characteristics that don't necessarily vary according to how closely related they are. For example, Dante's terza rima is hard to translate into English because Italian has pure vowels and therefore a lot of rhyming words, and English has too many different vowel sounds, resulting in a paucity of available rhymes. I could believe that a translation of Dante would work better in an unrelated language that also has pure vowels, like Japanese. (I'm bullshitting here, I don't know any Japanese at all, but it seems possible.)
Thanks for this. Now that I think of it, you might have nailed the issue of "Faust" (and, I would guess, other German poetry) going to Russian better than into English because Russian is closer to German rhythmically - in word length, and maybe in stress (and definitely in stress pattern, due to more similar word length). English words are so short that you can see the translators struggle to fill up the line.
I remember seeing translations of bad Russian songs into German that came out perfectly and wondering why someone bothered. In those cases, the rhythmic part clearly came out right with very little work, and so the entire project was a lot simpler.
Back on SSC, I read someone posting their "pet theory" that US vetocracy got worse due to the banning of "Pork Barrel" earmarked spending by congress in 2011. It was an interesting point of view because it's counter-intuitive (earmarks are close cousins of bribes). But congress is bringing them back but with some new limits. I'm intrigued and want to see what happens, and I guess the SSC reader wasn't alone in having this pet theory.
Can someone explain why methane release from cattle is a major cause of global warming? I understand that the sheer volume of methane release from cattle is large, but is that a relevant metric? Cows are releasing carbon molecules which were captured from the atmosphere in the recent past through photosynthesis. They are part of the "fast carbon cycle" not the "slow carbon cycle" which releases carbon molecules which have been trapped in the earth for millions of years. The slow carbon cycle accounts for most of the net release of carbon into the atmosphere, which seems like the much more relevant metric. Or am I wrong on this point?
I understand that methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, so is it this conversion of CO2 into methane within the bodies of cows that makes them so bad? I've read that methane will also break down in the atmosphere back into CO2, but I'm not clear on whether the time scale for this decomposition is weeks, years or decades.
The way I understand it, methane matters in terms of climate change because we have substantially more cows now than we had in the past, which means that even if it cycles pretty fast we have more methane in the atmosphere now than we used to (if we break even on CO2 in total it has still spend more time in a more harmful form than it would otherwise have).
I don't know if it's the right place to ask / suggest, but I would like to read Scott's review of this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51778153-livewired I often get more from his reviews than from reading the books myself...
Reading the comment on humane treatment standards for animal experimentation made me think of rabbits.
The several people I have met who have worked with rabbits in research settings have all told me exactly the same thing that Primo Levi (and also chef Thomas Keller) said about them: on Day one they are cute, by Day Two they are just rabbits, and around Day Three you pretty much stop caring about the damn rabbits because they are just so useless and dumb.
[“in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation” -- Primo Levi, "The Periodic Table", Ch. 9 'Phosphorus']
I'm not advocating active cruelty to rabbits, just noting the universal opinion, including that of a two-time Nobel Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor who can't even bring himself to care about them.
Mice seem way smarter, rats are tough bastards who deserve some street-respect, but rabbits are not exactly "charismatic macro-fauna."
Not sure what the statue of limitations is on this, but in the NY Times today... "Another person who flagged a parent’s participation in the riots was Matt Hess, 29 (The Times agreed to identify him using only his middle and last name, because he has experienced harassment online)". It appears that online harassment is grounds for pseudonym use?
Scott told us that when he mentioned his fear of receiving death threats, the reporter came back that he got them, every journalist got them, it was all part of the job. Then when the reporter wrote the article, he mentioned that he and his editor got a lot of angry emails. This was plainly to make us feel sorry for him and angry about the people sending nasty messages.
So when it served his purposes, nasty emails were just all part of the job, ignore them. And when it served his purposes, nasty emails are terrible things which made him feel bad. Therefore I don't believe the NYT has any consistent policy other than "what best serves our purpose in this story". So if it suits them ('we had to anonymise this person because of THREATS') then they'll do that as it makes the story punchier. If it suits them ('no anonymity for bad people!') they'll do that too.
Data Secrets Lox is running its monthly contest to find the best effortpost. There were 16 entries for February, spanning a range of topics. The poll was set up a few hours ago, and will run for the next week.
Maybe they are lying. But, if they are telling the truth, it blows a hole in the “Born That Way” theory.
“WASHINGTON, D.C. — Gallup’s latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup’s previous update based on 2017 data.
* * *
“One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual. This includes about one in six adult members of Generation Z (those aged 18 to 23 in 2020) [15.9%].
“The vast majority of Generation Z adults who identify as LGBT — 72% — say they are bisexual. Thus, 11.5% of all Gen Z adults in the U.S. say they are bisexual, with about 2% each identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender.
“About half of millennials (those aged 24 to 39 in 2020) who identify as LGBT say they are bisexual. In older age groups, expressed bisexual preference is not significantly more common than expressed gay or lesbian preference.”
"Born That Way" can still be true: There's less stigma today so more people should be leaving the closet. Especially bi people who have an easier time staying in the closet if that's what's incentivized.
But careful with this, this is an odd-numbered thread.
"But, if they are telling the truth, it blows a hole in the “Born That Way” theory."
There's two things at play here:
(1) As something becomes more socially acceptable, more people will be willing to come out and identify as that. There is truth to the "in the closet" stereotype.
(2) "Born That Way” was a political gambit to appeal to the normies. If you want to undercut anti-gay sentiment, make it a matter not of choice but "we can't help it, we didn't choose this anymore than you chose to be born straight". The principle is 'you wouldn't condemn someone who was born diabetic, or someone based on skin colour - unless you were a horrible racist and you're not a horrible racist are you? - so why condemn someone who can't help their sexuality?'
Andrew Sullivan drilled down a bit here. His comment, without suggesting they weren't really bi because that would be wrong, was to note that, as you have noted as well, the biggest chunk of that is bi, and that, of those bisexuals, 30% were living with an opposite sex partner and 2% with a same-sex. So, if that proportion holds over the rest of the bi population . . . at the least it's a group that can very easily identify as in or out of the LGBT family as convenient.
Another factor at play: the criteria people use to define themselves may have changed over time, shifting from behavior-focused to identity-focused.
The word homosexuality didn't exist until 1869, and it seems that in the early days of classifying people as such, it referred strictly to their behavior, not to romantic feelings or identity. The Kinsey scale was based on behavior. So if you always loved the same sex but you spent your whole life in a straight marriage, you were heterosexual.
This approach seems to have been more or less abandoned over the course of the 20th century. We see plenty of narratives in books and film with closet gay people in a straight relationships whose true feelings have never been fulfilled, and most people would now refer to them as gay despite having no sexual history with the same sex.
Now it seems to be a lot easier to place yourself in the LGBT category, just based on how you personally identify. Lest you think the old-fashioned behaviorist model is moot, I still had friends telling me about it in college, and they were very on board with it at the time.
Does the rise of bisexual identification imply that people are making a popular choice rather than expressing a sincere truth? JonathanD's comment insinuates that bisexual might be a misnomer for a group of people who pairs more often with the opposite sex than the same sex. Let me provide ya'all with another way to look at this.
Sam is Gen Z and shows no preference for one sex over the other. Sam likes same-sex relationships just as much as opposite-sex. What are Sam's chances of ending up with a peer (Gen Z) of the same sex, really? If we accept the statistics above, and for simplicity we assume about 50/50 male/female ratio in all groups, and we assume that Sam encounters people randomly...
About 8% of the people Sam meets will be a queer person of the same sex.
About 42% of the people Sam meets will be a straight person of the opposite sex.
So to begin with, and we're keeping this simple and somewhat random, Sam is about five times more likely to encounter a potential mate of the opposite sex.
I'm not done yet.
Several factors can further deplete Sam's chances of a same-sex relationship:
-We may be getting more liberal, but there is still more societal pressure against same-sex relationships than for them. For someone with no preference, a same-sex relationship is easier.
-People who want biological children may opt for an opposite-sex relationship so they can raise their biological children with the biological parent
-LGBT people aren't randomly distributed. They form social enclaves. Being in the LGBT enclave raises your chances of a same-sex partnership. Being outside it makes it rather hard to find a date.
-Who gets there first: most LGBT people I know had their earliest sexual experiences with the opposite sex because it was socially easier. This may bias a bisexual person toward opposite-sex relationships because they feel more comfortable sticking with what they're used to.
-Anti-bisexual stigma: not sure how this goes for gay men, but there is an anti-bisexual stigma among lesbians, many of whom will not date a bisexual woman because they feel like they can't take her seriously.
I am not at all surprised by the rates of same-sex vs. opposite-sex partnerships. Those numbers may still be true for a group of people who genuinely experience equal desire for both sexes.
Is my (simplified) statistical analysis totally bunk? Fight me.
I don't mean to imply that their predilections aren't genuine, just that on surveys in the 90s they would have checked "straight" and on surveys in the 20s they'll check "bi" and that that change in checkboxes doesn't imply a (large) change in the underlying population.
A few months ago *someone* was here freaking out about some survey result about gender or orientation among teenagers. (Something like a big spike in trans or gender fluid id, but I don't remember the details.) Someone else drilled down into the survey and found that the behavior numbers, or id numbers for kids a couple of years older, or some such thing had basically not changed. IE, what the survey is tracking is the acceptability, or maybe trendiness, or the underlying label, but not anything like a big shift in the underlying population numbers.
Not sure what you wish to convey with the *, but that someone wasn't me (I've only gone under this name). I think the salient fact that we agree on here is that the bisexual classification seems to offer people more room to shift in or out of visibility, regardless of their relationship status. It's not a very stable classification when so many external forces influence people's decision to use it, not to mention all the kids who use the id as a stepping stone, a half way point, or a position of uncertainty. Those dynamics can easily obscure the underlying, more stable, rates of innate bisexuality.
Just over six years ago, you said "If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo". Now that you have your private practice, are you still considering it?
I emailed them. They emailed me back with a bunch of reasons they think I'm wrong that they suggest I go over before I bet them. I'm still going over the reasons.
"If I Ran the Zoo" and five other books by Dr. Seuss now banned. No longer on Amazon. You can still buy Huckleberry Finn. (I checked) Sorry, I had to rant somewhere.
This one isn't on Amazon - they were withdrawn from publication by the Dr. Seuss estate. I'm not happy about this either, but it should probably be discussed in an even-numbered thread.
This is an open query that needs rationality to delve deeper into. It concerns the variants of the Covid19 virus. I refer to the Lancet report of December 8 2020 into the safety and effectiveness of the Astra Zeneca vaccine https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32661-1/fulltext .My skills are solely in pattern recognition. I noticed that the trials of the AZvaccine were conducted in locations from which the most virulent variants have arisen - United Kingdom and Brazil are referenced in the attached report, and South Africa in other reports not linked to here. The variants were identified in December 2020 when the attached report was published. This led me to the query - what chance the same place and same time of the wide-spread Phase 3 testing of the AZ vaccine are also the locations of the most virulent variations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Same place - coincidence with high certainty? Same time - coincidence with moderate certainty? Same time and place - I'd bet on low certainty of coincidence. Anyone have any insights for me?
There seems to be something wrong with the way Substack is generating message-ids for comment reaction notifications. It seems like they might generate the same ID for every reaction to a given comment, or something.
I'm not sure why this is something they'd be doing manually -- it seems like something their MSP (mailgun) ought to handle. But I doubt mailgun would generate duplicates like this, and fail to catch it immediately.
The consequence of this for my email client (OS X mail.app) is that it can't tell those messages apart -- it's showing them to me as if the are all a single message, with the subject of one but the body of a different one.
(This is a pretty stupid way to write an email client, but there's no accounting for bad engineering.)
I don't know if there's anybody at Substack you could talk to, or if there's any chance they'd understand my complaint if you did, and pass it on to anybody who can fix it. But this is a pretty bad bug. (I assume it hasn't been caught yet because Gmail doesn't trust the message-id to be unique, and displays the messages sensibly, unlike Mail.app, so most people don't hit it.)
I have examples with full headers I'm happy to pass along.
Want an introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy? Want someone to guide you through it? Here is the video series for you! He will be covering each canto in English translations, one per video:
Gripe about the state of public health communication [crossposted from my FB share of https://nyti.ms/3bchUvh]:
Tbh I think saying e.g. "The efficacy of J&J is 72%", by itself, is always so vague that it might as well be gibberish. It's basically just saying,
"The J&J covid-19 vaccine causes a ~72% reduction in the risk of."
It's an incomplete sentence, and put in plain English like that, the incompleteness is obviously ridiculous. Reduction in the risk *of what*? Infection? Symptoms? Severe symptoms? Hospitalization? Death? If the sentence doesn't tell you that, it literally hasn't told you anything.
I'm glad Carl Zimmer is here to help explain these ambiguities—he's a great science writer—but it's shameful that the state of public health communication is so bad that we even got to the point of needing him. There should never have been press releases or headlines or news articles reporting "The efficacy of __ is __%" by itself, as though that meant anything at all, in the first place. It should always have been, "__ reduces the risk of __ by __%."
Biden says the US will have enough vaccines for every adult in May. Does this mean that any adult who wants to get vaccinated in May will be able to get vaccinated? Or are there weird rhetorical tricks at play?
(The one exception I know of is the US *taking delivery* which is distinct from *it making it to a distribution point* but I seriously do not expect this to add more than a week.)
Doses administered per day are now over 2 million and still trending up, so we should have the capacity to administer 200 million more or close to it by then. The catch of course is that we need two doses per person, but still, that should realistically cover most of the population that wants to be vaccinated.
Have you considered creating a community space for editing UNSONG? Feels like a thing the community could do (with upvoting specific edits), an interesting technical challenge and a way to think about how books might work in the future. Also I imagine the community could add a few genuinely funny extras, if that's a thing you wanted.
Would be good if substack allowed you to collapse comments, rather than just their replies. Still takes quite a lot of scrolling to scroll past a long base comment.
I enjoyed your review of Fussell, and wrote a response, here: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/whats-the-status-of-status TLDR, I'm not sure why we should care so much about status as a heuristic, except insofar as it 1) makes an argument that meritocracy is a construct of the middle and upper middle class and 2) it demonstrates that envy and inequality won't be solved through economics.
I read your response, and I think you may have missed some key points about status. You contrasted upper and middle classes, but I think the more important distinction is between working class and middle class (see the comment about two "ladders"). There is basically a working class ladder (based largely on money) and a middle class ladder (based largely on prestige). Both of these are forms of status. I think you are right that recognition is more important than wealth. Recognition is the point of both ladders. We are striving to find some kind of social validation. In my view it is important to understand status because I think to be happy we actually do need to be climbing the ladder, but we also need to be able to put it in context, and see the ladder as a part of something more important, like a game we play.
Fussell wrote about three ladders- working class to upper working class about money, but also about building skills and achievements until you make good money and also have developed the skills to make physical things you want. Middle class to upper middle about money, but also about having impressive knowledge, connections and status. Upper to top out of sight about already having money and doing what you want and bragging that you don't care about status. He's worth reading because he was a good writer who has absorbed the old 'Harvard Three Foot Shelf' and automatically uses the thoughts and phrases of American high literary culture.
Is the upper class a ladder? I ask honestly because I haven't read the book and I am not really sure about my own opinion. On the one hand, the "nothing to prove" mentality seems consistent with the (quite rare) interactions I have had with the upper class. Is the upper class a social backwater where nothing really happens? Or is there really some kind of intense competition going on?
It's a good book, worth reading. I think the upper class is a ladder from 'Look I Made it' to 'nothing to prove'. But I don't know anyone Top Out of Sight. I know top working class and upper middles and Fussell is right about them.
The responses to your GOP post on twitter were fascinating. Snarky rose emoji urbanists who mainly discuss philosophy, politics and transit really *really* don't like to be considered high class.
Examples?
https://twitter.com/golikehellmachi/status/1365126078054887429
Is it really particularly obvious this is a tantrum about their personal class status?
That's the impression I got from reading through the comments but happy to hear your interpretation.
Fussell-Scott's theory of class is ar least based on observations of modern society. So what is incorrect in it.
Note that the purely economic and highly-Germanised (in that the thinking is clearly German, with the obvious choice of gewalt for power with its emphasis on force and making not ability) class analysis of Marx seems to have regularly failed it's own internal tests (indeed it even fails the tests when applied to historical societies about which Marx wrote). So this does not seem to be a basis on which to critique other analyses of class.
I think Scott's writings about upper class =/= wealth is absolutely correct, and I think to most people outside of the US that's fairly obvious. The failure to understand the nature of class is particularly pervasive in the US, maybe because America was steeped in the blood of the nobility. They think they've entirely rid themselves the concept of nobility. Their failure to understand the upper class as a birthright feature is in their national DNA.
I'd like to highlight the argument that several people there are making, which is that Trump can't be low class because he has gold plated toilets. I'm not really sure there's anything lower class than that
Electroplating is so good that you can get gold plating pretty cheap. And it looks good, and lasts. I have a gold plated knife two forks two spoons set for twenty bucks from Amazon.
Class has a lot to do with status. A starving PhD generally has more status than a waste collector raking in 100k+ (at least they can earn that much in my city).
A starving PhD has less status than a well-paid garbageman, just more status anxiety. I'd like to own the means of production myself, but it would be a hassle to get. And the connections a garbageman gets from his union beat starving PhD's like a drum.
In our current system yes. But does that tell you anything about class even in a Marxist analysis? Let's compare me and an Indian textile worker in Bihar. I own one gold item, a wedding ring, which is a marker of a significant and one-off (hopefully) event in my life. The textile worker likely owns multiple times as much gold as me because it is used as a store of value and a status marker. So by your implied analysis that the fact gold is expensive makes it a marker of class, I am probably lower class than a poor Bihari factory worker. Which is odd, as I'm solidly bourgeoise.
Note I doubt Marx would have made this mistake. Neither my wedding ring nor the hypothetical Indian's jewelry is a means of production in itself despite being relatively expensive. Your argument here does is a serious oversimplification of Marx. Arguing possessions determine Marxist status rather than control of means of production and the labour of others is the level of thinking through surface markers that gives so many twentieth-century Marxist movements such poor outcomes, and their detractors such easy rhetorical ammunition.
I forwarded it to a conservative guy I know. He said he agreed with basically all of it except he wants to keep using the term "culture war" because, quote, "'class' makes people think of commies".
So no wonder people are complaining about Marxism in the schools?
Yeah, but the flip side is that I think a lot of moderates and liberals have "class" as a thing they realize they should sort of be concerned about, and so using the word helps them draw the connection that they should be concerned about the sort of things the Republicans are talking about.
I am very sceptical about this working, because I think for a narrative about "class" as opposed to "culture" to work, there needs to be an obvious ordering on the two classes.
Economic class clearly has that, but it can't fit into your narrative - the average Republican voter is (slightly) richer than the average Democratic voter; it wouldn't surprise me if that stopped being true if you restricted to white voters, but at that point you attract the obvious retort "why are you choosing a form of analysis that discounts nonwhite voters?"
I think that you have correctly identified a cultural split in American, but when one side contains lumber barons and the other contains schoolteachers, I think that calling the two sides "lower" and "upper", and try and claim underdog points for the former, is (a little, but not wholly") misleading as a form of analysis and (very) unlikely to work as a political tactic.
If I were trying to make the case for that ordering, there are two things I might try. One would be talk about "social status". But the problem with that is that, unlike wealth, social status isn't rigorously measurable, and arguing that a school teacher has more of it than a lumber baron still looks deeply dodgy - you risk ending up using it as a synonym for "respect from the blue tribe".
