I like this. You might enjoy the recent documentary "Boys State" - teenagers are sorted randomly into fake parties and tasked with coming up with political platforms after the fact.
An associate of mine went to this program several years ago. His party couldn't agree on a platform, and so he convinced a group to splinter off and form a terrorist cell that engaged in guerilla warfare against the nascent government. I can't remember if they successfully staged a coup.
So, uh, watch out for that when assigning manifestos.
So, low does this work? the Democrats write the manifestos and then the Republicans get to decide whether to campaign for UBI and $15 min wage or reinstate slavery and patriarchy? Or the Republicans write them, and the Democrats get to choose between support for gun ownership and school choice or nationalizing industry to inaugurate strict central planning, with mandatory re-education of all white males?
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure how this would replicate the "divide" step of divide and choose. What's to stop a party from writing two identical manifestos that capture their preferred policy positions?
And, for that matter, what would stop a party from completely ignoring its assigned manifesto?
(1) Crimson Lake Party writes manifesto: "If elected, we will slash taxes by 20%" Automatic negation manifesto: "If elected, we will increase taxes by 20%"
(2) Gamboge Party: "Oh, thanks very much, we'll take the tax-slashing manifesto!" and Crimson Lake Party gets the tax-increase manifesto
(3) Voters don't want a 20% tax hike, so they vote the Gamboge Party into power
End result: whichever party writes the manifestoes is going to do the most milk-and-water, 'status quo all the way' manifesto so the opposition will have no advantage in picking one over the other and they won't be stuck with the disadvantage manifesto, resulting in both parties becoming ever more like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, since whoever gets elected is elected on a manifesto of "more of the same".
... Why wouldn't the party writing the manifestos just write the same thing (the thing the author likes) twice?
*Dividing* something that already exists and *creating* something new are very different processes. The incentive structure from one doesn't carry over to the other.
"giving the same manifesto twice is making the result of the election a coin-flip"
Elections have factors other than policy differences. My party's candidate will implement the platform with competence and integrity, and more importantly is fun to be around!
As you may know, something along these lines has been used in legal systems. In Periclean Athens, the convicted defendant in a criminal case could propose a penalty, the prosecutor could impose a penalty, and the jury chose between them.
More recently, it's used in complex arbitration. I think there are some famous examples in Baseball players union negotiations where the arbitrator asks both sides to submit a resolution so he could choose whichever he considered the most gracious and reasonable.
On top of generating generally fair results, it's also a great work-saving device for the arbitrators, so it's sort of doubly clever.
On the simple yes-no question, 45% said it could sometimes be okay/appropriate to write about companies' requests for investment, 13% said it was never okay/appropriate, and 42% weren't sure.
On the more complicated question, 45% thought that the actual investment request I included was appropriate, 21% weren't sure, and 34% thought it was inappropriate for various reasons. Of those who thought it was inappropriate, about 10% thought investment requests were never appropriate, and the other 24% thought it was inappropriate for various specific reasons.
The most commonly cited reason was that people thought it felt like a bait-and-switch where I didn't tell them the post was leading up to an investment pitch. At first I felt sort of offended by this one - I titled the post "Shilling For Big Mitochondria"! But on further reflection I guess it makes sense. I had been interested in writing about DNP for a while, hearing about this company cemented it for me, and so it was an awkward pastiche of the post I would have written anyway and a post about the company. I can see how it would be jarring to read.
Other people thought I needed to take more precautions to inform people that investing in biotech companies is very risky and really only suitable for professional investors. The company was only accepting investment from accredited investors, which I thought made this a non-issue. I'm not sure whether the people saying this didn't know that, or whether they think even accredited investors need a special warning.
Other people thought it was a conflict of interest that my friend worked at the company. I'm...not sure this is true? I learn about a lot of things through my social network, and networking is a known way of doing and learning about things.
I think in general a lot of the problem was that people thought of this as me trying to claim that this was a hot stock tip that would make $$$, whereas I was trying to present it as a basically charitable opportunity to support a company doing really exciting and possibly world-changing research. If I was claiming it was a hot stock tip, then having a friend working there might be distorting my stock-evaluation ability. If it's just a cool opportunity to help with research, then...I'm not sure. This blog is fun, but it's only going to be actually worth our time if it helps change the world for the better. That's a tough order for a blog, and one of the few ways I can imagine it happening is if it helps connect people who can get involved in important institutions like charities, research programs - and yes, - companies - in ways that help them grow.
I have no ability to give people hot stock tips that will make them money, and in general you should assume I'm not doing this. But I know lots of amazing people trying to change the world who deserve more support than they're getting, and I'd like to be able signal-boost this when I think it's valuable.
My current plan is that if I ever do anything like this again, I'll do it on a Classified Thread (remember those?) where it won't feel out of place to anyone, and I'll specify that I have no reason to think it will make anybody any money. Also, please don't ask me to pitch your business; there is basically no chance it will work but it will make things awkward.
I'm having trouble understanding why you think this is a charitable opportunity. You know about effective altruism, if you are seriously making the claim that investing in this biotech startup will do more good than giving the money to an EA charity, you will need to provide a mountain of evidence for that claim. I want to preserve and grow my wealth with my Investment Money, and do the most good with my Charity Money. I don't think mixing the two objectives is a good idea.
Can you explain your preference for keeping a hard line between investing and charity? It’s not obvious to me that utilitarian accounting would preclude investments that have both direct returns and positive externalities.
If he's motivated to get investors to give it money independent of whether it would be a good deal for the investor, ehe has a conflict of interest. "I really think it would be good for the world if this organization got a lot of money" may be a more noble reason than "it's run by my brother and I want him to get richer", but it's still a reason that distorts one's judgment.
If that is a conflict of interest, how is any discussion of anything Scott approved of not a conflict of interest? Mentioning something you heard on the news because you think it's a positive development is a conflict of interest by this logic. I can't see how any discussion of companies or technologies would not be a conflict of interest, if you are defining interest as simply approving of the proposed outcome!
I think you're confusing conflict of interest, where potential personal gain means you should not declare an opinion, which is a pretty-clearly defined concept, with having an interest in the company, which is healthy and part of how we want the economy to work. That Scott has a friend whose work is interesting enough to him to suggest it is worth supporting is no more contentious than me saying I believe we should all stop an listen to the birds for five minutes every day, and Scott's statement is probably rationally a more useful thing to do.
I'd class this as a case of rigour over-zealously applied, and hopefully not an example of the sometimes-observed distaste for commerce, although if the latter at least with got a thematic link to the recent posts on class I suppose...
It's a conflict of interest only if you assume that the goal of an investment can only be return. If the people recommended to are also interested in making the world better, then this is not a conflict of interest but just "an interest". It's the same interest, is my point.
Such a company would either trade the positive externalities for more money at the first opportunity, or would be outcompeted by more unethical companies and lose the ability to do good or make money. Moloch doesn't allow you to serve two masters.
It seems like you’re assuming a company can capture all of the value it creates. If it can’t, there are positive externalities. Competition can even reduce the ability to capture value (eg by driving prices down).
That’s a good way of addressing the deductive point.
And inductively, there are companies whose products and services make the world better. Therefore shouldn’t supporting a company like that who isn’t well known be a priority for an Effective Altruist?
A for-profit company is already trading the positive externalities for more money. That's how it makes money. There are 3 things you're forgetting:
1. You're assuming that charities are as efficient as for-profit companies are at spending money to increase human welfare. But for-profit companies get paid more to increase human welfare more, while charities don't. This is why for-profit companies are free to spend their money in ways that will eventually increase welfare a lot (e.g., creating Google, ), whereas charities are constrained to spend their money in ways that appear, to the average donator, to increase welfare right now (e.g., buying solar power panels for African villages), or to decrease total welfare in redistributing it to someone especially pitiable (e.g., the Make-a-Wish foundation, average cost $10K/wish).
I could write a long rant about my experiences in startups and government contracting, in which I learned that, when people are given a lot of someone else's money to spend, even if they have the best of intentions, they spend it in useless ways because they don't have the only metric (market value) that tells you how valuable something you're doing really is to people. The waste that results from not having paying customers to keep you in line is astounding.
2. When you invest in a company, you're not losing the money; you can sell the stock once the company has a firm financial footing, and give those proceeds to charity. Even if you make the assumption in #1, giving to charity and investing in a for-profit should come out about even in altruistic utilon generation.
3. "Moloch" is really bad anthropomorphizing which focuses entirely on the negative, personifies it, and attributes it with agency, thus encouraging people to think of free markets and of freedom as evil instead of as good, and to seek agents of Moloch to slay. It's Marxist mythology which has crept into the rationalist community (via Scott, I'm afraid).
Bear in mind that serious EAs have thought *a lot* about this stuff, and have virtually always landed on charity not for profit enterprises. And these are the same people who have also landed on 'generally, political activism is suboptimal' 'worry about AI risk' and 'working for big companies and give your money away is an excellent path to doing good', so I don't think this just a fear of non-leftist/libertarian/unusual conclusions.
There's a large difference between "the most-effective utilon generator is usually a non-profit" and "theoretically, no for-profit company can ever be as efficient as any non-profit company".
Why is it that not to long ago in the US poor people starved to death sometimes, and now they are fat? Is it because people give more to charity than they did then? No. It's because of improvements in technology (or if charity is increased it is because GDP has increased, which is due to technology). So I don't see how you can say that charity is clearly superior, when history shows that investment in technology is clearly where improvements in standard of living come from.
(Er, I shouldn't have said "trading the positive externalities for money". I meant, the positives aren't externalities, because the company is paid for them.)
With either extreme I know where they stand. Either they are profit-maximisers or they are bound by the rules of registered charities. If it's in the middle then who knows where in the middle it is?
I took his use of the word charity to mean “Treat this investment as a gift without any expectation of a financial return”.
Mixing the two objectives of increasing invested wealth and doing good for humanity are very much the trend in the investment world today. And even before ESG and impact funds were a thing, the idea of “double bottom line” has been around for awhile. I think your view that these objectives should be compartmentalized is more fringe and requires evidence.
I think the view that they should be compartmentalized is simply a reversion, back from utilitarianism to subjective, spiritualist, non-materialist ethics again, which denies that morality can be quantified, and claims that "material" and "spiritual" are separate magisteria.
Right now some EA groups' recommendations is that they will use billionaire money to take care of the obvious stuff, and that individuals with more normal amounts of money should spend it on smaller opportunities that they are uniquely placed to know about which the billionaires haven't found yet. If this drug has an X% chance of ending obesity, and I'm uniquely placed to know about it because I know a person who works there, I think it counts as a potentially EA-like thing that the billionaires haven't heard about yet.
(caveat: other organizations don't say this, and it's kind of complicated because the billionaires will only fund up to half of any charity's operating budget so it's always possible to increase the amount the billionaires will donate by donating yourself. This is my impression of what a few people have told me, nothing more)
It's tangential, but this seems backwards to me. Money is fungible, but time isn't. If I donate a relatively small amount, it's not worth my while finding niche donation opportunities. I should just give the money to EA funds or the top recommendation on GiveWell, which I can assume have sufficient capacity for my donation. Whereas if I were giving away a billion pounds, it would be worth spending time identifying particular giving opportunities, which I could then fully fund.
My suspision is that the position you refer to has its root in vanity: people don't like the feeling that their donation is insigificant compared with Dustin Moskovitz. But actually, it makes no difference to the impact. There's no need to be a hipster: just do the best thing, and if other people also do the best thing, that's great!
I could see an argument that it's not worth spending time hunting for unique opportunities, but you should still take advantage of any unique opportunities that happen to fall in your lap while you are going about your life.
Though I'm not sure that holds up, because even if you hear about a unique opportunity spontaneously, there's presumably still some due-diligence investigative work you'd have to do before putting money there made sense.
Big organizations like Open Phil don't have the capacity to vet hundreds of small (<100k) grants, so they prefer to give to organizations that can absorb large amounts of money. Since there are many opportunities for grantmaking in the 5k-500k range, and since the big funders are constrained in how many organizations they can vet, an individual donor that is prepared to do their own work can plausibly find a niche topic they know well that is competitive with many of the best giving opportunities.
I make annual donations to a Children's Hospital in my town to support their ongoing research program. It is a registered charity and my donations are tax deductible. So, it is not impossible. OTOH, when I donate I donate, and when I invest, I invest.
The existing EA framework ≠ the be-all end-all EA mindset. One can be enough of a consequentialist utilitarian to agree with the EA mindset per se, but have slightly different terminal values from the EA orthodoxy to the extent that one's calculus about which charities should be prioritized will be different. For example, this might be true of a preference utilitarian who *hard* rejects the Repugnant Conclusion, and for whom guaranteeing a pleasant life to those already living is much more important relative to preventing deaths than the existing EA framework assumes.
While I understand your thought process, wouldn't it be even better to invest in companies that are making a difference?
Our feelings about electric cars or Musk aside. A company like Tesla, who's stated goal is to reduce green house gas emissions from vehicles sounds like a great place to invest for your future in both ways. You can make money, and potentially protect the environment. More so than buying your own electric car.
As another option, I've heard of investment funds that target green initiative companies (green energy and such). Again, why not make money and do what you can to protect the environment.
Maybe you're on top of this, but most of us just buy investment funds or ETFs. There's a chance that you're supporting companies that actually go against your charity donations. Nullifying or reducing your own altruistic effects (in so far as buying shares in a company tell it you're happy with what they're doing).
I'd argue that investing for change is the most Effectively Altruist way to invest. Your investments would reinforce your charity dollars.
I think I need to go double check where I'm invested.
I wonder if this is partly responsible for Tesla's stock boom, and whether institutional investors have already incorporated measures of altruism into their models. I tried googling, but was overwhelmed by results linking to stories about people who (supposedly) were entirely motivated by altruism and just ended up making lots of money, because karma.
I also wonder why we even have to talk about this. If people invest to maximize expected utility, and their utility functions include concern for other people--both of which I believe are usably correct--then it should have been obvious since the great post-Christian progressive/moral revolution of the 19th century that seemingly-altruistic companies have higher stock values than P/E-equivalent not-obviously-altruistic companies.
I doubt institutional investors have started using altruism as a metric in their models.
Firstly because they would advertise the hell out of it. It's a lot easier to forgive lower than expected returns in a fund if the argument is "but we did good too".
Secondly because we would see more investor activism on that front, and it would probably be advertised to all hell again.
I admit, I could just be missing the advertising on these funds, and socially conscious activist investors as I'm not exactly the target demographic for that news.
I wonder if billionaires could start buying up huge stakes in these companies in order to push them to pursue better long-term goals instead of just the best short term returns.
The problem is that the non-altruistic return from investing in those companies is then less than from investing in other countries, so all non-altruistic investors put their money somewhere else. Unless there are enough altruistic investors to fully fund the altruistic companies, return on investment goes back up to the market return, the companies are paying as much for capital as before so no benefit to altruistic objectives, and the altruistic investors get their altruism for free — but not really, since their investment doesn't benefit the companies.
So the altruists should either invest in companies that only altruists invest in or spent money on charity instead.
1. Empirically, when a British Petroleum oil well polluted the Caribbean, BP's stock fell far below any market-rational value, and stayed low even after the reparations that would be demanded from it became known. The simplest explanation is that the market was punishing it for harming the environment.
2. Theoretically, an omniscient, non-altruistic investor would know when a stock had added utility to altruists, and that this should be factored into its expected market value. Investors don't care about the company's returns; they care about the market value of their investment. If a bunch of altruists will value the stock higher, then the stock really has a higher market value.
On the other hand, a non-omniscient, altruistic investor who doesn't know which companies are socially helpful or harmful will act just like a non-altruistic investor.
So the difference which motivates the behavior you describe isn't between altruism and non-altruism, but between knowing and not knowing about the ways companies help and harm others. Note that in my BP example, the harm done by BP was blared across all media nonstop for weeks, so everyone knew about it, and knew everyone else knew about it.
So perhaps social benefits would affect stock price more if Wall Street culture expected reporters and analysts to talk about the social harms and benefits of companies. This doesn't even require them to /care/ about them; merely to regard them as data that's useful to some investors. Once everyone believes that social net benefits are an important factor in stock value, they'll become an important factor in stock value.
3. I shouldn't have used the word "altruism", meaning "acting to benefit others at expense to oneself". I'm thinking rather of companies whose for-profit business happens to involve making stuff I think of as especially socially helpful, like Google, or the makers of coronavirus vaccine.
However, now that I think this through, as a good free-market economist I should accept that our best estimate of the social value of the stuff made is its market value, which represents its utility to its consumers. Hence, those companies with the largest gross income are those producing the most social value (except in non-free-market cases involving monopoly, regulation, confusopoly / private information, etc.). So if my investment strategy sought to maximize social utility, the only difference would be that I'd invest in companies with high gross rather than net income. But I'd go broke, because those companies are much more likely to go out of business than companies with high net incomes. (Note this doesn't apply to the preceding discussion of companies acting in ways which are socially perceived as beneficial; only to companies which are objectively socially beneficial as measured by market prices.)
The two strategies would give similar outcomes if the altruistic good-free-market investor considers the social utility that each company will produce over the life of the company.
A mountain of evidence that investing $X in a for-profit company can produce more social utility than giving $X to any charity: Google.
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a post, Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately, which justifies giving to charity, but (IIRC) on the basis that giving to charity may increases social utility more through the fuzzies that you personally receive from giving to charity (as fuzzies are essential to life), than through the utility produced from your money by the charity.
Google's first round of funding was $25 million, which I think they operated for a few years. It kept the Internet usable. Yahoo and Ask Jeeves had curated approaches that didn't scale; Alta Vista bogged down on trying to tackle NLP; metacrawler relied on other search engines to do a good job.
I may be overrating Google's importance in search; their main effect may have been gaining a monopoly by eliminating all other competition by the dastardly trick of patenting their PageRank search algorithm, which was so stupidly simple and obvious that you couldn't really make a decent search engine without using it.
But I use Google's free email service; their free doc service; their free spreadsheets; their free speech-to-text program. So do billions of other people. Add up the utilons there. I embrace the "repugnant conclusion".
Of course, this may all be cancelled out when they create the first AGI and conquer or destroy the world. But, until a few years ago, that didn't seem inevitable.
Scott, seriously, talk to a lawyer about this. Don't assume you can figure out what's legal and what isn't; you're very smart, but the law can be very dumb.
