I saw the article mentioned elsewhere and couldn't believe it. "Why do people make such a fuss about addiction? There's no such thing! I'm not addicted, I've just been taking heroin every night for five years!"
The test is stopping it, which he seems to have done when he wanted to. Similarly, I'm not addicted to caffeine, although I consume a lot of it, and the evidence is that I can go without diet coke for two weeks of Pennsic.
I don't know if he did stop, though. What he seems to have done was increased his dosage, then stopped taking that increase, and claiming to have no bad effects. He doesn't say he completely stopped taking it, and he's using the "no addiction, I proved it" argument to bolster "so me taking it every night is not being addicted" plus he seems to like throwing some other hard drugs into the mix every now and again. I think I'd like to hear from his wife and family about their opinions of his state, not self-reporting.
Temporarily stopping completely doesn't prove it's not addictive/not addiction either; there are many smokers who stop for a while but then take up smoking again because they can't get on without nicotine.
Same here, I enjoy using podcasts to fill the "empty time" when I'm commuting or working on something non-semantic like cleaning or photo editing. Some that would be interesting to people here are Lex Fridman (interviews with tech experts), 80,000 hours and Julia Galef's Rationally Speaking (interviews on rat-adjacent topics), Bayesian Conspiracy (ratsphere chitchat + sequences discussion) and Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur (review of future technology and SF topics)
(I was originally going to comment "Where?", but then I realized that this is probably something that could be found with a quick search, so I did a quick search and found it.)
Podcasts are made by people who are too lazy to write, for people who are too lazy to read. They're utterly inferior to text in every single way. You can't ctrl-F your way through a podcast. You can't skim a podcast. You can't cite or look up citations on a podcast. You can't load a podcast on a lousy connection. You can't listen to a podcast on a crowded or noisy space. You're limited to the rate at which people speak, which is much slower than the rate at which you read. If a podcast host names a thing or a person or a place you don't know you can't look it up. If a podcast host has an accent you don't understand or the sound quality is noisy you just suck it up.
The only exceptions are when the audio medium is the *point* of the podcast, such as sleepcasts, meditation, DJ sets, or language learning.
This x 100. I hate the shift from writing/reading to podcasting-YouTubing/listening-watching. It’s the worst thing that has happened to online communication since 1985 (when I started participating). The comment above covers the general problems with it. I have the additional personal issue of some cognitive issues that make auditory processing much harder than visual. I’ve had to stop various online activities over the years as things shifted from text to voice.
Wow totally disagree. I think that audio is a much better means of communication by text not just because the voice is more versatile than the written word [in terms of pitch, tension, pauses/spacing, etc], but also because I think the "improvisational" style of a conversation gives much more insight into the nature of the speaker than a polished piece does for an author. There's also the fact that nearly everyone has had more practice speaking than writing.
Do you still think they're utterly inferior to text in every single way?
> the voice is more versatile than the written word [in terms of pitch, tension, pauses/spacing, etc]
Depends on the podcast. Obviously if you're talking about art performances, recitations, singing, that sort of thing... non-verbal information is crucial. As I said, whenever the point of the podcast is the medium itself, obviously audio is better. For everything else, where the podcaster is trying to communicate some piece of information, opinion, etc. why would the non-verbal info matter? I guess they might bring some kind of stylistic point but that's largely outweighed by all the practical drawbacks (and you can also convey stylistic points into writing).
> I think that audio is a much better means of communication by text not just because the voice is more versatile than the written word [in terms of pitch, tension, pauses/spacing, etc], but also because I think the "improvisational" style of a conversation gives much more insight into the nature of the speaker than a polished piece does for an author.
Why would you care about the personal information of a speaker you don't know and who doesn't know you? It's not a conversation, it's a podcast. You're not having a social interaction.
>Do you still think they're utterly inferior to text in every single way?
Yes. I never listen to any podcast - instead, I read the transcript if available, and if it isn't, I shrug and move on.
There are many different types of podcasts, and not all are pure info dumps. Some are just people having interesting conversations, in a way that doesn't work with text. And a lot of the appeal for others is the way the hosts interact, despite your assertion that it doesn't matter. It's not a matter of laziness, it's something you fundamentally can't have in text. You might not be interested in those, but then it sounds like you're just saying things you don't like are inferior.
And podcasts do have some inherent advantages, like the fact that you can listen to them while doing things like chores or commuting (I don't know why you think you can't listen to them in crowded or noisy places, headphones are a thing).
1. Non-verbal communication is important even if you only care about informational exchange and not about the aesthetic quality of the piece. This is because vocal realization allows for a lot more subtle emphasis than I can do with writing. This is far more than a stylistic point -- it's often essential for understanding (perhaps this is why our voices evolved to be so versatile in the first place). This is why it's valuable e.g., to listen to an audiobook of an author reading their own work, even when you're listening purely for informational content: you might learn something!
[strictly I think this point alone should prove that speech is not utterly inferior to text in every single way. Speech is higher-fi than text, and this is a big reason why you have to consume it more slowly. This comes with advantages and drawbacks].
2. I care about the personal information of the speaker because I think it's relevant to what they're saying. How does the speaker treat themselves and others? Do they really believe what they are saying? Are they present with/trying to understand their interlocutor or are they reciting points from memory and not really listening? These and others will affect how I take their point.
3. Speech, as you acknowledge, is better than text for conversation (and anyone who's ever texted recognizes this). I realize this doesn't bear on your point about broadcasts, but it does bear something on the utter inferiority of the medium. I.e. if you want to consume a conversation as opposed to a treatise or essay, speech will be a better medium.
I think we're talking past each other because we have different ideas of what a podcast is about and until we get into specifics we're probably not going to find common ground. Your points are probably valid for the kind of podcast you listen to where visibly its aesthetic value is linked to the audio medium - such as audiobook readings. Again, I'm not disputing that there's a place for such podcasts whose very point lies in the medium.
>I think this point alone should prove that speech is not utterly inferior to text in every single way.
I didn't say speech was inferior to text, I said podcasts are inferior to their written equivalent. Obviously, like million of people at this moment, I'd rather have a live conversation with friends than text them.
>if you want to consume a conversation as opposed to a treatise or essay, speech will be a better medium.
I think here lies of the crux of our differences - I don't see the point of listening to a conversation I'm not a part of. The veneer of interactivity and casualness is fake, since I cannot in fact interact with any of the participants. If someone had something interesting for me to hear, I'd be better served if they said it in an elaborate elaborate format that's easy to get through, skim and re-use (i.e. text). But again, I think we have to get into specifics if we want this discussion to get anywhere.
>Your points are probably valid for the kind of podcast you listen to where visibly its aesthetic value is linked to the audio medium - such as audiobook readings.
I agree that we're probably talking past each other (hard to communicate over text, I suppose ;)), because for this point I explicitly brought up the nonfiction audiobook as an example where the audio format was not necessary to the message, but still aided "purely informational" understanding (e.g. by including richer phrasing, emphasis, and expression).
A slightly stronger emphasis, e.g., doesn't just sound pretty, it can change the whole meaning of a sentence.
[Perhaps some writing system could seamlessly include these features, e.g. varied spacing between words, subtle levels of emphasis, slight dialectical/accent differences, etc. to the fidelity that speech does but none does even though doing so would clear up ambiguity.]
>I didn't say speech was inferior to text, I said podcasts are inferior to their written equivalent.
Interaction is information, and interaction is done worse over text. Pycea's comment is relevant here: " a lot of the appeal for others is the way the hosts interact, despite your assertion that it doesn't matter. It's not a matter of laziness, it's something you fundamentally can't have in text."
9 of them host a show in conversation or interview format. Insofar as speech is a better format for conversation than text is, and many popular podcasts are conversation-based, many popular podcasts are not better off as writeups.
>I think here lies of the crux of our differences - I don't see the point of listening to a conversation I'm not a part of. The veneer of interactivity and casualness is fake, since I cannot in fact interact with any of the participants.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
More seriously: Listening is a social interaction (as is reading fwiw). It is interaction because it requires active effort from both parties -- it is as much work to listen well as it is to speak well.
I also think that this rebuttal misses the (central) point stated above that social interactions contain important information about the content of the argument, and so insofar as conversations are higher-fi wrt interaction specifically, they trump text in this regard.