And the other would be to talk about "control of institutions", which is where I think you have your strongest case - blue-tribe-controlled institutions (academia, a bit more than 50% of the media by influence, the arts, and HR departments) look to me more significant than red-tribe-controlled institutions (the police, a large minority of the media, the military (but decreasingly among officers) and a bit more than 50% of the rest of business).
But trying to go from "social class that has more influence in more/less institutions" to "upper/lower class" when there's this really obvious economic axis challenging those labels pretty hard strikes me as questionable.
I would agree, and suggest further that all in the upper class go to college. (I started reading "The Bell Curve, Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" today... I didn't realize it was such a tome.)
"Monopoly" isn't right, or close to being, and while I'm sure you don't intend it literally, I worry about the cumulative effect of that kind of rhetorical flourish.
Couldn't using "workers" accomplish the same thing without triggering the cons?
I don't like to consider them high class either. Most of them can't even use a knife and fork properly.
Caring about proper use of dining utensils is totally low class.
No offense meant! lol. I'm not saying it's good or bad to be high/low class or to care about dinner table manners or not. I'm just reporting that anecdotally, in my own life, the biggest sticklers about dinner table manners were all very working class.
_Caring_ about table manners is medium-low class because only low class people need to. Higher-class people have correct table manners, effortlessly.
I got "this is what the Republicans are already doing", "the Republicans would never do this in a million years", "everyone already agrees this is obviously true and you're wasting my time", "everyone can easily see this is obvious garbage so you're wasting my time", "you're just trying to transform the Republicans into the Democrats", "you're proving you were never a real Democrat because no Democrat would say something like this", etc.
The last post I got that kind of response on was my Conflict Vs. Mistake one, which I still feel good about, so I'm hopeful that I feel okay about this one in a few years.
The "this is what the Republicans are already doing" replies boggled my mind. The post clearly said the proposal was for them to "use the word class." They aren't doing that now!
I think people got very confused because a large portion of the post was describing Republican positions and how they tie into the narrative of class. So in their minds they saw those positions as things Republicans already do and thought that Scott was telling them to adopt those positions, when the post was telling them that the positions they already hold are actually about class so they should talk about class.
There were some folks on the thread that claimed that Scott was basically describing Tucker Carlson schtick, which sounded pretty accurate from me. These were folks who liked Carlson and were glad Scott was saying similar things.
While I don't think Carlson represents the entire Republican party, I think you could be forgiven for conflating him with mainstream Republican (or at least Trump voter) beliefs.
I also don't think Scott's exclusive point was to use the word "class" but instead to target specific class markers (e.g. college degrees) with legislation and rhetoric.
Given that this is an odd numbered thread, I'm not sure how much more this conversation can continue before it crosses a line. (Or perhaps I need to check over my shoulder?)
As someone who made that point (heatedly, probably unhelpfully), let me try to restate:
Republicans don't explicitly use the word 'class', but they espouse a functionally identical concept to the cultural definition which Scott Alexander pushes. Words matter, but if find a new provocative term for, I don't know, 'praxis' and then reveal it with fanfare as a new strategy for the far left, I imagine a few eyerolls. It is unusual to see Rush Limbaugh make SA's argument better and, I think, sufficiently noteworthy to point out; to take one example from his decade-long corpus:
“The Democratic Party is a closed clique. They are not the best and brightest. They're not the smartest. They haven't had to prove themselves in the market in many of these peoples' cases, the career politicians. This is the establishment. This is the elites. Their concerns just have very little in common. Illegal immigration, to complain about it is so, so uninformed and so small-minded. They never encounter, they never face the consequences of their own laws. They don't face the consequences of their own directives or actions.”
It is a little odd that someone presumably attuned to political dialogue would miss the constant drumbeat on the right, claiming the left is foremost, a cultural other threatening the values, the esthetics, of mainstream America? Again, let me good ol' Rush say it just as well:
"Most Americans are, in fact, conservative. They may not always vote that way, but they live their lives that way. This fact has been successfully hidden from the population. Until now. (https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/why-liberals-fear-me)"
They 'live their lives that way'. How far off do you genuinely think RL's message is, from SA's thesis? I would argue there is almost no daylight between the two visions.
The main reason I feel compelled to react, is that it is a little, itty-bitty step from there, to framing policy initiatives as cultural warfare. Within that culture-first framework, it becomes trivially easy to credibly reframe, say 'access to contraception' as a technocratic euphemism the Other's culture of permissive sexuality. Rush, again:
"What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We're the pimps. (interruption) The johns? We would be the johns? No! We're not the johns. (interruption) Yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word. Okay, so she's not a slut. She's "round heeled". I take it back."
Culture, culture, culture. I value Scott's writing in many regards, and would like a good explanation of the difference between what SA wants, and what Rush did. I'm not asking for someone saying Rush is wrong, I don't even think you need to think that. I am just saying he was First, and he won.
Forgot I can't copyedit once I hit submit -- check
Accidentally liked my own comment -- check
Guess you become a noob-by-default once you turn thirty, I might as well accept it and embrace the 50 years of boomer struggle ahead
I guess the central question here is whether what's going on is better modelled as a clash between classes or a clash between cultures.
Maybe it's just a function of the people I hang out with, but my stereotypical "Republican" isn't an unemployed plumber with a wife-beater and a very large truck covered with bumper stickers. My stereotypical "Republican" still looks a bit more like Thurston Howell III, driving his Lexus down to the country club in the morning for a quick round of golf before going sailing in the afternoon. We can argue about the exact prevalence of the two groups, but the latter is, I think, still a pretty significant fraction of the Republican Party; I mean, who else is the consistuency for the Republican tax cut agenda?
If you go around telling Thurston Howell III that some obese, nose-ringed Gawker journalist living in a rat-infested San Francisco apartment and subsisting off ramen and ironically-purchased frappuccinos is his class superior, he's going to rightly laugh at you. And this isn't a misunderstanding of social vs economic class, it's just an acknowledgment that the vast majority of journalists etc are not very high up the class pyramid.
Now, my Thurston Howell and your unemployed plumber don't have much in common in terms of class, they would have trouble eating at the same table or having a basic conversation on most topics, but they are both Republicans and do share many of the same enemies. Trying to shoehorn it into a class struggle, though, just doesn't seem to work.
I think we probably agree. The republican party is a coalition of different people (much the same can probably be said about any successful political movement in the US). The strategy of keeping them on a united front by leveraging cultural concerns framing liberals as cultural vandals is not new (see Rush Limbaugh's entire career). It was also extremely successful starting in 2010, and I would argue that it has culminated in Trumpism.
I guess I am arguing there is almost no difference between the way Republican opinion leaders frame the Democrats, and how SA says they should. The only difference is the use of the word class, coerced to signify almost exactly what Republicans have been claiming all along. What's extremely odd to me is that people are finding this novel, or indeed any different from what we're used to.
It's all the weirder to me, because I find this to be a classist argument from Scott: red tribe should keep doing what it's doing, but make this slight language adjustment on the advice of a grey tribe outsider that, I have to imagine, is not exactly in touch with what Republicans want or how they use language.
From that point on in the reasoning, I worry that I am getting uncharitable, so I hope someone can tell me I'm taking this way too far:
I think it's *very* classist of Scott to suggest that red tribe rephrase their existing core argument with a slightly grey tribe twist, based on a version of the word 'class' very much unlike current parlance (especially in the Republican party), but which happens to be a flavor-of-the-month meme in grey tribe.
It is doubly classist to package this fairly superficial advice as if it is a new strategy. Like, hey red tribe, we in SF are the class of people with the good ideas, let me re-explain your strategy to you, but with my own words.
I think it is triply classist (please someone tell me I'm just out of my mind) to package this advice together with a random policy prescription, which has no cultural import in red tribe, currently. Scott's inclusion of this policy is deeply ironic, if, like me, you think the SF-elite constitute a very credible class, with its own objectives and cultural signifiers, one that is about as alien to red or blue tribe (or high and low class, whatever), as they are to each other. If you agree on this point, I think the optics obviously become just grey tribe telling red tribe to care more about grey tribe things.
Finally, what's unsaid I think reinforces the last point. No mention of god, abortion, or tradcon issues like sexual mores. I think they are so conspicuously absent from Scott's proposed platform, that the entire advice can be almost-charitably restated as 'hey red tribe, keep your strategy basically the same, but take on slightly more grey tribe language, forget about those pesky conservative positions, and start caring about Grey Tribe policy ideas. Sounds good?'
Am I that wrong?
Alright, let me try and steelman Scott here.
The Blue Tribe has a narrative of "the Republican party stands for nothing except hate". The less legible Republican platforms are to the Blue and Grey Tribe, the more that narrative will stick and the higher Democrat turnout will be (turnout being driven mostly by fear rather than appreciation, and we all fear what we don't understand). Ergo, the Republicans should make at least some effort to make their platform make sense to the Blue and Grey Tribe, so that the Grey Tribe stops voting Democrat and the Blue Tribe vote Democrat less.
There is still one giant hole in this argument, which is that because of the fragmentation of US media the Blue Tribe are well-insulated from anything the Republicans actually say. But it can probably kill Grey Tribe turnout dead, even without any policy changes.
I think Thurston Howell accepts that his brother-in-law in the Senate needs to spout some nonsense in order to get elected.
"My stereotypical 'Republican' still looks a bit more like Thurston Howell III, driving his Lexus down to the country club in the morning for a quick round of golf before going sailing in the afternoon."
This is strange because, as a matter of practical fact, Thurston Howell III is far more likely to be a registered Democrat.
This boggles my mind. Republicans use the word class all the time!
I know people that are active in SF politics and the blue tribe characteristics (including the fact that they look down on heartland Americans) was dead on to me.
Two things I would have written differently:
The descriptions of schools they graduate from is overly restrictive. The UT Austins and Michigans of the world are churning these types of people out.
I don't know about your group of friends, but ironically eating fast food every now and then is definitely a thing.
I'm a lifer in blue-tribe-world both personally and professionally (now old enough to be raising kids in it) and had this same reaction.
I think the core issue with Scott's post is that it's a bunch of coherent policy positions Republicans could take to attract the vote of Scott-like people. The problem is that Scott-like people are a tiny sliver of the American population, so even if those policies attract 100% of Scott-like people, they might drive away 1% of everyone else, which results in the GOP losing out on net votes. Probably even worse, when you consider where Scott-like people are distributed geographically (e.g. the Bay Area).
I thought politics is forbidden in odd numbered open threads. I take it that it's more of a soft rule than a hard one?
Oh hell somebody has to do this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl0hMfqNQ-g
Hi there, I've discovered this blog after the entire NYT incident, and SSC and ACX have been a godsend. I'm sure the entire period was less than ideal for a lot of people in the community, but as brand new member i just wanted to express my deepest gratitude to scott and the entire community for just existing.
Love this and glad to be here.
Thanks!
I was going to suggest that maybe that was real Josh Hawley posting as troll Josh Hawley, much like Picasso's quote about how he paints his own fakes. But then it turns out that Picasso's "I paint fakes, too" quote is itself a fake. How's that for meta?
Edit: no wait, the Picasso fakes quote might be true. Everyone involved in this story is dead and we'll never know. Too much, man.
"But doctor, I am Josh Hawley!"
You're willing to take bets over future developments for small amounts of money? Oh boy!
Hi Scott,
Have you considered writing a review of Carl Hart's new book, or a blog post that examines his ideas re: drug use and addiction? I don't know if it interests you, but it seems like the kind of thing that would be up your alley.
I'm the person you failed to come to terms with, just because the terms were extremely poor. To make this bet work I think you need to offer better odds than just buying Opko stock (who own the only calcifediol formulation in the US). I don't get how you can think there's only a 25% chance that vitamin D works at all, but that there's a 50/50 chance that NICE would approve it by 3/1/21. If this offer is genuine than it seems that you must be more optimistic about vitamin D than you're letting on. Rootclaim would definitely offer better odds because they have quite a lot more money than me. :)
https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex/status/1362144763147821056
Wait, what? How is there only one calcifediol formulation, that is owned by someone?
In the US the only approved calcifediol formulation is Rayaldee, there are other formulations which aren't patented so it's not a monopoly, but if that trial is successful you'd expect that stock to increase in value a lot.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04551911
This is also the subject of a totally fascinating shareholder fight with an activist investor basically accusing the CEO of slow playing the Rayaldee trial so that he can take the company private.
https://siancapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/OPKO-Presentation-October-28.pdf
At a glance, they have a patent on *24-hour extended-release* vitamin D (US 8,778,373) which I don't think is terribly exciting given that 25-hydroxyvitamin D has a half-life of like two weeks.
I agree with you, but don't underestimate the marketing power of a positive clinical trial.
There is a frame issue here. You assume the disease is classified and defined (it isn't) and treat pharmacological VitD (sun?) as the possible saviour. This is a mug's game. I posted a review on flu and don't wish to be boring but one could make a claim that Covid/Flu are just as easily characterised as functions of (seasonal) VitD metabolism. I am reminded of van Helmont's experiment that concluded that water was what caused trees to grow or worse, that killing virgins caused the sun to keep shining. Sorry but your knowledge is inadequate yet complacently so. There are few people who understand this virus/vitD dynamic and actually the evidence doesn't stack your way so your wager seems a little erm... naive? Some copernickanism and some empiricism is needed? Apols.
I don't understand anything you said here, but in case it's helpful this is how I think about this data: https://shotwell.ca/posts/good-decisions-bad-data/
I agree. You don't. In a sense, you can't. Your frame is a clinical trial where none of your assumptions are valid and you discard unhelpful data to fulfill your normative desires. Your trial isn't valid. It's fine. I have no skin in the game but it isn't science. Carry on. Have fun.
How much is too little money for your vitamin D bet?
Random question: so as a nutrient, "protein" breaks down as a bunch of different amino acids that aren't all biochemically interconvertible by humans and therefore you get a bunch of groups of them that are all each required in various amounts.
A thing I've wondered: how much tolerance is there for intakes that average out across time but at each point in time are heavily unbalanced? Like, say you alternated days where on odd days you consumed plenty of half of them but got very little of the other half, and on even days the other way around. Would this noticeably cause any nutrition problems? What if the alternation was over longer periods, like weeks, or months?
Longer time, definitely. To get an idea of what the shortest interval might be, look for the "leucine hypothesis" - the theory (currently rated at about 50-50 odds by top fitness experts) that you need am minimum amount of the leucine amino acid in your meal to trigger muscle buildup. So if this is even partially true, it means the amino acid distribution is important for intervals of around "one meal", so hours.
Nutrition problems - yes, like for a vegan diet, where you need supplementation long term. In that particular case it looks like it takes months for effects to be felt. But different amino acid profiles will probably be felt at different time scales.
I once asked this question. I didn't get a simple answer, and there may not be one, given the complexities of metabolism, but was told that there are proteins whose job is to store surplus amino acids for future use, and in principle, they can be stored indefinitely. I presume that, if the body is seriously short of protein, these proteins are drawn down and any surplus aminos excreted. This suggests that as long as you get enough protein overall and a little to spare, fluctuating amino acid intake is no big deal, and is easier to bear if you have more protein above the minimum, while if you are getting barely enough, it has to be evenly balanced. But that is my extrapolation from what the biochemist said, so draw your own conclusions.
Last day to finish my entry for the book review contest. I really wish I hadn't waited til last night to start it…
Realistically it will take me weeks to read all the reviews and do anything with them and if you beg really hard I will probably let you slip in after the due date.
I sort of wish you hadn't said that - I've been working like a demon all day, am getting close to the end (because without a deadline I produce precisely nothing..) And now you've given me a sort of backsliders escape route!
Here's my compromise self-deadline - I'll have it done, dusted and on your desk by the end of the 1 March. And all will be well :)
I finished it and sent it off so I'm feeling rather chuffed with myself - who needs sleep eh? I feel like a student again!
If anyone is keeping tabs on what books have been reviewed, I took on The No Breakfast Fallacy by Tim Worstall. Part of me thinks it would be hilarious if 3 or 4 people also reviewed the same book. Unlikely, I know.
I just ordered the book I want to submit, but I'm planning on waiting to submit it for his second book review contest that I'm hoping he'll have. It's better to take your time with this.
Part of me agrees with you. Of course it never occurred to me that there might be a second review contest.
However, I gained a huge amount from trying to write something up in a couple of days (it had been percolating in my mind for months..)
My review might well have been better had it been given more time but I don't think there's much of a negative - Scott can skim read it and no-one else will have to suffer. And I can take a little more time with another review next time if there is one.
Have you reached out to rootclaim to see if they'd make the bet for a lower amount? It says on that page, "We are open to discussing lower or higher amounts, and the funds can be pooled from multiple sources.*"
Ok, any chance someone might help me understand why Bayes seems to play a prominent role in the “rationalist” worldview? Nothing I say here is in the slightest novel; I’m not saying that the community just failed to consider these amazing insights. I’m just curious what the basic take is on what I would guess are fairly stock concerns.
When I first encountered the Bayes theorem it was as a fairly unremarkable lemma in inductive logic. It wasn’t presented as any big deal in itself; it was a piece of a much larger puzzle about how to develop rigorous approaches to scientific and other empirical inferences. Yet it seems this particular theorem is sometimes conceptually isolated and treated almost as if it were a solution to the larger problem in itself. Isn’t the theorem just a transformation rule that doesn’t work unless you come in with a quantified antecedent probability, and unless you have some objective methodology for quantifying your initial likelihood then the theorem isn’t going to give you any more objective basis for any particular probability assessment in the face of new evidence? Second, even if you can somehow justify an antecedent probability, are there non-trivial real-world situations where we have grounds for discerning the requisite numerical inputs to apply the theorem to adjust that prior probability? Are there any real-world problems where the theorem has been used in a meaningful way to advance an argument, beyond simply using arbitrary numbers to illustrate the mundane idea that one should change beliefs to incorporate new evidence as it comes in? If not, in what sense is an emphasis on Bayes really helpful in the context of current, real-world problem solving over and above a generalized emphasis on being open to assimilate new evidence in an appropriate way, keeping in mind the totality of the evidence you had before the new discovery?
One thing I may have seen in the past (or may have imagined, or may be inadvertently caricaturing as I try to re-create it) is the idea that it is better to apply something like a quantitative assessment even if it involves making up arbitrary numbers, as a sort of discipline on your subjective guesswork. But it seems to me that if the inputs are all highly subjective guesses along a very wide range of potential numerical assessments, one may in many cases be likelier to do a much better job using subjective intuition on the whole problem at once—where one can at least think about the problem as a whole—than by trying to guess at each small part in isolation, which could often be harder to meaningfully assess in isolation. I would guess that in most complex situations where there is likely to be meaningful disagreement in the real world, numerical judgments are likely to be more accurate as applied to the totality of a problem than by “solving” a problem using a multiplicity of highly subjective guesses as to component numbers that preclude you from thinking about their interrelationships as you go along.
Hey, sorry if this is all wrong or seems hostile. I’m asking out of sincere curiosity.
This might be relevant. https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/
Zooming way out, I think having a qualitative understanding of Bayes' Theorem is a major upgrade for your cognitive toolkit.
The equation says that P(A | B) isn't the same as P(B | A) - it's more complicated than that. If you're paying attention, you should sit bolt upright when you learn this. "Wait - maybe marijuana *isn't* a gateway to hard drugs! Maybe being raised in a house with lots of books doesn't guarantee good grades in school! Maybe every news story I've seen about longevity and food choice is mistold!"