By involved with Substack, I mean someone who's either involved in Scott's income guarantee from Substack or directly involved in investing in the company itself.
All it takes is one casual person swinging by because they heard about this Scott Alexander person somewhere, reading about "Magic Carpets is a swizzy new startup", deciding to sell the very shirt off their back to invest in Magic Carpets, then the thing goes "ka-blooey", they lose everything, and they get angry and go to law over it.
Doesn't matter if Scott never said "Sell your shirt to invest in Magic Carpets", there are plenty of dumb smart people out there.
This reads like a fully general argument against every communicating anything to anyone. There's no real obstacle to someone suing someone else for _any reason at all_ (or even no real reason).
Reg D only applies to issuers. And it only deals with 33 Act compliance. Non-issuers need to worry about BD regulation and 40 Act compliance as well. Reg D does not help with that.
I left a comment in the survey essentially saying that accredited investors need warnings, but it was probably too short to explain well. @bunnydogwalking already posted the excellent Matt Levine column, so I'll assume you've read that.
I completely agree that there is value in signal-boosting on this blog investments that genuinely interest you because /actual/ sophisticated investors read this blog. (And because you already realize that this only works if you ignore people asking you to pitch their business.)
However, "accredited investor" does not in any way mean "sophisticated investor". Random dentists or Google SWEs or whoever should not be investing in private placements. But, I'm libertarian enough to say that they just need a warning. "Don't invest in private companies if losing $250,000 would make you lose any sleep" or whatever. (Yeah, a company could accept a small investment, but that's a red flag.)
The point isn't to cover your ass -- the point is (1) to genuinely convince dentists that the opportunity is in fact targeted at more sophisticated investors and (2) to convince people complaining about all this that it was never a problem because you were only interested in bona fide sophisticated investors in the first place. (But obviously this won't help with people who are just vaguely offended by capitalism in general and large amounts of money in particular.)
I personally did NOT get the impression that the biotech company was targeting accredited but unsophisticated investors, but due to this becoming some big thing where you're soliciting general feedback about signal-boosting investments, I'm offering general feedback.
It was I who suggested that there were legal problems with suggesting an investment opportunity in your friends company.
In my time I was accounted to be a savvy practitioner of securities law. People paid me for my advice. Some of them heeded me. Some of them didn't. One of the guys who didn't is in durance vile still.
My free advice to you was don't do it. I saw downsides and you claimed you had no upside, so the conclusion was easy.
You have a constitutional right to commit journalism, but I thought the post in question crossed the line from journalism into solicitation.
In the future, I would say that it is proper and legal to report on development stage technology, and even to say that the developer is looking for funding. But I would cut it off at that. Let the unwary use their Google fu, to find the company.
Is there a difference between saying "Acme is making exciting rockets, and by the way it is looking for funding" vs. what I did (which you seemed to think crossed the line into making an investment pitch)?
Your original post made me uncomfortable. It is lawful and proper to practice science journalism. And I thought the original post went past that. I don't want to try spec out all of the possible variations. It is tedious and it would require me to do research that I do not have the tools for or the inclination to do. If I see something that makes me uncomfortable I will say so.
Can you point to an enforcement action which contains a fact pattern analogous to Scott's blog post?
My experience with securities lawyers has been that there are a ton who have academic legal theories (and will charge you a lot of money to share those opinions with you in fancy memos!) but few who have relevant enforcement perspective and can contextualize the risk.
We can probably agree that just about every real estate deal with multiple particpants and angel deal could be some sort of Reg D violation with a broad interpretation of solicitation. The value of legal advice is contextualizing risk - not restating the law into laymen's terms.
No. I am not doing research. I don't have the tools. I don't have the time. And, it is not enough fun to do for less than $1000/hr. I am not even going to drag in my friend who was general counsel of FINRA or my other friend who was general counsel of the SEC.
I think whether or not there is a risk of enforcement cracking down on Scott, one might think that if he's doing the *sort* of thing that they could *legally* crack down on, then that might be a sign that this post is *ethically* problematic, even if it's not likely to lead to actual legal trouble. (Of course, if someone thinks the regulations are badly written, then that might be less of a significant worry.)
"Accredited investors" doesn't actually mean people with any kind of education/credentials in investing; it just means people with $200k/year income or more. Scott, you're probably an accredited investor.
So yes, I do think that "even" accredited investors need warning. I have a relative who regularly puts his money in stupid things (like various shitcoins) and then loses most of it, and I think it's immoral to pitch investments to him without disclaimers (and yes, I suspect he's accredited - he has high salary, but achieved the high salary recently at age 60, and he's retiring soon with little savings).
I was wondering how you became an "accredited investor". So it's basically brokerage saying "show us your bank balance - okay, you have enough dough to make it worth our while to take your orders"?
There's a lot of confusion about what "accredited investor" even means, because it's an obscure point of US law.
It has nothing to do with "worth our while to take your orders". If you just want to buy Apple stock or whatever, you can open an account with $500 and have at it.
"Accredited investor" means "eligible to buy minimally-regulated financial products".
If I have a company that does not comply with the extensive requirements to be "publicly traded" (periodic public, audited financial statements and other public disclosures), I cannot make it available as an investment to the general public. If I accept a bunch of investments from regular people, $5k at a time or whatever, I have committed a crime and could go to jail.
However, I can accept investments from rich people, i.e. "accredited investors". It is my responsibility to confirm that they meet the criteria. I might have a minimum investment, but I'm checking their bank statements not so much to confirm that they're worth my while, but rather to confirm that I won't go to jail.
The theory is that startups need someone to invest in them, but regular people need protection. Regular people get more protection from dodgy investments than rich people, but rich people in turn get high-risk, high-reward opportunities along with the truly dodgy investments.
A somewhat more cynical take is that too many people qualify as "accredited investors":
Really rich can get hosed too. And you can make big money on publicly traded stocks. If you invested $1,000 in APPL 20 years ago and you held on to your investment, you would have more than $300,000 now. Of course if you had invested $1,000 in Hertz Renta Car back then, you have what is known in Bankruptcy Latin as bupkis.
Okay, I had no idea Hertz was doing so badly, and looking at Wikipedia makes me go "What the hell?"
"As of 2019, the company had revenues of US$9.8 billion, assets of US$24.6 billion, and 38,000 employees. The company filed for bankruptcy on May 22, 2020, citing a sharp decline in revenue and future bookings caused by the COVID-19 pandemic"
How do you go from "assets of 24.6 billion" one year to "sell the family silver, we're broke!" the next? This makes me think something more was going on there - like creative accounting? Not really anything like the assets they claimed? Or they really were living "from one paycheck to the next" so their revenues were covering the fleet expenses, and that doesn't sound like a good way to run a business.
I've read further into that Wikipedia article and this makes me go - pardon the bluntness - "holy fuck". Plainly, I am not cut out for the heady heights of high finance!
"Hertz financed itself mostly by taking out loans secured by its fleet of cars, and if the cars fell in value, Hertz’s lenders had the right to demand an immediate payment reducing the amount of the loan, so it was still comfortably covered by the cars’ now-lower value. Because of the crisis, used-car values and sales volumes fell right as Hertz lost most of its customers. The bankruptcy filing started a 60-day clock, during which Hertz’s secured lenders must wait before they can foreclose on the 400,000 U.S. cars that were financed through such arrangements."
So let me see if I have this straight: they were leasing some at least of their fleet? so they were buying them on tick? and then borrowing against those? so they owed double payments on the cars? and then the used car market went kablooey?
I suppose it made some kind of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" sense at the time and so long as nothing happened it was workable, but they don't seem to have made provision for rainy days.
True, I should have phrased that differently to be clear that super-rich also get dodgy investment opportunities, unless their staff keep slick salespeople away. My real point was that low-tier accredited investors are below the point where they realistically get access to interesting startups and whatnot.
My brother the doctor was approached by his investment adviser as to whether he would be interested in investing in private equity funds. He called me because he that I had some involvement in the field, and our other brother who is an executive in a PE owned company. We both told him to stay away.
Ask yourself we said: "Why do they need my money now?"
A story told by George J.W. Goodman, a financial writer and television personality (active from the late 60s until the turn of the century), is about the investor who visited a ranch to see the cattle that he had purchased as a tax shelter. He drives past acres of pasture where fat kine repose in rumination to the ranch house. He goes into the office excited find out which cattle are his. They say none of those, yours are down that road about a mile and the send one of the ranch hands out to escort him. The ranch hand drives him to the drives to the appointed spot where he see a bunch of sickly cows in a rocky scraggly pasture. The ranch hand says. Those are your cattle.
30 years ago, I was a partner in a law firm. For a living, I wrote offering documents for private placements and public offerings. But, my income and assets did not meet the accredited investor test. I couldn't invest in the deals I had created. In the long run I was as well off. A lot of those deals didn't make money.
My understanding of these sort of investments is that you invest in 10 of them and you expect one of them to do well enough to pay for the other nine that tank.
This sort of record apparently makes you worth listening to, because you took a large fortune and failed to make it a smaller one.
"Other people thought it was a conflict of interest that my friend worked at the company. I'm...not sure this is true? I learn about a lot of things through my social network, and networking is a known way of doing and learning about things."
The tricky part here is that this is how pyramid schemes work - word of mouth recommendations from a friend of a friend. We know this is not you, but by the same token, you could be perfectly honest about this! Your friend could be perfectly honest about this! And somebody reading the recommendation sinks their life savings into this because they trust your word and when/if it goes belly-up (because this is a risk when starting any new venture), they've lost everything.
I suppose many of us are sensitive or even over-sensitive to such things as conflict of interest because of the jobs we work where we get it hammered into us about a higher standard of conduct than even Caesar's wife. There is a thin, let us hope bright, line between "a friend of a friend told me about this cool new thing" and "fill your boots".
And even with the best will in the world, some people *are* going to take "I heard about this cool new thing" as "hot stock tip make easy $$$$$".
I think Scott needs to come up with some definition of conflict of interest that is consistent and makes sense to him. Because it doesn't make sense as written. It's not a conflict because...learning about stuff through a social network is normal? Okay, but how does that connect to the concept of a conflict of interest? Is Scott assuming it's not a conflict because the friend didn't blatantly give him money to write about the company on the blog?
That said, I'm not really sure Scott is under an obligation to avoid conflicts of interest. He's a blogger, not a lawyer or financial adviser, so if he wants to use the platform to shill companies that his friends create, knowing he won't be able to objectively evaluate his friends' companies, I'm not sure there's an ethical problem as long as the relationship is disclosed.
I suppose "this is the shiny new thing a friend told me about" and then leave us to go and dig out the details for ourselves if we're really interested, and certainly no hint of "please send your bank account and credit card details to this email address"?
Yeah, I'm comfortable with the proposed approach of keeping the investment pitches to classified threads. But not because it's not a conflict, it definitely is, but I don't think the blogger/reader relationship is the sort of privileged relationship of trust where conflict of interest rules apply.
" I learn about a lot of things through my social network, and networking is a known way of doing and learning about things" – the fact that it is a known way does not mean it is a good way. To make a hyperbolic comparison, murder is a known way of solving your problems, established from the earliest days. Many people still disapprove of this venerable institution in a broad-based manner! It is the same with nepotism; like the poor, we have it always with us, but unlike the poor and murder, it's never good.
I saw the investment advice as potentially muddying the waters with regards to the medical advice. i.e. saying "you should invest in this" implies that the product is probably really great (and therefore maybe you should consider taking some even if it hasn't been through the whole FDA approval process that your readers know you're sceptical of). I'd rate this as relatively low risk, but I'd say the investment shilling was one of the factors that contributed to the perception that the product might be worth taking
The company mentioned as investment opportunity is trying to make a new, completely different drug that use a completely different biochemical process to achieve mitochondrial uncoupling, with a goal of being much safer than DNP (which also works via mitochondrial uncoupling, but is very dangerous). The company is NOT trying to take DNP through the FDA approval process!
The fact that the company is trying to develop a different, safer drug should not indicate that the original drug is safe!
Quite aside the legality of it all, I have another view: There are few rules I live by more stringently than 'I give no investment advice.' despite having more than enough formal education in Finance.
I will even give relationship advice before I give investment advice. One exception: I will raise a flag - once - if a product is either objectively a bad idea (usually because of inordinate fees or carefully hidden risks) or looks like an outright scam.
You can find your way out of insomnia and into sleep by focusing in a counterintuitively alert way on your hypnagogic hallucinations, using them as a sort of biofeedback mechanism and following them as they change their characteristics in predictable ways:
This was very neat and closely matches the meditation practice of the fire kasina. Usually when I would practice that, I would have more visual clarity for a short period of time and more vivid memories.
Very interesting article. I've experienced hypnagogic hallucinations fairly consistently throughout my entire life and the general progression outlined from formless to distinct and from 2D to 3D aligns with what I've always experienced. I do have doubts as to how useful this advice is to a person not familiar with hypnogogia though. Even with my familiarity each different stage when I'm really struggling with a racing mind at bed time, trying to get out of "The Rut", just shifting my focus isn't enough. I usually have to do a full reset, get out of bed, cool off, even walk around some and that's what get's my mind to calm enough for the hallucination to start. Still, I'll be paying more attention and trying to follow the "guideposts" more mindfully now. Also, an element of my hypnagogia has always been aural. Hearing music or voices. This can start as early as what you call "The Lava Lamp". Is this something you've experienced or seen written about?
I haven't noticed much in the way of aural hypnagogic hallucinations, but I haven't gone out of my way to look for them either. Sometimes they show up at the closest-to-sleep guideposts when the microdreams begin. I've got tinnitus, too, so that might overwhelm any subtle aural hypnagogic hallucinations. I'm not surprised that for other people this could be as striking as visual hallucinations are for me.
For most of my life, I've been able to do the following, whenever I closed my eyes in a quiet place. I would visualize something with a pleasant and easy to visualize texture or pattern (such as, e.g., polished wood, velvet, snow, stained glass, leaves, embroidered material) and look at it for a while. Sometimes I mentally tug at the image just a little, sometimes I just let it sit there, and, after a while, it will begin to morph and become another picture, then that picture will become another picture, and so on. While I'm seeing this, I wouldn't be asleep yet and could talk and describe what I'm seeing, but eventually I would fall asleep if I stay like this. The only problem is, once in a while I will get a picture of something unpleasant and have to forcefully discard the image and start another sequence.
Other people told me they couldn't do this, so I guess this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but perhaps that's something that might come for some people if they tried.
Interesting! I wonder if this can be used to induce a lucid dream from waking.
My trick for falling asleep - including in the middle of the night - is always reading a book, which I guess is another way of focusing attention away from emotionally charged thoughts and getting out of the local minimum you mentioned. An e-ink reader with fully adjustable backlight (no minimum level) is amazing for this, as turning on the light in the room or, God forbid, looking at an LCD screen would make falling asleep more difficult.
Yes, this is a method of getting straight into lucid dreaming called a Wake-Induced Lucid Dream or WILD. The dreams will be very short and unfocused if you try this first thing at night, you need to have woken up at night during a longer REM cycle to get much value out of it.
Thanks for putting the time into writing this. Every tool in the insomnia wars is a valuable one.
But in your list of standard treatments I'm surprised you didn't mention sleep compression therapy. To me, this should be the first port of call for those with sleep issues.
Another comment feature request (somebody's probably asked for this already): the ability to collapse a certain comment thread. Especially in the open threads, it's much easier to collapse an long, uninteresting thread than to scroll all the way past it.
You should actually already be able to do this. There's a vertical line leading down from top-level comments; if you click on it, it collapses all sub-comments. It doesn't collapse the top-level comment itself, though, which means long top-level comments you're not interested in still need to be scrolled past, but it should help with unwieldy threads.
I was typing this just as you were - thanks for saving me the proofreading.
I would really like it if you could collapse the top-level comment as well - sometimes it's long and difficult to scroll past too. This is currently my #2 feature request, behind an edit button.
Huh, hadn't realized that the new reddit UI does this. I guess that makes it a less bizarre design decision (though the highlighting on reddit is a lot more obvious and it collapses the parent comment as well).
Also, thanks for making me open reddit in a different browser and thereby reminding me how glad I am RES exists (new reddit looks awful).
I just love these modern, undocumented text-free interfaces with their essentially undiscoverable features. Congratulations to SubStack for contributing to the modern trend of prioritizing appearance far ahead of usability; I wonder whether they've been poaching UI designers from Apple.
As a longtime software developer trying to specialize in GUI design I concur in your bitter sarcasm. Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini at least gave it a try, but it seems to be a losing battle.
Ooooh, it does! And I would never have thought of clicking on the line! I dunno, these modern apps with their fancy 'you should have imbibed this knowledge with your mother's milk' designs 😁
Thanks! I had no idea. I would like a design feature like a little downward pointing triangle at the top that made it more obvious, so that newbies don't have to explicitly hear about it, but can guess based on the visual representation.
But having the feature at all is the biggest thing.
That works well if the top of the vertical line is visible on the screen, but otherwise it collapses in a non-intuitive manner and you are now reading several comments below the top-level comment whose replies you ignored.
I hate clicking in that region. I have no idea what, specifically, I'm collapsing, and sometimes I just click because it's a wide open space and I need to get the window in focus.
So I have a question for you smart and beautiful commenters. When assessing all the big COVID questions (was the whole lockdown worth it, how fast should reopening be, was it personally worth it for me) I think the biggest unknown is long-term cardiac effects. If I just spent 2% of my estimated remaining lifespan hiding from something that had a 0.03% chance of killing me, that’s pretty stupid. If COVID had a 0.03% chance of killing me but a 20% chance of significantly reducing my lifespan via heart damage, that’s entirely different.
Everyone quotes the same exact study proving frequent heart damage from COVID-19 (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916). This study has since undergone what Retraction Watch would call a “megacorrection”, and I feel like the effect size is so big it should have been reproduced many times by many hospitals. A more recent study of athletes looks far less threatening (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2777308), but still indicates that COVID-induced myocarditis is a real phenomenon. The pandemic has been raging long enough that I feel like such damage should be detectable in the form of say, an increase in heart attacks in young people in Lombardy and NY over the last year, but I’m not a medical doctor and I don't know if it will take much longer for such effects to manifest.
FWIW I’ve been hiding long enough that I will continue to do so until vaccinated, so don’t worry that I’m looking for an excuse to be irresponsible.