Do these responses fairly represent and adequately address your concerns?
Insight into the nature of the speaker can be a negative as well as a positive. Writers like The Last Pychiatrist, specifically hid as many details about themselves as they could, so that the arguments would speak for themselves, and there would be no insight into the nature of the author. It wouldn't surprise me if Scott preferred being evaluated for his ideas rather than his personal idiosyncrasies.
imo nobody can avoid telling who he is. E.g. The Last Psychiatrist by deliberately hiding personal details tells me a lot about what he is like [private, maybe a bit neurotic, straining to be objective], and what to expect from his blog!
Hard disagree. My brain is very well evolved to follow conversation, and much less so a lengthy text. While I prefer text for study and review of dense material, a podcast is a much easier way to absorb adequate introductory information about a topic—which is often all that's required.
If a crowded environment or slow speaker is your issue: buy noise canceling headphones and speed up playback rate to 2x or more.
If they say something you don't know about: feel free to pause and look it up.
If the quality is so poor you can't follow it: don't listen to that podcast. If a text is so badly written that I can't make sense of it, I don't read it. Why would I not follow the same principle in audio?
>My brain is very well evolved to follow conversation, and much less so a lengthy text.
No, it's not. You learn to speak just like you learn to read.
>If a crowded environment or slow speaker is your issue: buy noise canceling headphones and speed up playback rate to 2x or more.
Yes, these are clumsy solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist. Kind of like Microsoft praising the quality of its defragmenter when Linux filesystems don't fragment at all.
>If the quality is so poor you can't follow it: don't listen to that podcast.
The point is that someone could have something interesting to say but just be bad at setting up audio (which is a separate skill and even a job for some people). If they had stuck to writing text this wouldn't have come up.
This is purely anecdotal, but when it comes to complex pieces I can follow the thread much easier if I'm getting the information via audio vs. text. If a book contains numerous digressions and side-beats that branch off from a main topic I find myself having to go back and reread prior sections pretty often to stay on track whereas if I'm listening to it I can follow it effortlessly.
I agree that if I'm getting a focused info-dump on a topic I'd rather have text than a podcast, but for more digressive works - audio is better.
>No, it's not. You learn to speak just like you learn to read.
We learn to speak via osmosis as soon as we are born and have to learn to read by explicit instruction. We have spoken for maybe 1 million years and been writing for maybe 10,000.
> The point is that someone could have something interesting to say but just be bad at setting up audio (which is a separate skill and even a job for some people).
So is writing interesting, yet easy to follow blog posts. People like Scott for whom that skill comes naturally are quite rare.
You CAN, however, listen to a podcast while doing things which otherwise occupy your attention, such as jogging, cleaning, or driving. They are very handy at those times.
"Podcasts are made by people who are too lazy to write, for people who are too lazy to read. They're utterly inferior to text in every single way"
There are reasons to hate podcasts and reasons to like them. I suggest that you're assuming that other people are so much like you, fundamentally, that there's no legitimate reason for anyone to make podcasts or listen to them.
I think the problem is people mixing up their reasons for listening. For establishing a parasocial relationship, or otherwise providing a simulation of the social experience, podcasts are superior. For the conveyance of information, text beats audio in almost every way. But in the case of a lot of popular podcasts (ie Rogan, Harris, Friedman etc) people are doing more of the latter than the former(and are barely aware of it), and therefore enjoying the experience more than that of reading a book, but actually learning and retaining a comparatively small amount of information.
I challenge anyone to listen to one of these three hour podcasts and actually measure what was retained an hour later, and then do the same with a book.
You're only addressing the 'demand side' of podcast production (and I mostly agree with you).
But the _supply side_ is different. I don't like listening to (audio-only) podcasts but I can watch some of them and I used to really like Joe Rogan when he was posting his shows to YouTube. It's probably _much_ easier to get him and his guests to _talk_ than it would be to have them write, e.g. a blog post.
I worry doing that and waiting for responses would be enough of a trivial inconvenience that I would stop doing those threads. I might try it once or twice, but I'm not optimistic.
Perhaps we could have a norm that community members put "Please don't quote me" in their bios? (1) Click the commenter's avatar, (2) Check whether it has the request, (3) Proceed with confidence.
That'd be smooth enough. There's only 5-8 comments per highlight post, so not too much workload for Scott, and it wouldn't bog down the comments section with a bunch of disclaimers, or create some meta-disincentive to post because you don't want to highlight the fact that you don't want your post highlighted.
Why can't people just prepend their comments with "don't quote" or "quote anonymously"?
It's a little extra work for them but it's less work for Scott and they're commenting on a public forum and then not wanting to be quoted.
I understand someone making a comment or two that is maybe a little more revealing than they'd like so they prepend it with request not to quote.
But if your personal policy is you're so scared of being quoted you don't want any of your comments highlighted, maybe commenting online isn't for you, because there are plenty of other people who won't respect your wishes.
I think it's similar to having a blog and not wanting anyone to link to it. Sure I can understand that for the occasional blog post, but if your policy is ask everyone to never link to your blog maybe you should make your blog private.
Most quoted posts seem like "effort posts" that the person wanted to share: either correcting misinformation or just sharing a big infodump. It doesn't seem like there's much risk of a casual comment like the one I'm currently writing will end up there, and I don't think it's arrogant to assume that a correction or infodump might be worth sharing.
I don't understand how someone, even mistaken, about whether someone else's comment is quote-worthy, could be arrogant. What's arrogant about quoting someone else?
I think you didn't understand me. I would be reluctant to label my own comment as "do not quote" because it seems to assume that what I say is quote-worthy. Even it it is, it seems arrogant for me to [i]assume[/i] it is.
But kaminiwa's observation makes the whole topic sort of moot.
I'd just like to throw into the conversation as someone who's recently been quoted in a Comments Highlights post that it absolutely made my day. Of course there are people who feel negative about it and that's worth considering, but I don't want positive experiences to be lost in the conversation.
Same, I was thrilled to get quoted. Given that the comments are, after all, public, I think we ought to lean towards quoting-by-default, with the expectation that if you don't want to be quoted you preface accordingly or put it in your profile.
This might be a bit clunky, but there's also the option to stick a disclaimer at the end of posts like "If you don't want you comment highlighted in a followup thread, please mention that". Though if you don't know ahead of time which posts you'll highlight comments for, putting it at the end of every one may be weird.
If Substack is anything like news websites, people use fake emails to sign up most of the time, and most people won't be notified, losing Scott a significant percentage of comments on average.
Maybe only do this for particularly significant comments, like insider information, people risking their jobs?
Why not just reply in a public comment asking if they're willing to be quoted? The commenter could always email Scott directly if they don't want to answer in public.
Scott would have to wait until they respond or set some kind of opt out time threshold, which probably amounts to as much if not more of a trivial inconvenience than just pinging the people in question (which Scott indicated was likely already enough of a threshold that it would make him stop doing these posts altogether).
I'm a bit confused about the warm-bloodedness thing. I was trying to look this up actually because I've just been kind of confused generally as to what the distinction is supposed to be between endotherms and homeotherms-but-not-endotherms. (I am not any sort of biologist, if that wasn't clear.) Like, OK, poikilothermy seems obviously distinct, but once you're within homeotherms, I was like, I don't really see an obvious distinction between these different methods of maintaining temperature that should distinguish some of them as "endo"? Especially considering that like a main method of thermogenesis is shivering, which -- as a muscle-based mechanism -- seems to be getting pretty close to a behavioral mechanism, you know?
It's the shivering thing that kicked off me looking this up, really. Because I keep reading that non-shivering thermogenesis, which is based on this uncoupling, happens only in brown fat cells, and that adults don't have much of these?? So they get all their heat from shivering?? And that's just like... that can't be right.
IDK, I am basically clicking around on Wikipedia here, so some parts contradict other parts. Like, oh, maybe all cells have UCP1, just brown fat cells have *more* of it. But other parts say no it's only brown fat cells. Or maybe adults have more brown fat cells than thought. I am confused!
Because like yeah generating heat from uncoupling, that's pretty distinct, much more so than shivering! And it also, y'know, matches everyday experience, where you don't start shivering the instant you're colder than is comfortable. But it's really confusing to keep reading that adult humans don't have much in the way of non-shivering thermogenesis going on. Like, huh? What's up with that statement? Where does that come from? Or is there some way I'm missing that it could actually be true??