I'm not sure explicitly using Bayes is especially helpful, any more than explicitly using predicate logic is especially helpful. It's a description of what you're trying to approximate with whatever approximation you use. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/06/on-first-looking-into-chapmans-pop-bayesianism/
A lot of my interest comes from the idea that the brain is explicitly approximating Bayes theorem, maybe so literally that different neurotransmitters represent different terms in the equation, and this explains a lot about thought. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/12/its-bayes-all-the-way-up/
I'll be posting more on this soon.
Okay, something I've noticed during the pandemic is what I call lawyer vs. Bayesian (or at least what I think is Bayesian, other posters please correct me since I'm a bit of an outsider to the rationalist world). For one of many examples, should we stick to the recommended regimen for Pfizer/Moderna, or should we go with a "first doses first" strategy in which some people might wait a long time for a second dose.
- Lawyer: The clinical trials gave a second dose after 21 days. If we wait 22 days, we have no idea if the vaccine will work!
- Bayesian: We know from immunology that memory B-cells do not die off after 3.5 weeks. Normally boosters are given months after the original vaccine. Preliminary data from the clinical trial shows effectiveness from one dose even if we don't know how long.
I think Bayesian has done a lot better than Lawyer in this pandemic.
Similarly, we are hearing that we can't say with 100% certainty that a recovered or vaccinated person can't contract an asymptomatic case that is dangerously contagious to a non-vaccinated person. Is you 99% likely to spread the disease, or 1%? We have better than zero information on this, because throughout history people with natural or acquired immunity are clearly highly unlikely to be super-contagion sources--more like 1% than 99%. What should we conclude about how much sense it makes for recovered or vaccinated people to stay locked down or even wear masks or observe strict social distancing? Dr. Fauci now thinks two vaccinated people can relax with each other, but from a population and therefore public-point of view, the more sensible advice may be: If you're recovered or vaccinated, it's not worth sacrificing your ability to earn a living and provide essential services just for a vanishingly small risk that you'll help spread a disease that most people recover from.
Regarding vaccination schedules, you can also go one layer further and look at your necessary confidence level. I simultaneously believe that one-dose (or extended dosing interval) schedules are more likely than not to be fine *and* we should stick with the protocols studied in the Phase 3 trials.
In my view, once we have a validated treatment protocol it becomes the standard of care. We should only deviate from that standard -- especially at the population level -- with highly compelling evidence, not on the mere balance of probabilities.
To put it in another context, if "more likely than not" is sufficient to deviate from trial protocols now, then we should have issued emergency approvals for vulnerable populations alongside the stage 3 trial, when we knew with reasonable certainty after stage 2 that the vaccines were probably safe and had a good chance of being effective. "Wait until December for approval, but immediately depart from protocol" is not a self-consistent state of affairs.
Well, if you put it that way I'm on team "issue emergency approvals alongside the Stage 3 trial".
I'll never forget how the FDA slow-walked COVID-test applications throughout February. The worst pandemic in a hundred years was looming, the CDC test was defective, and they were telling applicants to FedEx printouts and memory sticks to Document Control. Rules that make sense in normal times stop making sense in time sensitive crises where wasted days kill lots of people.
In a crisis like this "will this probably save lives or probably cost lives" is a better standard than "are we 100% sure this will save lives, otherwise inaction."
I also wonder whether these failures represent:
a. Procedures that normally make sense but should be altered during a crisis.
or
b. Procedures that really never did make much sense, but their badness only became visible to people outside the system when they so visibly screwed the pooch with covid tests.
Probably some of both. A bias toward inaction and inertia makes some sense. You shouldn't be shaking stuff up all the time. That changes in a crisis.
There's some quote exchange in Chernow's biography of Grant where Grant made some decision and somebody asked "are you sure that's a good idea" and Grant was like "no, but in war the worst thing is inaction". Now, maybe that thing was attacking at Spotsylvania Courthouse, but generally it served him well.
The problem is that you can't make it possible to relax the rules within a crisis without making it possible to relax the rules when it isn't really a crisis but someone can plausibly claim that it is by enough to trigger the clause. And the combined effect of those things may be bad.
It's easy to say that looser rules would be better in the current situation, but you can't *make* rules that are looser only for the current situation.
This also applies to indirect methods of loosening the rules. If you can loosen the rules when it's a really important crisis instead of just a normal one, everyone will claim that every incident is really important. If you can loosen the rules when lives are involved, suddenly lives are involved constantly (you can make a connection between just about any policy and lives). If you can loosen the rules when the governor proclaims an emergency, guess what happens.
I think you're making an over-broad categorical claim here. Yes, a person at HHS or the FDA could have issued a memo or decision on Feb 1 basically saying "wave normal rules and expedite COVID test applications" and the result would not have been Rule by Emergency Decree. In fact, these rules did eventually get waived (as did the ridiculous rules about months-long approval process for building N95 factories), just a month too late.
Quebec decided on a "first vaccine first" strategy and has stuck to it. Will this lead to everyone injecting themselves with random drugs? I doubt it.
"Yes, a person at HHS or the FDA could have issued a memo or decision on Feb 1 basically saying "wave normal rules and expedite COVID test applications" and the result would not have been Rule by Emergency Decree."
What makes you think this? It is only feasible for someone to issue such a memo if the system allows it, and any system that allows it would also allow unlimited emergencies in normal times. Youi can't very well say "you can only issue emergency memos in *real emergencies*, not in fake ones".
The same is true if they can get a memo out after a few months of bureaucracy. The same system that forces them to go through months of bureaucracy in a real emergency also forces them to go through months of bureaucracy in a fake one, and that's how we prevent fake ones from being too disruptive.
-> Ok, any chance someone might help me understand why Bayes seems to play a prominent role in the “rationalist” worldview?
(I'm assuming there is no good way to do quotes or links yet?)
I believe the answer to your top level question is that LessWrong in general, and Elizier Yudkowsky in particular, have been strong proponents of Bayesian inference as a general model proper rational thought.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XTXWPQSEgoMkAupKt/an-intuitive-explanation-of-bayes-s-theorem
"Soon you will know. Soon you will be one of us."
EY went so far as to proclaim that we should have priors, and thus initial estimates of probability about any possible question we contemplate, with, I believe, the specific example of a random, unknown interlocutor asking the question "What kind of tree can I see outside my window?" EY maintained that a rationalist should be willing to answer this question rather than say "I don't know". (Someone correct me if my memory is incorrect).
The [ACX Tweaks](https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks) browser extension enables Markdown-style links and basic styling (not quotes yet, I think).
It currently supports text links like above, blockquotes beginning with ">", and italics with asterisks. (Though someone was having trouble with this feature where it removed all content, if you have this then disable the "Apply comment styling" option, stability fixes coming soon.)
Testing:
> It currently supports text links like above, blockquotes beginning with ">" and *italics* with asterisks.
Another *test*
There shouldn't be a gap before the italics in the blockquote, that's just substack's formatting having an unfortunate conflict with mine. Fix coming soon.
He did say basically that, yeah: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t-know
Ok, I'll play. I'm looking at the tree outside my window (well, to be honest, it's dark now, but I was legitimately looking at one earlier in the day). How many leaves are on it ?
AFAICT, Yudkowsky would answer something like "anywhere from 0 to 5M". This is a fine answer, and there's nothing technically wrong with it... but... how is it better, *in practice*, than "I don't know" ? If you wanted to bet real money on it, what number would you feel comfortable betting on ?
One thing you could do is maybe do some queries on Google to see how professional botanists have answered this question; or run a few back-of-the-envelope calculations; or maybe geolocate my IP to see if I live in New York (likely 0 leaves) or Los Angeles (likely the average number of leaves) or Magadan (0 leaves, lots of needles), and so on. But, at this point, you're no longer playing by original rules. You're trying to nail down an estimate, by starting with a prior that you've obtained by boring old frequentist methods, and then updating it via Bayes' Theorem (or whatever other methods you end up using). There's nothing wrong with that, but you're forced to tacitly admit that your original answer still was, "I don't know".
> Ok, I'll play. I'm looking at the tree outside my window (well, to be honest, it's dark now, but I was legitimately looking at one earlier in the day). How many leaves are on it ?
> You're trying to nail down an estimate, by starting with a prior that you've obtained by boring old frequentist methods, and then updating it via Bayes' Theorem (or whatever other methods you end up using).
I think that's the point? "Bayes thinking" tells you to begin with a prior, then update that prior with all available information to form a posterior with greater confidence. The prior is less important than the process, since "Bayes thinking" immediately turns my mind to the questions I'd need to answer to have a useful answer to your question.
But then, there's nothing special about Bayes; the real statement is, "try to quantify your guess". Until you do, your answer is still "I don't know", Bayes or no Bayes. And once you quantify it (probably using frequentist methods, such as estimating the average volume of a tree or whatnot), you could use Bayes to update on evidence, or you can use whatever other technique you want, and some will be better than others... But Bayes won't give you any special magical insights out of nowhere, like the Rationalist community appears to believe.
I don't think anybody is saying that "using frequentist methods" is mutually exclusive with "using Bayes' theorem".
Using frequentist methods "alone" would be appropriate for, say, guesstimating the average value of the next 10 rolls of a die whose outcomes you have already recorded for 1,000 rolls—the situation being predicted is functionally identical to the situation having been observed.
The reason rationalists love Bayes' theorem so much is that it allows them to guesstimate values about situations that *aren't* identical to situations already having been observed—rolling a different die that has a different number of faces that has never been rolled before, or rolling the same die on grass instead of a flat table, or dropping the die rather than rolling it, etc. etc. etc.—the answer is still equally "I don't know", but you can quantify it with more accuracy than if you hadn't observed outcomes of different-but-similar-in-some-ways situations before.
Rolling a die is not necessarily the best example because that can also be predicted using basic theoretical probabilities, but obviously Rationalists aren't nearly as interested in rolling standard dice as they are in, say, determining whether our universe is a simulation, or, choosing whether to endow with a mechanical arm an artificial intelligence that has only been observed in a simulated environment.
> rolling a different die that has a different number of faces that has never been rolled before ... —the answer is still equally "I don't know", but you can quantify it with more accuracy...
How so ? I just rolled a die with a certain fixed number of faces. Can you tell me what number came up ? How would you use Bayesian reasoning to improve your guess, given only the information that I just told you -- i.e., that I rolled a die, and that it has a number of faces ?
I would argue that the only reasonable answer is "I don't know"; or, if you prefer, "the number is likely somewhere between 0 and 500", which, in practice, is as useful as "I don't know"; and Bayesian reasoning does absolutely nothing to improve this situation for you. Yes, you could collect more data and use Bayesian reasoning to update your guess, but at that point there's nothing special about Bayes; in fact, in the case of dice, frequentist reasoning would probably work just as well (if not better).
The reference "Bayes" is often to Bayesian epistemology https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/ rather than directly to Bayes theorem.
Some central takeaways are:
Beliefs are probabilistic not 0 and 1 (this is the major one)
You should change your beliefs gradually when new evidence appears
How you should change your beliefs is precise.
Bayesians think that probabilities are fundamentally about quantifying personal uncertainty, So for many problems an objective probability doesn't exist
Also for making up numbers, one could appeal to the surprising level of quality one can get from fermi estimates.
Or the methods of super forecasters, or personal histories (eg calibration)
Bayes was a statistician, and multiple different things are named after him. In particular, I think you (and lots of other people) are using Bayes' Theorem interchangeably with Bayesian probability, which results in confusion.
Bayesianism is contrasted with Frequentism. Frequentism is a way of interpreting mathematical probabilities as claims about repeated experiments (flip a coin 100 times, get 50 heads), and cannot sensibly talk about individual non-repeatable events. Bayesianism is a way of interpreting mathematical probabilities as claims about knowledge (a single coin flip will definitely be either heads or tails, but my prediction about that event can be expressed as a percentage). Frequentism has the advantage of being very concrete and only making testable claims. Bayesianism has the advantage of being much more broadly applicable and matching an intuitive way to think about uncertainty (though its dependence on a priori "priors" reflects a real lack of mathematical rigor underlying the theory).
I think this dichotomy is a helpful way to think about what people mean when they say "Bayesian reasoning." Notably, Bayes' Theorem is also true in Frequentist probability. In the context of Bayesian reasoning, Bayes' Theorem becomes a formula for updating predictions based on new evidence. Without that context, it's a fairly mundane theorem which happens to be named after Bayes. I think advocates of Bayesian reasoning would be well served to mention the theorem less, but using the word "theorem" makes people feel like their philosophy has solid mathematical grounding.
Technically, Bayes wasn't a statistician, but a priest. It's probably easiest to understand his ideas and the contrast to alternatives within the context of statistics, but they've been central to thinking about reasoning in economics, psychology, and philosophy for about a century, while physicists (and L.J. Savage) brought the idea to statistics a bit later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bayes
And, I guess as long as we’re being precise, not a priest but rather a Protestant minister!
I think these are great questions. I'm not strictly qualified to answer them succinctly here, but I have some great ideas for further reading if you're curious --
First off, though I know you were looking to escape toy examples, it deserves mention in passing that when you ask rooms of trained medical professionals toy questions in their domain which would benefit from the application of the theorem, they often struggle: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4521525/
In non-toy domains, I think some of the best work on this is from Tetlock in Expert Political Judgment and maybe even moreso in Superforecasters. Lots of examples and methods for gauging how effective these tools are.
3Blue1Brown has an evangelic video on BT as well. I don't think 3b1b is uniquely tied to the rationalist community or anything, I think just a lot of people geek out about what a useful tool this can be:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM
He goes through the math which you know, but also talks about its use in finding shipwrecks and other domains, which you might find interesting.
You have a broader question about the usefulness of estimating priors vs. just a composite answer. Your take sounds reasonable, but I think there is good stuff suggesting that starting estimation on small components and building up is generally more powerful. Maybe from Harford or Weisenthal but... I'm not confident I have the best recommendations here so welcome any ideas from other readers.
Over-inflated sense of their own brilliance and uniqueness. There are plenty of other communities, academic and otherwise, who value logic and Bayesian thinking, without advertising that those are their underlying heuristics. The rationalist community is just particularly prone to self-congratulations.
I've been loosely in the rationalist community for about a decade (under various different names), starting on LW when it was more active. Honestly never really saw the fuss about bayes theorem, the main takeaway from it really seems to just be "take prior probability into account." I've found other concepts from rationalist sphere much more useful, like inferential distance, game theory stuff, non-central fallacy, ugh fields, etc.
Bayes seems to have become iconic as a symbolic thing more than anything else, as Eliezer wrote about the "Bayesian Conspiracy" and people made bayes t-shirts. Not because its something people actually use that much
Hi! I'm a grad student studying probabilistic ML (I like to call myself "a professional Bayesian"), and I've always been confused by this too.
I agree strongly with Oskar Mathiasen's comment above -- to me, "Bayesianism" refers to Bayesian epistemology. The core insight of Bayesianism is that it's possible to reason under uncertainty in a mathematically principled way. To do this, one uses probabilities to represent degrees of beliefs, and then updates those probabilities as new evidence is encountered. (Cox's theorem shows that probability theory is the only formalization of reasoning under uncertainty that satisfies desiderata, so the choice of using probability theory for all of this is not arbitrary.)
To me, the most important thing about Bayesianism is that it provides a theoretical framework for reasoning under uncertainty. Before Bayesian models of reasoning, people were using logical models of reasoning, where each belief had to be definitely true or definitely false. This is a very brittle reasoning system, and Bayesian reasoning presented a major advance over it.
Bayes' rule is an incredibly simple piece of mathematics, which hardly even needs a name because it is so easily derivable from other important formulas in probability theory. I don't understand why everyone is always poring over the math of Bayes' rule as if it contains some arcane secrets.
Yes, I understand that Bayes' rule provides a formula for updating one's beliefs in light of evidence. And yes, I understand that updating beliefs in light of evidence is important. But I think that's a much smaller insight than "we can represent degrees of belief as numbers and then use them to reason under uncertainty". And also, the math of Bayes' rule just isn't that interesting.
(As a final note, I don't think people are actually implementing full Bayesian updates in their brains. Bayesianism is useful as an idealization, and as a proof-of-concept that reasoning under uncertainty is possible, but it is completely intractable to do the full Bayesian update. So all practical Bayesian agents will have to be doing some approximation, and I suspect that they'll need to do so much approximation that their actual belief update won't actually look much like Bayes' rule.)
I come from a similar place, and I think you articulate this point really well. Bayesian statisticians are this band of mathematicians who like to use MCMC and hierarchical models, and rant about frequentists and their devilish pvalues (i think they’re a great bunch, but am forever biased by the fact that some of my kindest, most wonderful instructors were dedicated Bayesians). I wonder what someone like Andrew Gelman would say about this appropriation of ‘Bayesian’ by the rationalist community, as shorthand for ‘intellectually honest’. Speaking of, Andrew’s blog is phenomenal, but you might already know that.
For what it’s worth, I think Nate Silver applies the term fairly helpfully in lay discussions
See Ed Jaynes' book _Probabilty Theory: The Logic of Science_ for a nice explanation of this worldview and a start on how to use it in the real world.
Someone please correct me if I have this wrong, but I figured this approach was helpful for some concrete applications where frequentist stats isn't, like drawing conclusions from the experimental results from a dozen different clinical trials, all of which were done in a slightly different way. Or creating an AI that can learn from its environment. Eh?
Who here is currently applying Bayesian stats in their work? I'm curious to know how you do it.
People who apply this model to their own thought processes seem to be going for a greater awareness of their own uncertainty and a more careful consideration of all the variables influencing their expectations. That doesn't prevent anyone from thinking about interactions between variables.
If it all sounds very esoteric, here's a real-world example. At least one member of the fire department complained for years about the state of the under-maintained creek that runs through Talent, Oregon, pointing out that, in the unlikely event of a fire starting in the overgrown blackberries on a windy day, that fire would quickly become unstoppable and maybe even burn down our town. The city council did nothing on the basis of "not gonna happen, too expensive". And then we got a lot of dry weather, the whole west coast caught on fire including the blackberries along the creek that runs through Talent, Oregon, the wind happened to be blowing north that day, and half of Talent burned down. I know hindsight is 2020 and maybe I'm taking this a little too far, but I'd like to think that, if the city had started by considering the likelihood of a fire, and updated that likelihood based on the fires we've seen in the last few years, their decisions might have been better.
Dramatic hypotheticals aside, I figure the most fundamental benefit of the thought exercise is simply to allow for probability and uncertainty in your mode reasoning.
Bayesian modeling is a big deal in old-school machine learning, and there's a lot of data scientists/machine learning types in the original rationalist community; you can tell by the early focus on AI existential threats.
The uncharitable answer is: because the Rationalist Community is still a little too intellectually downstream of whatever random idiosyncratic things Eliezer Yudkowsky thought were particularly important when he was a teenager.
This terminological issue about making "Bayes" the name for this movement goes back many decades before Yudkowsky, and is common across academic disciplines.
You mean that deriving things from first principles people don't naturally converge on polyamorous anime loving cryonics fans?
This is an issue that philosophers of science worry about every once in a while - why do we use the name "Bayesian" when Bayes's Theorem is equally useful for alternative accounts of probability, and isn't that central to what's going on?
I believe the main reason is that Bayes proved his theorem in the middle of a paper where he wanted to infer the probability of some event that either did or did not occur in the past (in his case, something about someone throwing a billiard ball on a table with a particular spin, if I recall), and the point of the method is that one-off things like *that* can in fact have probabilities, and not just things that are elements of repeated trials.
If you have enough interest in the relevant aspects of philosophy of science, I think this is discussed quite well in John Earman's book, "Bayes or Bust?"