I realize that nowhere in my comment did I actually write a question. The question is "how prevalent and serious is long-term cardiac damage from COVID, and does it occur in the absence of serious disease"?
My assumption is that max vax policy is the highest priority and there are few incentives to publish studies that may be interpreted as less than apocalyptic. So my non-answer is that we won't know soon... not that we have enough distance from the first cases to postulate quantities like 20% shorter lifespan.
That said, this article slipped through and I thought was interesting and balanced (https://www.vox.com/22298751/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-hauler-symptoms). It does not address intermediate or long term cardiac issues, specifically, which I believe are more prevalent with COVID (anecdotally within my friend circle).
The "long-term" in your question makes it impossible to have any COVID-specific data, but I'd wager that the body of evidence will build over time that COVID does cause significant (using this in the scientific way, not the "a lot" way) heart damage in a clinically meaningful way.
First, cardiomyocytes don't regenerate. Second, severe infections, such as influenza, strep, etc, can cause myocarditis that damages the heart in a long-term manner. Of course, CoV-2 isn't influenza, etc, but since the heart damage from these infections appears to be from the body's inflammatory response, I do think it's suggestive that we should expect something similar from COVID.
>Second, severe infections, such as influenza, strep, etc, can cause myocarditis that damages the heart in a long-term manner.
But that wouldn't occur in the absence of serious symptoms. A lot of the fear about long COVID is centered on the idea that you could get lifelong issues even if you didn't get seriously ill.
It's reasonable to assume that severity of illness and severity of damage correlate, but I also think that we should have some epistemic humility about where the breakpoints are. Does mild COVID (or influenza) increase your relative risk of a heart attack 25 years down the road by 0.1%? 1%? 10%? I don't know, but you might ask yourself what size of an effect over what time frame you personally care about, and if the over-arching research structure is well-suited to sort of that effect over that time frame.
Interestingly, there was a paper published today in Science with an abstract that ends: "raise concerns about the long-term consequences of COVID-19 in asymptomatic as well as severe cases." Published today so I haven't read in full. Link: https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/12/scitranslmed.abf7872
IANAP but I would think that the kind of heart damage that would show up less than a year later in a noticeable increase in fatal heart attacks among young-to-middle-aged people would be *severe* not moderate, still less mild. "Moderate" damage is presumably the kind of thing that combines with the usual infirmities of advancing age to snuff you at age 64 instead of 80, and "mild" damage might shave only 5-8 years off your life. But nobody will know if such things are happening for another 30 years or so.
>If I just spent 2% of my estimated remaining lifespan hiding from something that had a 0.03% chance of killing me, that’s pretty stupid.
You spent 2% of your estimated remaining life hiding to protect others with a much higher chance of dying. We are part of a collective whether we like it or not. If you don't want to be: return to monke
I've complied with the rules to the letter for the more than a year so I don't particularly appreciate your tone, but fine, let's take me out of the equation. We've forced everyone to spend ~1.25% of a human lifespan with drastically reduced freedom and pushed a hundred twenty million people in the developing world into extreme poverty. If COVID had been allowed to run unchecked, it would have killed ~0.5% of the developed world population (much lower in the developing world) with the average victim losing less than ten life years. Third world children are going malnourished so that American 78 year olds can live to be 84. The only way this made any sense is if heart damage/long-hauler syndrome are a real and widespread phenomenon.
There's also damage to the healthcare system if you let it rip, and also, death rate will rise once the healthcare system is overwhelmed, although maybe not by that much. And of course, it's not like restrictions have been maximally onerous everywhere all the time. In the UK for example, you could do many normal things during last summer/early autumn. Likely it'll be a very long time before we know whether restrictions were worth it in countries that couldn't pull off what Taiwan or New Zealand achieved.
I think this is fair too, and there's a lot of permutations to consider (e.g what if we'd declared victory after discovering dexamethasone and prone positioning, then let 'er rip)
"We've forced everyone to spend ~1.25% of a human lifespan with drastically reduced freedom and pushed a hundred twenty million people in the developing world into extreme poverty. If COVID had been allowed to run unchecked, it would have killed ~0.5% of the developed world population (much lower in the developing world) with the average victim losing less than ten life years."
In the first sentence, you are comparing the economic conditions of the pandemic response to the economic conditions of 2019. In the second sentence, you are considering the health conditions of the pandemic response to the health conditions of an unchecked pandemic. It seems unfair to use a counterfactual for the second when you use the actual non-pandemic year for the first. Can we get any comparison to the counterfactual economic activities of a world *with* a pandemic but *without* government response?
This is a fair point, and very hard to know. I think back to this famous article, before views on the virus started sorting according to broader political views (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/). If everyone had this "you can't outrun your Appointment in Samarra" attitude, which is more or less the attitude of earlier times, the economic effects would have been modest. But that might be impossible in this day and age. A major pandemic recession might have been inevitable.
"Can we get any comparison to the counterfactual economic activities of a world *with* a pandemic but *without* government response?"
Florida is a lower bound. Not zero restrictions, but in-person schools, large outdoor gatherings (including Super Bowl parties that amazingly failed to become super-spreader events as predicted by much of the media), and a much smaller economic hit, e.g. unemployment at 4.8% compared to 9% in CA.
As usual, I'd again want to be careful about using one place as a baseline, because each place has a unique set of economic conditions. I would at least want a broader comparison set among US states or regions (Los Angeles and San Francisco had largely similar restrictions, but extremely different health outcomes - I don't know whether their economic outcomes were similar or also different). You can get some of that here: https://carsey.unh.edu/COVID-19-Economic-Impact-By-State
But I'd also want to look at the difference between nations with very strong restrictions (like Australia and New Zealand) and those with weaker ones (like Sweden). And I would be very confused about where to put places like the UK on this chart, when they were restrictive in saying that partners that don't live together shouldn't visit each other's homes, but anti-restrictive in paying people to go eat inside restaurants.
I've thought about this for awhile, but if isolating is effective, why wouldn't it make more sense to have all the people with a much higher chance of dying to isolate and everyone else work to support them? I mean now they should get vaccinated, and we didn't know all the facts of the disease then (or maybe even now). But in line with the argument you are making, wouldn't it have made more sense to encourage everyone with a low chance of dying to intentionally not isolate while everyone with a high chance of dying *and those who need to have contact with them* isolate?
Empirically: most people with a much higher chance of dying cannot be effectively isolated from the general populace, either by themselves or with an additional caretaker cohort. A society might exist where this strategy could safely be implemented, but it is not any existing society.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm assuming you're referring to nursing home care and care for people currently experiencing medical issues that put them at higher risk. And they would need access to medical staff without fear of infection?
If not, sorry, my reply is going to be off on the wrong tangent.
We're already asking people to isolate as much as possible. Wouldn't it be easier to just tell the nursing home nurses and aides, and a subset of the hospital staff, to isolate instead of what we are doing now? We know now that surface contamination is a much lower risk factor for infection. With more healthy people encouraged to remain in the workforce, wouldn't we end up with more people able to make grocery and supply deliveries? Yes we'd be setting up to classes of people, but isn't that better than now where we end up sending someone to go work at a gas station who lives with fat diabetic grandma?
What empirical evidence do we have that this is not possible with our existing society? My family has lived without stepping into a store for this past year, and I understand some rural environments may not have the same choices we do, but we aren't particularly high risk and wouldn't that calculus change if we encouraged a bunch of 20-somethings to go out and get well-paid Instacart jobs instead of sitting at home?
We *have* told nursing home nurses and aides, and people who want to visit their grandparents, to isolate. We have seen how effective that is.
If you want to propose a much *stricter* lockdown, that is actually enforced, for people in these classes, that might be interesting. But what would it look like?
We've told everyone to isolate/distance/go to some restaurants/wait don't go to restaurants. Constantly changing and applying across the board is what I feel is the eroding part of it. Creating a bright line seems like it would be easier to get compliance with. And if that's too much for a nursing home aide? Find a new career for awhile. I hear Instacart is hiring.
My wife's parents were very good at isolating for the first 8 months. They'd occasionally see a grandkid if the visitor had a 2 week isolation period ahead of time. But now they've just given up (and they haven't made plans to get the vaccine even though it's available in their area). They're inviting family to 6-8 household get-togethers. Going on road trips and visiting other people in other states. They're done.
But if instead all along they had full access to any other household in the "isolate" category, they would have had enough social interaction to keep them going. More "here are the conditions where this is okay" less "don't do this unless you absolutely have to".
As for how to implement and enforce this? That's difficult... but the current quarantine has been difficult to enforce as well.
Create avenues for employers to have tort against isolating employees that didn't isolate? Allow stores to ban people in the isolate category in exchange for requiring them to offer curbside for that same constituency. Allow some stores to designate themselves as an isolation store for senior citizens? Have the CDC encourage people to join third-party "circles of trust" apps as an approved way of dealing with the pandemic.
Too late now, but it would probably look like telling the people who are employed as caregivers for the elderly that they're going to be living on-site for the duration (probably renting out a nearby hotel), and using some fraction of the trillions of dollars we're spending to compensate them for their losses to instead give the caregivers a very generous incentive package. Or, if they don't go for it, offer the incentive package to anyone willing and able to step up as their replacements.
Then tell the rest of the world to go get it all over with, maybe compressing the first, second, and third waves into a few months. If the pandemic insists on dragging on anyway, as it might, you'd want to plan for maybe a four-weeks-on, four-weeks-off rotation for the staff, and put returning staff at the top of the priority list for whatever tests are available.
It seems from your further comments that your question is really whether it was collectively worth it to enforce social isolation, but there is also the question of whether it is personally worth it, which seems implied by your question of how much an infection may personally affect you.
Surely, the cost is not uniform per person. You're acting as if it was universally a bad thing for everyone, but I certainly didn't experience it as bad. Normalizing of work from home means I was finally able to get a cushy Silicon Valley job without needing to move to Silicon Valley, which means my wife gets to keep her job too. I was able to get rid of a car and don't have to commute any more, presumably ever again, freeing up an hour a day for the rest of my life. My job normally involves travel to sites to provide technical direction and assistance to customers, which I can now do without traveling, eliminating tremendous inefficiencies that were seemingly only ever there for purely cultural reasons, not because remote collaboration was actually any less effective. Reduced travel load for business travelers and increased scale from being able to work on more concurrent problems is potentially a permanent positive affect. We seem to have effectively eradicated the normal flu in this past season. If we keep up the behaviors that resulted in that, that's a permanent positive change for everyone.
I think the response clearly had tremendous social costs collectively, but I don't think it had no collective benefits. If we can really eliminate most business travel and commuting, that is a holy grail of futurism we accelerated by decades at least. The personal cost to you (as in, was it worth it to comply with social distancing?) entirely depends on whether you personally lost a job and to what extent you value regular in-person contact with people not in your bubble. It sounds like you value that quite a bit and miss being able to get out of the house more often, but not everyone misses this.
I realize I probably sound tone deaf because I personally don't care about physically interacting with people other than my wife, so I didn't lose much, but another issue is I have permanent spine injuries that restrict what I can do anyway, and it's a lot easier on me to work from bed than it is to travel anywhere for any reason at all (being there is fine, but getting there is miserable for me). Consider the impact it can have on the disabled community and society as a whole to normalize work from home if that means being unable to regularly and consistently get out of bed no longer means you can't work.
Yeah, I should have written this better. I felt like I could make the calculation for myself pretty easily and that this is an example of how to think about it (what percentage of your life do you hide vs. what's your odds of dying), trying to make the point that the heart damage frequency is a huge determinant for me and most other non-old people. I was mostly posting to see peoples' opinions of the heart damage theory.
What you've called me on is that this is basically an exercise in calculating QALYs, I can't just equate quarantine months with lost life months. Some people experienced huge utility loss, others (like you) basically lost zero or even gained. My personal circumstance is that I was stuck home with a stir-crazy miserable three year old in an apartment for the first two months. I would rate that period of my life as having a utility value of about 0 or possibly negative. After playgrounds and daycares reopened it got much closer to 1. I might have lost 0.3 QALYs all told so far. My wife suffered more and probably lost more like twice that. Calculating the population-wide average is daunting to say the least.
This morning I woke up and looked at the clock on my phone. It said 05:00. I hopped out of bed and went for a run*.
After I got home and showered, the rest of the household was still asleep. I got ready for my weekly trip to the grocery store - 06:00 on Sunday is my favorite time to shop during a pandemic.
As I turned on the car, I had a moment of disorientation: it said 05:00! I then remembered that DST had taken effect overnight, but up until that point I'd not even considered that I was awake an hour earlier than normal. I wasn't at all tired, but normally if I'd awakened at 04:00 I would have rolled over and gone back to sleep.
Chalk one up for the expectations channel: (1) Input: awake at what would have been 04:00, (2) Prior: the clock said 05:00. (3) Perception: it is 05:00.
What my partner does: (1) download a guided meditation app, (2) when she wakes up earlier than expected, turn on one of the meditations, (3) if she falls asleep during the meditation - success! Proper rest has been attained. (4) if she doesn't fall asleep during the meditation - also success! Meditation practice has been reinforced.
This depends; do you have any theories what's waking you up? Some miscellaneous ideas, not all of which will be useful to you:
(1) Go to bed later; if your body thinks it's getting enough sleep to wake up at four for some reason, it might be good to retrain it.
(2) Don't drink anything for the last hour or so before bedtime, so you don't end up with a pressure in your bladder after some hours that might wake you up.
(3) Possibly try soundproofing your room a bit more. If there's a sound that happens at 4 AM that you're not consciously aware of (e.g. someone else's alarm, or some birds that happen to like 04:00 in particular), this could be waking you up.
(4) See if you can learn not to mind. Don't let it frustrate you; turn around, try to go back to sleep like you would in the evening. I realise this is very easy to say and tricky to actually do, I spent a while being really annoyed at waking up in the middle of the night myself, cognisant that the annoyance was making it worse, but struggling to fix my attitude about it. It did, however, eventually work - I just had to convince myself (and that was easy) that I'd still get enough rest. (What helped me here was reminding myself that lying in bed was in fact still restful to some degree even without actual sleep.)
No clue if any of those will help, but good luck in any case!
Thank you. Im honestly baffled as I've tried many different interventions. Supplements, no supplements, tea, no tea, meditation in the middle pf the night, leaving room, not leaving room, liquid consumptive, etc. Someone else posted an interesting article here about insomnia. Gave me a lot of good ideas. There are many intelligent people here. Thanks for your comment.
Make sure you get at least 10k steps a day. Even if you work out hard, you need to ambulate a above that level. I had a problem, where I would smash myself in the gym (think a hard sub 40 minute 10k row), but still couldn't sleep! Turns out I was deskbound the rest of the day and it just wasn't enough movement to tire me out etc.
This is a very big issue, and the focus of at least one major science field.
I'd recommend 2 things:
1. Read a serious book on the subject. I did, and it rid me of a number of misunderstandings about sleep that I'm very grateful for. Sorry, I don't remember the title, but I'm sure there are many good ones (and probably more crap ones :).
2. Talk to a sleep specialist doctor. A single appointment can answer a lot of questions!
I put a lot of trust into Dewey as in the few places where I know some backgound, he alway appears to be on the correct side of the controversy (e.g. the lart on Melatonin matches what Scott has to say)
I have a similar problem except it's 2-3 AM, almost consistently, and how fast I can get back to sleep afterward varies.
I've found that forcing myself to stay up a bit later helps, and so does avoiding naps during the daytime. Also melatonin helps me sleep through the night, but occasionally give me bad dreams, so your mileage may vary on that.
My therapist recommended I try magnesium supplements, ZMA to be exact, but I'm not sure they're making a difference.
1. Try going outside within 30-60 minutes of waking up (as long as it’s light out) for the day. Fifteen minutes in the sunlight is plenty, ten minutes is probably enough.
2. Try going outside for 30-45 minutes before dusk until dusk.
These things should help reset your circadian rhythms.
Waking up earlier than expected is sometimes a sign of depression; if you're concerned that applies to you, consult a doctor. See https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ for more.
Can I suggest you change the font on that? The Lato font it uses is fine, but if the weight was changed from 300 to 400 the strokes would be thicker and I'd find it easier to read. I'd also find it easier to read if the text was darker (e.g. change the colour from #555555 to #000000).
Yes, I do sometimes do that. I also use the Stylus extension to write my own CSS. But i wrote the comment primarily for other people; not all of Scott's readers use FF or know how to write user CSS, and it would be nice if his website was accessible for as many people as possible.
Is 4am roughly halfway through your night? (Or closer to your rising time, but you're not giving yourself a full 8 hours to sleep?) Because for me, waking up in the middle of the night is normal and seems inevitable. The important things is whether I can get back to sleep quickly and get quality sleep for the second half of the night.So if you can't prevent the waking, maybe you can tackle it from that angle.
Sorry, can't edit out that accidental link. Currently it's dead but I suggest not clicking it in case something malicious is one day parked there. (If I were a malicious hacker, I would consider buying up as many of those sorts of domains -- a single word common at the end of sentences, at a TLD that is a word common at the beginning of sentences -- as possible.)
Same problem - hit in my late 30s. My body seems to need 8 hours of sleep but only gets 7 with the nighttime interruption. I get back to sleep by reading without difficulty but it takes time away from sleep. Have tried:
- melatonin (didn’t feel any more well rested during the day)
- Magtein magnesium (after like 6 months finally gave it up as doing nothing)
- Steps / exercise
- Fifferent diets - Mediterranean, low carb, low fat, a bowl of pasta before bed
Just got l-theanine 200mg and planning to try taking before bed.
On the weekends I’ll wake up early (no alarm), take a shower, then read for an hour and go back to sleep. With that approach I feel rested and energized during the day. Unfortunately my job doesn’t allow that during the week.
I had the same problem. My psychiatrist tied it to my mental disease. I was prescribed meds against that disease, the sleep thing wasn't occurring that often. Then I was prescribed drugs specifically to solve this, and now I never wake up that early. If you're visiting therapist, ask him about it.
On more general advice, physical and mental activity. I used to walk a lot, up to an hour of fast walking. Mental activity is working on something/learning something. Getting the good-tired feeling was making wonders to me.
Oh, no edit button. I posted this comment and started wondering. If my issues with sleep were a symptom of a disease, then maybe the good-tired feeling wasn't causing me to sleep better, maybe it was simply a correlation. I feel slightly better -> I get healthy tiredness and healthy sleep.