I've been very confused about this as well. My guess has been that when they told me as a kid that there were cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals, they just didn't understand the full continuum of tunas and dinosaurs and self-warming plants and so on.
Adults have various other thermo-regulatory mechanisms short of shivering, like increasing/decreasing surface blood flow, changing body position to reduce surface area, or putting on a jacket.
From the wiki: "Such internally generated heat is mainly an incidental product of the animal's routine metabolism, but under conditions of excessive cold or low activity an endotherm might apply special mechanisms adapted specifically to heat production."
The idea is that every cell generates heat constantly, as a byproduct of their primary function. Only for shivering and brown fat cells is generating heat is the primary function.
The commentary from Cerastes seem to buffet this. They point out that cold blooded animals can usually slow down their metabolisms for long periods of time. We would explain that homeotherms need to have their metabolism running on "high" constantly in order to generate enough heat to maintain body temperature.
As a general rule, if you are confused because "these biological categories don't really seem so distinct the more I look into them", well, you probably aren't actually confused. The world is extremely fuzzy, and terminology like this is typically more useful for organizing lectures to undergrads than it is for mapping onto the world. I'm an organismal biologist and I had to look up the terms you mentioned to make sure there wasn't some important nuance I had forgotten about, but I don't really think there is.
TL;DR: "warm-bloodedness" is a matter of degree, not kind, which probably explains your confusion.
My understanding is that there are two main distinctions to make. (I'm not familiar with the english terminology, so sorry if the wording seems off - these are my own translations from swedish.) 1). Organism that can generate warmth, and those that cannot. (Endothermal - can create warmth through internal processes - and ectothermal - needs to rely on external sources such as sunlight.) 2). Organisms that keep a constant temperature regardless of their surrondings, and those that keep the same temperature as the surroundings. (Homeothermal - maintain a constant body-temperature - and poikilothermal - same temperature as surroundings.) (Endothermal organism usually have a faster growth rate, but is less energy efficient.)
But of course these are categories made by man for man to make predictions. Since biology famously is messy, we need to fill in the gap with the term "mesothermal", referring to intermediate states between endo- and ectothermal - where the body-temperature is allowed to vary within some intervall.
Also, big ectothermal organisms are "gigantothermal" through share size. This means that their body-temperature does not fluctuate quite as fast as smaller animals. A bigger mass takes longer to cool down or warm up, so a big animal - for example a big, ectothermal dinosaur - is like a coastal climate; kept closer to the mean temperature. (Weird analogy perhaps, but you get my point hopefully.)
And oh, bats and bears (for example) are heterothermal - they can vary their body-temperature, ie. have some body-parts colder than others. This is related to dormancy, which makes them more energy-efficient. Especially bats.
One more thing I thought of: Some animals, like frogs and snakes, can survive freezing temperatures due to glucose that protect their cells from actually freezing. I guess this can be considered a form of "endothermal" protection for poikilothermal organisms...
I would have thought that all organisms, including the ones we classify as cold blooded, can generate warmth through internal processes. How can you convert food into motion without generating some heat? Wouldn't the more appropriate distinction was between organisms whose biology is designed to generate heat when doing so is useful and those whose biology only generates heat as a side effect of doing other useful things, such as moving?
You’re probably right. And even the distinction I was going for should have been between animals relying on internal processes vs those relying on external sources, to regulate body temperature.
Also, the bats and bears-example are more like ”temporal heterothermy” - variation over time. Others, like great white sharks, are regionally heterothermal, ie. variation throughout the body...
In theory, making friends online should be easy. Instead of luck and circumstance of the physical world, the virtual world should give us access to the few most compatible friend-candidates out of billions.
And yet, I still default to the physical world for finding new friends.
Question 1: where, online, have you found "true" friendship and how?
Question 2: I know that some have tried (and failed) to create a social network for the non-masses. Do you think there is opportunity for a social network for people with long attention spans that rewards the building of deep relationships? If yes, do you think it should be an open network (like Reddit), or more akin to a dating/matching app that filters the billions down to the most compatible? Ex. If love of Nietzsche is non-negotiable, would be easier to filter by that first.
Maybe friendship is more about somewhat non-compatible people finding a connection, perhaps after being thrown together against their will? So searching online for the perfectly compatible person could be exactly the wrong way to find friends.
For most people, searching online is certainly the best way to find people to talk to about quantum theory, muppet porn, or whatever their niche interest is. But their best friend-to-be might well be an annoying neighbour. (If love of Nietsche is really non-negotiable, that might change things, I suppose...)
If ”similar but not to similar” in love is due to the selection for likeness - passing on as much of the genome as possible - versus the selection for avoidance of incest ... Then this should not apply to friendship at all.
Reding Henrish, The weirdest people in the world right now.
Could kinintensive cultures promote friendship between kin/most like, since trust will be mediated by kinship? And conversely, WEIRD culture promote friendship through more reciprocal altruism-styled mechanism? Like recognition of certain norms concerning ”neutrality” &c.
...for Weird: perhaps the opportunity to cooperate and engage in any activity is the base of friendship? Mutual gain?
And also, I would connect Weird culture to thymos and prestige-baed hierarchies. Weird people might be looking for ”valuable” friends, with useful skills? While kinintensive cultures would be more prone to rely on dominance-hierarchies, but - i guess - mainly within the kin-network.
I would say that this is the romantic definition of friendship which I have subscribed to and practiced for most of my life. But is it optimal?
The definition of friendship compatibility doesn't preclude a variety of personality types. For example, one can seek a chess-playing, philosopher who loves Rick and Morty. The results for such a query may still include an annoying neighbor (just not your annoying neighbor).
Old friendships are often defined by a history of shared experience. Maybe that's why new friendships have such high barriers to entry. Compatibility matching could provide a functional substitute for shared experience.
I realize that clinical terms like "compatibility matching" sound antithetical to the magic of friendships. But that can be fixed with some marketing.
IMO, Friends are people who stick with you through adversity (willingly or by coincidence).
Adversity makes people emotionally vulnerable, revealing more of them than they'd like. Accompanying people who hang around after that can usually be assumed to like the 'real you', warts and all. My fastest progressing friendships are all traceable to times when I and some strangers had to band together through a sudden and difficult situation.
It's difficult for online acquaintances to end up in such a situation.
Exception that proves the rule: Mmorpg friends I made during middle-high school felt quite real. But that's because it was a place where I could be myself, during a particularly bad time in school. The adversity, made it real.
1. I haven’t found that online. I have people who’s posts I like to read. People I feel fondly towards. People who I banter with, but no friends. None I would reach out to if I needed something (financial, emotional).
My experience is that friendship is best formed through cooperative activity towards a shared goal. If I wanted to create an online friendship generator, it would probably be more like a game than a social network. Or even more powerful would be something to connect people with compatible skills to work on real problems matched to their interests.
This seems right. The only online friends I ever became close enough that I genuinely thought of them as friends, asked some for favors, and even met one in person, came from my time working as a volunteer on a cooperative online project. (It was the Open Directory Project--a volunteer-edited online directory of websites that was useful back when search engines kind of sucked, but became obsolete once Google got good enough.) I still feel wistful about those days--I don't know if I've ever felt so much a part of a community in my life.
"Something to connect people with compatible skills to work on real problems matched to their interests"--that sounds like it would be great for several reasons, even if it didn't succeed at creating deep friendships.
It also sounds like it would be similar to an employment agency. I haven't done a deep dive on employment agencies but my current impression is that people are spending a lot of money trying to do a good job of matching employers and employees and the results are pretty disheartening. So I suspect your thing would be hard to do well.
Similar experience - my only real friendships were with the fellow members of a mod team I was on. It took both mutual interests in the topic (why we were mods there in the first place) and a forced structure/duty that kept us around at regular hours and forced near-constant discussions to push it into the friendship zone.
Exactly! IRL it's easiest to make friends by pursuing a hobby, playing a sport, or joining a group with common interests. The internet is no different - if you start sharing your interests and ideas with the world, friends (and/or potential love interests) will come to you.