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/bayes-or-bust
TBH this is one of the things that turned me off of the capital-R Rationalist community, as well. All the articles on Bayes' Theorem were very clear and definitely useful; but no theorem, no matter how useful, deserves to be worshiped. When I started reading claims like "all of modern physics could be developed in a few years if only the scientists were smart enough to use Bayes' Theorem", what I heard was, "Earn millions in your spare time by following this one simple rule". You can't get any useful insights out of purely arbitrary guesses, no matter which theorem you use.
> You can't get any useful insights out of purely arbitrary guesses, no matter which theorem you use.
Practically, that doesn't seem true at all – if you're iterating at all, i.e. actually looking at the results of having made "purely arbitrary guesses", and then even somewhat systematically varying one's 'arbitrary' guesses in subsequent 'trials'.
One big implication is that it _mostly_ doesn't matter what your initial guesses are. If you're committed to actually looking at the results and changing your mind (i.e. calculating posterior probabilities which become your new priors).
Well, no, it kind of does matter. In the real world, you don't have infinite evidence, so you are not guaranteed to have enough data points for your probability estimate to converge. To put it another way, if you wanted to discover all of modern physics in a decade, you still couldn't do it, because it would take you much longer than that just to collect the evidence.
Let's use a trivial example, and say that you believe in ghosts to some degree. You turn your back for a moment, and a glass falls off your kitchen counter and shatters on the floor. What caused the fall: was it a ghost, or an earthquake (let's pretend like these are the only two choices) ? How many data points would you need to collect to conclude that it was an earthquake after all, if your P(ghost) = 0.999, as opposed to 0.001 ?
You're right – arbitrarily strong priors can be arbitrarily difficult to update and thus converge on the 'truth'.
I wasn't thinking of 'adversarial' examples like that.
But you claim that you read things like "all of modern physics could be developed in a few years if only the scientists were smart enough to use Bayes' Theorem" whereas I remember "the scientists were smart enough" as something more like 'if scientists were Bayesian superintelligences'.
But again, I wrote "If you're committed to actually looking at the results and changing your mind ..." which theoretically covers someone changing their mind even given an extremely strong prior about, e.g. the existence of ghosts.
In the real world, most people are not in fact either "committed to actually looking at the results" or even really open at all to changing their minds.
But also in the real world, people really can and _do_ change their minds, update on evidence, and even overcome extremely strong prior beliefs. The fact they don't do so for _every_ belief, or even that many at all, over the span of a lifetime, doesn't seem to detract from the point that doing so is in a very real sense a (good) model of rational thinking, i.e. believing true (and useful) things.
So, inflation. Top economists disagree on the topic. Naive arguments suggest there should obviously be inflation. Will there be? For anyone with savings, anyone nearing retirement or in retirement, this is probably the most important topic to get right at the moment.
I think no, and am implicitly betting on this with my asset allocations.
My model of inflation: inflation is determined by the interaction of "the total amount of goods produced and services rendered" and "the amount of money circulating." Most people only focus on the latter - if the former goes up, inflationary pressure is reduced.
Furthermore, most people (including top economists) neglect the fact that recessions (particularly ones with credit crunches) *destroy money*. There's more money-like instruments than you learned in Macro 101.
While I don't think it goes far enough, the U.S. Federal Reserve's recent adoption (last year) of an Average Inflation Targeting framework is a good development. If they follow it, they will not only try to prevent too much inflation from happening, but also if they mess up, push harder in the next period.
> What happens if goods and/or services go down while circulating money goes up. Prices of everything goes up I assume?
Yes - more money chasing after fewer goods and services -> prices get bid up.
> what does the economy look like if services go down while goods go up and credit goes down?
Depends on the balance!
There are ideas that say roughly what you did - that money going to different sectors out of proportion to their productivity (malinvestment) causes problems. But they are contentious.
I would say having one currency be half of every transaction allows for tradeoffs to be made between goods and services, and that this is beneficial.
I meant "having a single currency, i.e. the way things are now, is beneficial relative to a multiple-currencies-per-sector" approach. "One" was ambiguous!
There is about $18T in negative-yield debt that agrees with your assessment.
The response in the US to the coronavirus-induced recession seems to have not allowed much money to be destroyed.
Destroy money?
I think a big part of the issue is a disagreement on what “inflation” even means at this point. Focusing on the US, let’s say things like food and consumer goods continue to be cheap, but land/home values (particularly in cities), stocks and other assets, as well as important necessities like healthcare costs continue to rise significantly. Is that inflation? The Consumer Price Index currently says “no”, but the average experience of someone on the ground could very well be “yes”, for example, if they’ve been saving up for their first home.
The question underlying a lot of this, IMO, is an argument as to whether the US government’s recent propensity for printing lots of money is the primary force behind the rise in these prices.
The matrix whose principal eigenvector is inflation, whose second eigenvector corresponds to cost disease..
Think there is a pretty compelling argument that stocks and home prices are going up due to low interest rates and low bond yields (since money doesn't really have anywhere else to go). Doubt that has very much to do with healthcare costs though, costs there have been rising like crazy for decades and don't seem to care at all about what's going on in the rest of the economy.
Land, stocks, and purchases of old homes aren't a part of GDP.
I have read the theory that over the last two decades, there has been inflation in assets, goods and services that are not easily imported / are not subsidized (food). If you think about it, it somewhat makes sense. Housing, higher education, health care, professional services: all stuff that has gone up in price significantly.
Consumer goods (which are mainly made in Asia / Mexico), and food (which comes from Mexico or is subsidized) have not risen in price nearly as much.
I agree and this makes intuitive sense to me. Any pointers to the places you read this from would be helpful.
I find it a bit hard to know what to do with this information, though.
The biggest question as always is "How much risk does this introduce into all these non-CPI instruments?"
The Federal Reserve preferred metric in measuring broad inflation is core Personal Consumption Expenditures which excludes food and energy. There has been notable deflation in the price of household goods that is likely the result of globalized supply chains which allow US-based consumers to access low cost manufacturing capacity outside the country (think TVs and cars). While the deflationary influence of goods has kept the core PCE within a tight and acceptable range since the mid-1990s, it's hard to argue that there has not been a significant reduction in purchasing power for many important things, like higher education, healthcare, financial assets and very recently lumber (https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/lumber-price?op=1).
Financial assets, in particular, have been supported by the low / zero interest rate policy enacted by the FED. That most of the developed world is pursuing a similar policy has kept the value of the USD reasonably stable (until recently) and maintained our relative purchasing power. Intermediate and long term interest rates, as represented by US Treasuries, have been rising recently (5, 10 and 30yr rates over 30 bps higher in a month). I believe the market has started discounting a removal of extraordinary fiscal stimulus, a normalization of the interest rate policy, and (just maybe this time) inflation. I believe that the debt load on corporations and the federal and state governments limits the degree to which the govt/treasury/fed can allow rates to rise as a large rise would make refinancing existing debt prohibitively expensive. Perhaps this is the mechanism that finally pushes inflation over 2% as the FED's usual tool to contain inflation is limited. However, these are all one-sided interpretations and there are plenty of good ones that suggest that sustained inflation is far off like capacity utilization and wage growth.
The US has not seen rising inflation in 40 years. There is even a relatively new ideology among macro economists called Modern Monetary Theory that (simplistically stated) posits that debt is inconsequential to the US as long as the US dollar remains the reserve currency of the world economy. Perhaps that's right, but it smells like "this time is different" to me and rationalization for continuing the credit and debt driven expansionary policies that have led to inflationary disasters in the past. My opinion is that the most important property of inflation is that it is a very non-linear process. The current mantra among FED governors is that they will allow inflation to run "hot" for a time, perhaps up to 2 years before deploying measures to contain it. I am fearful that the limitation on traditional inflation-fighting tools and their academic hubris will be insufficient to put the toothpaste back in the tube. My investments reflect my view in the form of cryptocurrencies, energy and uranium equities, and agricultural futures. I will buy precious metals if they find some stability.
"fed can allow rates to rise as a large rise would make refinancing existing debt prohibitively expensive."
The rate of inflation going from 2% to 4% would decrease the amount of debt in real terms and also substantially increase tax revenue. That's something to keep in mind. The Fed isn't going to raise rates for no reason. They are going to raise rates because the rate of inflation is increasing.
The CBO projects that net interest outlays to service the federal debt will more than double "from an estimated $290 billion in 2021 to $664 billion in 2030." (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56910).
The CBO also projected in March 2020 that the average interest rate on US Treasury debt would remain below 3% through 2030 (https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2020-03/56165-CBO-debt-primer.pdf).
The 2030 net interest outlays would climb by 35% by 2030 if borrowing costs rise by 10 bps every year for the next 10 years which, if inflation is running above 2% for some time, seems like it would be a pretty nice outcome. Would tax revenue also go up sufficiently to pay for a 3x increase in debt service costs in this scenario? If not, would the government reduce spending to accommodate the rising costs (ha!)?
If inflation was to rise to 4%, where are interest rates and how substantial is the tax revenue increase? The sensitivity of costs to just a mild rise in interest rates leads me to believe that the FED would under-react to a moderate to large inflationary rise which could lead to even more inflation.
(when people refer to the banks wanting low inflation what is meant is that this is what their most powerful clients want: yagaoMEGHIRU(ii) stood still .. looked intently into här radiating eyes: volcker's constituents, in this sense, are the institutional bond holders .. large fund distributors: they want low, stable inflation: the banks .. credit corporations, to varying degrees depending on their model, profit off of volatility: they don't care which way rates are moving, so long as they are moving: this is what pushes capital through the system .., in consequence, through the conduits: the derivatives constructed by the u_agents were self-adjusting hybrids with built in shock switches allowing for the propulsion flows of supply shocks to propagate in predetermined manner: these were what were referred to at the time as 'invisible distances', the channels through which unexpected flows would be transformed into expected flows): ((__)(criminal (re enron)) the u_agents operated according to the regulation of a modular guild of actor/agencies, without any centralized control: enforcement of guild protocol was implemented via fines or strictures in minor cases, or suspension or banishment in major ones: disputes were moderated via internal arbitration: banishment was enforced via lobotical procedures referred to as 'clipping': the megamen could be fairly called 'micromechanics' in the full let's-blow-everything-out sense of the word: they were, by dual mandate, agents for the management of approaches in .. around what get passed off as non-equilibrium systems, .. were responsible for the regulation of inter-coordinations between multiple of these systems with overlapping parameters: people are fond of referring to the emergence of 'the madness' in respect to the buildup to the financial crisis).
It's not a sure thing, but if anything has challenged my traditional Austrian economics (amateur status to be sure) worldview, it's glancing at a negative yield for 50 year Swiss debt.
I just checked out the real Josh Hawley's twitter, and after scrolling through several pages the only thing I found offensive was his support for an increased minimum wage. What am I missing?
Lately I've been playing a lot of Civilization 4 with the Fall from Heaven 2 mod. I know there's at least a couple of people here who are fans. I play with the More Naval AI mod personally.
What's everyone's favorite civilization? Of the ones I've tried, I've really like the Luchuirp and the Calabim, they've just got such fun mid-late game mechanics. I'm thinking of learning a civ with a great early game rush, anyone got a preference there? Hippus, Doviello or Grigori seem like good candidates.
Anyone have a good method for playing modded multiplayer Civ IV these days?
Amurites are fun in an OP kind of way; once you get Firebows it's almost too easy.
Illians are definitely their own thing. The mechanic centering around The Draw, where you sacrifice a lot of your productive capacity and make everyone declare war on you, in the hopes that if you survive long enough you can ascend Auric and become invincible, is a lot of fun. If you haven't played them yet I would recommend.
I have a soft spot for the Malakim - the most rationalist civ! They're also the most likely to get Chalid, who's one of the game's best heroes.
If you get the right modmods, you can play as the Mechanos and have ornithopters.
Some strategies I've had fun with: Lanun into Infernals. Go all out on science and summon Hyborem long before others can deal with him. Raze your way into overpowered specialist economy supercities and conquer the world.
Heroes to beeline with a variety of civs: Duin Halfmorn (pair with a dwarven civ for grabbing the excellent Dwarven Druids just one tech further). The three Giants from Pact of the Nilhorn. Chalid, as mentioned.
Luchiurp + Kilmorph makes gold a non-issue and you can expand Civ3 ICS style. And even your worker golems can end up throwing fireballs, it's just too easy.
Svartalfar + Fellowship is fun but the 'Hunting' knowledge path is hard to pursue. Nevertheless it's pretty cool to capture a bunch of animals and build zoos in every single city, sometimes from your own summons.
Balseraphs are pretty cool. For flavor points you *should* play with insanity, having three traits is worth it anyway.
Holy shit I can't believe other ACX people (including Scott!) are into FFH. I thought it was some forgotten mod from some forgotten game no one but me cared about.
I recommand Magister's ModMod, he's still making it 15 years later and it's imbued with flavor. It integrates more naval, bugfixes and more.
As far as balance is concerned it's pretty established the Doviello get the short end of the stick and the first civ to get Chalid Astrakein is guaranteed to win.
Maybe we can crowdsource the funds so that you can take the $100,000 bet against vitamin D?
Maybe we could start a market where we could make predictions about these kind of things. Call it a guessing market?
Precognition market? Techno-diction market? I'm sure the marketing wizards will come up with something.
Yep was thinking the same. This seems like a perfect use-case for crowdfunding, via a smart contract or just, and probably easier at this point, some other plain crowdfunding platform
Yep, I'd kick in and I bet quite a few others would as well. $100k-worth? No idea.
I have a friend in his mid 20s who thinks he might have had dyslexia his whole life but was never diagnosed because he was capable enough in other modes of thinking to work around it in several ways. I've seen him read aloud and he reads pretty slowly+haltingly, misreads a lot, has to go back, etc. You wouldn't know it unless you watched him read, though. He's a very successful computer programmer; when I asked whether he has issues reading his own code he said he mostly uses the indentation/shape of the code to figure out where he is.
He is hesitant to get a formal diagnosis for several reasons, but he is looking for advice. Does anyone have a suggestion for good resources he could use to learn more about whether he does have some kind of dyslexia, and if so, what he can do to improve his reading ability? Past the obvious results it's hard to know what to trust in google results. He is about to start graduate school where he will have to read a lot of papers and textbooks and is worried he won't be able to read quickly enough.
Many dyslexics find some fonts more readable than others. Strangely enough, many say that Comic Sans is the easiest to read. This probably doesn't apply much to papers and textbooks, but could come in handy for situations where the text is on a computer and the font can be changed.
Text abd background colour make a difference. I know people who have coloured films to put over what they're reading.
A text to voice programme that will read out loud what he wants to read.
My son is dyslexic. A laptop has been wonderful. There are many text to voice programmes out there. IMHO a dyslexia diagnosis is useful if you want to access support from institutions eg a reader/writer in an exam or a note-taker during lectures but not that useful for the person with dyslexia.
There are some forms of dyslexia that seem to be strictly physical - for that form of dyslexia, there are structures in the eye that are asymmetric in normal people, but more symmetric in dyslexics, which then frustrates the brain trying to synthesize the images into what you see and so on. Apparently that form of dyslexia is helped by closing one eye to eliminate the difficulty of choice issue the too-symmetric structure causes.
1. I'm interested in funding part of a Rootclaim bet (say, up to 25k) if the rest can be raised and terms agreed upon - probably give some share of winnings like 10-20% to the debater and the rest to the funders. Debater should probably have some stake in it as well.
2. There was a similar suggestion on Hacker News (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25587410) for the Rootclaim bet on their claim that COVID-19 originated in a lab. I might be interested in funding a team against that as well.
I'll put in another 25K, so if we can find two other people willing to commit at that level, or bargain them down to 50K, sounds like we have a plan.
I'm reading their page on the bet and not seeing anything about a "debater" - can you link me to what that's about?
I'll check for sources in a bit, it's spread across several pages on the blog, but basically their terms are a 6+ hour debate that's judged by mutually agreeable people
https://blog.rootclaim.com/100000-syria-debate-challenge
This talks about a debate. It could be the 100k challenge on vitamin D doesn't involve a debate?
They also say for people involved in public debate already they might go down to 10k, which likely includes you, so try contacting them and see.
Hm, see https://twitter.com/Rootclaim/status/1364653518389473281?s=19
So the vitamin D challenge is based on public health recommendations but they're open to a debate.
I would put in another 25k
Here's the Rootclaim lab leak page,
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/what-is-the-source-of-covid-19-sars-cov-2
(for others)
I had to disable the ACX-tweaks chrome extension because it had the odd effect of hiding all of the comment text from most of the comments. I love the *format* it gives to comments but I'd kind of like to be able to read their *content* as well, so... :-(
Ah, sometimes it does that before everything loads? If it's still an issue, just disable the "Apply comment styling" option, which should fix it. (I'm working on overall stability fixes too.)
Aha, that fixed it! Thanks!
I had this same issue. Thank you for the explanation and the extension!
I offer to bet $100 that Vitamin D treats COVID as specified by Rootclaim against Scott. I think it's more likely than not that Vitamin D is reasonably effective. If Scott's not interested, I'll make the same bet once against anyone else I know personally.
I’m confused about Scott’s issue with betting against Rootclaim. If someone offers a certain specification for a bet, an offers to bet X units of currency in those conditions, isn’t it natural to say “I like that bet, but I’m only OK betting Y”?
Isn’t it a built-in feature of betting on *money* that you can pick the amount separate from the conditions and odds?
(Jason, that wasn’t really a question for you—though you’re welcome to enlighten me—I just piggy-backed on your comment since it was the first I noticed on that subject.)
The institution has declared a specific $100,000 challenge: https://twitter.com/Rootclaim/status/1364653518389473281?s=19
Got it, thank you.
Scott: on your point #1 there was an article in the New Yorker recently which seems pertinent.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others
Bottom line, the pattern of excess deaths in India (and many other countries) does not seem consistent with large numbers of unreported covid deaths. If do, the IFR has large geographic variation even above the effects of demographics. The reason Is not clear but the article does present evidence that some degree of prior immunity may be present (in Asia and Africa but not the Americas). In any case, the addition to your mistakes page may be premature.
It surely makes a difference that these countries have much younger populations than the US.
It does. But this is not sufficient. Eg India’s population pyramid is similar to Mexico’s but reported IFR differs by an order of magnitude. One possible answer is that covid deaths have been undercounted but the excess death data (discussed in the article) does not seem consistent with this hypothesis. In which case IFR has large geographic variantion even beyond the effects of demographics
This paper has an interesting hypothesis (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/obr.13221?casa_token=PF-2gTd9O34AAAAA%3A_7LPuPoKHpavKndYaXgntglPQI1_StZ77ou1LDR8EIxj8OkEcEN3f6BPsDOJ7hPluSIvbACMJx1cz_JA) Of course, it is also calling for further study. If correct and considering the 2018 UNC study that only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy, it could help explain some of the relative COVID outcome here.
The big puzzle there IMO is that Indian immigrants to wealthy countries have an extremely high risk of Covid mortality. The same is true of basically every sunny equatorial country. Low risk in the home country, high risk for immigrants from that country to the North. This is the exact same ethnogeographic pattern as Ricketts.
https://shotwell.ca/posts/africa-covid/
Also schizophrenia. Black Africans have exactly normal rate, blacks in UK have about 10x normal rate. Usual explanation is racism but there's a substantial minority who think it's Vitamin D or some other sunlight-related issue.
MS is another one that follows this pattern. I think with schizophrenia there's a lot of plausible causal stories around racism, education, and how the condition manifests or is diagnosed in the different regions. It's much harder to find that with Covid because you would expect mortality rates in low and middle-income countries to be higher because of worse medical care and higher rates of diseases like HIV. The only three explanations that make any sense to me are vitamin D, Ivermectin use, or enormous undercounting of mortality in developing countries.