Still, it doesn't hurt to try being more physically and mentally active.
I had a pretty bad sleep problem for a while. I believe it was significantly stress related. I had a month where I averaged 2-3 hours a sleep per night, despite giving myself 8-9 hours of time in which I could have been asleep. I had much longer periods of time when I would wake up early, like you describe, and just didn't get enough sleep. Melatonin briefly worked to move me from 2-3 hours to 5+, but only for a few nights. Stronger sleep medicine did work at getting me closer to 6-7, but I was worried about dependence and being groggy in the morning.
What really ended up helping me was lowering my stress. I changed jobs, since my job at the time was unnecessarily stressful, but I still had times at my new job where I was waking up early for stretches of time. I had to intentionally reconfigure how I approached my job. I set better limits on work time verses family time. I also made myself just let things go, both at work and in other areas that would cause me stress. This was hard, and it's difficult to describe. I would still do things, but maybe spend less time on it, or just told myself not to care as much about the task or the results. The funny thing is, I'm pretty sure that my quality of work is just as high or higher than it was when I was stressing myself out about it.
Exercise and better eating habits both helped, but only after I tried to reduce stress.
> Substack has removed the "like" button from comments here, as per your feedback.
And yet they have not removed it from your posts - thus creating a permanent Upvote Underclass, toiling forever underneath the guaranteed-superior metrics of He, the Heartgetter; the Sole Possessor of Internet Metric Wealth; He, who is clearly more Liked than others; He, to whom all the Gratitude Button Clicks are funnelled – He, Known As "Scott"...
The reasons that the community asked for the "like" button's removal in the comments don't really apply to Scott's top-level posts. The consensus is that like buttons are bad because they push you towards being reddit and people optimizing for likes instead of good discussion. Scott could let the same factors drive him, but if he was going to do that, he could also do it based on other metrics like traffic numbers.
While I agree that "hearting" comments was a bit of a silly implementation in this context, the ability to acknowledge a comment without having to write a reply did serve a useful purpose. It was a nice way to signal that you found the comment thoughtful, useful, or of value in some way even if you didn't have anything specifically to add. Without that acknowledging mechanism you wouldn't even know if anyone even read your comment without replies. Maybe the community can think of a way to acknowledge comments that provide value without having to reply. Personally, I don't have a problem with "liking" comments in general. It's not a competition, just someone saying "thanks".
Although liking comments is typically wholesome and sincere for the liker, it can affect the likee in negative ways. Paradoxically, in my original comment on one of this blog's first posts that we should remove the like feature, throughout the week I was getting emails about who had liked that post, and I could feel the same sweet release of dopamine that I get from all other sites with likes. In all such places, there is a strong incentive to post likeable comments rather than controversial ones, which is not always a bad thing, but I think a space like this benefits more from people playing with ideas without thinking too hard about how likeable those ideas are.
I agree with this, but I also think it's nice to have a ranking mechanism... which is why I still like the idea of "hidden" hearts that are only used for ordering the comments but are not visible anywhere (and certainly don't produce an email notification!).
Something else to consider: there are people who monitor Twitter users' likes. I don't think Substack exposes this information currently (but maybe there's an API that does), but knowing this about Twitter made me worry about, e.g. liking Scott's tweets.
I wish there was a way for me to show agreement with your comment without spamming your email with a comment saying “I agree” that’s useless to you but potentially useful to other readers of this post.
Substack are gonna love us demanding code rewrites, but I think the main problem was "someone likes your post - gives it a heart" and you would have an inbox stuffed with emails about likes.
Personally, I would prefer a way to be notified about "someone replied to your post" but not "someone liked it". Likes are lovely, I'm not ungrateful! But I want to know if I have to lace up my boots to get into a fight over some comment versus "oh, thanks?"
So I suppose what we need is for those who are happy to get 20 emails about "someone liked your comment" to have a way to do that, and those who want to be notified about replies but not likes to have a way to do that.
It's moot now, but the likes and replies came from different email addresses, and I set up a rule to filter the likes so I didn't have to see them. (That said, still against likes.)
I dislike non-anonymous hearts. The API still lets you give hearts, but what stops me these days is that fact that the user gets an email telling them I did it. That email is often annoying, as many users say -- but even if it wasn't, I'd rather leave it like a happy little surprise.
I am a pro-liker, though I would prefer if we could toggle the email notifications. It was really useful to have a ranking of posts and also be able to quickly respond to high-quality posts without writing out a full comment. I would definitely have voted for likes if I had known about the poll.
People are naturally resistant to change, so in the beginning they would disfavor hearts.
But I think it's way better to have them. It's easier to skim the comments and spend more time on the insightful ones. And, yes, I think this community is very good at hearting the insightful comments.
There's a video game forum where the like button is explicitly labeled "Thank", and it seems to work pretty well. But it's also about a video game and not CW stuff, so I'm very not sure it would work well here.
There's a big difference between "on average, increases lifespan in mice" and "is good for humans". For example, (most strains of) mice don't get DNP-induced cataracts, but humans do! Even if everything else carried over exactly, probably that would turn this from net positive to net negative in humans.
Paracelsus might point out that 1 mg/day is 1/2% of the lowest dose known to cause cataract - 200 mg/day. I've used 1 mg (in alcohol solution) for 2+ years.
Ah, I didn't catch that you were recommending such a low dose for humans in an absolute rather than relative sense.
Agreed that 1 mg is below any dose known to cause side effects, but it's also below any dose known to cause positive effects, unless you've really extrapolated out from this mouse study - in which case there are safer things that increase lifespan in mice.
No, the takeaway is that 1 mg/day causes sufficient uncoupling to prevent weight gain during aging. Plus, there's a metabolic factor of something like 7 mouse/human, so the effective dose in humans would be expected to be sub mg. This is important. Read the paper, ignoring lifespan.
Famous last words. Either it's really not dangerous, in which case it's probably also not doing anything, so you shouldn't bother taking it or it *is* dangerous, in which case you shouldn't bother taking it.
After listening to the "All our mice are broken" podcast by Eric and Bret Weinstein I'm suspicious of mouse studies. (Quick summary of 'broken' mice. Lab mice unwittingly selected for having long telomeres. Result of long telomeres, much better at repairing cell damage, much more susceptible to cancer in later life.)
Don't the labs have a control group of mice that makes clear whether the longer lifespan is genetic or from whatever drug they're testing? Or is the claim that drug effects on mice don't generalize at all to humans because the mice are so genetically weird from the long history of breeding for science?
There is a reason "....in MICE" is a common joke about medical research.
It is, as I understand it, an ongoing debate: there are concerns that mice and other common animals are poor proxies for humans, and so are inappropriate to use in many contexts, and there are concerns that science conducted with mice is being done in an inappropriate manner, and the issue is not the mice per se but poor experiment design. An extraordinary number of drugs fail to translate from mouse to human--a paper here (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrclinonc.2011.34) is alleging a 95% failure rate for cancer drugs that were promising enough in animal models to start clinical trials, and it holds up an 80% attrition rate in cardiovascular disease drugs as good. Part of that is certainly just that new drugs are hard to find, but part of it is that animal models aren't great. Do we have anything better? Unfortunately, not really.
Grin. One thing from the Weinstein brothers interview, C. Greider said something to the effect of, "you know it's weird but if we let the mice live long enough and then do an autopsy, they have lots of cancers." Or something like that... don't quote me.
Since there is no politics allowed in this thread, I thought this might be a fitting question and I thought many people here may have a similar experience. If this crosses the line, feel free to remove and I apologize but I hope it is sufficiently meta.
Since I was a teenager, I have been interested in political issues, social issues and anything related to the culture war. I have diverse interests but topics usually only interest me if they relate to social and political philosophy. I have accumulated a lot of information and ideas related to stuff that is controversial.
As many of you probably have, I have developed eccentric and controversial opinions which socially isolate me from my peers. Sometimes I really wish that I had just took up an interest in physics, chemistry or history. I maybe wish I just looooved sports maybe.
I feel like this is kind of a wasteful accumulation of information if I do not actually use it to further advance my career or life in anyway. It seems like it just turned me into a weirdo. I am certain others have felt the same. Has anyone tried these approaches?
(1) Intentionally develop non-weird non-controversial interests as replacement.
(2) Abandon pursuing intellectual things and just watch Netflix or play video games.
(3) Just passively consume information and keep opinions to yourself and accept that.
(4) Try producing content in some way. (Currently considering this the most)
I very much enjoy interacting with people and producing content based on my ideas. But I am concerned about cancellation. I want to do Youtube or blogging the most. I am concerned about getting the wrong person upset and what they could do to my "real life." I can be anonymous for a while but that doesn't seem to work out so well even for very careful people. I am thinking I want to do youtube with my face but not my name and have no public profiles that could be used to identify me. This could at least make it so that someone has to work hard to get me in trouble. Could still happen though. Is this stupid?
Any personal experiences in this area? Thoughts? Thanks so much.
I recommend disengaging from conversations that are about virtue and affiliation - who is hypocritical, who is a threat, who is a coward, who is a dumb idiot, and so on. In my experience the vast majority of misery that comes from involvement in the, uh, “politics fandom” comes from this, and I’ve gotten happier as I’ve worked to not engage in it and miserable when I’ve lapsed.
Weird opinions on policy questions and the like is fine, and unrelatedly someone needs to have them for us to find new good policies, but you have to work on cutting out toxoplasma. Hate is the mind-killer, even, or especially, hate that would seem to be justified.
If people depend on you for their sustenance (spouse kids etc) and you work in a field where people cancel each other, then I’d probably dial it back.
My experience here is basically I have a good life and career that got kinda sorta jeopardized once by some of my opinions. Nothing huge but the writing was on the wall. I had to evaluate how much these opinions about “shit that doesn’t put food on my table” actually matters.
A few hard questions for you to answer:
1- are your opinions that unique? Is it possible to enjoy the company of a community that shares some of your opinions and advance your contributions to society on some other axis than being a public contrarian?
2 - what’s the upside of broadly sharing unpopular opinions? Of course it is your right but if there’s little upside and lots of downside then...
3 - in the case that you feel this is your duty or calling, are you sure you aren’t confusing your civic/humanitarian duty with the emotionally engaging pastime of talking shit as a form of entertainment?
4- are you prepared for this endeavor to succeed and have your life picked apart by haters?
You seem uncertain about your goals. Are you looking for:
- expressing your ideas and getting feedback on them
- more social interaction, making friends and so on
- finding activities that aren't "wasteful"
Whatever time you already spent thinking about politics is a sunk cost. Possibly, it might be useful someday, but probably not in any direct way.
With respect to getting feedback on your ideas, I don't think YouTube makes much sense? It's more work and higher risk. You might learn more posting pseudonymously if you can find the right forum.
I'm curious why you can't just be a weirdo into esoteric things? From what you wrote, it seems more like you want validation or acceptance into a group of people than to do anything exactly. I often feel similar, but I've come to accept I'm just the weird one with mix-match opinions. Nothing wrong with being eccentric.
I would suggest seeing if you might not find either an advocacy group with narrowly targeted goals if you have specific political-ish passions. Or perhaps local government. City commissions and small local non-profit boards are often easy to get on to, and they let you affect your local community. You could also seek out places that encourage heterodox thinkers.
Think through your security situation. If you do what you are thinking of and get de-anonymized, what are the risks? How can you mitigate those risks? I'm thinking of Bruce Schneier's list of questions, from "Beyond Fear."
Step 1: What assets are you trying to protect?
Step 2: What are the risks against these assets?
Step 3: How well does the security solution mitigate the risks?
Step 4: What other risks does the security solution cause?
Step 5: What trade-offs does the security solution require?
If you become the target of an internet hate mob, it'll be terrible. It'll be terrible regardless. But if you're in a situation where the haters can't really jeopardize your income source, you'll be a lot better off.
It is not wasted time if you enjoyed researching the questions. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a weirdo. My peer group hasn't stopped hanging out with me just because I spend a lot of weirdness points on wacky ideas, in fact they sometimes ask for my input on things (sometimes even in a non-joke way).
This "I must change something" idea just seems premature to me. Do you have any other reasons for wanting to change things (e.g. you have information with important ethical implications)? Break your 'Ugh field' and REALLY think about it.
The correct solution, if you are capable of it, is to learn what normal people believe, and get good at telling them things from your own beliefs that are only one inferential step away from that, and framed in their own language and terminology.
If you do this properly, you will seem interesting and insightful, and people will be interested in coming to you for your take on things. It can be a big help to your career and social life.
However, it takes being really, really focused on modeling the other person's thoughts and knowledge and thinking about how what you say will interact with that and what the result will be, rather than being focused on talking about your own cool ideas and showing how much you know. If you aren't both dedicated to and competent at doing that, it won't work.
This is a very useful answer (I'm a little sad I can't signal boost it with a ❤️!)
You could imagine a grid of opinions, with one axis being "irritating to likeable" and another axis being "unhelpful to useful."
It's not noteworthy to generate unhelpful irritating takes, nor very useful to generate likeable pablum that everyone nods along to without actually being helpful. What about true novel takes that nobody will believe?
Maybe there's a third axis that's key here. A good contrarian needs to have ideas that are novel, helpful, and just approachable enough.
Either way you want to find that sweet spot in the upper right quadrant, or high top right octant, and that multi-variable function is why finding a great contrarian is so damn hard. You can't just say things people think are crazy but happen to be secretly right, that's probably not even half of the work.
There might some other axis to maximize, being able to frame and package and communicate your opinions well is critical too.
Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian is on the whole a pretty good book to encourage you not to abandon the contrarian spirit, but to get better at doing it in an actually convincing way.
But insofar as that is teaching you the importance of contrarianism, and you already know that, you might want to settle in to the tradesman-like skill building of forcing yourself to go to toastmasters or some sort of clubs or activities that praise you specifically for honing your abilities at communication.
That's why I got into nerding out about alcohol. I could use that to relate to normal people and was particularly useful in business settings.
I also joined a discord with that share similar weird (and accept other weird) ideas about political/social issues. And strangely enough, most of the active posters share my same first name.... The discord is one structured around a podcaster that shares roughly similar ideas and openness, but I'm primarily there for the community more than the podcaster (even though I like the podcaster).
I too have Controversial Opinions™*, but I'm a math nerd and I spend a large proportion of my time socializing with other math nerds. I think that the math community generally doesn't cancel people, so I feel safe there. I.e. I've taken the first option as cancellation insurance.
Options (2) and (3) sound great from an individual perspective but are probably not sustainable in the long run and also contribute nothing to the world, so probably rule them out for a life plan. Option (4) sounds possibly feasible as a life plan, but I think that in order for this to be cancellation-proof you're going to have to be rich enough to have "FU money" like Elon Musk or whatever.
*Hopefully this isn't a real trademark. If it is, sorry.
Very happy to see likes gone. Reward signal proliferation is the herald of Moloch.
(Has anybody made a tumblr demetricator like they have for twitter or facebook? I wouldn’t go on the latter two even with it, but I’d head back to the former happily with it.)
What’s the best resource for finding out the risk of a particular medical procedure? Not looking for anything super esoteric here, just statistics on basic procedures like an appendectomy.
In the 1990s and early 2000s (if you were at least in your teens back then), what were your expectations for how the Internet would shape human society? Did things pan out the way you expect?
Personally, I was somewhat of an Internet utopian. I thought putting all of humanity's knowledge at everyone's fingertips would make everyone more rational and stamp out superstitions. I thought enabling instant worldwide communication would reduce mistrust between countries, ethnicities, and religions, because everyone would have friends from all over the world. Clearly I was naive, but I still think the Internet has done orders of magnitude more good than harm for the world: the instant access to information, the huge range of creative content, the easy access to TV shows, movies, games, the ability to navigate around any city in any foreign country as if it were my home town...life without the Internet seems unimaginable.
The Internet came along late in my life, I was in my 30s. From that point of view, there were several serious negative effects I did not anticipate, and I don't think anyone did. Two of the less obvious (to me at least):
(1) Everyone is instantly a small fish in a big pond, whatever he tries to get good at, and the gentler experience of being a big fish in a small pond for a while is no longer available. When I was young, if you were the best among your friends at riding a bike, or best in the school at writing, it was a big deal, because so far as you could tell there was no one better. You would learn better in time, of course -- but in time you would also be better yourself, and arguably the scope of your competition increased in rough pace with the increase in your abilities. With the Internet, you can't *not* be aware the moment you start trying to do something well that there is always someone better, often much, much better (if you are a newbie). I have seen this effect be discouraging to young people. They have a potential talent, and they try to develop it, but are discouraged because they are so promptly made aware of an entire planet of competition, and the 50 million people who are already far better.
(2) The increasing ability of people to delude themselves about the popularity of their opinions or ideologies. It's said that the human mind can't really comprehend group dynamics much past the Dunbar Number (about 150 people), and this may play into it. What I see happening is that as soon as people can find a few hundred people who agree with them on some viewpoint -- and the Internet makes this easy-peasy, no matter how weird your opinions there are surely 150 people on Facebook who agree with them -- then people tend to kind of "round up" that 150 to some huge number, certainly a substantial fraction of everyone, often a majority. So in the face of what they consider *direct* proof of the popularity of their point of view ("me and *all* my 150 FB friends agree!") they tend to dismiss any *indirect* evidence of its unpopularity (e.g. the election didn't go the way me and my 150 friends were sure it would), either with skepticism or paranoia ("must be some giant fraud!"). This seems to have led not just to the intellectual ghettoization that was predictable when everyone could talk to everyone, but to a significantly *higher* level of inter-group suspicion and paranoia. People find their sympatico support group, courtesy of the Internet, but then they have a hard time believing other groups as large or larger legitimately exist, I think just because the human mind isn't capable of grasping the concept of a billion people dividing into tens of thousands of distinct viewpoints. It's just too complex -- so we react as if word of mouth were still setting our event horizon, which is to say pretty inappropriately and dysfunctionally. This operated much less pre-Internet simply because *all* we had was indirect evidence of how many people had a certain viewpoint or ideology, and to the extent that indirect evidence was legit (i.e. elections were fair) we had no choice but to accept it.