Dunno about “true” friendship but I very much enjoy the Thursday Zoom happy hours on persuasion.community. I don’t have a ton of natural affinity with the people in my industry, especially wrt politics, but Persuasion is dedicated to open conversations and the group self-polices well.
Have found. Not willing to really explain. In all cases, I met people in RL later, repeatedly. In one case, trans continental flights were needed for that.
Small communities work best. I think live chats (IRC, or others like it) help with building connections with people. You see them often (however often you get on the chat), and there is a small enough user-base that you can spend more time (even unconsciously) on knowing those people. The one I most use is probably about 20 people, though not all are active all the time. This worked relatively well because of some underlying interest (programming), but I think forming small communities can be harder if you focus too hard on a single topic. Forming a community around Nietzsche might be fun, but as people grow bored or want to talk about other subjects they either make the community not solely about Nietzsche or leave to go join communities about... Hume or something.
Larger communities like many Discord servers can let you build up friendships, but it is way harder since everyone is interacting with a lot of people on there. While they may remember you and be friendly, they generally become at most "nice person to talk to".
I don't really have good ideas for a social media platform that encourages this. As mentioned in my first paragraph, I think focusing too narrowly on topics can harm this. Being able to talk about a wide range really helps get a greater view of people.
I have a suspicion that we don’t really know what to filter by in order to find highly compatible friends. There are some obvious life experience and intellectual interest candidates that maybe take you 80% of the way but a lot of the compatibility potential is in the last 20% and it’s murky. This makes serendipity a lot more important than intentionality.
I mostly haven’t, but to start out, you need a small enough community so that the same people keep showing up and you actually remember them. And the problem with that is there’s often not as much going on.
Also, when people are serious about finding someone (dating sites), the first thing they do is filter by geography. So it seems like online communities that are centered on a community or region would have an edge, even if they don’t strictly limit by geography? But there needs to be a common interest as well or you get NextDoor.
Our family has one friend who we got to know on WoW who is close enough so that my wife and our two adult kids flew up to his wedding — I had a previous commitment or would have gone.
Conjecture: making friends involves too much going on "under the hood" to be explicitly modeled in that way. In addition to the obvious surface-level exchange there's communication happening that we're largely unaware of, e.g. body language, intonation, dynamic word selection ("I saw it coming", "oh, I see what you mean"), the effect of location and ambience, even possibly pheromones. Plus the synergistic effect of all of those things together. When I think of my closest friends, yes there are shared interests and whatnot but something just clicked with them in a way that it didn't with lots of less close friends who are on paper arguably "better" friends. I suspect that trying to filter too much on conscious-level stuff like "must love Friedrich Wilhelm" is actually putting the cart before the horse.
Friendship requires trust and most of us, I think, are biologically wired to trust people we met IRL. There have been a couple of articles floating around about decreased trust between members of remote teems: there's more blaming and reporting and less spontaneous helping between people who haven't met IRL. Maybe it's something about microexpressions and emotional mimicry, or maybe it's something about the primordial fear of physical retribution for wrongdoing, but it seems that most people tend to be more ethical and trusting towards real life contacts. My experience is that this is less salient for people who are further along on the autistic spectrum.
#1: On the IRC roleplaying Darkmyst. I even met 2/3rds of my polycule there and the relationships are still going strong. As others have said, the key seems to be to have shared activities with people. (In the case of roleplaying, I find the bonds build out of the vulnerability of revealing what's going on in your imagination.)
#2: I think I haven't found one. I use and can recommend schlaugh.com for getting a social media fix, but I'm not yet sure about whether that's generating deep relationships. I do think it's generating better ones than I'd be seeing on Twitter or Facebook, but given the constraints of schlaugh.com there's also a lack of immediacy which I feel may be needed to create proper deep bonds. That said, I *would* say I've made friends there, quite strongly so.
Mysterious. I haven't really found anything I would call "friendship" online; at most I would call the users I am most familiar with "longtime acquaintances" (or something like that), and based on my experience I feel pretty dubious about a social network like that working. My current intuitive guess is (something like) that the investment required to create a "friendship" for any pair is large and there's not enough in internet communications for a-pair-of-users-who-met-on-the-internet to meet the requirement because of asynchronicity etc., but I feel pretty unsure about this.
Also, related gwern writing: "Face-to-face meetings, even brief ones, appear to cement personal connections of trust and liking to an extent not achieved by even years of more mediated contact like phone calls or Internet text discussions / emails / chat;...." (at https://www.gwern.net/Questions#sociology)
Re: comments. Just do what you're already doing, Scott. I think they add something special to the Substack.
The addition of "don't highlight" is more than enough to guarantee anyone who doesn't want their comments seen (on a public forum!) won't be surprised. You could ask Substack to put a small text under "Discussion" with a disclaimer, if you want to make absolutely sure.
The difference is that if someone has a friend who sometimes reads ACX but probably doesn't read the comments, posting a story about them buried deep is probably okay. But if it's highlighted, then there's a much higher risk of it being seen (which was the objection at least one person had). I do think the disclaimer idea is workable though.
You can't edit the "Discussion" text, either? Something like "Discussion. Your comments may be republished, check About page for details."? If you can't do that, man, Substack really has a ways to go. Having to remember to manually add a disclaimer to every post will get old fast.
What may slow them down is the fact that they seem to use the exact same code for every substack. They've hardcoded astralcodexten in numerous places for stuff like expanding comments, so maybe they're trying to find a better way to do it. On the other hand, they've hardcoded astralcodexten in numerous places, so doing it one more time shouldn't stop them.
If you open up the developer console on your browser, they actually have a recruiting message in there. But like Aapje, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
I agree in principle; however they're probably optimizing for getting the features out to their client as fast as possible. Maybe they're planning to repay the tech debt later, in a seamless way. (Whether they get around to it is another story!)
Yes, that's always the promise: 'later, we'll fix things'. However, either they keep growing and there's money, but facilitating that growth still takes precedence, or they'll stagnate, so they could make it right, but they'll start focusing on saving money. So in practice, this theory of fixing the technical debt seamlessly almost never happens.
In reality, what tends to happen is that things become such a mess that adding features takes longer and longer & you get more and more bugs. So the only solution is to scrap things and start over, and then migrate to the new code, which is not going to be seamless.
The more crap the company accepts, the sooner the software needs to be replaced. However, you also create a company culture that accepts crap, so it's hard to change course and make the new software more robust.
++Test to see whether posting comments works again++ (can we all start developing for substack at once? incremental changes won't work. We have to be the Napoleonic France of frontend development, sweeping l'ancien regieme from before us with an iron fist, or an iron broom or somehing)
OK most likely not doable and a dumb idea. But could you heart your own comment as an indication that you don't mind if it's re-posted. This would mean that you (Scott) have to be able to see who put the hearts on a comment. If it's a workable idea, then lemon hearts turn into lemonade. (And where is the post you talked about hearts and not liking them?)
I saw the article mentioned elsewhere and couldn't believe it. "Why do people make such a fuss about addiction? There's no such thing! I'm not addicted, I've just been taking heroin every night for five years!"
Yeah, sure, you're not addicted.
Well, as long as it doesn't ruin your life, you're merely dependent on it, not addicted to it.
The test is stopping it, which he seems to have done when he wanted to. Similarly, I'm not addicted to caffeine, although I consume a lot of it, and the evidence is that I can go without diet coke for two weeks of Pennsic.
I don't know if he did stop, though. What he seems to have done was increased his dosage, then stopped taking that increase, and claiming to have no bad effects. He doesn't say he completely stopped taking it, and he's using the "no addiction, I proved it" argument to bolster "so me taking it every night is not being addicted" plus he seems to like throwing some other hard drugs into the mix every now and again. I think I'd like to hear from his wife and family about their opinions of his state, not self-reporting.
Temporarily stopping completely doesn't prove it's not addictive/not addiction either; there are many smokers who stop for a while but then take up smoking again because they can't get on without nicotine.
Same here, I enjoy using podcasts to fill the "empty time" when I'm commuting or working on something non-semantic like cleaning or photo editing. Some that would be interesting to people here are Lex Fridman (interviews with tech experts), 80,000 hours and Julia Galef's Rationally Speaking (interviews on rat-adjacent topics), Bayesian Conspiracy (ratsphere chitchat + sequences discussion) and Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur (review of future technology and SF topics)
Scott has previously mentioned he doesn't like real-time communication.