"Racism causes delusional break from reality"
I mean, it's probably to be expected nowadays, but WHAT? "Yea yea we didn't even bother to try for a mechanism, fuck racism tho"
Yes. This is one of the strongest bits of (indirect) evidence for the vitamin D hypothesis. But of course it doesn’t have to be vitamin D, could be anything linked to sunlight. Eg I’ve seen speculation that it is actually melatonin
Yeah, or nitros oxide, the difference is that we have quite a lot of non-ecological evidence that vitamin D is involved in Covid. https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/
I thought the other most interesting hypothesis mentioned in that article is that while moderate overcrowding (many people to a home, with standard developed-world distances between homes) is extremely bad for covid (because people get really high viral doses if they share a bedroom with an infected person), the extreme overcrowding common in slums in Africa and India (many individual beds within a few feet of each other, in separate shanties, in a large slum) may actually be really good for covid (because people get really low viral doses from people sleeping nearby but separated by the outdoors from them).
"They found that the total number of “all cause” deaths reported between May and August almost doubled in India compared with the same period in each of the past five years."
C'mon, that's obviously underreporting.
Nope. If you read the next sentence they point out that the breakdown by age and sex doesn’t fit unreported covid deaths. Fits quite well to lockdown deaths (untreated other diseases, deprivation etc) but not Covid, which is the topic under discussion.
There are no such things as "lockdown deaths".
If you read the whole sentence instead of stopping after the first six words you will see that I spell out what I mean by lockdown deaths. Specifically, other diseases that go untreated because of lockdowns (the article specifically mentions untreated tuberculosis as a significant contributor to all cause mortality), deprivation (people that lose their livelihoods because of lockdown - note India did not have any trillion dollar bailouts) etc. That's twice in two comments that you've deliberately plucked quotes out of context to fit your narrative (but to make exactly the opposite point as the source material). That pattern, plus your profile picture, makes me think you are the same commenter as `Enopoletus' on DSL, whom I blocked after concluding he was not there in good faith. Since I don't want the aggravation of arguing with a presumed bad faith commenter, I'm going to take the same policy here, and will henceforth cease to engage with `Eharding'
I like the hearts voting system. I just wish the "top first" sorting actually worked
"Top first" works perfectly by pure power of tautology.
It works as designed (ie. puts things near the top based on a combination of number of hearts, how recently it was post and black magic), it just doesn't work the way you would actually like it to work.
The hearts option for some reason makes me miss the lack of a downvote button more than I did on the old website (presumably because my brain goes into reddit mode more now), so I actually find it mildly annoying for that reason.
Has anyone read Brian Muraresku's Immortality Key? About psychedelics as the ancient root of religions
I'm struggling to get through it. It feels like lots of tenuous threads strung together with wishful thinking
I haven't read it, but based on your description I'd recommend that you stop.
Lol ok I will
I'm not going to read the book, but I did enjoy Muraresku's podcast with Andrew Sullivan (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/brian-muraresku-on-psychedelics-and).
It reminded of Bryan Caplan's quote about Robin Hanson:
> When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is “Eh, maybe.” Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is “No way! Impossible!” Then I think about it for years.
Muraresku's theory: I'm doubtful! But I'll never think about stories of ancient rituals the same way.
Haven't read it, makes me wonder if this is like Robert Graves' "The White Goddess". Yes you can have an over-riding "one big idea" and string a lot of disparate elements together and be very convincing, but that doesn't make it right.
I think psychedelics/shamanism do have something to do with "varieties of religious experience" as the man said, but you can go too hard on that and end up with "all religion is mental disease, St Paul thought he was having a religious experience on the road to Damascus when it was just epilepsy" type conclusions. Or the opposite extreme, which is that everyone should get drunk/high and experience Cosmic Truth and that will somehow solve all the problems of society once we are all off our faces as many hours in the day as feasible.
Okay, please pardon the swearing, but I looked this up to see what it was about and what did I see as publisher's blurb? Oh holy fuck, here we go again:
"A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations."
Oh goody. Yet another one of these. Like Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code" and the pseudo-history guff that was based on, or yet another Gnostic popularisation book put out by Bart Ehrman or Elaine Pagels.
Then I keep reading and see that the foreword is by Graham Hancock. Graham. Hancock. The pseudoarchaeology guy, the Erich von Daniken des nos jours. Well, that tells me what I need to know about the level of academic rigour and scholarship involved.
And then I see this pile of steaming crap that I can't even dignify as horse manure because at least horse manure can be used as fertiliser for the roses:
"There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist – the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found."
Hey guys, I have something else of that ilk for you. Did you know the bowl that Alexander allegedly drank wine from before his death has never been found? That means Alexander never existed! There is zero archaeological evidence for what cornflakes Rameses the Great ate for breakfast! As for the complete bollocks of theological understanding of what the Eucharist is - but I have said enough already. I don't know what the hell "archaeological evidence" for the Eucharist they expect, unless it's something like digging up a goblet neatly labelled "cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, signed Pontius Pilate". There are documents such as the Didache, from the first century, which give a description of basic Christian ceremonies and teachings, including the Eucharist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didache#Eucharist
I hope to Christ this is just the usual publisher's nonsense but if it's anything expressive of the contents of the book, then this is indeed The Usual Tripe.
This is how I feel reading the book
I swear to God, if I had a tenner for every "This will shake the Church to its foundations" that I've seen, my bank balance would rival that of Jeff Bezos.
You're right it's psychedelic da vinci code
> There is zero archaeological evidence for what cornflakes Rameses the Great ate for breakfast!
WHAT YOU SAY !!! My life is a lie ! Heh.
That said though, admittedly I'm an atheist, but still: if a person told me that God spoke to him and literally ordered him to carry out some specific series of instructions, I'd assume that he was mentally ill, not holy. I have a feeling (though I could be wrong) that most Christians would make the same decision... but... why ? I know there are lots of explanations to the extent of "God used to talk to people in the past but doesn't anymore" or "actually God's voice is more like a feeling in your heart and not a literal audible voice", but... do Christians really find these extra-Biblical assumptions satisfying ?
On top of that, we don't have the Pharaohs' corn flakes, but we've got a lot more evidence for theirs and/or Alexander's existence than we do for pretty much any ancient religious figure (plus or minus Pythagoras). Obviously, if one has faith, that isn't an issue in any way, but can you really blame people for wanting more ?
I think St Paul is a counterexample.
Okay, I have two things here: the spiritual effects of the Eucharist, and the physical elements.
This guy is seemingly trying to push the notion that all (?) religions got started by the use and effects of drugs, in particular psychedelic drugs. That's not wholly incorrect; if we look at, for example, the ecstatic cult of Dionysus that involves the notion of intoxication and unity with the god. That's wine, though, and although there are apparently suggestions that "entheogens" were admixed, that's scholarly speculation (so "zero archaeological evidence", to quote the blurb above): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian_Mysteries#Role_of_wine
Other religions do include the use of similar intoxicants; bhang and datura associated with the worship of Shiva, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/lifestyle/shiva-s-flora-738216 or the drink consumed on the festival of Holi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thandai
Now here is where I start swearing like a trooper again. That publisher's blurb about the wine used in the Eucharist is so mangled, I can only hope it is a poorly-understood paraphrase thrown together by an unpaid intern and not a direct quote:
"the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus"
I'm not going to go into the spiritual effects of the Eucharist, my quarrel here is with the nonsense regarding the physical elements.
(1) The Eucharistic elements are bread and wine, not wine alone
(2) The Eucharistic ritual is based loosely on the Passover seder, see the typical meal, and unless we're expected to indulge in some "nudge-nudge, wink-wink, bitter herbs, herbs = herbal medicine = drugs, Harold", I don't think there's much room there for "it wasn't wine they consumed"
(3) The implication or assumption or whatever the hell is going on here is that the Sabbath/Sunday gathering and ritual meal of the early Christians involved consumption of intoxicants in the setting. Well, the only intoxicant was wine in the meeting and they weren't glugging that down. In fact, some denominations are so anti-alcohol that they even replaced the wine with grape juice: https://www.umc.org/en/content/communion-and-welchs-grape-juice
(4) There *was* a separate meal later, the agape or love-meal, and yeah that did lead to problems at times; there are notes of criticism of people taking advantage, replicating social strata where all were supposed to be equal, and getting drunk/over-eating. The fact that getting drunk *was* rebuked shows that it was *not* part of the intention of the rite. From St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (they seem to have been the problem children of the early Church):
"20 When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. 21 For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. 22 What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not."
And straight after this, St. Paul describes what is the Lord's Supper/Eucharist:
"23 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for[f] you. Do this in remembrance of me.”[g] 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."
(5) In support of that, this excerpt from Pliny's letter of the first century asking for advice on what to do if he encounters Christians in his duties as governor:
"They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food--but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition."
So that's our "archaeological evidence", as far as it goes. If what the author or whoever threw this unholy mess together wants is some Indiana Jones type to dig up a wine vessel labelled "Communion wine for J. Christ and twelve others", they're out of luck. That's like asking for archaeological evidence of the wine I drank with Christmas dinner last December, that bottle has long since gone into the bottle bank and been recycled and I don't have photos, videos or anything but my bare word that yep, I drank wine with my dinner.
What this guy is doing is the equivalent of something I've run across before; do you know why Santa Claus is dressed in red and white? Because those are the colours of fly agaric mushrooms, used in shamanic rituals. That's why we associate flying reindeer with Santa Claus!
Except that the popular image of "Santa Claus" comes from the American poem in 1823, "'Twas the night before Christmas", where Santa is the jolly old elf dressed in red. So the entire line of 'reasoning', if we can use that word in association with what is going on here, falls completely flat. Unless, again, we want to assert that if you, Bugmaster, say you drank a can of Coke, what you really mean is that you did a line of cocaine.
*insert entire fecking string of eye-rolling emojis here*
Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm not defending whatever cockamaime silliness that guy is pushing. I'm just saying that you can't blame people for thinking, "look, we all know that Jesus is our Lord, but wouldn't it be nice if there was as much evidence of him as there is of Alexander, Rameses, or heck even Hammurabi". The same goes for specific religious ceremonies.
HAVE I GOT THE CHANNEL FOR YOU! Did Jesus exist? Yes, probably:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_hD3xK4hRY
But as I said, I'm staying away from the spiritual/religious angle and just concentrating on the physical elements. Now, I don't know what the kykeon in the Elusinian Mysteries was compounded of, nobody has the recipe book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kykeon
That it probably had something in it to get the participants high? Well, not impossible, we don't know. Our pal here would probably be very enthusiastic on that point about "see, see? proves my point!"
But what everyone *does* agree on is that it was a drink, usually barley-based (now I have the vision of people getting high on Robinson's Barley Water which is something else entirely). What that excerpt above is doing is like saying "nah nah bruh, it wasn't no drink, it was shrooms!" (or whatever).
You can make a definitive statement in response to that "you're full of it, mate", whether or not you believe in Kore and Demeter. The rationalising explanation of the longevity of religious beliefs is that they were based on ecstatic experiences which the participants took as evidence of the presence of the god or whatever the sacred doctrine was, because they had been transported out of themselves, and that this experience was drug-fuelled.
It could indeed be, but that doesn't take into account the altered state of mind that can be achieved without drugs when participating in rites structured to be impactful (I'm wincing at using that word, but however) and accompanied by genuine faith in what was happening. People can *theorise* that "it must be ergot, it must be psychedelics" but there is no actual *evidence* of the kind that they are touting above.
Suggest you try "The Road to Eleusis" by Ruck, Hofmann, and Wasson - about LSD and the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Reserving my right to comment that this is once again a theory based on a particular foundational assumption - people must have been experiencing a chemically-induced high - and is no more than that, and if the assumption is incorrect then so is the theory.
The traces of ergot-infected grains in the ritual spaces is certainly interesting and may be indicative, but given that one of the co-authors of the above, Albert Hofmann, is the one to synthesise LSD, it does seem like rather a hobbyhorse of the persons involved. Someone else might claim that the 'secret' of the Mysteries was sparkly unicorn dust, or glove puppets, or UFOs, or whatever *their* hobbyhorse might be.
It is probably rash and too far of me to claim I could link in leprechauns with the Mysteries, but once let me establish a linkage with the attendants of Hephaestus and I can leap off from there. Does that 'prove' that the secret of the Mysteries was small Irish shoemakers?
What do people do when they are feeling demotivated? What with the pandemic and everything work feels pointless and absurd in a kafkaesque sense. How does one make tasks feel meaningful without external sensory feedback?
This surely won't work for everyone, but I once heard somebody ask "Who says you have to feel like doing something to do it?" and it stuck with me.
Another, possibly better suggestion: do something you liked as a kid or teenager. My version of this: getting back into a style of music I really liked then.
I do things I don't feel like doing all the time, the problem is that it requires a lot of mental energy and effort, which limits how many tasks I can do.
Yes, this is about right. It is hard to muster up much concern about anything when the end result is that I will return to dust in 0-30 years. Yet, I persist in trying to raise my kids as kindly as I can, and treat others with courtesy. We may be all doomed but I'd rather be the musicians on the Titanic than the panicking masses.
I've always been a fan of Voltaire's Candide. Everything might be pointless, but I can work here, in this one small corner of the universe, and shape it to my liking.
Also--can you change jobs? Perhaps the reason your work feels pointless is because you need a change. Even looking around job sites might give you either a new appreciation for the job you have, or the impetus to start applying.
Limit the work done to the bare minimum so you don't get fired. Streamline it to be as efficient as possible (this makes it more interesting by itself), use spare time to do something more interesting. WFH makes this a lot easier than on-site work.
Alternatively, begin training/pivoting into a job that feels meaningful, possibly using time gained from #1.
Beeminder.
There are a few things I do depending on the type of demotivation.
If I am lacking motivation to work on something that I want to work on, meaning I want to have the motivation to do it because it is something I like doing, I will try to think about what my future self wishes I had done. If I find it hard to do the work out of anxiety I will try to break the task into the easiest pieces. If I find it hard to do the work because it is boring I will challenge my self to do a small piece of it and often tell my self things like "I can do anything for 5 minutes". This often works well for endurance/aerobic exercise, though is less useful for work or academic pursuits.
I also have tried somethings from Acceptance Commitment Therapy. Particularly, writing out what I want my future life to look like (in relation to the task I am demotivated to do or similar tasks) and then reread that desired future many times. This helps visualize the positive things about task and reinforce the behaviors that I desire.
I also will take a more heavy handed/mean approach with myself. I may think to myself about how much of a loser I am for not doing something, or how I will be a failure if I dont do something. I am proven to depress so this is not a good tactic in the long run. but I have found it very effective at getting me out of bed in the morning to exercise.
If you are not motivated because you see no purpose to the activity things are a bit harder. I would focus on the task, not as "work" with an overarching purpose, but as work that can be mastered or done well. If you have to write an email, just thing about how you can best write that email and ignore the larger context. Or if you have to schedule a meeting, just think about that single meeting and nothing else, not even the content of the meeting. If you do small things really well, your general mood and outlook towards these tasks is likely to improve and you may be more motivated to do them in the future.
Regarding the Covid-19 death toll and comparisons:
1. Cutting through the hyperbolic/jingoistic hyperbole from so many sources, one fact remains clear: the differences in national outcomes is the key point. Why the shocking disparities? e.g. USA and UK (and other advanced nations) at one end of the spectrum, with Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, at the other.
Some countries lie, others lack the means for accurate tallies, a few tell the truth. That's why the Spanish Flu of 1918-21 mortality ranged from guesses of from 50 - 100 million. The same is true for this outbreak. We might never know because of the duplicity of China, Russia, and perhaps India.
2. Leadership. It's all about leadership. Clowns like Xi, Trump, and Boris are amongst the greatest mass murderers of the 21st century. History will not remember them kindly. Leadership counts.
3. So let's stop focusing on meaningless mass comparisons. Focus on the individual losses. I know. My 34 year old daughter was one of the casualties.
Re: #3 - that's terrible to hear. What an awful thing to have to go through!
Re: #1 and #2 - I think most people are underweighting the effect of random chance. When I was a kid my home town got hit by a tornado. A street where my friend lived had houses on one side totally destroyed and houses on the other side untouched. We can imagine them asking, "What did the north side of the street do differently?!"
Suppose someone with a job at nursing home took a COVID test, got a negative, and went to work. But the negative was a false negative, and they wind up infecting many residents. This person acted responsibly, but random chance wound up taking hundreds of lives. The exponential nature of the virus's spread means that random events get amplified to terrible proportions.
This is not to say there weren't policy and leadership failures - I am livid about them! But again, I think the effect of chance is underrated.
On #1 it's less random chance and more just a conscious and dichotomous choice. Among first-world economies, the countries whose leadership made the decision to eliminate the virus all eventually eliminated the virus, while all those who didn't make a decision to eliminate the virus have all continued to suffer ongoing waves of it, all with roughly similar results.
Luck did play a role in the early days of the pandemic in determining which countries had an easy path towards elimination and which ones had a difficult path. New Zealand was playing the game on easy mode, not just because it was isolated with a small population, but because the first stage of the pandemic took place during summer so there were still very few cases in late March when the country took the decision to eliminate through lockdown.
Did Canada and Germany make different decisions than Australia on this, or did they just exist in situations where they couldn't succeed in eliminating? They seem to have done quite a bit better than most of their neighbors nevertheless.
In deaths per million terms, Germany has 842 compared to 1323 for France or 1157 for Poland; a bit better but less than a factor of two.
Canada has done the best out of the major rich countries that didn't actively attempt to eliminate it, with 579, nearly a factor of three better than their only neighbour the USA. Still, it's a big gap between there and the successes of the "eliminationist" countries, the worst off of which is Japan with 62.
Did Japan attempt elimination? My understanding is that Japan just attempted curve-flattening, and had much better results anyway.
Poland's actual deaths are twice as high as its reported deaths: https://github.com/dkobak/excess-mortality
Xi? Rly? China's death toll has been ~5K, and there's no reason to doubt that. The government didn't react as quickly as it could have, but it was tough to know how deadly the virus would be in January. Replace Xi with Putin; Russia and probably Belarus' have the highest COVID deaths as a percentage of the population in the world.
China. A "truth-teller"? Only 5k deaths? Nothing to see here? Read this article, and then comment from knowledge, not forelock-tugging:
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/02/asia/china-wuhan-covid-truthtellers-intl-hnk-dst/
I hope to read more of Scott's writing on Effective Altruism-adjacent topics. One topic in particular: how did the economic fall out of the pandemic affected the world's poorest people, and what changes to charity donations should be made based on this.
Dr. Jason Fung articulates the science behind intermittent fasting pretty well. It is based on the hormonal theory of obesity.
Other than his hugely popular books on that and diabetes, he's also written a book called "The longevity solution", in which the chapter on salt says something controversial. It says that decreasing salt intake to keep blood pressure under check is unnecessary and possibly even harmful to health!
In my view, he implies that the recommendation to reduce salt that cardiologists make (for hypertension), is a confusion about the data.
Would love your opinion on that. A relevant article :
https://www.dietdoctor.com/the-truth-about-salt
The field of nutrition has problematic evidentiary standards.
The field of nutrition as expressed by random doctors (especially doctors who feel the need to tell you that they are doctors) selling diet books is pretty much safe to disregard in its entirety. If they are ever correct, it will be by accident.