I think 2) is correct. Another part of it is that due to technology (starting at the Walkman and continuing) we can separate from groups more easily, almost at will. The feeling of a large group of people who might agree or disagree but were still a group - not a self-selected group with a "common interest," but a physically present large number of people - is no longer familiar to everyone. Without that experience of what groups feel like and what they do, it's easier to attribute conditions to them that are true of only a few people we know. It's partly because "another person" is like a cypher, or a list of opinions, or some digital imaging. With this diminished frame of reference for "person," why wouldn't people think everyone is like them; or, that a change of a few characters on a screen means the other person is so unlike you. I'm not familiar with the Dunbar effect but I think some of what you describe is a side effect of personal tech. We were both adults before this stuff took off and I think I assumed most people were not serial killers, and had feelings, but in terms of assuming what people think, it pretty much stopped there. I did not assume people would like what I liked or think what I thought. Now there seems to be a long list of text that indicates what is or isn't human, and that list can be copied. Honestly I worry about it.
On the second point, I think many people do the opposite - they assume any other group they find troubling instances of is equally large as the mainstream. It's easy to come to the conclusion that every Republican is anti-mask anti-vax right now, despite both of these being minority views among Republicans.
I remember moving to San Francisco in my late 20s. It was 2002 and everywhere I went, people were talking loudly into cell phones and ignoring everyone else around them. It had not been possible before to tune out everyone around you while still interacting socially, to that degree. Another thing that disappeared was the awkward line. Nowadays, people innocently line up and stare at their phones and don’t interrupt each other. Back in the day, you could sort personality types by who would or would not strike up a conversation with the strangers in the line. There was a collective aspect to daily life which was felt as somewhat inevitable. I think it’s gone; we don’t have to feel that collective anymore, with the right tech, there is a socially acceptable way to dissociate from the group.
We underestimate the cost of this. People with few or no priors of membership in groups of physical strangers will - do - relate differently to actual individual strangers. More judging in some dimensions and far less in others. Things are soaked for every trace of symbolism and then abstracted. The presence of the physical other human is then secondary.
I did not think any of it would get this far. I was so wrong. However, the social fabric will never be the same, and that has cascading consequences. Soon people will have forgotten, or been born after and not know.
Honestly, I would still describe myself an Internet utopian - although admittedly not with the ideas of rationality and superstition-stamping, "just" with the ideas of better mutual understanding and better communication, a bit like your "would reduce mistrust between countries, ethnicities, and religions, because everyone would have friends from all over the world," except changing "would" with "could". And it's clearly happening for some kinds of people! And the others become more visible, so they can at least in theory be avoided.
I reckon the internet is still a fairly recent invention as far as history is concerned (what with it really only taking off near the turn of the millennium) and there's a lot to get wrong about it. Before my mum died, I would report to her on how social media has been evolving with "we're still learning the ropes," which I guess says a lot about my expectations. ;) But, seriously, I do observe a lot of interesting discussion happening today about how discourse can go wrong and how it can go right (both on bubbled internet, and on non-bubbled non-internet channels) and how we can encourage more of the latter, and I'm interested in how it'll look in another ten years. (It might be fairly stable as it is now, I don't mean to discount that, I just have a prior that it won't be.)
Regardless what one thinks about the communication angle, though, I agree with "I still think the Internet has done orders of magnitude more good than harm for the world." Very useful invention!
I thought that the Internet would be chopped up between a small handful of large corporations as soon as the technology became good enough to be genuinely valuable instead of just a curio. My classmates got angry at me for not playing along with their utopian visions of a better tomorrow.
I wrote an article in 1996 looking at the potential for a world of strong privacy enabled by encryption, but I didn't take it for granted that it would go that way, so the present mix of private and public is consistent with what I wrote. I did mention the potential criminal uses of encryption. I expected an anonymous digital currency (Chaumian — the idea of something like Bitcoin never occurred to me) to be here by now. I correctly predicted VR interactions along the general lines of Zoom, although a little sooner than they happened. For anyone curious, here is the link to the article:
A couple of years ago I heard a recording of me and a computer science buddy of mine chatting during the gab-session portion of a Terence McKenna conference at Esalen in 1996. I was amused at how keenly we saw the potential pitfalls ahead:
Me: I see a couple of possible paths that the effect the new media is going to have on people could go:
One would follow the model of what happened to Europe when the Church stopped becoming the sole interpreter of the Bible, and the Bible was printed so that anyone could read it and interpret, and many people did, and started different interpretations, and that sort of caused an explosion of different ideas and different ways of looking at the world.
The other would be... this is a little more difficult to express. There's a terrific Buddhist magazine called "Tricycle," and one of the things that's terrific about it is that it's not sectarian. It has a whole lot of viewpoints; it talks about all sorts of different flavors of Buddhism that people respect. [And this is] because there aren't enough Buddhists in America to have really cool magazines for all these different sects. Now if that were to change tomorrow, and there was a different magazine for every sect, then each magazine would have a single viewpoint, the other viewpoints would be portrayed maybe but seen as sort of heresy and talked down about.
I can see that sort of thing happening on the web, or with web-like media, where people start pursuing ideas that they're interested in and they care about, [and] they may end up digging themselves a niche of their own preconceptions and the prejudices they already have about information, and going to information sources that support that and prop up things that may or may not be valid.
The other option is that they could be exposed to so many different types of information -- from the original sources, not filtered through the mass media -- that they'll actually become more informed about more different points of view.
I can't tell right now which way it's going to go. Or maybe it's going to go in both directions for different people.
Him: You can't keep ignorant people ignorant because there's too much access to the other knowledge.
Me: Only if you want it, though. It's not like now: today if you turn on CNN, you get not only the information you're interested in; you're getting information that CNN thinks that a large audience of people is going to be interested in. So you're inevitably going to be confronted with things that mess with your prejudices. Now the downside of this is that CNN is mapping the societal prejudices of its market share onto all of its audience, and because there are so few media sources, there are only a few selected branches of prejudice that you're allowed to tap into. But whether the future's going to break that up, or just mean that there are going to be tighter groups and smaller groups of predispositions that are reinforced...
Him: That's choice -- those that wish to insulate themselves in only that information they want to see that supports their inner worldview, will insulate themselves excellently. And those that wish to just throw themselves into the unknown constantly will have a readily-available source of unknowns...
Do you think mathematical proofs are important, or do you think you were tortured into learning them when the important stuff was in application? I am writing an article on the field of the history of science, and this question winds up being an essential question for understanding the difference between learning science and doing science, between learning math and doing math, between a philosophical and an engineering approach to knowledge.
I think there's a lot to unpack in this question, here's some quick thoughts:
* What is a "proof"? Is it strictly a chain of logical inferences from a set of axioms? Or does a really convincing human argument count as a proof? Almost no one actually writes out formal proofs, even though in pure math, they should exist in principal once you unwind the human proofs. "Really convincing" arguments are sufficient for most real-world applications.
* Important when and to whom? Formal proofs can be useful for software validation; human high-level mathematical proofs are useful when establishing correctness of models or algorithms. Only a small fraction of people will pursue careers where proofs are useful, but for those who do, proofs are an indispensable tool.
* What's the role for proofs in education? Even if a lot of people will never use proofs for their career, they have benefits for brain-training and as part of a comprehensive liberal arts education. On the other hand, I might argue that the brain skills for programming overlap a lot with proof writing, and that programming is a better place to invest time in modern education.
* Can math be useful without proofs? Yes, there are a bunch of theorems that are useful even if you don't know the proof. However, knowing the proofs often improves your understanding of the mathematics and therefore its usefulness; and you can't really add new theorems without doing proofs. I'd make the analogy to computer software and programming: you don't have to know programming to use software, but knowing a little programming will enable you to do more, and knowing a lot of programming is necessary to develop new software.
I argue that the convincing human argument is actually what proofs are for, and that the role that they are used for, rather than formal derivations, explains why mathematicians don't like statistical or probabilistic arguments. (That is, the statistical argument asks the reader to trust the author, while a human argument gets the reader to convince herself that the conclusion is true.)
Stephen Wolfram was the first to convince me of your claim "convincing human argument is actually what proofs are for". There's a _huge_ portion of 'theorem space' that's un-explored, even ignored, because it's just not interesting to humans. And that's fine! But it's also a very unique _perspective_ !
And just like proofs, software _code_ is for people too.
It depends a lot on what *kind* of math (or science) you are doing. If you're programming a factorization program to solve packing problems, all you care is that the method works. If you're designing a cryptographic program that relies on the difficulty of factoring larger numbers, the existence (or nonexistence) of proofs on how hard factoring is, and your ability to understand those proofs, is extremely important.
Yes and no. I spent years using Cauchy's residue theorem with no real understanding of why it worked. Years later (reading Penrose) my lack of understanding was apparent, and I had to go back... I'm still fuzzy about some parts of complex integration.
I've only really retained (some of) the core intuitions from my undergrad (Real) Analysis class, but I still get a visceral thrill thinking of the awesome intellectual ride it was to actually follow the logic 'all the way up'!
For people who have been shoved through the science/rationality training course for decades, I think that things like the scientific method and logical reasoning and evidential proofs and so forth can come to feel like common sense or natural thought patterns. I think it can be hard for some people to remember just how unnatural and difficult these methods of thought really are and how much work it takes to make them feel natural and second-nature.
Things like working through proofs are small but essential parts of this long process of thought-shaping. It doesn't matter that you're never going to do a proof again in your life, what matters is that you have the experience of working through assumptions, deductions, and conclusions in a controlled, supervised setting, where your mistakes are caught and nuances are taught.
This process doesn't *have* to happen in math class, using mathematical proofs - it could be done in other ways - but it's good for it to happen as many times as possible in as many different contexts as possible, for the patterns to solidify and generalize, and proofs in math class seems like a really good and powerful and synergistic candidate.
This is a great point. I am stupidly shocked too often at people's lack of desire to quantify important decisions into simple expected value expressions. And I am currently confused by how difficult it is for these habits to be formed. Even people of very average intelligence can become numerate according to Edward Cokely's research, but how long does it take?
I think knowing why something is true is important. You get that from the sort of proof that can be done in a few minutes and held in your head thereafter. Examples would be the simple proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus (that taking an integral and taking a derivative are inverse operations) or the square inside a square proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
A proof that you can follow step by step in a book, and possibly memorize the steps but don't actually understand and will have forgotten in a few months, is of very little value. It doesn't even show you that the conclusion is true, since you could easily be fooled by a step that's wrong in a not-obvious way, as in the "proof" that 2=1 (algebra) or that a right angle equals an angle slightly larger than a right angle (geometry).
Proofs are extremely important for mathematicians because that's what mathematicians do: write rigorous proofs. Learning proofs in math class is necessary practice for anyone hoping to become a mathematician.
For other fields, like my own, physics, you can get away with doing hand-wavy "proofs" and "derivations". Learning how to do things rigorously is less important. Your hand-wavy proofs will occasionally be wrong because you accidentally include an invalid assumption somewhere. This is a problem, but not a big one, because you can check it with experiment, simulation, or by having a mathematician come back through and prove things later. The more mathematically savvy you are, the less likely you are to miss this sort of thing, but that also makes you less likely to quickly get a probably good enough answer.
Mathematicians (and their rigorous proofs) do play an important role in science by going back through and making sure we didn't miss anything important. Rigorous proofs are even more important in pure math because you don't have the other to experimentally check your results. The only standard to compare it to is the rigorous proof, so it had better be done exactly correct.
For your survey: Looking at the history of science yields all sorts of people who didn't have the expertise you'd think was necessary, but still made important contributions. So yes, you can become an expert in a field without formal math (Faraday), or without lab experience (a lot of theorists), or without understanding history (probably most scientists).
You are right that history of science reveals that raw intelligence is not the driving factor, but instead experience and persistence of investigating (Faraday) or even being at the right place at the right time (James Watson).
Well said, thanks. I often say that I use the circuit I've built to check my math. (which is usually right after I made a sign mistake somewhere.) As a practical matter, I hardly use calculus anymore. I know a bunch of approximations, which will let me reduce the problem to algebra, which gives me some sort of guess as a first try. My favorite course in grad school was solid state (it might have been the prof.). After all the exacting integrals of mechanics, E&M, QM, here was a course where you had to make the right approximation. It wasn't so much about getting the math exactly right and more how to think about the world. Purcell's 'back of the envelope' calculations.
Re survey: I'm not sure how proofs, history and labs are related. Are proofs, doing the integral? If so then yes essential. The history of physics is interesting, but mostly distracting to learning it. And I think everyone should do labs, though it's not necessary. Labs are an important part of learning for most people. I bought my son (2nd yr, college engineer) a ~$20 Sterling engine for Xmas. Once he got it working we spent hours figuring out how it worked and tracing out the engine cycle. Great fun, 'cause I'd never figured out a Sterling engine before.
One side of this is that weird abstract math often has practical applications. This is true when the abstractions are based on things that occur in real life like circles, etc., but it is also true for things that were originally pursued as intellectual curiosities like imaginary numbers or non-Euclidean geometry. Part of this is that abstract math stretches out in many different directions and the universe has many nooks and crannies so there's bound to be some collisions, but I think this is an inadequate explanation for how the universe seems to line up with math sometimes even when math is trying very hard to define something unreal.
The flip side of this is that mathematicians who believe their work is safe from any negative real world implications may find down the line that there is in fact some way to use their math in some type of weapon.
I enjoyed the post on Trapped Priors, and while I thought it had some insights into the problems, I didn't quite buy that (1) priors are trapped, (2) they can be trapped *without* an emotional response, and (3) any faulty Bayesian reasoning is necessary to describe what is going on.
For the case of dogs being scary, an emotional response is being confused with a factual statement. There is a difference between "Dogs are dangerous" and "Dogs will make me feel scared". The brain is predicting 'Dogs will make me feel scared'. When you see a picture of a dog, and it makes you feel scared, this is a legitimate positive example. It is correct to update that dogs make you feel scared. But, you need the emotional response to conflate this with 'Dogs are dangerous'. It is only when you do not separate the emotional response from the factual statement do you commit an error. For example, I can be emotionally scared of flying, but rationally accept that it is very safe. All the evidence that flying is safe won't change my prior that it will make me feel scared; partly because I already have a high prior that it is safe.
The second example is that of the polar bear. In this case, we are leaving out the priors on the friends evidence. Basically, how do you update on weak evidence? For example, I have a prior that there are no polar bears.
Day 1: I see no polar bears.
How do I update my prior?
Day 2: I see no polar bears.
How do I update?
Day 3: Friend says she sees a polar bear, but I do not see one. How do I update?
Day 4: Friend says she sees a polar bear, but I do not see one. How do I update?
....etc.
Eventually, I need to update that my friend is very unreliable. So say on Day N, my friend says she sees a polar bear, *and* shows me photographic evidence. The evidence is not just 'friend saw polar bear and has picture', the evidence is 'friend who was previously wrong for N days now has a picture'. It is correct Bayesian updating to require stronger evidence from this friend.
We mostly aren't doing math as part of everyday reasoning, so I guess it comes down to what comes naturally? That seems like something cognitive scientists might study, not something we can figure out based on armchair logic or intuition.
If I had to guess, though, it would be that we aren't constantly updating our beliefs based on everything that doesn't happen. Instead that would happen later, when the subject of polar bears comes up and we think about when we've seen one.
I agree that your first point is a good distinction to make. I think most of the time the emotional reasoning centers are a kind of tail that wags the dog, and that this is possible to break, but not as helpful as you'd like.
A common pattern in therapy is something like a patient saying "I won't interact with dogs, they're too dangerous". Then we spend a lot of time questioning and challenging that belief and proving that most dogs aren't dangerous at all, and then the patient says "Fine, I won't interact with dogs because I get too scared when I do it", keeping the exact same emotional response and pattern of dog-interacting.
In politics, this sometimes looks like someone saying "I'm against gun control because guns save lives on net", then spending a lot of time proving guns cost lives on net, then someone saying "Fine, I'm against gun control because it makes it easier for a tyrannical government to oppress people".
(I'm not trying to attack gun rights in particular, just give a - possibly false - example)
I agree that separating out a rational from emotional response is a good first step, but it's not something most people naturally do, and it doesn't always get very far.
I think your second example is an error. If you see your friend has a picture of the polar bear, you should go back and update any previous estimates you made of your friend being unreliable for saying there's a polar bear. I'm not sure if people would actually do this. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
The 'picture of the polar bear' was not meant to be conclusive evidence; just stronger evidence than saying you saw one. (i.e. the picture could be fake, photoshopped, etc.). I agree with you if the evidence was overwhelming and conclusive, you should update as you suggested. But if it is stronger without breaking that threshold, it would be correct to discount it, if it was from an unreliable source.
I think there's a distinction between "friend could be honestly wrong" and "friend could be lying", and the picture is proof positive that the first one is false (P(picture|friend honestly wrong about polar bears) ~= 0 since it is essentially impossible to fake a picture by accident, therefore P(friend honestly wrong about polar bears|picture) ~= 0 also, regardless of what it was previously).
(It doesn't have much of an effect on P(friend lying about polar bears), though, for basically the reasons you state. Hopefully, you pick your friends such that P(friend lying for no obvious reason) is very small.)
No, but I don't find Tom Hanks very attractive in particular. He has a kind of potato face, an Everyman look which probably helps with his popularity, but he's not the type that gets me going "oh yes, handsome!" (or indeed "pretty!")
Like C MN below, I'm asexual so I lean very heavily towards aesthetic (rather than sexual/romantic) attraction.
As a straight man, I have usually have trouble discerning what men women find attractive. It randomly occurred to me that Tom Hanks' character seemed to have qualities that might make him attractive (leader, empathetic, fighter, "dad-like"), so I decided to ask about it.
Dude, my best advice is to be yourself. There is no discerning women's taste in men, it runs the gambit. I was really skinny when young, and could never 'bulk up'. Turns out there are some women who like skinny guys. That said, from what I can tell Tom Hanks is a mensch (Dan Carlin interview) honesty and character, I think that's important... and then give good foot/ back rubs. :^)
Ha ha! I wasn't asking for romantic advice, but I guess from the feedback to my thread, it preemptively torpedoes any attempt on my part to get my Tom-Hanks-from-Saving-Private-Ryan game on to score ladies at parties.
Thank you for that, my late father would have appreciated it (he loved accordion music). A live recording of the late (died just this year) and great Joe Burke, Irish traditional musician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SXMvfvCgQ
Are there any cogent theories out there as to how our sense of smell developed from an evolutionary perspective? Last time I checked, the biochemical foundations of how our sense of smell works in the first place are not entirely understood, but no one seems to care that much at all.