Link for future readers: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/weyl-contra-me-on-technocracy
(I was originally going to comment "Where?", but then I realized that this is probably something that could be found with a quick search, so I did a quick search and found it.)
Podcasts are made by people who are too lazy to write, for people who are too lazy to read. They're utterly inferior to text in every single way. You can't ctrl-F your way through a podcast. You can't skim a podcast. You can't cite or look up citations on a podcast. You can't load a podcast on a lousy connection. You can't listen to a podcast on a crowded or noisy space. You're limited to the rate at which people speak, which is much slower than the rate at which you read. If a podcast host names a thing or a person or a place you don't know you can't look it up. If a podcast host has an accent you don't understand or the sound quality is noisy you just suck it up.
The only exceptions are when the audio medium is the *point* of the podcast, such as sleepcasts, meditation, DJ sets, or language learning.
This x 100. I hate the shift from writing/reading to podcasting-YouTubing/listening-watching. It’s the worst thing that has happened to online communication since 1985 (when I started participating). The comment above covers the general problems with it. I have the additional personal issue of some cognitive issues that make auditory processing much harder than visual. I’ve had to stop various online activities over the years as things shifted from text to voice.
Wow totally disagree. I think that audio is a much better means of communication by text not just because the voice is more versatile than the written word [in terms of pitch, tension, pauses/spacing, etc], but also because I think the "improvisational" style of a conversation gives much more insight into the nature of the speaker than a polished piece does for an author. There's also the fact that nearly everyone has had more practice speaking than writing.
Do you still think they're utterly inferior to text in every single way?
> the voice is more versatile than the written word [in terms of pitch, tension, pauses/spacing, etc]
Depends on the podcast. Obviously if you're talking about art performances, recitations, singing, that sort of thing... non-verbal information is crucial. As I said, whenever the point of the podcast is the medium itself, obviously audio is better. For everything else, where the podcaster is trying to communicate some piece of information, opinion, etc. why would the non-verbal info matter? I guess they might bring some kind of stylistic point but that's largely outweighed by all the practical drawbacks (and you can also convey stylistic points into writing).
> I think that audio is a much better means of communication by text not just because the voice is more versatile than the written word [in terms of pitch, tension, pauses/spacing, etc], but also because I think the "improvisational" style of a conversation gives much more insight into the nature of the speaker than a polished piece does for an author.
Why would you care about the personal information of a speaker you don't know and who doesn't know you? It's not a conversation, it's a podcast. You're not having a social interaction.
>Do you still think they're utterly inferior to text in every single way?
Yes. I never listen to any podcast - instead, I read the transcript if available, and if it isn't, I shrug and move on.
There are many different types of podcasts, and not all are pure info dumps. Some are just people having interesting conversations, in a way that doesn't work with text. And a lot of the appeal for others is the way the hosts interact, despite your assertion that it doesn't matter. It's not a matter of laziness, it's something you fundamentally can't have in text. You might not be interested in those, but then it sounds like you're just saying things you don't like are inferior.
And podcasts do have some inherent advantages, like the fact that you can listen to them while doing things like chores or commuting (I don't know why you think you can't listen to them in crowded or noisy places, headphones are a thing).
These are all great points!
1. Non-verbal communication is important even if you only care about informational exchange and not about the aesthetic quality of the piece. This is because vocal realization allows for a lot more subtle emphasis than I can do with writing. This is far more than a stylistic point -- it's often essential for understanding (perhaps this is why our voices evolved to be so versatile in the first place). This is why it's valuable e.g., to listen to an audiobook of an author reading their own work, even when you're listening purely for informational content: you might learn something!
[strictly I think this point alone should prove that speech is not utterly inferior to text in every single way. Speech is higher-fi than text, and this is a big reason why you have to consume it more slowly. This comes with advantages and drawbacks].
2. I care about the personal information of the speaker because I think it's relevant to what they're saying. How does the speaker treat themselves and others? Do they really believe what they are saying? Are they present with/trying to understand their interlocutor or are they reciting points from memory and not really listening? These and others will affect how I take their point.
3. Speech, as you acknowledge, is better than text for conversation (and anyone who's ever texted recognizes this). I realize this doesn't bear on your point about broadcasts, but it does bear something on the utter inferiority of the medium. I.e. if you want to consume a conversation as opposed to a treatise or essay, speech will be a better medium.
What do you think about these points?
I think we're talking past each other because we have different ideas of what a podcast is about and until we get into specifics we're probably not going to find common ground. Your points are probably valid for the kind of podcast you listen to where visibly its aesthetic value is linked to the audio medium - such as audiobook readings. Again, I'm not disputing that there's a place for such podcasts whose very point lies in the medium.
>I think this point alone should prove that speech is not utterly inferior to text in every single way.
I didn't say speech was inferior to text, I said podcasts are inferior to their written equivalent. Obviously, like million of people at this moment, I'd rather have a live conversation with friends than text them.
>if you want to consume a conversation as opposed to a treatise or essay, speech will be a better medium.
I think here lies of the crux of our differences - I don't see the point of listening to a conversation I'm not a part of. The veneer of interactivity and casualness is fake, since I cannot in fact interact with any of the participants. If someone had something interesting for me to hear, I'd be better served if they said it in an elaborate elaborate format that's easy to get through, skim and re-use (i.e. text). But again, I think we have to get into specifics if we want this discussion to get anywhere.
>Your points are probably valid for the kind of podcast you listen to where visibly its aesthetic value is linked to the audio medium - such as audiobook readings.
I agree that we're probably talking past each other (hard to communicate over text, I suppose ;)), because for this point I explicitly brought up the nonfiction audiobook as an example where the audio format was not necessary to the message, but still aided "purely informational" understanding (e.g. by including richer phrasing, emphasis, and expression).
A slightly stronger emphasis, e.g., doesn't just sound pretty, it can change the whole meaning of a sentence.
[Perhaps some writing system could seamlessly include these features, e.g. varied spacing between words, subtle levels of emphasis, slight dialectical/accent differences, etc. to the fidelity that speech does but none does even though doing so would clear up ambiguity.]
>I didn't say speech was inferior to text, I said podcasts are inferior to their written equivalent.
Interaction is information, and interaction is done worse over text. Pycea's comment is relevant here: " a lot of the appeal for others is the way the hosts interact, despite your assertion that it doesn't matter. It's not a matter of laziness, it's something you fundamentally can't have in text."
Here's a list of the 10 most highly paid podcast hosts: https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/the-10-highest-paid-podcasts-and-podcastsers-2020/
9 of them host a show in conversation or interview format. Insofar as speech is a better format for conversation than text is, and many popular podcasts are conversation-based, many popular podcasts are not better off as writeups.
>I think here lies of the crux of our differences - I don't see the point of listening to a conversation I'm not a part of. The veneer of interactivity and casualness is fake, since I cannot in fact interact with any of the participants.
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
More seriously: Listening is a social interaction (as is reading fwiw). It is interaction because it requires active effort from both parties -- it is as much work to listen well as it is to speak well.
I also think that this rebuttal misses the (central) point stated above that social interactions contain important information about the content of the argument, and so insofar as conversations are higher-fi wrt interaction specifically, they trump text in this regard.
Do these responses fairly represent and adequately address your concerns?
Insight into the nature of the speaker can be a negative as well as a positive. Writers like The Last Pychiatrist, specifically hid as many details about themselves as they could, so that the arguments would speak for themselves, and there would be no insight into the nature of the author. It wouldn't surprise me if Scott preferred being evaluated for his ideas rather than his personal idiosyncrasies.
imo nobody can avoid telling who he is. E.g. The Last Psychiatrist by deliberately hiding personal details tells me a lot about what he is like [private, maybe a bit neurotic, straining to be objective], and what to expect from his blog!
Podcasts are good in situations where you can't read. Driving, cleaning, cooking, etc.
The same situations where people traditionally listen to radio.
Hard disagree. My brain is very well evolved to follow conversation, and much less so a lengthy text. While I prefer text for study and review of dense material, a podcast is a much easier way to absorb adequate introductory information about a topic—which is often all that's required.
If a crowded environment or slow speaker is your issue: buy noise canceling headphones and speed up playback rate to 2x or more.