Another good heuristic is that an article entitled "The Truth About X" is many orders of magnitude less likely to be true than an article just entitled "X"
Dr. Fung seems pretty hood with data. He is simply explaining different studies out there. I could not fo that for myself, as I don't have a background in biology. So I'd not be good at judging studies in it.
Dr. Fung's main focus is helping obese patients with diabetes or at risk for diabetes, lose weight.
Oh, and one noe thing...Fung has used intermittent fasting successfully to help thousands of people lose weight. So, it is not an untested idea.
Any diet works, as long as you stick to it. IF (perhaps surprisingly) does a good job controlling hunger, so it has a decent success rate that can be explained for that reason alone.
However, my experience trying IF is that it is terrible for athletic performance: I lost lots of strength, and when I went off the diet to regain strength, I gained back *all* the weight I lost. So it was a complete failure for improving my composition.
I had much better results simply by eating nutritious, satiating foods on a normal schedule: lean meats, vegetables, fruits, whole grains.
As for the salt question: I've read other articles calling into question whether low-salt actually improves health outcomes for patients with high blood pressure. I feel like it's fair to be skeptical of the low-salt intake recommendations.
" when I went off the diet to regain strength, I gained back *all* the weight I lost"
That's the problem with every diet out there. It's not too hard to go on a diet and lose weight, but sticking to the diet is hard, and once you fall off any bit, then all the weight (plus some bonus) gets packed back on. Get sick or injured, can't stick to the diet and exercise regime? Hello again, fatness my old friend! Fall off the wagon of individually counting out grapes as you are carb controlling? Welcome back, pounds!
I think part of the problem is time scale. Do we expect something you put effort into to last forever with no effort afterwards?
I lost 24 lbs in 7 months dieting (but not so much it was painful) and weight lifting (and this doesn't count the pounds I turned from fat to muscle).
I spent another ~6 months or so loosely counting calories and exercising about 1/3rd as much and didn't gain any weight back.
I spent another 19 months not exercising and not counting calories and I've gained back 19 of the 24 pounds. (we intentionally went back to old lifestyle during my wife's pregnancy and the infant period)
I don't think those 7 months were wasted or useless in any way. I'm very interested if restarting the diet will take as much time and effort as the first time.
I neglected to mention this in my previous comment, but the high-protein/high-fiber diet actually did succeed in improving my composition over long-term, even after re-bulking to get back lost strength. I'm just an N=1 sample, but I definitely felt like intermittent fasting was a bad tradeoff for fat loss vs health.
Achieving weight loss is trivially easy. *Maintaining* weight loss is the holy grail of obesity research. No one has found it yet.
This guy seems like a sham. He seems to serially oversell his results based on small observational interventions. He might be right, but he isn't putting up the science to prove he is. This is unfortunately very common in the obesity sector--bad science in service of selling books and consultation services.
There has been some push-back on the salt and blood pressure recommendation. I remember the Healthcare Triage youtube channel did a couple videos on it a while back, saying that the amount of sodium most folks consume (3000-4000 mg/day) is probably okay, and the evidence that reducing it to 2000 or even 1500 mg/day is good for blood pressure and your heart is not strong.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34S27FGwYr8">Diet and Salt</a>
IF has a load of studies behind it. At least some effects of it (autophagy) are pretty much scientific consensus. No idea about the particular regimen peddled by the book, though.
I wouldn't risk too much salt if I had hypertension, but it seems safe otherwise.
My own experience with intermittent fasting — 16 hours between the last food of the evening and the first food of the morning — is that it makes it easier to hold down my weight for behavioral reasons, whether or not it does it for biological reasons. Having committed myself to that policy, I don't nibble in the late evening or eat an early breakfast.
When people send you book reviews, have you been replying to confirm you got them? No worries if not (or if you're behind in doing so), I just don't want to discover that through some quirk of email you didn't get mine.
I got a response: "Thanks, I've put it in the pile."
This makes me nervous about mine (which I sent last Thursday). When did you send yours?
I've been inconsistent about checking/responding to these, but I actually don't think I got yours (unless it was under an unexpected name). Try sending again to scott@slatestarcodex.com
I sent it from the email account linked with my real-world name, since that's the one I actually regularly check; the subject line was "Book review contest submission - "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow"
If you happen to spot that subject line, feel free to let me know? Otherwise, I'll probably resend sometime tonight. Thanks.
Oh, I didn't realize this wasn't your real name. I've got it.
Like you, I use my middle name online. :)
I love that book btw!
I sent mine in about two days ago and got the same response.
I sent one and did not get a response, for what it's worth.
I sent one and didn't get a response either.
I'm not Scott, but I assume that at some point he will say "if I didn't confirm that I got yours, please send it again" and give you a chance to do so. He already mentioned upthread that the deadline is a soft one, at least if you're nice about it. So I wouldn't be too nervous if I were you (or Evan Þ).
Note, I don't have skin in the game here as I'm not participating in the contest (but am eager to read all your book reviews).
I got yours; sorry I am so behind in responding to these.
No worries, and thanks for confirming.
I'm curious, how many book review entries did you wind up getting?
Whoever recommended the video game Outer Wilds a while back - thank you. I finished it months ago, but I still find myself regularly thinking about it from time to time.
I had a lot of trouble getting into it, but its excellent rep keeps making me want to give it another go.
I didn't get very far. Barely off the first planet. It was a little slow going. Does it pick up?
Yeah, I also was confused as to why it got such high praise for the first little while, but it certainly picks up as you gain a better understanding of what's going on and how to go about doing things.
I mean, it never picks up in any meaningful way; outside of a few isolated sections it's a pretty sedate experience. But your understanding of the space really starts to expand. By the end of the game it really gives you a feeling of mastery over the whole system in a way that I found pretty impressive and empowering.
I wish I could wipe my memory and experience that game again for the first time.
Have you found any other games like it? I know Myst is often mentioned, but that’s a bit too esoteric for me.
The Witness. It was such an amazing experience I often get overcome with emotions just thinking about it.
In Scott’s “Still Alive” post, he mentions a woman telling him that SSC was her favorite postpartum reading and hoped the blog would be back before she had another baby. My husband thought this was me, but no!
I did spend a lot of long nights rocking a sleeping newborn while reading SSC, and I’m glad to have ACX in time for our second kid to arrive. I’d love to know how many other moms with little kids are reading the blog.
At least one other!
I am, my daughter is one.
Neat- I figured I couldn’t be the only one. My husband and I find ourselves using this blog’s idiom a lot when talking about our kid, so I’m always interested when other parents chime in on relevant posts. I kind of wonder where a conversation with a bunch of ACX-reading moms would go.
If any of you are in Philadelphia, let me know and I’ll drop you a line once I start hosting meetups again.
Apropos of nothing in particular, I recently came across a quote I thought was striking and might be appreciated here:
"Sanity must outrun power."
(I interpret this to mean that the more power you have, the more sanity you need to avoid doing something disastrous.)
My interpretation is "the sane must mobilize faster than the powerful"
Recommending this again on the visible Open Thread because I think many people would be interested in this.
History for Atheists Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiNGb4kjorb1XpElFZmvShA
Cons: it concentrates heavily on religious topics because that's where a lot of atheist pop-history misconceptions arise. This might be boring/not my area of interest/are you trying to stealth-convert me? for some people
Pros: it's not stealth-conversion (or any kind of conversion)! it's fun, educational and I find it very informative. Give it a go!
I'll check that out, thanks.
I don't think he's active on Quora anymore, but the guy who is making the channel (Tim O'Neill) wrote a lot of very interesting response-essays debunking myths on various topics about ancient Christianity, the Middle Ages, etc.
Technological Innovation in the Middle Ages: https://www.quora.com/What-level-of-technology-was-in-place-during-the-Middle-Ages/answer/Tim-ONeill-1
Sanitation and cleanliness in the Middle Ages: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/12/did-people-in-the-middle-ages-throw-excrement-out-windows.html
What you should take back with you if you ever get time displaced to the High Middle Ages and need money: https://www.quora.com/What-common-household-items-would-you-bring-with-you-on-a-time-travelling-trip-to-medieval-Europe-to-act-as-a-medium-of-exchange/answer/Tim-ONeill-1
He also has a blog at http://historyforatheists.blogspot.com/ . Despite the name, I appreciate it as a Christian.
Definitely. He's honest which is a great plus. He's upfront about not believing and about not being an apologist for things that happened within and throughout Christianity, but if someone is spouting nonsense, he goes "ah for feck's sake" and dives into the history. He wants the historical facts to be kept straight and anyone and everyone should appreciate that.
Thanks for the recommendation- reading his blog really scratched an itch for me, as an atheist who is often annoyed by the way atheist evangelists seem to prioritize their anti-religion message over the facts. Their behavior only reinforces the stigma that atheists are angry assholes who don't understand religion very well, and it's nice to see them corrected by an atheist.
He's good, he explains things well and being Australian of Irish descent, I can get where he's coming from. He has a little running feud with Richard Carrier and it's great sport when he gets stuck into him over on his blog 😀 https://historyforatheists.com/
This is unrelated but I gotta say, of everyone I met while working in Oz, the Irish Australians were the most hospitable to an American far from home. Had multiple offers of "you can sleep on my couch if you need a place to stay", one of which I accepted and it was a great time. Is this common or did I just happen to run across a couple really generous ones?
Thank you again, Scott, for restarting (reinventing?) your blog. I didn't realize how much I looked forward to your posts, and to reading and participating in the comments section, until they were gone. :)
I'm not really online - the toxicity of the internet has driven me away from everything except your blog and one video game board that does its best to stay non-political (sigh, 46 with three kids and still reading about video games) - and when you shut down I really felt the loss. Here's hoping that the excellent community transfers to Substack. Seems to working well so far. :)
So I promised myself I'd participate more than I used to. My first question to throw out to the group:
What was so awful about Henry VI?
I've been listening to Mike Duncan's Tides of History podcast. He did a great series of episodes on the War of the Roses, a topic I only have a vague grasp of. He lays the genesis of the war more or less at Henry VI's feet, which is unusual for Mike Duncan, who isn't a big proponent of the "great men" approach to history.
If I'm understanding Mike correctly, he believes that Henry V handed his infant son a stable, powerful England, and that because of Henry VI's misrule after he came to majority, everything more or less fell to pieces. But Mike's complaint about Henry VI seems to be solely that he was indecisive and timid. Which fine, not good qualities for a (nation? empire?) that usually had bloody and battle-hardened rulers, but these don't seem like capital offenses. I mean, the Roman Empire survived Caligula in pretty good shape, right? Henry was the 16th in a direct line of succession from William the Conqueror. It seems strange to me that such a mild defect could throw the who shebang off like that.
So what about Henry VI's indecisiveness proved so deadly? Or am I (and maybe Mike Duncan, if I'm interpreting him right) laying too much blame on him?
I think you're thinking of Patrick Wyman - he's the guy who does Tides of History. Duncan is Revolutions.
It was more about the fact that Henry VI simply could not exercise even the basic functions of Kingship, in a system that needed that to function properly. He didn't even need to really be good at it - just being competent enough to make appointments, etc would do it.
It didn't really eradicate Kingship, either. The monarchy survived - it's just that the person who eventually stabilized things was a usurper with a very weak claim to the throne in bloodline terms.
That seems to be in line with what Wyman (sorry! I can't believe I screwed that up) was saying.
But he would have had to have been UNIQUELY indecisive, no? That's where I'm getting hung up. Are there outrageous examples of him refusing to do simple things?
When he was 31 he stopped speaking for a year and a half. He couldn't even acknowledge his infant son, beyond a glance.
.... that qualifies. I forgot about that.
Yeah, I remembered the episode but not whether it was him or not. I had to look it up. It's interesting that a similar thing had happened to France the king before, when Henry V was rampaging around. And for that matter, if Richard the Lion doesn't get himself killed and replaced with his brother, maybe Phillip Augustus never conquers the Angevin empire in the first place.
It really seems like if England could have managed a good run of a few kings in a row, they're might not be a modern France, but rather a Greater UK with smaller states on its periphery. Of course, managing a few good ones in a row is a trick that no one really seemed to figure out, hence the whole thing going out of fashion.
I don't know much about the early Henries, but I think part of the problem was that Edward III had too many kids and in turn they had too many kids (look at John of Gaunt, fourth child and third surviving son of Edward, three wives and a mistress, fourteen kids of whom eight survived). Henry's grandfather rebels and usurps the throne from his cousin, which is not a great precedent for stability. You have all these royal cousins running around considering they have as good a right to the throne, then you have Henry VI who succeeds to the throne when he's not even one year old, has a gaggle of relatives acting as regents, is reputedly a timid and modest guy (no wonder), and when he is finally old enough to take over the reign for himself, hello an economic depression and something Wikipedia tells me is "the Great Bullion Famine" when Europe somehow managed to run out of silver and gold, on top of the French slowly but surely driving back English dominion in France.
You have a hawk faction at court pushing for "war, war" with France; internal tensions when *that* gets sorted out between the king and queen's faction and that supporting other family members; a small popular rebellion that does get crushed but is a sign of how the wind is blowing. Guy has a nervous breakdown and once he gets over that, they then sail into the Wars of the Roses.
A very strong, confident, charismatic character *might* have prevented the Wars of the Roses, but realistically the best way to do that was to cold-blooded murder any potential troublemakers, mostly your own relatives. Henry was not that guy.
Even in the reign of Henry VIII, the Plantagenet descendants were still trouble - the Pole family were seen as a threat as having as good - or even better - right to the throne as Henry (being cousins of his) and his marital troubles, lack of an heir, and religious realignment meant that they were suspected of constant scheming (to be fair, they were doing some scheming but so was everyone else in or around the Tudor court). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Pole,_Countess_of_Salisbury
"look at John of Gaunt, fourth child and third surviving son of Edward, three wives and a mistress, fourteen kids of whom eight survived)."
While doing genealogical research I found a possible line of connection in which I am a direct descendent of John of Gaunt, and thus of Edward III. I was mildly excited, though I have since discovered that it is quite probably that every person with British ancestry is a descendent of Edward III.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_of_Edward_III_of_England
Yep, Eddie seems to have been the English version of Genghis Khan 😀 It's rather ironic, in view of how a few generations down the line the Tudors who had displaced the Plantagenets (using their share of Plantagenet blood as basis for the claim on the throne) ran into the problem of "oh drat I can't manage to father any living sons".
This certainly makes sense to me. Wyman really seemed to argue, though, that the norms of the English government at the time were so strong that these sort of things weren't putting much pressure on it, and that had Henry VI not been such an invertebrate, everyone would have fallen in line.
If I'm getting it correctly, he argues that the way government was structured, it required that the king (nobody else, just the king) be a very active decision-maker. That it didn't matter THAT much if the decisions were bad, just that they were made. If the king abdicated those responsibilities, two things happened: first, there was nobody else to take over. There was no bureaucracy to keep functioning without order from the king; it wasn't the Roman empire. Everything ground to a halt.
Second, there really wasn't anything in place that allowed power to devolve to someone else. Yes, sure, during his minority everyone accepted the rule of the regent, but as soon as majority was reached there was no way for anyone else in the entire country to claim authority (and hence all the rest of the royal blood running around didn't much matter).
So you have Henry VI, who (apparently) wasn't simply indecisive, he seemed to be allergic to making even the smallest decision on anything whatsoever. So zero was getting done. Wyman doesn't really provide examples, though, and I feel like I'm reading between the lines.
I thought it was interesting. The theory certainly doesn't fit with any other moment in history I can think of.
Again, I don't know that much about Henry VI but recent reading of biographies of Henry VIII and figures in his court informed me that one of the big things that Thomas Cromwell did was provide the beginning of this kind of government structure - a proto-civil service and laying out what Parliament could and couldn't do.
Henry VI's problems seem to be that (a) he was a dove in a time of hawks (b) he didn't want to aggravate anyone so tried compromise but everyone wanted him to come down on their side so this wasn't popular with anyone (c) a lot of relatives buzzing around who were sure they could wield power better (d) an economic slump on top of constantly losing the war with France over British claims to sovereignty in France on top of a Europe-wide crisis due to a shortage of precious metals which badly hit the currencies (d) those same ambitious relatives making shapes to lead rebellions and seize the throne which eventually broke out in the Wars of the Roses (e) perennial accusations of corruption, undue influence, etc. about figures at court (as every court since time immemorial has had) (f) Henry's own mental problems which are diagnosed as ranging from nervous breakdowns to insanity.
So Wyman has a point that a strong, decisive king may have averted what happened, but some things genuinely weren't Henry's fault (he didn't have anything to do with the European economic crisis) and that the people making the decisions (because as he says, if the king isn't doing it, *someone* will step up to do it) were struggling amongst themselves - this took the form of Henry's queen, Margaret, versus first the earls of Suffolk and Somerset, and second versus the duke of York.
The strong, decisive king would have imprisoned or executed most of his relatives because they were the main troublemakers. Victory in France would also have helped, but this was really a lost cause and dragged on into the reign of Henry VIII. Henry was not the guy to kill people, and even though his successors were, they too had trouble during their reigns - Henry was succeeded (and some claim murdered) by Edward IV, succeeded in turn by his minor son whose uncle then seized the throne as Richard III who was in turn defeated in battle and succeeded by Henry Tudor, Henry VII.
Henry does seem to have been a weak king who allowed factions to grow at court, but one can't lay all the blame on him. The Wars of the Roses *might* have been avoided by a ruthless, harder king who purged the court and disposed in whatever manner of his rivals who were also his family, but that's not a certainty.
I do think under a better king the relatives might not have need to be killed or imprisoned, because they may not have been troublemakers without the cipher on the throne.
Does anybody actually have more than a vague grasp of the Wars of the Roses?
So, I listened to Dan Jones' (where does that apostrophe go anyway?) The Wars of the Roses a while back, and a couple of other things around this era. I am by no means anything like an expert, but rather a pop history hobbyist.
That said, my understanding is more or less the same as Mike's, and seems to be the consensus in the stuff that I read. But . . .
I would dispute the bit about Henry V's realm being stable. The English had just spent decades conquering (back) the portions of the Plantagenet patrimony that John Lackland had lost, and when they came, they brought English armies of conquest. Which means that the English had just spent a couple of generations conquering, losing, and reconquering large chunks of the country, and as a consequence those chunks of the country did not care for the English. I've seen the Hundred Years' War credited with the genesis of French nationalism on this account. So yes, Henry V's realm was powerful, but I don't think stable is fair. The French king still wanted his land back and was still fighting for it, and a lot of the people on the land wanted Henry's troops out. (Also it turned out that God was on the French side, which is inconvenient if you're on the other side of a war.)
That said, his long minority meant a long regency, with a lot of powerful magnates vying for authority. For the last ten years of his minority, they were vying for authority while losing a war they thought they'd won and blaming each other and trying to figure out what to do. By the time the English were driven back to Calais (and lost Gascony!), you have a lot of very powerful figures who just lost a ton of territory and wealth and are looking to blame each other and retrench their influence. And then it turns out you have poor Henry on the throne. Maybe a strong king could have managed it, or even managed to retain Normandy and Gascony, but not him.
Maybe if the realm really was stable things it could have weathered a weak king. Or, for a different counterfactual, maybe with one dominant regent and/or favorite it might have been manageable.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I was surprised that Patrick (as Brett points out below, the podcast host is Patrick Wyman, not Mike Duncan) didn't focus on the extended regency. But he genuinely seemed to believe that the English system was so stable that, had Henry VI not been so incompetent, that there wouldn't have been conflict between former regents and the king after is majority. Which seems counterintuitive to me (and to you, I think :)).