Have you ever wondered how we can identify thousands of unique scents - including novel scents made in a laboratory? How can this possibly work on a molecular level? And how did this ability evolve? I have not seen any good answers to how this works and has evolved on a molecular level.
If molecular interactions are distinct enough, i.e. there's some molecules (that can be made by an evolved organism) that can respond in some way _very_ differently for different molecules (e.g. being 'smelled'), and if that can be 'wired up' so that another molecular system can receive the distinct signals/signatures/info, then feedback (e.g. natural selection) can iterate to select _anything_ that's useful.
That is pretty distinctive about smell (and taste, tho much less so) – it's so distinctive and, while there are possible 'combination' smells, it's so hard to group or categorize smells. They _all_ are much more distinct than other sensations or forms of perception. (Hence my thinking of it as a 'hash function'.)
Given all that – and I'm really just making this up on the spot, tho I have thought about it extensively before – I have a hunch that each smell might have just been _accumulated_ one by one. Maybe it's less the case that 'our noses smell' as that 'the nose is where all of our specific-molecule detectors are located'.
I'm a programmer so I'm biased to always think in terms of information. But, from that perspective, smell seems _obviously_ like a 'hash lookup', it just uniquely (or mostly uniquely!) identifies things. I _think_ of smell as – basically – answering 'what molecule is this?'. I'm very sure it's actually much more complicated, but, AFAIK, it's a good one-sentence approximation.
So you're saying there are unique receptors in the nose for each potential molecule that humans can smell - even novel ones that have never existed before? Or is there some "molecule identification mechanism" that's not receptor based?
FWIW, there's a book based on this - "Emperor of Scent"
The 'unique receptors per smell' is the simple version – but note that it's _per smell_, not per-molecule. I would expect that receptors generally react to 'similar' molecules – molecules that react with whatever mechanism a specific receptor uses in the same or similar ways.
I'd _also_ expect that a lot of smells are a combination of a number of receptors being activated, so novel smells would be a new combination of existing receptors.
There _are_ 'molecule identification mechanisms' that aren't "receptor based" but I don't think that's how human smell (or animal smell, or maybe most living thing thing's smell) works. I don't think any living thing smells in a way similar to molecular spectroscopy. I'm pretty sure it's always a kind of 'molecular touch' – and different molecules 'feel' differently to different receptors.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I'll add it to my ever-growing reading list :)
FWIW, Wikipedia seems to confirm my basic understanding:
> It [olfaction] occurs when an odor binds to a receptor within the nasal cavity, transmitting a signal through the olfactory system.
> There are a large number of different odor receptors, with as many as 1,000 in the mammalian genome which represents approximately 3% of the genes in the genome. However, not all of these potential odor receptor genes are expressed and functional. According to an analysis of data derived from the Human Genome Project, humans have approximately 400 functional genes coding for olfactory receptors, and the remaining 600 candidates are pseudogenes.
So it seems like any particular smell is more accurately a 'combo' of some number of up-to about 400 different receptor signals and "... each individual odor receptor is broadly tuned to be activated by a number of similar odorant structures."
I've been brainstorming about ways that marking "∼new∼" posts should work.
Mostly because I had a long-unscratched itch to write software (since I don't do it at my job any more), I wrote a sample interface for new comments that is currently in this state:
1. Comments dynamically populated because of background loading (which can be turned off) get the ∼new∼ label, so you can control-F through them.
2. It has the classic "set the time for marking posts as ∼new∼ we had with bakkot's script at the old blog. See https://i.imgur.com/QRCkUR8.png for an example.
3. You can manually set that time to "now" or "latest time of any comment currenty on the page".
4. If you are not on a tab and it gets new posts, the icon gets a blue dot added to it. (Oops, Firefox-only for now. Why must Chrome be so difficult?)
5. I also make up new letter-based avatars for people who haven't uploaded a pic yet. https://i.imgur.com/NKhC0DC.png I wasn't sure it worked with accented characters until I saw Etienne's comment below!
Is this useful? Is this a good start for "hey Substack, something like *this*?" You can look at the code (all on Github) if you want, but it's not as elegant as Pycea's. (I have this bad habit of falling back on
plain JavaScript when I should be using jQuery.) Hopefully something useful for people to steal.
Any gardeners around? Starting to get my seeds started and excited for the season. Going to try to grow kajari melons and quinoa as my weird experiment plants this year, and also making a second attempt at ghost peppers (plus all the humdrum beans and tomatoes and such). What are you guys growing?
I just gave away my impulse-bought quinoa after deciding I wasn't ever going to plant it. My experiments for the summer are going to be digging plastic bottles into the bed for deep watering (pretend ollas), and a ground cover (I'm thinking sweet alyssum).
A bit too cold to actually get the plants in the ground, but we've got a bunch of stuff propagating in a grow-rack I built in the basement out of zip ties, led lamps, and cheap garage shelving. We have half a dozen raised beds set up for the back yard and a bunch of soil/compost ready to go. A few kinds of peppers, green onions, snap peas, zucchini, various herbs, garlic, probably something else I'm forgetting. We're also doing tiered flower beds in the front yard- but that's 100% my wife's project. She built the tiers out of paving stones and filled in the soil about a week ago, so it's ready to go as soon as we're past last frost.
I've got about half a dozen species of passionflower soaking before I sow them, some physalis, a few trees waiting to germinate. No idea if anything will actually grow and bear fruit.
I've dabbled with ... plant care? I don't consider caring for potted plants to be quite 'gardening'.
I wasn't planning on taking on any other new living things! I wanted to limit myself to one plant to start (having moved, and being stuck in a tiny apartment).
But it _was_ really nice having some basil, and mint, and rosemary that I could just _pick_, right there, a short walk away. And it's _so_ good right off the plant!
Last week after watching Paths of Glory, I ended up on Stanley Kubrick's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick). Perhaps some people here are immersed enough in Wikipedia controversies to know where this is headed.
The first thing you will notice is that the page rather conspicuously lacks an infobox, that wonderfully convenient and standard portion of prominent Wikipedia articles which gives readers a place to look for generic biographical information such as dates and locations of birth and death, cause of death, relatives, years active, and often a very brief summary of work. Instead there's just a picture of him (from before he was even a director, but that's another issue) with his signature below. This irritated me. It is the most prominent biographical page violating this standardized format I've ever seen. But I thought, ok, maybe it was recently edited by someone unfamiliar with Wikipedia. Perhaps someone accidentally removed it with a recent edit. I headed to the edit history page, and MAN OH MAN was I unprepared for the rabbit hole I was going down.
Turns out this is a long-standing and incredibly bitter controversy on Kubrick's page which has been mentioned in the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-wikipedias-bickering-editors-go-to-war-its-supreme-court-steps-in-1525708429) and the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-wikimedia-foundation.html). Practically any reader familiar with Wikipedia will recognize the current state of the page to be a clear aberration. And yet, citing "lack of consensus", the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee has declared the subject off-limits until September of 2021 and has instituted harsh sanctions against anyone trying to edit the page to normalcy or even discussing the issue. I was quite dismayed by this, but I became truly appalled after I dug into the edit war and discovered that just a few obsessive, megalomaniacal editors have been lording over the page and trying to impose their anti-"idiotbox" (their term) philosophy on whatever pages they get their hands on. There were similar efforts by one such prominent editor to remove the infobox on Frank Sinatra's page (as of now they've lost that fight, thankfully) among others. All the while they've been coordinating amongst one another to vote brigade on polls concerning the question and to get opposing users banned, often successfully, for continuing to make the absurdly obvious case that Kubrick's page should have its infobox, like the pages for every other as-prominent person in the arts.
As I said, there will be no further discussion allowed on the issue until September of 2021. They originally pushed for a 3-year ban - THREE YEARS! - but were not granted that request. So for now I just wanted to bring some attention to this unimportant issue which nevertheless has been driving me crazy. I will post about this again in a later open thread once the ban has been lifted so that anyone else who is bothered by the current page can come join the effort to get this fantastic director the infobox he so deserves.
Also, I highly recommend Paths of Glory. It's a beautiful film.
What a RIDE. There's an arbitration that's literally "Civility in Infobox discussions", Frank Sinatra's talk page alone has over 12000 words (!?) on whether to collapse its infobar or not.
> I'll comment one (hopefully last) time to reassert that a compromise is illusory nonsense. What is the reason that we should care more about the feelings of a few Wikipedians than about ease of use to the reader? Nobody here should give a rat's a** what some Wikipedians want (in comparison to utility of the article) and nobody should give even a moment's thought to making a "compromise" based on personal preferences. Those editors could stop editing tomorrow and disappear- what will be left then? An article catered to the aesthetic desires of particular individuals who will not always be around. Many of the opposers have made it clear that they don't care about collapsing this infobox in particular, but rather that this is one of the last battlegrounds for them to make their stand that infoboxes are bad, and this is one of the last places where that argument might still win. This is an example of local consensus, battleground behavior, and is against Wikipedia policy. This argument needs to stop being about what individuals personally want to see happen with all infoboxes, and it needs to start being about why THIS PARTICULAR INFOBOX ought to remain collapsed in a manner that contrasts with almost every other Wikipedia article. Not a single reason has been put forth yet
I think in general most Wikipedians do care about ease of use for casual users, and that's why this page's layout is such an anomaly. My opinion of Wikipedia initially went slightly down after learning about this, until a friend pointed out that another way of looking at it is that every other as-significant article I've seen does follow the infobox convention. That's pretty impressive, given how large an encyclopedia it is and how apparently there exists an opinion out there that they are distracting or reductionist or whatever.
What I'm wondering about now is how the Arbitration Committee members are selected, whether they can be overruled, whether they have any relationship to the bad editors, and similar practical questions regarding Wikipedia's structure. How did this anomaly arise? And how did it get resolved the other way for Sinatra? I really can't bear to dig in much further though. It's mind-numbing reading and anything attempted before September will be futile.
Wow, most of the arguments that oppose the infobox seem to be centered around the idea that the 'lede' or the introductory paragraph contains all that information, and that it would simply be recapitulated... why the hell is the lede so long? I looked at other comparable directors, and they do not have these orgastic waterfalls of text. It's unpleasant. It's not easy or quick to read. If the information could be put into an easily formatted infobox, why the hell is it in this mess of prose?
There's a pretty prominent post at the top of /r/slatestarcodex right now that opposes prose, and while I think it's a fun but mostly insipid thought experiment, I may have to update seeing this insanity.
I just checked out that /r/slatestarcodex post and I think "fun but mostly insipid thought experiment" is right. A key difference of course is that a Wikipedia infobox doesn't tend to *replace* its article's prose, like the OP was arguing for. Most of that info would still be there in prose form in the lede or body of the article. It's just nice to have a regular place to hold the information least reliant on prose. And yeah, the lede is long and awkward. One wonders if they felt like they worked so hard on writing up this article that they just wanted people to read it in its entirety as a unified piece of art or something. Well too bad. If they want to write a biography of the guy, be my guest. But Wikipedia articles serve a different purpose.
Some other opposing arguments I saw suggested that Kubrick's body of work is too hard to summarize in an infobox. I'm not sure I'd agree with that either, but even if you were to grant that point, it isn't much of an argument against having any infobox whatsoever for basic things like birthday, death day, cause of death, etc.
It's just such an obvious decision that I'm surprised the Arbitration Committee didn't close discussion the OTHER way and leave the infobox up until September. Seems like overriding the default page layout should require a pretty extraordinary argument, and none of the arguments opposed are even halfway decent.
These infobox arguments are some of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever read. I hate you for sending me down this rabbit hole, but I can't look away.
It really does show how blind stubborn stupid humans can be, as a small minority digs in its heels and vows that Sinatra and Kubrick will be the hills that they die on, clutching their anti-infobox banners.
Sorry for damaging your sanity. I also wish I had remained ignorant of the Infobox Wars. But alas, I am now driven mad by an obsession: not just to see Kubrick's infobox restored, but to see these warped, contemptible editors lose the whole war and die on all of their hills in vain, never to edit a Wiki article again.
I’ve really enjoyed reading one of your book review posts after I have read the book. It helps me see things in a different light and I rarely have anyone around me offline where I can continue the conversation around the ideas presented in the book.
Was curious if the group could help craft a go-to list (3-5 should do it) of some of the most impactful books (as defined by him) Scott read and reviewed.
It’s been a while since I read most of them, so I don’t have the best sense of Scott’s view of the relative impactfulness of the different book reviews, but here’s a few contenders (leaning in large part on my view of the impactfulness of each):
Inadequate Equilibria (and if Meditations on Moloch were a book review it would be right up there)
Possibly interesting idea for determining whether chickens are conscious.
tl;dr: Are you a chicken? If not, then chickens are likely not conscious.
Slightly longer version: string together the [[self-sampling assumption]] with some stats on how many chicken-moments exist vs. humans-moments. If chickens are conscious, it's unlikely you'd find yourself in a human body, you're much more likely to be a chicken. Therefore, the fact that you're not a chicken has to be evidence against the idea that chickens are in the class of conscious entities.
If the numbers for chickens aren't large enough to be interesting (ok, maybe it's unlikely you'd be a human, but not possible), then at the very least this is an argument against insects being conscious, and *definitely* an argument against panpsychism (you're almost certainly not going to be experiencing existence as a human of everything is a little bit conscious, since humans make up a vanishingly small amount of matter in the universe)
Less flippantly, it does provide some evidence that chickens don't exist. If you're not a chicken, you can't ever be 100% sure they don't exist. But the very small amount of evidence this provides for chickens not existing seems to be swamped by direct sensory evidence they exist.
Whereas, "are they conscious?" I don't have a lot of other evidence for that, so maybe this funky anthropic argument is the best I can do for now.
This seems a little too fully general. Doesn't it also argue that there is no non-human conscious life anywhere in the universe? Or more locally, that say, non-Americans aren't conscious?
The strength is in proportion to the reference class you choose. If the reference class is americans, and you're american, then the chance of being you is proportional to num_americans / num_humans which is not 1, but also not unreasonable. You should add some small weight to the idea that non-americans aren't conscious, but not much.
If you find yourself elon musk, this is very strong evidence for solipsism.
Overall though, anthropic arguments definitely tend to lean towards the overly general side. I wouldn't put a ton of epistemic weight on this idea.
In order for the self-sampling assumption to make any sense, the reference class can't include observers who are incapable of asking the question "are chickens conscious". For the purposes of the anthropic principle, there is no difference between a conscious but unintelligent animal and a grain of sand.
It's not arguing low probability events don't happen, just that they happen infrequently. In the extreme case, where all matter in the universe is conscious, it would be very surprising to find yourself a human. It's not zero probability though.
Additionally, this is just one way of reasoning in the absence of other kinds of evidence. Without really knowing what consciousness is, this argument is better than nothing. If you happen to know what consciousness is, and how it works, you can rely on that and just assume the fact that you're human is just good luck.
I think your argument is a bit like drawing a random number from a pot of {1,...,1000} (let's assume a uniform distribution), seeing that you got 561 and then going on to say "Did the pot actually contain all the numbers from 1 to 1000? I think not, for if it did, I would have been very likely indeed to pick a number other than 561!"
It's evidence for solipsism certainly. The fully general problems come out because it's really hard to determine what the appropriate reference class is. We don't really know what qualifies you for self-selection. Is it actually consciousness as I'm kind of implying here? Or is it "have read this comment" in the way that "we can assume the universe is fine tuned for reading this comment because otherwise you couldn't be reading this comment"
I have no idea how seriously to take this argument honestly.
Even in a universe in which chickens are conscious, humans who use this reasoning would end up concluding that they are not.
Also try: are intelligent aliens concious? There are (I believe) definitely many more conscious intelligent alien entities than conscious human entities, but once again this leads us to conclude that there are not.
Here's a life hack that's not as popular as it deserves to be.
If you are in the US and not feeding yourself from a CSA, it might be worthwhile for you to try out an irregular produce delivery service, i.e. Hungry Harvest, Imperfect Foods, or Misfits Market.
I tried all 3, and I currently get a weekly Hungry Harvest box and an occasional Imperfect Foods box. (My experience with Misfits Market was very limited, since Hungry Harvest seems better in every way possible.) In my experience, all 3 are perfectly legitimate businesses - no obligation, will let you either cancel entirely or skip deliveries at any time, will resolve problems really fast and in your favor. I've had just about no quality issues with the produce (but I did get some fruit that was way too tiny). With Imperfect Foods, I did have some issues with how the groceries were packed.
Hungry Harvest and Imperfect Foods currently allow you to completely customize your box. Misfits Market seems to allow it in some areas, but not in others. Hungry Harvest will deliver your groceries for free if they are worth more than $30, and Imperfect Foods will deliver them for free if they are worth more than $60.
I found Hungry Harvest to be by far the best, but it is the one that doesn't deliver to all that many places. (And also it's hub-based, and I have no way of telling whether the other hubs are as great as the one that's near me in Maryland. But the fact that it's hub-based might be part of why it's so good.) The website says it currently delivers to "Maryland, Washington, DC, Virginia, Greater Philadelphia, Southern New Jersey, Northern Delaware, South Florida, The Triangle Area & Charlotte in North Carolina & the Detroit Metro Area." If you are lucky enough to be in one of their delivery areas (and if you don't have a CSA), I'm pretty sure you won't regret trying them out.
What's so awesome (besides the fact that you help farmers, suppliers, and other businesses sell perfectly good groceries that would otherwise be wasted)? A lot of things. You spend less time at supermarkets. You get to try things you never tried or never even knew existed and at very good prices. That was how I first tried dragonfruit and romanesco. At some point I had 6 kinds of oranges on my counter because fancy restaurants in DC area refused their deliveries due to the pandemic, and Hungry Harvest picked them up. You get all kinds of nice extras from local businesses who just realized some of their groceries were too close to the sell-by date or who decided to change their packaging.
AFAIK that's a myth to upsell low-grade produce to environmentally concious members of the middle class. Irregular fruit and veg is processed into fruit juice, tinned soup, frozen vegetable lasagne, etc. They don't just throw it onto the compost heap if it doesn't look perfect.
Significant amounts are also donated to food shelves, at least near where I live. I've spent hours sorting some very "ugly" apples into 5-lb bags at a place near me that processes industrial-scale food waste into "consumer" packaging (think imperfect crops, or factory screw ups that are still safe to eat like misshapen tortillas or mislabeled soups). Not sure if it's a nation-wide thing though.