If they say something you don't know about: feel free to pause and look it up.
If the quality is so poor you can't follow it: don't listen to that podcast. If a text is so badly written that I can't make sense of it, I don't read it. Why would I not follow the same principle in audio?
>My brain is very well evolved to follow conversation, and much less so a lengthy text.
No, it's not. You learn to speak just like you learn to read.
>If a crowded environment or slow speaker is your issue: buy noise canceling headphones and speed up playback rate to 2x or more.
Yes, these are clumsy solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist. Kind of like Microsoft praising the quality of its defragmenter when Linux filesystems don't fragment at all.
>If the quality is so poor you can't follow it: don't listen to that podcast.
The point is that someone could have something interesting to say but just be bad at setting up audio (which is a separate skill and even a job for some people). If they had stuck to writing text this wouldn't have come up.
This is purely anecdotal, but when it comes to complex pieces I can follow the thread much easier if I'm getting the information via audio vs. text. If a book contains numerous digressions and side-beats that branch off from a main topic I find myself having to go back and reread prior sections pretty often to stay on track whereas if I'm listening to it I can follow it effortlessly.
I agree that if I'm getting a focused info-dump on a topic I'd rather have text than a podcast, but for more digressive works - audio is better.
>No, it's not. You learn to speak just like you learn to read.
We learn to speak via osmosis as soon as we are born and have to learn to read by explicit instruction. We have spoken for maybe 1 million years and been writing for maybe 10,000.
> The point is that someone could have something interesting to say but just be bad at setting up audio (which is a separate skill and even a job for some people).
So is writing interesting, yet easy to follow blog posts. People like Scott for whom that skill comes naturally are quite rare.
You CAN, however, listen to a podcast while doing things which otherwise occupy your attention, such as jogging, cleaning, or driving. They are very handy at those times.
"Podcasts are made by people who are too lazy to write, for people who are too lazy to read. They're utterly inferior to text in every single way"
There are reasons to hate podcasts and reasons to like them. I suggest that you're assuming that other people are so much like you, fundamentally, that there's no legitimate reason for anyone to make podcasts or listen to them.
I think the problem is people mixing up their reasons for listening. For establishing a parasocial relationship, or otherwise providing a simulation of the social experience, podcasts are superior. For the conveyance of information, text beats audio in almost every way. But in the case of a lot of popular podcasts (ie Rogan, Harris, Friedman etc) people are doing more of the latter than the former(and are barely aware of it), and therefore enjoying the experience more than that of reading a book, but actually learning and retaining a comparatively small amount of information.
I challenge anyone to listen to one of these three hour podcasts and actually measure what was retained an hour later, and then do the same with a book.
You're only addressing the 'demand side' of podcast production (and I mostly agree with you).
But the _supply side_ is different. I don't like listening to (audio-only) podcasts but I can watch some of them and I used to really like Joe Rogan when he was posting his shows to YouTube. It's probably _much_ easier to get him and his guests to _talk_ than it would be to have them write, e.g. a blog post.
I don't know whether it would be worth the trouble for you, but you could ping people about specific comments you want to quote.
I worry doing that and waiting for responses would be enough of a trivial inconvenience that I would stop doing those threads. I might try it once or twice, but I'm not optimistic.
Perhaps we could have a norm that community members put "Please don't quote me" in their bios? (1) Click the commenter's avatar, (2) Check whether it has the request, (3) Proceed with confidence.
That'd be smooth enough. There's only 5-8 comments per highlight post, so not too much workload for Scott, and it wouldn't bog down the comments section with a bunch of disclaimers, or create some meta-disincentive to post because you don't want to highlight the fact that you don't want your post highlighted.
Why can't people just prepend their comments with "don't quote" or "quote anonymously"?
It's a little extra work for them but it's less work for Scott and they're commenting on a public forum and then not wanting to be quoted.
I understand someone making a comment or two that is maybe a little more revealing than they'd like so they prepend it with request not to quote.
But if your personal policy is you're so scared of being quoted you don't want any of your comments highlighted, maybe commenting online isn't for you, because there are plenty of other people who won't respect your wishes.
I think it's similar to having a blog and not wanting anyone to link to it. Sure I can understand that for the occasional blog post, but if your policy is ask everyone to never link to your blog maybe you should make your blog private.
If I didn't want to be quoted, I think I might still feel like it was arrogant to assume what I was saying was quote-worthy.
Most quoted posts seem like "effort posts" that the person wanted to share: either correcting misinformation or just sharing a big infodump. It doesn't seem like there's much risk of a casual comment like the one I'm currently writing will end up there, and I don't think it's arrogant to assume that a correction or infodump might be worth sharing.
That's a really good point; I have to admit I didn't think the question through to that extent.
I don't understand how someone, even mistaken, about whether someone else's comment is quote-worthy, could be arrogant. What's arrogant about quoting someone else?
I think you didn't understand me. I would be reluctant to label my own comment as "do not quote" because it seems to assume that what I say is quote-worthy. Even it it is, it seems arrogant for me to [i]assume[/i] it is.
But kaminiwa's observation makes the whole topic sort of moot.
What about only pinging people whose user names appear to be their real names?
That's a very small proportion of commenters.
that's the point
I think an example that started the discussion was this comment: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-class#comment-1427102 -- that doesn't obviously appear to be someone's real name, but they still didn't want to be re-broadcast. (In that case, it seemed to be specific to the comment, not the author.)
I'd just like to throw into the conversation as someone who's recently been quoted in a Comments Highlights post that it absolutely made my day. Of course there are people who feel negative about it and that's worth considering, but I don't want positive experiences to be lost in the conversation.
Same, I was thrilled to get quoted. Given that the comments are, after all, public, I think we ought to lean towards quoting-by-default, with the expectation that if you don't want to be quoted you preface accordingly or put it in your profile.
Do this but interpret no response within n days as a yes?
I really want an opt-in system. No response should be categorized as a no.
This might be a bit clunky, but there's also the option to stick a disclaimer at the end of posts like "If you don't want you comment highlighted in a followup thread, please mention that". Though if you don't know ahead of time which posts you'll highlight comments for, putting it at the end of every one may be weird.
If Substack is anything like news websites, people use fake emails to sign up most of the time, and most people won't be notified, losing Scott a significant percentage of comments on average.
Maybe only do this for particularly significant comments, like insider information, people risking their jobs?
Why not just reply in a public comment asking if they're willing to be quoted? The commenter could always email Scott directly if they don't want to answer in public.
Scott would have to wait until they respond or set some kind of opt out time threshold, which probably amounts to as much if not more of a trivial inconvenience than just pinging the people in question (which Scott indicated was likely already enough of a threshold that it would make him stop doing these posts altogether).
I'm a bit confused about the warm-bloodedness thing. I was trying to look this up actually because I've just been kind of confused generally as to what the distinction is supposed to be between endotherms and homeotherms-but-not-endotherms. (I am not any sort of biologist, if that wasn't clear.) Like, OK, poikilothermy seems obviously distinct, but once you're within homeotherms, I was like, I don't really see an obvious distinction between these different methods of maintaining temperature that should distinguish some of them as "endo"? Especially considering that like a main method of thermogenesis is shivering, which -- as a muscle-based mechanism -- seems to be getting pretty close to a behavioral mechanism, you know?
It's the shivering thing that kicked off me looking this up, really. Because I keep reading that non-shivering thermogenesis, which is based on this uncoupling, happens only in brown fat cells, and that adults don't have much of these?? So they get all their heat from shivering?? And that's just like... that can't be right.
IDK, I am basically clicking around on Wikipedia here, so some parts contradict other parts. Like, oh, maybe all cells have UCP1, just brown fat cells have *more* of it. But other parts say no it's only brown fat cells. Or maybe adults have more brown fat cells than thought. I am confused!
Because like yeah generating heat from uncoupling, that's pretty distinct, much more so than shivering! And it also, y'know, matches everyday experience, where you don't start shivering the instant you're colder than is comfortable. But it's really confusing to keep reading that adult humans don't have much in the way of non-shivering thermogenesis going on. Like, huh? What's up with that statement? Where does that come from? Or is there some way I'm missing that it could actually be true??