I THINK it's "Dan Jonses's", but I'm always uncomfortable with adding the apostrophe-S thing to a name ending in S too
The system was not stable, or rather, it would have been stable without so many strong characters all trying to grab a slice of the pie.
Let's jump ahead a couple of generations to see what happens. Henry VI is out of the way, he is succeeded by Edward IV. Edward dies and leaves a minor son behind. A Royal Council to act as the regency is formed, but because the Woodvilles - the family of the mother of the young king - are suspected of trying to gain too much influence, the Council petitions the king's uncle to be Protector in their place.
Richard III (for this will be he) happily takes on the job. First thing he does? BAM! arrests members of the Woodville family, has two of them executed. POW! has a guy who was an opponent of the Woodvilles and recommended Richard for the job beheaded (because he's too politically powerful and will be a blockade on Dicky's road to power) ZAP! has all his brother's kids declared illegitimate KA-POW! has himself declared king of England (his young nephews disappear and nothing more is ever known of them).
That's pretty decisive action. It doesn't save Richard, as discontent is simmering and those pesky rival relatives haven't gone away and oh look they're raising armies. Cue (eventually) the Battle of Bosworth Field, the victory of Henry Tudor, and Richard's body being found under a carpark five hundred years later.
Stable, yes, with a strong and ruthless king to crush any opposition before it had a chance to get started *or* a mild king but no ambitious types who are pushing for war, influence, and a chance to sit on the throne themselves.
Does the Mistakes page still, er, exist? It never seems to have reappeared at https://slatestarcodex.com/mistakes/
It's now at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mistakes
See the arrow next to "Gift subscription."
I'd briefly like to put a friend's speculative evolution project into the spotlight, here, by linking to a recent post about chimera-genetic plants (by which I mean plants possessing more than one genome in their cell nuclei) native to the world he's been designing from the ground up, because I think this is the sort of world-building some people here might appreciate: https://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?s=0f448d599b7f2b514ad1cc016cf55560&showtopic=2786&st=90&#entry35434
Be sure to check out the rest of that thread for context if that post piques your curiosity!
I'm not trying to spam here, but I think I posted this last week too late for it to be noticed.
Is there any chance for an updated version of this? https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/
As far as I know that site still works -- I just logged in to check. However, a bunch of recommended people on it don't have their location set, so they show up at the bottom and are missing from region searches. This includes the guy I recommended. Not sure what happened there (maybe that field was added later?)
Interesting. I didn't know you could add entries yourself (I thought they had to go through Scott).
I'm also hoping he signal boosts it to his now larger audience.
Anyone else who subscribes via RSS and is seeing stub posts show up with contents of "null"?
I assume this is because they're Patreon posts that I'm not allowed to see. But IIRC, Substack promised Scott these wouldn't get in the way for regular non-Patreon readers, so I'm kind of annoyed that this is happening.
Posts or comments? I've been making and deleting comments on old threads to test some stuff.
Oh, that wasn't me: there doesn't seem to be an RSS feed for comments. (If there were, it would solve a lot of problems.)
Is the rationalist community aware of this recent 3Blue1Brown video? It explains an amazing new way to look at Baye's Theorem (using odds instead of percentages) that I've never heard before in all my reading of Lesswrong and SSC. (maybe I just haven't read enough?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM
You linked to an old bayes video, not the recent one.
Anyway, I think I've seen that most people in this community who are familiar with Bayes' theorem are familiar with the odds form (and use it, since it's easier to do updates than with probabilities).
Shit, you're right. Thanks for letting me know. This is the video I meant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG4VkPoG3ko
The odds form really caught me off guard. I guess I've been living under a rock because I'd never seen it presented like that until I watched that video.
I've been getting this in my eyes for the past few days; anybody have any experience with this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_snow
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/27/7a/30277a3a093c5edcf47dfa160e5f0603.jpg
I've had something like Level 2 and Level 3 CEV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination#Levels_of_CEV_perception) since I was a kid. It's not intrusive for me, but if I focus I can see the snow / colored sparks / etc.
I've only had one migraine in my life, and it didn't come with a headache.
I started being able to see it (and others similar to it) after meditating a lot, though I'm sure it's possible to notice it if you just focus on visual field for too long. My current best guess is that everyone "sees" this but it's ignored subconsciously because it's not really useful in daily life.
I wrote a post on a few other visual effects and others have commented on it (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SYpKvHaYogAXNpveK/mild-hallucination-test ).
Rootclaim here - We are very open to discussing lower amounts if we believe it will promote rational thinking, probabilistic inference and elevate public debate. Feel free to contact me to discuss.
Does anyone know how the Substack API works? They don't publish specs.
I'm looking at a sample way of pulling comments, and I can't figure out what "last_comment_at" means. I set it to be a month in the past, or a month in the future, and I still get all the comments.
//astralcodexten.substack.com/api/v1/post/32218385/comments?token=&all_comments=true&sort=most_recent_first&last_comment_at=2021-02-27T02:53:17.654Z
There seems to be some hidden variable that keeps track of the most-recently-sent comment. If I could understand that variable, I could cache comments and load them a lot faster. . .
2020 marked the 14th consecutive year of democratic decline in the world: https://freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-freedom-world-2020-finds-established-democracies-are-decline
Why? Is it because democracy looks less appealing now than it did in the 1990s, when the West decisively won the Cold War and a new age of freedom seemed to be dawning? Is the reason for democratic backsliding the same in immature democracies like Mali or Burma as it is in established democracies like the USA? In the US, income and wealth inequality are skyrocketing. Is it possible that any large group's political power must be proportional to its economic power in order for society to be stable, and that with increasing inequality, the elite will demand (and successfully obtain) increasing power over the middle class, thus eliminating democracy in favor of oligarchy?
This may be a difficult topic for an odd numbered
There's a whole thread with dozens of replies (including some from Scott) that's just as much about politics as my post. I'm talking about the one that starts with "The responses to your GOP post on twitter were fascinating." I'm trying to follow the rules, but if everyone is interpreting the rules loosely, I'm going to interpret them loosely too.
apologies, it wasn't meant as an acusation if rules violations. it's just you might get more replies and engagement from people in an even#.
My apologies to you too. I didn't mean to sound aggressive.
14 years is way too short to draw any kind of conclusion that's likely to distinguish itself from contingent noise. In 1815 it seemed the treaty of Paris had sealed all hopes of a more democratic Europe for quite a few decades and yet
If you go to the bottom of the summary page you linked, you'll see that there's going to be a report launch later on in March where they'll talk over the findings of the report and host some discussions around the implications of these erosions.
And the event is only open to members of the media. Maybe I'm cynical, but it seems kinda off to host an event about the retrenchment of liberty and then only open it up to a specific class of people.
Off the top of my head, China's successful rise as a major economic and military power offers an alternative model to capitalism+liberal democracy, and it's probably a model that a lot of powerful people all over the world feel much more comfortable with than capitalism+liberal democracy.
Did you notice there seem to be some spam comments on the page https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
You might want to clean that up?
Is an open thread like a bleg? Since you know a lot about psychoactive substances, maybe you can post sometime about substance addiction among the most highly creative people. It seems to me there is a very high correlation. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Jimi Hendrix - the list is long. 3 possibilities (not mutually exclusive): 1. There is no correlation once we take into account other variables. 2. Narcotics/psychedelic enhance creativity. 3. Creative people are more drawn to narcotics/psychedelics (availability or personality) but they don't impact their creativity, at least not positively.
Here's Miles Davis in his autobio: "Then the idea was going around that to use heroin might make you play as great as Bird. A lot of musicians did it for that. I guess I might have been just waiting for his genius to hit me. Getting into all that shit, though, was a very bad mistake."
There is a high correlation among jazz musicians in the period ~1940-1990. The correlation among other highly creative people seems rather less clear to me.
Given those examples, I'd replace "highly creative people" with "musicians". My opinion is that a big factor is the stress of living on the road while touring.
I've read in the Dutch novel "De ontdekking van de hemel" (chapter 26) that Dickens used to host a Christmas dinner every year for his friends, and that he always hired somebody to stand outside under the window in the snowstorm and shout: "Oooh, it's so cold!" all the time, so they could even better enjoy the warmth inside, and the goose.
Dickens and Christmas is a special relationship:
https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/charles-dickens-christmas.html
And the BBC thankfully provides us with an elaborate description of Dickens' Christmas dinners: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-46378745
But they don't mention this particular detail, as I thought they definitely should. Perhaps it's not true, after all?
A thought about heterogeneous treatment effects, and what it might mean.
In a clinical trial of some treatment (or any Randomized Controlled Trial) you can subtract the means of the two groups and get an estimate for the average treatment effect. Suppose it's positive. There could be multiple reasons for this effect:
1. The effect is positive for everyone, but there's noise (measurement error, other factors, ...) which make it necessary to have a large sample to see the effect which is true for everyone.
2. The effect is positive for some people, none for others, negative for yet others. But the positives outnumber (or outweigh) the negatives, so the average effect is positive. This is individual treatment effect heterogeneity.
We often interpret results as if they mean (1) is true. But if (2) is true, then it means for some people the treatment could have negative effects. If those effects are consistent for them, they should actually avoid the treatment. Even more alarming, there could be treatments with average negative effects which are positive for some people, and we might never know. If the individual treatment effect heterogeneity is quite large, there's a strong case for experimenting with many treatments individually to see what works for you.
We might even be able to study this to quantify which of (1) and (2) is true by:
A) Looking for treatment effect heterogeneity among some groups (e.g. it's positive for men but negative for women), or
B) Giving repeated treatments to the same people and seeing if there's a consistent effect for them, or if it's just noise and really (1) is true.
Curious what y'all think.
Can anyone with experience with a 'second brain', 'personal knowledge base', 'Zettelkasten' or whatever you call it (e.g. Roam, Obsidian, Zettel, paper notebook) share their experiences with it? How they got into it, what software they use and why, what they use it for (every trivial neat thing you learn? or only important stuff you want to put into serious writing later), and what they got out of it, professionally or as far as personal goals are concerned. If you started using one but abandoned it I'm also interested, and if you use one coupled with a spaced-repetition memorizing thing I'm particularly interested.
I see at least one person beat me to the punch but I'm willing to toss $100 into the Vitamin D challenge assuming Scott's not being inundated with bets. It will probably make me a lot more facile on the discussion than I would ever be otherwise which presumably would save me at least $100 in the long run either way..... as WSB would say, no way can this go (slurs) up?
Uh I don't know why facile popped up there but just assume I'm an idiot when I meant proficient
I want to share a preprint link to this cool synesthesia article, where the authors describe a cognitive profile underlying synesthesia that has some common traits with autism.
In their model, synesthesia is a trait that emerges from this larger pool of people who are cognitively distinctive in a variety of other ways, including the non-synesthete relatives of synesthetes. They don't go into extensive detail but they do give an idea of what cognitive traits set the group apart, some of which are very common among autistic people, and they note that the incidence of synesthesia in the autistic population is higher. They hypothesize that synesthesia and autism may be two different outcomes of a distinct neurodevelopmental trajectory.
I found this article enlightening as a synesthete because I am definitely not autistic, but I have traits that resemble autism, and I seem to relate very well to autistic people. This model in this article allows for us to have common experiences without placing me on a spectrum for which I'm pretty sure I don't qualify.
I'm often privy to "I think she's on the spectrum" conversations, and I know a lot of people who put themselves there despite being so subtly different that I wonder if they're undermining the whole classification. This paper proposes a new way to think about it: as a larger category that includes autism, or a common neurodevelopmental pathway upstream of autism that produces different outcomes.
Since a lot of people on ssc are either on the autism spectrum or have spectrum traits, I want to ask: does anyone here have synesthesia? Do you see some of these other traits in yourself or your relatives? Does this re-frame how you think of yourself, or do you still find that the autism spectrum is the most appropriate model for you? https://psyarxiv.com/87fuj
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1698902.html
Comes with a warning that people who are feeling emotionally fragile shouldn't read it.
An article addressed to the left, about the importance of acknowledging that there could be a very long term change for the worse in their own lives, and that many people have not yet done so. A defense of prepping. (Does it need a defense? Yes, in some social circles.)
An attack on tear-it-downism.
My comment on it, which siderea might not post:
I do think one of things legitimately shocking about this is that normal imagination about disasters at least includes the normal ability to gather for mutual aid, comfort, and pleasure. And yet, here we are.
I agree with the rest of your points. I hadn't thought about just how pathological left-wing anti-prepperism is. This doesn't mean I'm psychologically ready, though I can hope the taoist meditation I've been studying (the teacher's been talking a lot about accepting change) will help.
I'll add your points to my opposition to what I call tear-it-downism-- a viewpoint I see on both the left and the right-- the belief that things are so bad that tearing everything down can only lead to an improvement. They're obviously wrong, but it's nice to have clearer arguments. I'm interested in whatever you want to say about why tearitdownism is becoming more prevalent. Add tearitdownists to the list of disaster amplifiers.
I'm inclined to think that opposition to cars is partly opposition to people having extra capacity. I don't have a car. Having a car means more freedom of movement, move ability to store stuff for emergencies, and spare shelter. There are homeless people living in cars, and they're better off than homeless people without cars. This doesn't mean cars are great, but the anti-car ideology doesn't seem to include the drawbacks of not having a car. However, the idea seems to be that virtuous people have utter trust in the government to make things work. See also left-wing opposition to charter schools and home-schooling.
I could even say a few things about the idea that virtue is shown by driving your fat percentage as low as can theoretically be endured. The science doesn't take it that far (it just ignores what some people can endure), but the culture does.
****
https://zeynep.substack.com/p/critical-thinking-isnt-just-a-process?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta
An essay by Zeynep Tufecki about how the people she knows from poor/authoritarian countries were much quicker to believe serious trouble was coming.
"But when someone asks me when we'll be getting back to normal, my first, visceral response is to want to reply, incredulously, "Why? Was global warming canceled?""
Global warming isn't a sudden catastrophe; it's turning New York into South Carolina. Also, the poster doesn't reference anything suggesting weather-related damage as a percentage of GDP either has increased recently or will increase over the course of the twenty-first century.
If New York is turned into South Carolina, what is South Carolina turned into?
Eyeballing google maps, maybe Cuba?
I'm not sure GW is expected to act quasi-uniformly. In fact, I read somewhere it's likely to affect the closest regions most.
I just read the article, and I get a lot of aspects of the general sentiment, but think the author is missing a big part of it.
For example, I'm not really sure why the author is so focused on climate change, and talks about it like it somehow will be the main cause of instability in the future. What the author is missing is that things have always kind of been on the razor's edge of stability on both the big and small scales throughout the entirety of human history. How many wars have we had in the last 100 years? how many earthquakes? tsunamis? pandemics? Hey, there was another bad pandemic only 100 years ago! on the smaller scale, how often has a loved one gotten a serious disease? gotten in an auto accident? something else?
In other words, things have always been very fragile. Humanity has not yet figured out how to create a truly antifragile society. And on the small scale, our health is vulnerable and we will inevitably age and die.
I think that the author is right in that people shy away from really looking at the reality that life and all the good things in it are very fragile. But I think the author misses that it's not like this special new thing that's being caused by climate change; it's the way things always have been.
She's talking about the progressive community she's familiar with, and a lot of that is people who've had pretty good physical safety for their whole lives-- maybe their parents did, too. Yes, there are accidents and aging, but the social structure was pretty good and fairly reliably helpful.
While it's true in general that life is fragile, how much you feel that is likely to be related to your actual circumstances.
Things have been fragile forever - apart from the lifespans of the Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y/millennials. In the Anglosphere there were zero catastrophes that stressed the state to breaking point between 1945 and 2020 (there were some in continental Western Europe). There were a couple of things that looked like they could *become* catastrophes (most obviously the various Cold War near misses), but they didn't.
The Lancet preprint "Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes" which claimed 80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths was removed from The Lancet server and is under investigation. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3771318
"India’s case fatality rate is half the US’; if the same pattern holds among missed cases, " The fatality rate among the undiagnosed should be much lower than among the confirmed cases, because hospitalized cases are more likely to receive a positive swab result than the mild cases who recovered at home. On the other hand, I have seen non-scientific sources saying that in India the sick are less likely to seek hospital care, especially if they are poor, so the pattern may not hold.
The comments on that removed paper were precious. (Lancet does say that these preprints are not peer-reviewed, so presumably nobody read it before putting it up.)
"Although the paper claims it is a randomised study, it also says that all patients treated in 5 wards received calcifediol treatment, while all three of the other wards received no calcifediol. How this study can be considered randomised is therefore questionable (maybe the wards were randomised but that is a very poor level of randomisation)."
"Why did more patients treated with calcifediol die (36) then were admitted to ICU(30)? I would have thought that in general seriously ill patients would be admitted to the ICU where some fraction of the patients would die. Below are direct quotes from the report.
"Out of 551 patients treated with calcifediol (at admission), 30 (5.4%) required ICU,"
"out of 551 patients who received calcifediol at admission, 36 died (6.5%)""
Hi Scott - I think I'm the counterparty you've been looking for regarding this Vitamin D bet. I will bet any amount of your choosing. You name the amount and I'll match it. Just one request: If I win, you donate that amount to the Revolution Robotics Foundation. If you win, you can receive the money yourself, or have me donate the amount to a cause of your choosing. Deal?
Let's say that we have three languages, A, B and Z, where A and B are similar/related and Z is distinct from both of them. As an example, A could be English, B German and Z Japanese. Are there examples of a short paragraph, poem or sentence in A that is "better" translated to Z than it is to B? The trivial case would be if A has some technical word that just so happens to be missing in B and exist in Z, but that's boring. I'm thinking more of unexpected ways in which the "spirit" can be better kept in Z. This will of course be subjective but could still be fun to argue around.
Sadly me myself am lacking in knowledge of languages, so I can't try to find my own examples.
A while back I read about one of the last notable uses of "thou" in English. A prosecutor addressed the defendant as "thou" which was offensive and shocked the court. He doubled down with, "Yes, I thou thee, thou traitor!" The first "thou" in that sentence is a verb. All of this makes more sense in German than in present-day English.
I don't know if it is notable, but I often use the English familiar forms to my wife to express affection.
Ever tried to translate your affection faithfully into another language (one you didn't grow up speaking)? God it's hard. You want to say something subtle and sexy, and your translation ends up sounding blunt and awkward.
Then again, badly-translated romance can be very endearing.
I think use of the familiar works better for that purpose in English because it is so rare. "Du" or "Tu" could be used for a friend or a servant, supposing anyone still had servants.
But I don't think "Du bist meine liebe" sounds particularly awkward.
Fair point about the familiar. I was thinking more along the lines of how words and phrases have romantic connotations that don't translate well. Like, when you want to tell a French woman she's heartbreakingly beautiful, but you end up telling her she's cute and it gives you chest pain.
Or, for that matter, trying to sound romantic when you're culturally expected to be subtle about romance, and you just can't pull it off.
"How was... the food?"
"It was very good! I enjoy very much!"
And he looks at me like I'm being so literal.
I noticed this with my laughable attempts to relate to our newborn in a semi-bilingual way. I'm reasonably fluent in English but baby talk is much much harder.
It's still used in some parts of England.
Bullseye's comment made me think of this: some languages allow for grammatical constructs that others don't. Greek lets you turn nouns into verbs (say someone behaves like a goat- you might say he "goated"). We see this a little in English (pigging out, horsing around), but it's usually a playful exception to the rules. So if you want to sentence a passage by verbing some nouns, Greek would be a fair choice, even if it's not closely related to the language you're starting with.
Many such cases! (Epistemic status: not a linguist and moderately drunk)
For example, some Balkan Slavic languages have grammatical evidentiality (http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/?p=4317):
You can say:
1st evidential: Kucheto izyade ribata. “The dog ate the fish (I saw it happen).”