Aldi in Ireland sell 'bacon offcuts' which are random mis-shaped chunks of bacon - every sort, could be large pieces or gammon or rashers, most likely a mix - put in a bag and sold at EU1.99 for a kilo. This one is definitely for cheapskates who like bacon :)
My point was not being environmentally conscious - I am not even entirely sure how you would make that point. My point was "improve your life while helping farmers and other businesses recover their costs". I can vouch for "improve your life", and I personally know farmers who are very happy to have an extra customer to sell their imperfect-looking stuff to.
It might be true in some cases that irregular produce will get used up anyway, but it's by far not always true. You need the people who are willing to take the produce off your hands at the very last moment, and they will probably pay you worse money than customers who want the produce unprocessed. (Also, many of the extras they sell, such as short-coded milk products, cannot be reprocessed.) The irregular produce vendors are there for when things go wrong with the supply chain, and that's a good thing.
Food pantries are a valid point, but a farmer donating food to a food pantry doesn't get to recover his costs, which is a problem. Again, I would say it's good to allow them to have the option to recover part of the cost, rather than forcing them to take a loss they may not be able to afford.
I use Hungry Harvest too. It is pretty cool to have a guaranteed supply of vegetables even if you don't make it to the grocery store. You do have to be pretty good about keeping on top of your vegetable collection to avoid waste.
I was originally going to write something snarky here about dang millennials paying more for messed up veggies... but the pricing on Hungry Harvest looks pretty good.
I very much enjoy the Book "S." by Dough Dorst and JJ. Abrams. It's presented in the form of a old library book with wide margins, with one story being the original book text and another one told in comments written on the margin by two readers (communicating via this book). See this picture here for an idea: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/sites/default/files/2014/May/openbook-markings.jpg
This made me wonder: Are there versions of this concept for real literature? Like a novel by Joyce or Hemingway or a philosophy text by Kant or Plato, with comments, interpretations and discussion added on the margins? I'm not looking for a scholarly discussion, more like a book club-style commenting to read along with the main text. If the text is very dull, I'd like very fun-to-read comments as a counter to keep me interested.
The closest to this concept I've found so far are bible comments (which I find very enjoyable to read, I found a good one in German that suits me) and a philosophy seminar I visited at university where our lecturer would discuss a text (Blaise Pascal) by reading one or two sentences, then taking 10-15 minutes of time to comment on these, then move on to the next sentence. It took us one semester to read less then 10 pages, but it was really interesting.
I know this isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but a “highbrow” equivalent to S. is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which is written as a poem by a fictional author + commentary from a different one.
I think you have just described the Talmud — the Mishnah plus the interpretations by various sages. Also legal texts from Imperial China, with the statutes in one color and the commentary in another. I think there could be multiple layers of commentary, but I'm not sure.
Hey everyone, thank's for the comments so far! These are all good (as I wasn't aware of them before or didn't make the connection in case of the Talmud).
There appears to be a lot of fictional options (everything you suggested except the Talmud) and I can think of a few additional ones, the most obvious one being the princess bride (one of my all-time favorites).
But why one earth is there not the same as a comment for original works??? Copyright shouldn't be an issue for older material and I can't imagine I'm the only one who would like to read a commented version of various classics.
There are annotated versions of many classics, although not to the extent you're asking for. Generally they just explain context for words whose meanings have changed, or cultural artifacts that are no longer known to a modern audience.
As for why more don't exist: I would assume most who are interested in analyzing classics at that level would simply write their own book about the classic, without the text of the classic itself contained. Part of that is probably down to length and what publishers are willing to publish. Part of it might also be that a lot of literary analysis is more interested in being at the structural level than the line level--if you're going to explain the light in Great Gatsby, it makes more sense from a rhetorical perspective to write "the light in Great Gatsby represents the unobtainable, as seen in X, Y, and Z scenes" than to write a little footnote or parenthetical at each instance the light appears.
On a Facebook group for professors, someone linked to some site that allows you to post .pdfs for your students to read this way with each other. It sounded like a good idea, but I didn't check it out myself. I expect there are a few implementations.
The Dictionary of the Khazar's is a historical novel/dictionary kind of like this, and is even more meta, very fun.
Ian Stewart's Annotated Flatland is great for it's wild foray's into tangential topics, like that Pascal lecturer.
The Green Lion Press publishes well annotated works of science. I strongly recommend their Principia by Isaac Newton which features Newton's words in red and many different levels of commentary on the same page, all perfectly and divinely formatted.
The Landmark History series does this with works of classical history and is amazing. I own them all.
Norton Critical Editions provide extensive commentary on everything.
The math writer Martin Gardner did an annotated version of Alice in Wonderland, which if it's anything like his annotated The Man Who Was Thursday would be very good.
Also, they seem like they're meant to award some sort of recognition, but I would guess that most of the people with those icons would rather blend in than stand out for this features.
If we still had hearts, I'd give you one for this comment :-)
But yes, as a "founding member" I have a weak preference for my contribution to be anonymous. Not a big deal, and at least they aren't blue checkmarks.
The citizens of an ancient city state needs to build a wall around their city this year, or else they will be enslaved by invading barbarians, making everyone very unhappy. Building the wall is going to cost 1000 gold coins. The citizens are libertarian and want to solve the problem without taxation. You have been summoned from the future to organize the funding with assurance contracts.
Wealth in this society is unequally distributed according to a Pareto distribution. There are a few wealthy people with thousands of gold coins, a bigger group with smaller fortunes, many people with one or two coins and a large group of people who are completely destitute.
A simple solution would be to have people pledge to pay for the wall, and collect the money once enough money have been pledged. But this would incentivize free-riders to wait with their pledge and hope that others pledge enough so that they don't need to. Another option is to collect pledges from all citizens, and then return the excess gold. But what's a fair formula for returning the excess gold?
More generally, if anyone knows a good popular write-up on the practical implementation of assurance contracts (especially dominant assurance contracts) I would be very grateful.
There's the not technically taxation solution, where libertarian Nehemiah takes all the gold (or else the Ammonites invade and everyone loses everything), plausibly comitting to do nothing if even a single person tries to freeride. Then you give them each back 90% of their gold or however much is left over.
Sure, I think that's my second example. "Another option is to collect pledges from all citizens, and then return the excess gold.". But then the problem becomes how to give back the leftover gold. Do you give it back in proportion to the pledges wealth? Or in proportion to the size of their pledge? Or do you give everyone the same amount? Or do you do some kind of progressive system where poorer people are returned a higher proportion of their pledge?
It seems like this would create lots of political conflict. Preferably we could have a more elegant contract somehow that avoids this kind of politics?
My rather jaundiced view is that if the rich people aren't willing to stump up for a wall to protect them from the invading barbarians, they deserve to be pillaged and plundered.
But this also reminds me of that Cavafy poem:
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
The solution is to depend on a privileged minority. Make a list of everyone believed to have more than a thousand gold coins. Draw up a contract by which everyone on the list agrees to chip in a number of gold coins equal to 1000/N, where N is the number of people on the list, if and only if everyone else on the list so agrees.
Provided that N is large enough so that the individual contribution is well below the value to the individual on the list of having the wall and small enough so that there is nobody on the list who is in favor of the barbarians or doesn't believe in the threat, it should work. "Greater than a thousand" is a useful Schelling point, to avoid people on the list insisting it should have more names on it.
Nehemiah's solution was pretty libertarian. Every family that owns a house along the edge of the city is expected to build the portion of wall in front of their own house. When the barbarians come, you don't want your section of wall to the weakest spot, or they will break in there and wreck your household in particular. This works best if the edge of the city is the most valuable, so the wealthiest families live there and the poorer families live in the center.
"I am still trying to find the right balance between helping people make good choices vs. trying to be a level more sophisticated than "police officer teaching a D.A.R.E. class to high schoolers"
Good luck with that, there are always people who take "do not do this highly dangerous thing as it will end very badly for you" as a personal challenge 😀
I'm just a sliiightly bit afraid about the degree to which Scott worries about the negative consequences of his posts. (Zvi would say something about asymmetric justice, I think). I hope it doesn't end up paralyzing him, or worse, stop him from saying what he really believes in his natural truthful style out of fear of the decisions 1% of his readers might take with it -- which in absolute numbers is significant when you have a big readership. He shouldn't forget the benefits also scale with the numbers, even if they are harder to see.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the desire to write well enough that absolutely everyone understands exactly what you mean. Personally, I would be overwhelmed and paralyzed, but I'm no Scott with words. But I would start feeling uneasy if "woe, 1% of people misunderstood the content; I'd better improve my communication skills" turns into regular "woe, 1% of people decided to do something I think is a bad idea partly as a consequence reading the information and my opinions; I'd better reiterate that they shouldn't do it and exaggerate one side of the info next time around."
I'm an adult. I'd like to hear what Scott actually knows, believes, suspects, etc., without him trying to shade it to keep me from making bad decisions. I think a clear statement like "Don't use this stuff, it's really dangerous!" is sufficient.
ISTM that the world currently has a surplus of people who feel that responsible use of their platform requires them to lie overtly or by omission, to shade the truth to avoid saying upsetting things, to avoid some topics lest someone get the wrong idea, etc. This is great when you're writing articles for the Weekly Reader (a newspaper-like thing distributed in schools for young children), but not so great when you're reading for competent adults who'd rather know what the world looks like than be protected from it.
I do like that Scott tells us about strange and interesting things that I would never approach with a ten-foot bargepole 😁 Trouble is that within this community there are those who are interested in trying strange and interesting drugs for themselves, and who also think that warnings are for little crybabies. He mentioned that 5 people read his post on THIS WILL SET YOU ON FIRE FROM THE INSIDE and thought "That's the stuff for me!"
So trying to stay on the right side of the line about "strange and interesting things but people will not take them and set themselves on fire from the inside" is tough, and probably safer to err on the side of caution.
Or maybe just a big notice at the very start about DO NOT DO THIS, I MEAN IT, I'M SERIOUS, THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION TO DO/TAKE/BECOME THIS THING 😀
I'll admit that I kind of feel like, if you read Scott's writeup and it made you decide to rush out and take some of that medicine, your risk tolerance is probably already so high that the added risk of cooking yourself from the inside is a small part of your daily risk budget. (I'm imagining some guy whose hobby is drag racing on a motorcycle during thunderstorms.)
Guys! I got 8hrs of sleep last night! I did wake up a few times but got back under the veil pretty quickly with tje hypnagogic hallucination method posted in this thread. Thank you whoever posted that link!
Coming out of an obnoxious cold, I have a few interrelated questions:
1. What determines whether a cold gives you a runny nose, or a sore throat, or a cough, or all of the above? Is it a feature of the virus (so that if I hear you coughing, and then catch your cold, I can expect mine to involve a lot of coughing too), or does it vary based on the person (some interaction of virus genetics and person genetics, say), or is there a way to nudge a particular cold (e.g. if I have a strong preference for stuffy nose over sore throat, is there medication I can take that will shift the symptoms accordingly)?
2. Why is coughing a thing? It makes good sense from the virus-spreading point of view, of course, but how come a near-involuntary process that causes the infernal racket of a coughing fit hasn't been selected out of the population?
Non-sickness related coughing happens when you get something stuck in your throat. It stops you from getting bad things in your lungs. I assume it is difficult to evolve to prevent that instinct from getting hijacked while still keeping the functionality intact. It wouldn't help the individual so much as those around the individual who are not yet infected. Those people are potentially competition anyway.
But in general I don't think you should be surprised that a disease is able to cause symptoms that are not beneficial to the host. Bacteria and viruses mutate at a much faster rate than mammals, so they are always going to have the edge in the game of coming up with ways to hack the hosts body vs trying not to be hacked.
But why doesn't e.g. my dog have coughing fits? Do they (a) not know how to cough at all (maybe they somehow don't get things stuck in their throat)? (b) not get tons of upper respiratory tract diseases, or they don't make them cough (e.g. because group dynamics are different and there's no point for the virus)? (c) don't change position from vertical to horizontal during the day, so have an easier time keeping their airways clear?
I can attest that dogs (and cats, and bunnies, and probably most other animals) are capable of coughing. It does seem like they cough less frequently than humans, but I wouldn't make that claim with any degree of confidence. I don't claim to know much about animal (or human for that matter) respiratory health, but (b) seems likely for pets, and (c) or something similar seems likely for many animals. Maybe something like having a stronger instinct to not breath with food near your throat, which humans lack because of speech?
When you're sick with a cold, the bacteria (or virus) gets in your lungs and start to multiply. Your lungs respond by cutting off normal sodium transmission which leads to a buildup of fluid in the lungs. The purpose of this fluid is to help wash the invaders out of the lungs: as fluid builds up, we cough to remove the fluid, and the fluid carries the bad guys out of the lungs. When it's working it keeps the lungs from being overwhelmed while your immune wipes out the infection. When the immune system isn't doing a very good job of that, then fluid keeps building up and you can potentially end up drowning in your own fluids.
I just finished reading UNSONG and really enjoyed it (I know, I know - I'm late to the party).
Scott, have you given any thought to changing it or writing an adaptation for a different medium? It would make a pretty great graphic novel, and I can see it appealing to the same crowd that likes Douglas Adams, Pratchett, Gaiman etc.
I suspect UNSONG is a bit too niche for an adaptation to make financial sense. It's also going to be really hard to translate a lot of the insanely complex references and Kabbalistic interpretations of things to a different medium. I suppose graphic novels are at least a lot cheaper to produce than a movie/tv-series and you have a bit more breathing room than you would trying to cram everything in a two and half hour movie, but still.
Scott is/was [editing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/02/editing-unsong/) UNSONG to be published as a full novel at some point, which I think makes more sense as a first step towards getting more people to enjoy it.
I also liked Unsong, and I think it's fine as is in its current format. However edits 2, 4, 5, 7 (in the link above) would delete chapters, which would upset the kabbalistic structure of the book (see https://unsongbook.com/tosefta/ for an abundance of spoilers). Otherwise I feel mostly neutral about the proposed edits.
Also @above Substack doesn't support Markdown. I think that Substack should support Markdown, unless this would be extremely inauspicious or something like that.
I can't imagine Scott deleting chapters without restructuring the story such that the Kabbalistic structure stays intact. Should be pretty easy to split chapters or add shorter chapters in between others.
Substack does support markdown if you have the snazzy [browser extension](https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks) Pycea made for ACX. Until substack gets their shit together I'm using markdown formatting for quotes and links because it looks better for the people that have that extension and doesn't interfere too much with readability for the people that don't.
I am still very sad about #5. The Like button is nearly a strict positive IMO, and the complaints about it seem to boil down to "a friend of a friend once believed something because it had a heart next to it" urban legends. I neither understand nor appreciate this strange local custom.
The usual justification is that it incentivizes prioritizing upvotes, at the expense of quality. Like if you look at Reddit, half the time you have good contributions, half the time it's cheap jokes. At least the hearts didn't allow downvote brigading.
Which makes even less sense. Reddit is far and away the best of the big social media sites, exactly because of their karma system being the primary sorting tool. And this isn't one of the default subreddits - do we really think that **ACX readers** are going to upvote cheap jokes over serious effortposts on a regular basis? (The occasional really good joke, sure. But that's quality content too, and also worthy of being higher in the ranking. )
I stopped blogged because I realized I got more positive feedback when I got frustrated and wrote anti-Other posts. That's part of it - upvotes create some nasty incentives. It's a large part of why Reddit is such a hostile and ugly place, "best of the big social media sites" as it may be; there are always people who are happy to see it being stuck to The Other, and they will tend to drown out all other forms of upvote (because eventually everyone in whichever group is the minority The Other will pick up on this and go somewhere else).
The other part is that the culture here is antithetical to the idea of consensus truth; the truth lays with whoever has the truth, not whoever wins the voting contest. Upvotes, however, turn truth into a voting contest, which erodes a lot of the community - I'm a lot less likely to post under those conditions, because I generally try not to post unless I think what I have to say is unlikely to be said, which often means I'm posting stuff that would be downvoted or at least not upvoted - but not always, as in the case of this comment, where I am being unusually explicit about something I don't think most people have bothered to formalize their thoughts about.
So upvotes erode the community norms, and also the community. So no, glad to see them gone.
People also tend to consider the upvote button an "I agree with this" button and a significant portion of what makes the SSC/ACX comments great is that we have a bunch of civil, intelligent people here that have unusual/non-mainstream opinions. The last thing you want is to bury those at the bottom of the page.
This is pretty easy to roll into the plugins, too.
(You might be able to even modify the CSS itself but that's always been scary for me. And that would stop any new comments that get loaded from having it.)
Adding ".profile-img-badge { display: none; }" anywhere that can inject css should do it. Maybe I should add it to the extension... Though this only does it locally of course.
Wait what's the purpose of the blue circles? If they're purely a status thing then I think they should be removed, but if they're more than purely a status thing then Chesterton's Fence suggests that they should stay.
Lorien psych has a new page on alcoholism. Interesting like most pages there, thanks Scott! Some (possible) typos I found:
> Your primary care doctor should be fine; if your case is very unusual, you could seek a psychiatrist or addictionologist but if for some reason they’re not up to the task you could also find a psychiatrist or addictionologist.
Shouldn't one of the "a psychiatrist or addictionologist" occurrences be smth else, e.g. "an addictionologist or psychiatrist"?
Yes. Given as a psychologist as part of a mental health screening. Apparently they like to do various tests to make sure you don't have a learning or intellectual disability that might be underlying mental illness. My score was 135.
It was actually a very strange experience. The psychologist was so excited about my score that it made me a bit uncomfortable, and she was gushing about how "it might even be *higher*, since your results also show you're severely depressed and that might be impeding your cognitive performance." We barely even talked about the thing I was there for! I suppose it is a rare result from her perspective, like a doctor discovering a patient has a rare genetic condition, but it was creepy from mine.
The one positive consequence of lockdown for me has been learning to cook, which has been facilitated by the plethora of excellent information about cooking available from such sources as reddit, YouTube and books (largely books recommended by helpful bits of reddit and/or written by YouTubers).
Now that I'm looking at buying my first solo residence later in the year, I would like to learn about interior design in the same way so as to be able to make it look nice in keeping with my taste. However, so far I have not been able to find online resources or communities of anywhere near the same quality as for cooking. Is this because they don't exist, or because I'm looking in the wrong places? Are there good books but no good subs? Is there a Kenji Lopez-Alt of interior design? Any help much appreciated.