I've been very confused about this as well. My guess has been that when they told me as a kid that there were cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals, they just didn't understand the full continuum of tunas and dinosaurs and self-warming plants and so on.
Adults have various other thermo-regulatory mechanisms short of shivering, like increasing/decreasing surface blood flow, changing body position to reduce surface area, or putting on a jacket.
But a lizardman can do those things, it doesn't make it warm-blooded.
Yup, that's exactly my point. Note I'm only considering the distinction among homeotherms, I'm not considering poikilotherms.
From the wiki: "Such internally generated heat is mainly an incidental product of the animal's routine metabolism, but under conditions of excessive cold or low activity an endotherm might apply special mechanisms adapted specifically to heat production."
The idea is that every cell generates heat constantly, as a byproduct of their primary function. Only for shivering and brown fat cells is generating heat is the primary function.
The commentary from Cerastes seem to buffet this. They point out that cold blooded animals can usually slow down their metabolisms for long periods of time. We would explain that homeotherms need to have their metabolism running on "high" constantly in order to generate enough heat to maintain body temperature.
As a general rule, if you are confused because "these biological categories don't really seem so distinct the more I look into them", well, you probably aren't actually confused. The world is extremely fuzzy, and terminology like this is typically more useful for organizing lectures to undergrads than it is for mapping onto the world. I'm an organismal biologist and I had to look up the terms you mentioned to make sure there wasn't some important nuance I had forgotten about, but I don't really think there is.
TL;DR: "warm-bloodedness" is a matter of degree, not kind, which probably explains your confusion.
My understanding is that there are two main distinctions to make. (I'm not familiar with the english terminology, so sorry if the wording seems off - these are my own translations from swedish.) 1). Organism that can generate warmth, and those that cannot. (Endothermal - can create warmth through internal processes - and ectothermal - needs to rely on external sources such as sunlight.) 2). Organisms that keep a constant temperature regardless of their surrondings, and those that keep the same temperature as the surroundings. (Homeothermal - maintain a constant body-temperature - and poikilothermal - same temperature as surroundings.) (Endothermal organism usually have a faster growth rate, but is less energy efficient.)
But of course these are categories made by man for man to make predictions. Since biology famously is messy, we need to fill in the gap with the term "mesothermal", referring to intermediate states between endo- and ectothermal - where the body-temperature is allowed to vary within some intervall.
Also, big ectothermal organisms are "gigantothermal" through share size. This means that their body-temperature does not fluctuate quite as fast as smaller animals. A bigger mass takes longer to cool down or warm up, so a big animal - for example a big, ectothermal dinosaur - is like a coastal climate; kept closer to the mean temperature. (Weird analogy perhaps, but you get my point hopefully.)
And oh, bats and bears (for example) are heterothermal - they can vary their body-temperature, ie. have some body-parts colder than others. This is related to dormancy, which makes them more energy-efficient. Especially bats.
You might not be able to read this wonderfully informative piece on dinosaur body-temperature, but most of the references at the bottom of the page are in english: http://www.djur.cob.lu.se/Djurartiklar/Info/dinosaurier.html
One more thing I thought of: Some animals, like frogs and snakes, can survive freezing temperatures due to glucose that protect their cells from actually freezing. I guess this can be considered a form of "endothermal" protection for poikilothermal organisms...
I would have thought that all organisms, including the ones we classify as cold blooded, can generate warmth through internal processes. How can you convert food into motion without generating some heat? Wouldn't the more appropriate distinction was between organisms whose biology is designed to generate heat when doing so is useful and those whose biology only generates heat as a side effect of doing other useful things, such as moving?
You’re probably right. And even the distinction I was going for should have been between animals relying on internal processes vs those relying on external sources, to regulate body temperature.
Also, the bats and bears-example are more like ”temporal heterothermy” - variation over time. Others, like great white sharks, are regionally heterothermal, ie. variation throughout the body...
In theory, making friends online should be easy. Instead of luck and circumstance of the physical world, the virtual world should give us access to the few most compatible friend-candidates out of billions.
And yet, I still default to the physical world for finding new friends.
Question 1: where, online, have you found "true" friendship and how?
Question 2: I know that some have tried (and failed) to create a social network for the non-masses. Do you think there is opportunity for a social network for people with long attention spans that rewards the building of deep relationships? If yes, do you think it should be an open network (like Reddit), or more akin to a dating/matching app that filters the billions down to the most compatible? Ex. If love of Nietzsche is non-negotiable, would be easier to filter by that first.
Maybe friendship is more about somewhat non-compatible people finding a connection, perhaps after being thrown together against their will? So searching online for the perfectly compatible person could be exactly the wrong way to find friends.
For most people, searching online is certainly the best way to find people to talk to about quantum theory, muppet porn, or whatever their niche interest is. But their best friend-to-be might well be an annoying neighbour. (If love of Nietsche is really non-negotiable, that might change things, I suppose...)
Perhaps finding friends is like finding romance - there is the "similar but not too similar" thing going on there as well.
If ”similar but not to similar” in love is due to the selection for likeness - passing on as much of the genome as possible - versus the selection for avoidance of incest ... Then this should not apply to friendship at all.
Reding Henrish, The weirdest people in the world right now.
Could kinintensive cultures promote friendship between kin/most like, since trust will be mediated by kinship? And conversely, WEIRD culture promote friendship through more reciprocal altruism-styled mechanism? Like recognition of certain norms concerning ”neutrality” &c.
...for Weird: perhaps the opportunity to cooperate and engage in any activity is the base of friendship? Mutual gain?
And also, I would connect Weird culture to thymos and prestige-baed hierarchies. Weird people might be looking for ”valuable” friends, with useful skills? While kinintensive cultures would be more prone to rely on dominance-hierarchies, but - i guess - mainly within the kin-network.
I would say that this is the romantic definition of friendship which I have subscribed to and practiced for most of my life. But is it optimal?
The definition of friendship compatibility doesn't preclude a variety of personality types. For example, one can seek a chess-playing, philosopher who loves Rick and Morty. The results for such a query may still include an annoying neighbor (just not your annoying neighbor).
Old friendships are often defined by a history of shared experience. Maybe that's why new friendships have such high barriers to entry. Compatibility matching could provide a functional substitute for shared experience.
I realize that clinical terms like "compatibility matching" sound antithetical to the magic of friendships. But that can be fixed with some marketing.
IMO, Friends are people who stick with you through adversity (willingly or by coincidence).
Adversity makes people emotionally vulnerable, revealing more of them than they'd like. Accompanying people who hang around after that can usually be assumed to like the 'real you', warts and all. My fastest progressing friendships are all traceable to times when I and some strangers had to band together through a sudden and difficult situation.
It's difficult for online acquaintances to end up in such a situation.
Exception that proves the rule: Mmorpg friends I made during middle-high school felt quite real. But that's because it was a place where I could be myself, during a particularly bad time in school. The adversity, made it real.
Muppet porn you say?
(epistemic status: what seemingly worked for me)
You need the community to be pretty small such that it is possible to pretty consistently recognize usernames.
Then there needs to be activities eg games, people dont tend to consider discussion partners friends.
A surprisingly hard step is to go from group chats to private chats, i dont have a good solution here.
1. I haven’t found that online. I have people who’s posts I like to read. People I feel fondly towards. People who I banter with, but no friends. None I would reach out to if I needed something (financial, emotional).
My experience is that friendship is best formed through cooperative activity towards a shared goal. If I wanted to create an online friendship generator, it would probably be more like a game than a social network. Or even more powerful would be something to connect people with compatible skills to work on real problems matched to their interests.
This seems right. The only online friends I ever became close enough that I genuinely thought of them as friends, asked some for favors, and even met one in person, came from my time working as a volunteer on a cooperative online project. (It was the Open Directory Project--a volunteer-edited online directory of websites that was useful back when search engines kind of sucked, but became obsolete once Google got good enough.) I still feel wistful about those days--I don't know if I've ever felt so much a part of a community in my life.
"Something to connect people with compatible skills to work on real problems matched to their interests"--that sounds like it would be great for several reasons, even if it didn't succeed at creating deep friendships.
It also sounds like it would be similar to an employment agency. I haven't done a deep dive on employment agencies but my current impression is that people are spending a lot of money trying to do a good job of matching employers and employees and the results are pretty disheartening. So I suspect your thing would be hard to do well.