2nd: Kucheto e izyalo ribata. “The dog ate the fish (see, here is the evidence).”
3rd: Kucheto izyalo ribata. “(it is said that) the dog ate the fish.”
4th: Kucheto bilo izyalo ribata. “The dog (supposedly) ate the fish (but I wouldn’t count on it, buster).”
This comes from Turkic influence. So you can imagine many sentences like this where A = Bulgarian, B = Russian (a Slavic language without evidentiality), Z = some totally unrelated language with a similar form of evidentiality (probably there is an American one but I don't know which).
Interesting! If someone wants to pipe in with a Z language for this it would be appreciated!
Epistemic status: not a linguist and catching up to thisheavenlyconjugation
How about rhyming?
You mentioned poetry. Some languages are much easier to rhyme in than others. Ever read an English translation of some old Latin poetry where the rhymes sounded really forced? English is much harder to rhyme in than Latin. So if you started with a poem written in a hard-to-rhyme language, you might have an easier time converting those rhymes into a more distant rhyme-able language than a close relative. I know this is more phonetic than conceptual, but stripping a poem of its rhymes can diminish the impact of the writing, so I do think keeping the rhymes would stay truer to the original spirit of the writing.
On the other hand, if the poetry contains a lot of word-play, choosing a more distant language would probably work against you.
How about he expression of politeness in language?
Some languages contain constructs to show you're being polite (like the Thai ending their sentences with "ka" or "kop"). Those constructs seem to be more cultural than practical. Perhaps, somewhere in the world, there's a politeness-obsessed language whose nearest neighbors are not politeness-obsessed, simply due to cultural differences. If you wanted to translate with the same degree of politeness, you'd have to look farther to find a good match.
I have no examples, but I'd really love for a linguist to chime in here.
Not meaning to drive this thread off-topic, but Hamlet in the original Klingon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Klingon_Hamlet) was great. Supposedly, it's the spirit of Shakespearean dramas, which fits the Klingon spirit near-perfectly, and then it's also the really concise language that doesn't let the text meander.
"To be or not to be" ended up translated into Klingon as "continue or not to continue", after the actor who was supposed to say this line in Star Trek refused the original translation "to live or not to live" as too timid. (https://www.startrek.com/article/qapla-klingon-language-creator-marc-okrand-part-1)
More on the topic of your thread, translations of poetry are a completely different animal from translations of prose. Many cases of fantastic translations of poems seem to be just the accident of a fantastic translator doing those translations.
Here's one of those examples for you, with A being German, Z being Russian, and B being English.
Boris Pasternak's Russian translation of "Faust" beats every English translation of "Faust" I've seen. There's no competition. (If you know of any, do tell!) Pasternak managed to preserve the crazy, panting rhythm of the original. The translated text seems to glow just like the original text. Pasternak was a fantastic poet, and this translation is easily one of his finest works.
There is another Russian translation of "Faust", by Lunacharsky, and it's by far not as spectacular. At least in this case, it really is about the translator, not about the language.
The previous discussion has been excellent, but yours is the first real example. Thank you!
You're welcome, but it's not a particularly insightful example. Obviously, if the translator into one of the languages is aiming to translate just about every word precisely, and the translator into the other language is a poet who isn't very concerned with being as close to the text as possible and is more concerned with the feel of the entire thing, the poet wins, whatever the language.
While looking at this example, I discovered that the translation at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14591/14591-h/14591-h.htm is a lot better than I remembered and is really quite good, but I would say that Pasternak's Russian translation still wins.
There may also be non-technical words missing. E.g. if I translate "hunden är ju hungrig" from Swedish to Finnish (unrelated), I get "koirallahan on nälkä", where "-han" corresponds to "ju", but if I translate it to English (related), I get "the dog is hungry", with nothing corresponding to that particle, and the corresponding nuance getting lost in translation. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-han describes that this particle "[expresses] a fact that the speaker either considers obvious, or at the very least known to both the speaker and the addressed, and worth reminding someone of", and I don't think I can give a much clearer explanation than that, except to those who know German, in which case "ja" has a similar meaning ("der Hund hat ja Hunger").
Different languages handle different kinds of poetry better, depending on characteristics that don't necessarily vary according to how closely related they are. For example, Dante's terza rima is hard to translate into English because Italian has pure vowels and therefore a lot of rhyming words, and English has too many different vowel sounds, resulting in a paucity of available rhymes. I could believe that a translation of Dante would work better in an unrelated language that also has pure vowels, like Japanese. (I'm bullshitting here, I don't know any Japanese at all, but it seems possible.)
Thanks for this. Now that I think of it, you might have nailed the issue of "Faust" (and, I would guess, other German poetry) going to Russian better than into English because Russian is closer to German rhythmically - in word length, and maybe in stress (and definitely in stress pattern, due to more similar word length). English words are so short that you can see the translators struggle to fill up the line.
I remember seeing translations of bad Russian songs into German that came out perfectly and wondering why someone bothered. In those cases, the rhythmic part clearly came out right with very little work, and so the entire project was a lot simpler.
Back on SSC, I read someone posting their "pet theory" that US vetocracy got worse due to the banning of "Pork Barrel" earmarked spending by congress in 2011. It was an interesting point of view because it's counter-intuitive (earmarks are close cousins of bribes). But congress is bringing them back but with some new limits. I'm intrigued and want to see what happens, and I guess the SSC reader wasn't alone in having this pet theory.
See here for example: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/congressional-earmarks-are-coming-back.html
Can someone explain why methane release from cattle is a major cause of global warming? I understand that the sheer volume of methane release from cattle is large, but is that a relevant metric? Cows are releasing carbon molecules which were captured from the atmosphere in the recent past through photosynthesis. They are part of the "fast carbon cycle" not the "slow carbon cycle" which releases carbon molecules which have been trapped in the earth for millions of years. The slow carbon cycle accounts for most of the net release of carbon into the atmosphere, which seems like the much more relevant metric. Or am I wrong on this point?
I understand that methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, so is it this conversion of CO2 into methane within the bodies of cows that makes them so bad? I've read that methane will also break down in the atmosphere back into CO2, but I'm not clear on whether the time scale for this decomposition is weeks, years or decades.
Note: This is meant to be apolitical.
> but I'm not clear on whether the time scale for this decomposition is weeks, years or decades.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane#Removal_processes) suggests a mean lifetime of methane in the atmosphere of 8.4 years.
The way I understand it, methane matters in terms of climate change because we have substantially more cows now than we had in the past, which means that even if it cycles pretty fast we have more methane in the atmosphere now than we used to (if we break even on CO2 in total it has still spend more time in a more harmful form than it would otherwise have).
I don't know if it's the right place to ask / suggest, but I would like to read Scott's review of this book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51778153-livewired I often get more from his reviews than from reading the books myself...
Hi,
Reading the comment on humane treatment standards for animal experimentation made me think of rabbits.
The several people I have met who have worked with rabbits in research settings have all told me exactly the same thing that Primo Levi (and also chef Thomas Keller) said about them: on Day one they are cute, by Day Two they are just rabbits, and around Day Three you pretty much stop caring about the damn rabbits because they are just so useless and dumb.
[“in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation” -- Primo Levi, "The Periodic Table", Ch. 9 'Phosphorus']
I'm not advocating active cruelty to rabbits, just noting the universal opinion, including that of a two-time Nobel Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor who can't even bring himself to care about them.
Mice seem way smarter, rats are tough bastards who deserve some street-respect, but rabbits are not exactly "charismatic macro-fauna."
Not sure what the statue of limitations is on this, but in the NY Times today... "Another person who flagged a parent’s participation in the riots was Matt Hess, 29 (The Times agreed to identify him using only his middle and last name, because he has experienced harassment online)". It appears that online harassment is grounds for pseudonym use?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/style/the-season-of-the-snitch.amp.html
And yes I know it's statute...darn predictive text
Scott told us that when he mentioned his fear of receiving death threats, the reporter came back that he got them, every journalist got them, it was all part of the job. Then when the reporter wrote the article, he mentioned that he and his editor got a lot of angry emails. This was plainly to make us feel sorry for him and angry about the people sending nasty messages.
So when it served his purposes, nasty emails were just all part of the job, ignore them. And when it served his purposes, nasty emails are terrible things which made him feel bad. Therefore I don't believe the NYT has any consistent policy other than "what best serves our purpose in this story". So if it suits them ('we had to anonymise this person because of THREATS') then they'll do that as it makes the story punchier. If it suits them ('no anonymity for bad people!') they'll do that too.
Data Secrets Lox is running its monthly contest to find the best effortpost. There were 16 entries for February, spanning a range of topics. The poll was set up a few hours ago, and will run for the next week.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2812.0.html
So, here is a headline:
“LGBT Identification Rises to 5.6% in Latest U.S. Estimate”
https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx
Maybe they are lying. But, if they are telling the truth, it blows a hole in the “Born That Way” theory.
“WASHINGTON, D.C. — Gallup’s latest update on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender identification finds 5.6% of U.S. adults identifying as LGBT. The current estimate is up from 4.5% in Gallup’s previous update based on 2017 data.
* * *
“One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual. This includes about one in six adult members of Generation Z (those aged 18 to 23 in 2020) [15.9%].
“The vast majority of Generation Z adults who identify as LGBT — 72% — say they are bisexual. Thus, 11.5% of all Gen Z adults in the U.S. say they are bisexual, with about 2% each identifying as gay, lesbian or transgender.
“About half of millennials (those aged 24 to 39 in 2020) who identify as LGBT say they are bisexual. In older age groups, expressed bisexual preference is not significantly more common than expressed gay or lesbian preference.”
"Born That Way" can still be true: There's less stigma today so more people should be leaving the closet. Especially bi people who have an easier time staying in the closet if that's what's incentivized.
But careful with this, this is an odd-numbered thread.
"But, if they are telling the truth, it blows a hole in the “Born That Way” theory."
There's two things at play here:
(1) As something becomes more socially acceptable, more people will be willing to come out and identify as that. There is truth to the "in the closet" stereotype.
(2) "Born That Way” was a political gambit to appeal to the normies. If you want to undercut anti-gay sentiment, make it a matter not of choice but "we can't help it, we didn't choose this anymore than you chose to be born straight". The principle is 'you wouldn't condemn someone who was born diabetic, or someone based on skin colour - unless you were a horrible racist and you're not a horrible racist are you? - so why condemn someone who can't help their sexuality?'
Andrew Sullivan drilled down a bit here. His comment, without suggesting they weren't really bi because that would be wrong, was to note that, as you have noted as well, the biggest chunk of that is bi, and that, of those bisexuals, 30% were living with an opposite sex partner and 2% with a same-sex. So, if that proportion holds over the rest of the bi population . . . at the least it's a group that can very easily identify as in or out of the LGBT family as convenient.
Another factor at play: the criteria people use to define themselves may have changed over time, shifting from behavior-focused to identity-focused.
The word homosexuality didn't exist until 1869, and it seems that in the early days of classifying people as such, it referred strictly to their behavior, not to romantic feelings or identity. The Kinsey scale was based on behavior. So if you always loved the same sex but you spent your whole life in a straight marriage, you were heterosexual.
This approach seems to have been more or less abandoned over the course of the 20th century. We see plenty of narratives in books and film with closet gay people in a straight relationships whose true feelings have never been fulfilled, and most people would now refer to them as gay despite having no sexual history with the same sex.
Now it seems to be a lot easier to place yourself in the LGBT category, just based on how you personally identify. Lest you think the old-fashioned behaviorist model is moot, I still had friends telling me about it in college, and they were very on board with it at the time.
Does the rise of bisexual identification imply that people are making a popular choice rather than expressing a sincere truth? JonathanD's comment insinuates that bisexual might be a misnomer for a group of people who pairs more often with the opposite sex than the same sex. Let me provide ya'all with another way to look at this.
Sam is Gen Z and shows no preference for one sex over the other. Sam likes same-sex relationships just as much as opposite-sex. What are Sam's chances of ending up with a peer (Gen Z) of the same sex, really? If we accept the statistics above, and for simplicity we assume about 50/50 male/female ratio in all groups, and we assume that Sam encounters people randomly...
About 8% of the people Sam meets will be a queer person of the same sex.
About 42% of the people Sam meets will be a straight person of the opposite sex.
So to begin with, and we're keeping this simple and somewhat random, Sam is about five times more likely to encounter a potential mate of the opposite sex.
I'm not done yet.
Several factors can further deplete Sam's chances of a same-sex relationship:
-We may be getting more liberal, but there is still more societal pressure against same-sex relationships than for them. For someone with no preference, a same-sex relationship is easier.
-People who want biological children may opt for an opposite-sex relationship so they can raise their biological children with the biological parent
-LGBT people aren't randomly distributed. They form social enclaves. Being in the LGBT enclave raises your chances of a same-sex partnership. Being outside it makes it rather hard to find a date.
-Who gets there first: most LGBT people I know had their earliest sexual experiences with the opposite sex because it was socially easier. This may bias a bisexual person toward opposite-sex relationships because they feel more comfortable sticking with what they're used to.
-Anti-bisexual stigma: not sure how this goes for gay men, but there is an anti-bisexual stigma among lesbians, many of whom will not date a bisexual woman because they feel like they can't take her seriously.
I am not at all surprised by the rates of same-sex vs. opposite-sex partnerships. Those numbers may still be true for a group of people who genuinely experience equal desire for both sexes.
Is my (simplified) statistical analysis totally bunk? Fight me.
I don't mean to imply that their predilections aren't genuine, just that on surveys in the 90s they would have checked "straight" and on surveys in the 20s they'll check "bi" and that that change in checkboxes doesn't imply a (large) change in the underlying population.
A few months ago *someone* was here freaking out about some survey result about gender or orientation among teenagers. (Something like a big spike in trans or gender fluid id, but I don't remember the details.) Someone else drilled down into the survey and found that the behavior numbers, or id numbers for kids a couple of years older, or some such thing had basically not changed. IE, what the survey is tracking is the acceptability, or maybe trendiness, or the underlying label, but not anything like a big shift in the underlying population numbers.
Ok cool thanks for clarifying.
Not sure what you wish to convey with the *, but that someone wasn't me (I've only gone under this name). I think the salient fact that we agree on here is that the bisexual classification seems to offer people more room to shift in or out of visibility, regardless of their relationship status. It's not a very stable classification when so many external forces influence people's decision to use it, not to mention all the kids who use the id as a stepping stone, a half way point, or a position of uncertainty. Those dynamics can easily obscure the underlying, more stable, rates of innate bisexuality.
Just a comic gesturing at my own crappy memory, a textual attempt at self-deprecating humor.
Gotchya ;)
Hi Scott,
Just over six years ago, you said "If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo". Now that you have your private practice, are you still considering it?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
4. Isn't a large amount of the bet is the point? I mean, for money that I'm comfortable to lose I could bet on pretty much everything.
You can take the Rootclaim net for $10,000
"We are willing to reduce the stakes as low as $10,000 for applicants already involved in public debate on the issue"
https://www.rootclaim.com/rootclaim_challenge
I emailed them. They emailed me back with a bunch of reasons they think I'm wrong that they suggest I go over before I bet them. I'm still going over the reasons.
"If I Ran the Zoo" and five other books by Dr. Seuss now banned. No longer on Amazon. You can still buy Huckleberry Finn. (I checked) Sorry, I had to rant somewhere.
not on abe books either
This one isn't on Amazon - they were withdrawn from publication by the Dr. Seuss estate. I'm not happy about this either, but it should probably be discussed in an even-numbered thread.
Oh sorry, my bad... next week then. (A review of "McElligot's Pool")
This is an open query that needs rationality to delve deeper into. It concerns the variants of the Covid19 virus. I refer to the Lancet report of December 8 2020 into the safety and effectiveness of the Astra Zeneca vaccine https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32661-1/fulltext .My skills are solely in pattern recognition. I noticed that the trials of the AZvaccine were conducted in locations from which the most virulent variants have arisen - United Kingdom and Brazil are referenced in the attached report, and South Africa in other reports not linked to here. The variants were identified in December 2020 when the attached report was published. This led me to the query - what chance the same place and same time of the wide-spread Phase 3 testing of the AZ vaccine are also the locations of the most virulent variations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus? Same place - coincidence with high certainty? Same time - coincidence with moderate certainty? Same time and place - I'd bet on low certainty of coincidence. Anyone have any insights for me?
Some good food for thought and discussion here - Mark Lilla "On Indifference"
https://marklilla.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Lilla-On_Indifference.pdf
There seems to be something wrong with the way Substack is generating message-ids for comment reaction notifications. It seems like they might generate the same ID for every reaction to a given comment, or something.
I'm not sure why this is something they'd be doing manually -- it seems like something their MSP (mailgun) ought to handle. But I doubt mailgun would generate duplicates like this, and fail to catch it immediately.
The consequence of this for my email client (OS X mail.app) is that it can't tell those messages apart -- it's showing them to me as if the are all a single message, with the subject of one but the body of a different one.
(This is a pretty stupid way to write an email client, but there's no accounting for bad engineering.)
I don't know if there's anybody at Substack you could talk to, or if there's any chance they'd understand my complaint if you did, and pass it on to anybody who can fix it. But this is a pretty bad bug. (I assume it hasn't been caught yet because Gmail doesn't trust the message-id to be unique, and displays the messages sensibly, unlike Mail.app, so most people don't hit it.)
I have examples with full headers I'm happy to pass along.
Want an introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy? Want someone to guide you through it? Here is the video series for you! He will be covering each canto in English translations, one per video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6yPwlSl6r0&list=PLpiUReQm8Y8a6EVTuhjE6KK7dnS_IaPud
This is a (hopefully unobtrusive) test comment.
Gripe about the state of public health communication [crossposted from my FB share of https://nyti.ms/3bchUvh]:
Tbh I think saying e.g. "The efficacy of J&J is 72%", by itself, is always so vague that it might as well be gibberish. It's basically just saying,
"The J&J covid-19 vaccine causes a ~72% reduction in the risk of."
It's an incomplete sentence, and put in plain English like that, the incompleteness is obviously ridiculous. Reduction in the risk *of what*? Infection? Symptoms? Severe symptoms? Hospitalization? Death? If the sentence doesn't tell you that, it literally hasn't told you anything.
I'm glad Carl Zimmer is here to help explain these ambiguities—he's a great science writer—but it's shameful that the state of public health communication is so bad that we even got to the point of needing him. There should never have been press releases or headlines or news articles reporting "The efficacy of __ is __%" by itself, as though that meant anything at all, in the first place. It should always have been, "__ reduces the risk of __ by __%."
I agree. Those vague numbers have been bothering me.
Biden says the US will have enough vaccines for every adult in May. Does this mean that any adult who wants to get vaccinated in May will be able to get vaccinated? Or are there weird rhetorical tricks at play?
(The one exception I know of is the US *taking delivery* which is distinct from *it making it to a distribution point* but I seriously do not expect this to add more than a week.)
Doses administered per day are now over 2 million and still trending up, so we should have the capacity to administer 200 million more or close to it by then. The catch of course is that we need two doses per person, but still, that should realistically cover most of the population that wants to be vaccinated.
Have you considered creating a community space for editing UNSONG? Feels like a thing the community could do (with upvoting specific edits), an interesting technical challenge and a way to think about how books might work in the future. Also I imagine the community could add a few genuinely funny extras, if that's a thing you wanted.
Would be good if substack allowed you to collapse comments, rather than just their replies. Still takes quite a lot of scrolling to scroll past a long base comment.