I would be happy to learn that I am wrong!
Similar experience - my only real friendships were with the fellow members of a mod team I was on. It took both mutual interests in the topic (why we were mods there in the first place) and a forced structure/duty that kept us around at regular hours and forced near-constant discussions to push it into the friendship zone.
Exactly! IRL it's easiest to make friends by pursuing a hobby, playing a sport, or joining a group with common interests. The internet is no different - if you start sharing your interests and ideas with the world, friends (and/or potential love interests) will come to you.
My closest friend, not counting wife and kids, was someone I got to know through the SCA, as are several other reasonably close friends.
Dunno about “true” friendship but I very much enjoy the Thursday Zoom happy hours on persuasion.community. I don’t have a ton of natural affinity with the people in my industry, especially wrt politics, but Persuasion is dedicated to open conversations and the group self-polices well.
Have found. Not willing to really explain. In all cases, I met people in RL later, repeatedly. In one case, trans continental flights were needed for that.
Small communities work best. I think live chats (IRC, or others like it) help with building connections with people. You see them often (however often you get on the chat), and there is a small enough user-base that you can spend more time (even unconsciously) on knowing those people. The one I most use is probably about 20 people, though not all are active all the time. This worked relatively well because of some underlying interest (programming), but I think forming small communities can be harder if you focus too hard on a single topic. Forming a community around Nietzsche might be fun, but as people grow bored or want to talk about other subjects they either make the community not solely about Nietzsche or leave to go join communities about... Hume or something.
Larger communities like many Discord servers can let you build up friendships, but it is way harder since everyone is interacting with a lot of people on there. While they may remember you and be friendly, they generally become at most "nice person to talk to".
I don't really have good ideas for a social media platform that encourages this. As mentioned in my first paragraph, I think focusing too narrowly on topics can harm this. Being able to talk about a wide range really helps get a greater view of people.
I have a suspicion that we don’t really know what to filter by in order to find highly compatible friends. There are some obvious life experience and intellectual interest candidates that maybe take you 80% of the way but a lot of the compatibility potential is in the last 20% and it’s murky. This makes serendipity a lot more important than intentionality.
I mostly haven’t, but to start out, you need a small enough community so that the same people keep showing up and you actually remember them. And the problem with that is there’s often not as much going on.
Also, when people are serious about finding someone (dating sites), the first thing they do is filter by geography. So it seems like online communities that are centered on a community or region would have an edge, even if they don’t strictly limit by geography? But there needs to be a common interest as well or you get NextDoor.
Our family has one friend who we got to know on WoW who is close enough so that my wife and our two adult kids flew up to his wedding — I had a previous commitment or would have gone.
Conjecture: making friends involves too much going on "under the hood" to be explicitly modeled in that way. In addition to the obvious surface-level exchange there's communication happening that we're largely unaware of, e.g. body language, intonation, dynamic word selection ("I saw it coming", "oh, I see what you mean"), the effect of location and ambience, even possibly pheromones. Plus the synergistic effect of all of those things together. When I think of my closest friends, yes there are shared interests and whatnot but something just clicked with them in a way that it didn't with lots of less close friends who are on paper arguably "better" friends. I suspect that trying to filter too much on conscious-level stuff like "must love Friedrich Wilhelm" is actually putting the cart before the horse.
Friendship requires trust and most of us, I think, are biologically wired to trust people we met IRL. There have been a couple of articles floating around about decreased trust between members of remote teems: there's more blaming and reporting and less spontaneous helping between people who haven't met IRL. Maybe it's something about microexpressions and emotional mimicry, or maybe it's something about the primordial fear of physical retribution for wrongdoing, but it seems that most people tend to be more ethical and trusting towards real life contacts. My experience is that this is less salient for people who are further along on the autistic spectrum.
#1: On the IRC roleplaying Darkmyst. I even met 2/3rds of my polycule there and the relationships are still going strong. As others have said, the key seems to be to have shared activities with people. (In the case of roleplaying, I find the bonds build out of the vulnerability of revealing what's going on in your imagination.)
#2: I think I haven't found one. I use and can recommend schlaugh.com for getting a social media fix, but I'm not yet sure about whether that's generating deep relationships. I do think it's generating better ones than I'd be seeing on Twitter or Facebook, but given the constraints of schlaugh.com there's also a lack of immediacy which I feel may be needed to create proper deep bonds. That said, I *would* say I've made friends there, quite strongly so.
Mysterious. I haven't really found anything I would call "friendship" online; at most I would call the users I am most familiar with "longtime acquaintances" (or something like that), and based on my experience I feel pretty dubious about a social network like that working. My current intuitive guess is (something like) that the investment required to create a "friendship" for any pair is large and there's not enough in internet communications for a-pair-of-users-who-met-on-the-internet to meet the requirement because of asynchronicity etc., but I feel pretty unsure about this.
Also, related gwern writing: "Face-to-face meetings, even brief ones, appear to cement personal connections of trust and liking to an extent not achieved by even years of more mediated contact like phone calls or Internet text discussions / emails / chat;...." (at https://www.gwern.net/Questions#sociology)
Re: comments. Just do what you're already doing, Scott. I think they add something special to the Substack.
The addition of "don't highlight" is more than enough to guarantee anyone who doesn't want their comments seen (on a public forum!) won't be surprised. You could ask Substack to put a small text under "Discussion" with a disclaimer, if you want to make absolutely sure.
I second that a disclaimer or checkbox in or next to the comment box seems ideal.
The difference is that if someone has a friend who sometimes reads ACX but probably doesn't read the comments, posting a story about them buried deep is probably okay. But if it's highlighted, then there's a much higher risk of it being seen (which was the objection at least one person had). I do think the disclaimer idea is workable though.
Substack hasn't even gotten around to removing the hearts after a month, I'm not optimistic about them doing some special new thing.
You can't edit the "Discussion" text, either? Something like "Discussion. Your comments may be republished, check About page for details."? If you can't do that, man, Substack really has a ways to go. Having to remember to manually add a disclaimer to every post will get old fast.
What may slow them down is the fact that they seem to use the exact same code for every substack. They've hardcoded astralcodexten in numerous places for stuff like expanding comments, so maybe they're trying to find a better way to do it. On the other hand, they've hardcoded astralcodexten in numerous places, so doing it one more time shouldn't stop them.
> They've hardcoded astralcodexten in numerous places for stuff like expanding comments
So they've got an utterly incompetent dev team :/
The proper way to do it is of course to make a setting that is configurable per substack.
Job opportunity, sounds like.
I've done enough heroic efforts at incompetent companies that refuse to listen. They need to want to do better.
If you open up the developer console on your browser, they actually have a recruiting message in there. But like Aapje, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.
Why? Is there something specific about Substack that turns you off?
I agree in principle; however they're probably optimizing for getting the features out to their client as fast as possible. Maybe they're planning to repay the tech debt later, in a seamless way. (Whether they get around to it is another story!)
Yes, that's always the promise: 'later, we'll fix things'. However, either they keep growing and there's money, but facilitating that growth still takes precedence, or they'll stagnate, so they could make it right, but they'll start focusing on saving money. So in practice, this theory of fixing the technical debt seamlessly almost never happens.
In reality, what tends to happen is that things become such a mess that adding features takes longer and longer & you get more and more bugs. So the only solution is to scrap things and start over, and then migrate to the new code, which is not going to be seamless.
The more crap the company accepts, the sooner the software needs to be replaced. However, you also create a company culture that accepts crap, so it's hard to change course and make the new software more robust.
++Test to see whether posting comments works again++ (can we all start developing for substack at once? incremental changes won't work. We have to be the Napoleonic France of frontend development, sweeping l'ancien regieme from before us with an iron fist, or an iron broom or somehing)
An iron guillotine?
That seems to match the analogy the best :P
Well it's nice to see they've made the CSS look pretty but the 'new first' button is still completely borked.
OK most likely not doable and a dumb idea. But could you heart your own comment as an indication that you don't mind if it's re-posted. This would mean that you (Scott) have to be able to see who put the hearts on a comment. If it's a workable idea, then lemon hearts turn into lemonade. (And where is the post you talked about hearts and not liking them?)
As-of four days later, the hearts are gone! (I kind of miss them.)