I mean, I guess it becomes a lot harder for people to lend/borrow money over longer time periods. What is the benefit you'd want to achieve with this policy?
Historically, jubilees have been used to reduce functional debt-slavery, and to ensure social stability and economic mobility. The English kings would sometimes do this when a new one took the throne (James I is the example that springs to mind), as well as plenty of kingdoms in the Ancient Near East.
I am asking because I think there's an ongoing crisis in America of unsecured personal debt, the effect of which is to entrench the powers-that-be at the cost of the little guy. I'm wondering if a jubilee (and the expectation of future jubilees) could solve that problem (e.g. by encouraging more sustainable lending practices, freeing the middle and lower classes from debt periodically so they don't become de facto indentured servants).
Ok, well I suspect the details are going to depend a lot on the exact implementation and how easy it is to work around, but one thing that does come to mind is that you're going to see a lot of difference between people based on how close to a jubilee they were born.
For instance, people that get to college age in the decade leading up to a jubilee are going to find it near impossible to get a student loan, whereas people that are a few years younger are going to find it super easy. For whom this is better depends on your view of how useful a college degree is, but you're going to get some bitter generational envy either way.
Might it not be better to tax the hell out of anyone that is offering loans?
I think college degrees are very useful, but also that student loans are predatory. Frankly, I think a regular jubilee would smash that system (who in their right mind would lend 10 years out from a jubilee? Who can afford to shudder their business for 10 years?), and a system that didn't involve generational debt cycles would rise from the ashes.
I don't see why a tax on loans wouldn't just get passed on to the lendee most of the time. Also, I think loans (even unsecured personal loans) are undeniably useful as debt-leverage, but I think they're abused. A jubilee might allow us to get rid of abused loans without penalizing good loans, whereas a blanket tax would penalize everybody (and I think be easier to game).
> Who can afford to shudder their business for 10 years?
I was assuming the loans are granted by banks and other financial institutions that can just use the money to invest in something else during this period. Is that not the case currently?
Good point about the taxes just getting passed on to the lendee most of the time.
If you want to "reduce functional debt-slavery" or anything like that, just making it illegal to ever loan anyone money would do that. What you're proposing makes it illegal to loan (as opposed to give) money some of the time, but I don't see how the loans your system allows (e.g. 30-year mortgages the year after the jubilee) are better than the loans it prohibits (30-year mortgages the year before the jubilee).
Also, I don't think arbitrarily telling a bunch of people they can't borrow money this year (or decade) is going to "ensure social stability and economic mobility" nearly as much as you think.
1. Unsecured personal loans are useful but abused. They are probably also practically inevitable (people will loan their friends money). A jubilee, unlike the outright ban, acknowledges these facts, but still tries to mitigate the negative consequences of widespread, massive, long-term debt. Fwiw, I think it would also change the incentives of lenders for the better.
2. I proposed the jubilee for unsecured personal loans. Most mortgages are secured on the collateral of the house. Also, I'm proposing debt forgiveness on the last year, not that loans are not allowed on that year.
3. Historically, jubilees have done this. For example, this was done when James the I took the throne in England, and it helped to usher in the Jacobean era. It was also used (only once) in West Germany after WWII, and it's a big reason why (a) they recovered so fast, and (b) rich Nazi lenders did not keep as much power in recovered West Germany.
I was mainly wondering (a) how the commentariat thinks the incentives would change for lenders (and lending institutions) long-term, (b) what the long-term effect on lendees would be. I also think the societal effects of such a change would be interesting to see. E.g. Would it periodically serve as a ballast for trust in the government?
Learned recently about the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, and its possible role as tinder for the Palestine/Israel conflict. I'm fuzzy on the details, and not sure how settled* the history is, but it felt like it touched favourite SSC/ACT themes like James C. Scott's stuff re: state bureaucracy trying to govern peasants, and David Friedman's stuff re: a positive account of property rights.
Very roughly: small-time Palestinian farmers had been farming their land for generations, often communally owned (also it sounds like there might have been some kind of distinction between right of ownership + collecting tax, and right of residency+ working it, or something?). The Ottoman Empire wanted to make taxing it easier, so started requiring land be registered under a clear name / deed of ownership.
For various reasons, the small-time farmers often didn't end up registered on their land. This included communal land ending up registered to powerful individuals; not wanting your name on it so your son wouldn't be conscripted to the military; etc., but also there was a feeling that this was mostly just the Empire's formality, it won't *really* change anything, we're still going to keep working our land like our ancestors did and like our descendants still will. (Also the new landlords were sometimes local, but also often foreign e.g. Christians? But I'm not sure how that worked.)
But the new officially-Empire-recognized landlords disagreed, and did consider the land theirs to e.g. sell if they wanted—for instance, to sell it to immigrating European Jewish people wanting to escape the pogroms and other anti-Semitism and start a Jewish homeland there.
Literally this is happening 150 years later in Slovakia. Since the authorities distributing EU agricultural subsidies don't check with the land registry who actually owns and/or farms the land, people can apply to receive subsidies for land that isn't theirs, just on their say-so. Organized crime has sprung up around this loophole, and corrupt public servants tip them off about unclaimed land for a kickback. When the farmers who actually own and/or work the land try to apply for the subsidies, are refused and complain, the police shows up to intimidate them. Multiple farmers killed themselves because of that.
You probably know this given the reference to James Scott, but this pattern is literally an example given in Seeing Like a State: complex traditions of communal land usage get steamrolled by a government looking from on high, who wants a simplified view of who “owns” the land, so that they know who to tax or whatever. Chaos ensues.
My prior is that they're clearly not lying, especially when they have conducted rave parties in Wuhan. The answer is China has handled the Coronavirus by instituting harsh lockdowns properly and driving the reproduction rate to 0, something very few other countries have managed to replicate
There are asymptomatic spreaders, and foreign reintroductions from travellers (who can likewise be asymptomatic). Singe-digit daily cases in the world's most populous country is IMO self-evident BS.
China has greatly reduced foreign travel and has enforced quarantine (14 days) on every inbound traveller. I doubt disease reintroduction is impossible to stop. China primarily stopped the spread of disease to the rest of China by restricting travel from Wuhan (in spite of the Chinese New Year Festival). Whether China has single-digit or double-digit cases is impossible for anyone who doesn't have actual data that you can trust to prove, but it is quite clear that they do not have overwhelming cases (that's affecting their hospitals) and it is also apparently low enough that China has not only reopened its economy but removed compulsory mask mandates by last year August (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-beijing-masks-idUSKBN25H0H8). I have a very hard time believing, that a country that tied people to light-poles and used drones to spy on people not wearing masks is somehow still facing any serious threat from Covid after they decided even Mask mandates are not required.
Scott, not sure if you'll see this...but telling us to leave comments instead of emailing in the 4th bullet point of a newsletter is not going to work. I mean, it worked on me, here...but generally speaking you probably should just make the email address on the list autorespond with your explanation, or no one will ever see it in the right context.
Why don't we use a space ship to grab defunct satellites orbiting the Earth, and carry them off to the Moon to drop them on its south pole? That way, when astronauts land there to build the first Moon base, there will be a lot of spare parts lying around that they can use as scrap materials.
I'm sure this sounds like a joke, but follow my reasoning: A big problem with building a Moon base is that it costs a fortune to transport building materials there from Earth's surface. However, there are literally tons of potential building materials already in space in the form of disused satellites. A lot of money has already been spent getting those satellites off the surface. For just a little more (I'm guessing), the satellites could be sent to the Moon. All we'd have to do is get an unmanned space ship with a grabber arm and some long-endurance propulsion system (solar sail, ion engine) into space, have it grab dead satellites, turn on its propulsion, and slowly move them out to the Moon. It wouldn't matter if it took a year for the duo to reach the Moon and for the reusable space ship to drop the satellite on the south pole like a bomb.
This would kill two birds with one stone: the amount of space debris around Earth would diminish, while the amount of scarce scrap materials made of aluminum, titanium and silicon would build up within walking distance of the Moon base site. Astronauts could refashion it into useful objects.
The "bomber" space craft would go back and forth between the Earth and Moon until it finally fell apart.
Oops.
I like this. You might enjoy the recent documentary "Boys State" - teenagers are sorted randomly into fake parties and tasked with coming up with political platforms after the fact.
An associate of mine went to this program several years ago. His party couldn't agree on a platform, and so he convinced a group to splinter off and form a terrorist cell that engaged in guerilla warfare against the nascent government. I can't remember if they successfully staged a coup.
So, uh, watch out for that when assigning manifestos.
So, low does this work? the Democrats write the manifestos and then the Republicans get to decide whether to campaign for UBI and $15 min wage or reinstate slavery and patriarchy? Or the Republicans write them, and the Democrats get to choose between support for gun ownership and school choice or nationalizing industry to inaugurate strict central planning, with mandatory re-education of all white males?
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure how this would replicate the "divide" step of divide and choose. What's to stop a party from writing two identical manifestos that capture their preferred policy positions?
And, for that matter, what would stop a party from completely ignoring its assigned manifesto?
> replicate the "divide" step of divide and choose.
The rule should be that one Party writes only a single manifesto, the other manifesto automatically becomes the logical negation of the first one.
(1) Crimson Lake Party writes manifesto: "If elected, we will slash taxes by 20%" Automatic negation manifesto: "If elected, we will increase taxes by 20%"
(2) Gamboge Party: "Oh, thanks very much, we'll take the tax-slashing manifesto!" and Crimson Lake Party gets the tax-increase manifesto
(3) Voters don't want a 20% tax hike, so they vote the Gamboge Party into power
End result: whichever party writes the manifestoes is going to do the most milk-and-water, 'status quo all the way' manifesto so the opposition will have no advantage in picking one over the other and they won't be stuck with the disadvantage manifesto, resulting in both parties becoming ever more like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, since whoever gets elected is elected on a manifesto of "more of the same".
... Why wouldn't the party writing the manifestos just write the same thing (the thing the author likes) twice?
*Dividing* something that already exists and *creating* something new are very different processes. The incentive structure from one doesn't carry over to the other.
"giving the same manifesto twice is making the result of the election a coin-flip"
Elections have factors other than policy differences. My party's candidate will implement the platform with competence and integrity, and more importantly is fun to be around!
As you may know, something along these lines has been used in legal systems. In Periclean Athens, the convicted defendant in a criminal case could propose a penalty, the prosecutor could impose a penalty, and the jury chose between them.
Did they actually shove seeds into an open wound? That sounds less than ideal. And what if the wound wasn't a hole (e.g., a lost finger)?
More recently, it's used in complex arbitration. I think there are some famous examples in Baseball players union negotiations where the arbitrator asks both sides to submit a resolution so he could choose whichever he considered the most gracious and reasonable.
On top of generating generally fair results, it's also a great work-saving device for the arbitrators, so it's sort of doubly clever.
Re: investments
On the simple yes-no question, 45% said it could sometimes be okay/appropriate to write about companies' requests for investment, 13% said it was never okay/appropriate, and 42% weren't sure.
On the more complicated question, 45% thought that the actual investment request I included was appropriate, 21% weren't sure, and 34% thought it was inappropriate for various reasons. Of those who thought it was inappropriate, about 10% thought investment requests were never appropriate, and the other 24% thought it was inappropriate for various specific reasons.
The most commonly cited reason was that people thought it felt like a bait-and-switch where I didn't tell them the post was leading up to an investment pitch. At first I felt sort of offended by this one - I titled the post "Shilling For Big Mitochondria"! But on further reflection I guess it makes sense. I had been interested in writing about DNP for a while, hearing about this company cemented it for me, and so it was an awkward pastiche of the post I would have written anyway and a post about the company. I can see how it would be jarring to read.
Other people thought I needed to take more precautions to inform people that investing in biotech companies is very risky and really only suitable for professional investors. The company was only accepting investment from accredited investors, which I thought made this a non-issue. I'm not sure whether the people saying this didn't know that, or whether they think even accredited investors need a special warning.
Other people thought it was a conflict of interest that my friend worked at the company. I'm...not sure this is true? I learn about a lot of things through my social network, and networking is a known way of doing and learning about things.
I think in general a lot of the problem was that people thought of this as me trying to claim that this was a hot stock tip that would make $$$, whereas I was trying to present it as a basically charitable opportunity to support a company doing really exciting and possibly world-changing research. If I was claiming it was a hot stock tip, then having a friend working there might be distorting my stock-evaluation ability. If it's just a cool opportunity to help with research, then...I'm not sure. This blog is fun, but it's only going to be actually worth our time if it helps change the world for the better. That's a tough order for a blog, and one of the few ways I can imagine it happening is if it helps connect people who can get involved in important institutions like charities, research programs - and yes, - companies - in ways that help them grow.
I have no ability to give people hot stock tips that will make them money, and in general you should assume I'm not doing this. But I know lots of amazing people trying to change the world who deserve more support than they're getting, and I'd like to be able signal-boost this when I think it's valuable.
My current plan is that if I ever do anything like this again, I'll do it on a Classified Thread (remember those?) where it won't feel out of place to anyone, and I'll specify that I have no reason to think it will make anybody any money. Also, please don't ask me to pitch your business; there is basically no chance it will work but it will make things awkward.
Regarding accredited investors and warnings, I always point people at Matt Levine's write-up in https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-24/earning-the-right-to-get-swindled.
I'm having trouble understanding why you think this is a charitable opportunity. You know about effective altruism, if you are seriously making the claim that investing in this biotech startup will do more good than giving the money to an EA charity, you will need to provide a mountain of evidence for that claim. I want to preserve and grow my wealth with my Investment Money, and do the most good with my Charity Money. I don't think mixing the two objectives is a good idea.
Can you explain your preference for keeping a hard line between investing and charity? It’s not obvious to me that utilitarian accounting would preclude investments that have both direct returns and positive externalities.
People aren't fully rational machines. I'd say it's a conflict of interest.
Where’s the conflict?
I assumed he doesn’t hold a position and didn’t receive compensation for his blog post.
If he's motivated to get investors to give it money independent of whether it would be a good deal for the investor, ehe has a conflict of interest. "I really think it would be good for the world if this organization got a lot of money" may be a more noble reason than "it's run by my brother and I want him to get richer", but it's still a reason that distorts one's judgment.
If that is a conflict of interest, how is any discussion of anything Scott approved of not a conflict of interest? Mentioning something you heard on the news because you think it's a positive development is a conflict of interest by this logic. I can't see how any discussion of companies or technologies would not be a conflict of interest, if you are defining interest as simply approving of the proposed outcome!
I think you're confusing conflict of interest, where potential personal gain means you should not declare an opinion, which is a pretty-clearly defined concept, with having an interest in the company, which is healthy and part of how we want the economy to work. That Scott has a friend whose work is interesting enough to him to suggest it is worth supporting is no more contentious than me saying I believe we should all stop an listen to the birds for five minutes every day, and Scott's statement is probably rationally a more useful thing to do.
I'd class this as a case of rigour over-zealously applied, and hopefully not an example of the sometimes-observed distaste for commerce, although if the latter at least with got a thematic link to the recent posts on class I suppose...
It's a conflict of interest only if you assume that the goal of an investment can only be return. If the people recommended to are also interested in making the world better, then this is not a conflict of interest but just "an interest". It's the same interest, is my point.
If this is your bar, doesn't just about everything he writes about constitute that benefits anyone some sort of conflict of interest?
Using your criteria, doesn't everything he does for any reason "distort" his judgement?
Such a company would either trade the positive externalities for more money at the first opportunity, or would be outcompeted by more unethical companies and lose the ability to do good or make money. Moloch doesn't allow you to serve two masters.
It seems like you’re assuming a company can capture all of the value it creates. If it can’t, there are positive externalities. Competition can even reduce the ability to capture value (eg by driving prices down).
That’s a good way of addressing the deductive point.
And inductively, there are companies whose products and services make the world better. Therefore shouldn’t supporting a company like that who isn’t well known be a priority for an Effective Altruist?
A for-profit company is already trading the positive externalities for more money. That's how it makes money. There are 3 things you're forgetting:
1. You're assuming that charities are as efficient as for-profit companies are at spending money to increase human welfare. But for-profit companies get paid more to increase human welfare more, while charities don't. This is why for-profit companies are free to spend their money in ways that will eventually increase welfare a lot (e.g., creating Google, ), whereas charities are constrained to spend their money in ways that appear, to the average donator, to increase welfare right now (e.g., buying solar power panels for African villages), or to decrease total welfare in redistributing it to someone especially pitiable (e.g., the Make-a-Wish foundation, average cost $10K/wish).
I could write a long rant about my experiences in startups and government contracting, in which I learned that, when people are given a lot of someone else's money to spend, even if they have the best of intentions, they spend it in useless ways because they don't have the only metric (market value) that tells you how valuable something you're doing really is to people. The waste that results from not having paying customers to keep you in line is astounding.
2. When you invest in a company, you're not losing the money; you can sell the stock once the company has a firm financial footing, and give those proceeds to charity. Even if you make the assumption in #1, giving to charity and investing in a for-profit should come out about even in altruistic utilon generation.
3. "Moloch" is really bad anthropomorphizing which focuses entirely on the negative, personifies it, and attributes it with agency, thus encouraging people to think of free markets and of freedom as evil instead of as good, and to seek agents of Moloch to slay. It's Marxist mythology which has crept into the rationalist community (via Scott, I'm afraid).
Bear in mind that serious EAs have thought *a lot* about this stuff, and have virtually always landed on charity not for profit enterprises. And these are the same people who have also landed on 'generally, political activism is suboptimal' 'worry about AI risk' and 'working for big companies and give your money away is an excellent path to doing good', so I don't think this just a fear of non-leftist/libertarian/unusual conclusions.
I think GiveWell was also founded by people with private, not public or charitable, sector backgrounds?
There's a large difference between "the most-effective utilon generator is usually a non-profit" and "theoretically, no for-profit company can ever be as efficient as any non-profit company".
Why is it that not to long ago in the US poor people starved to death sometimes, and now they are fat? Is it because people give more to charity than they did then? No. It's because of improvements in technology (or if charity is increased it is because GDP has increased, which is due to technology). So I don't see how you can say that charity is clearly superior, when history shows that investment in technology is clearly where improvements in standard of living come from.
(Er, I shouldn't have said "trading the positive externalities for money". I meant, the positives aren't externalities, because the company is paid for them.)
With either extreme I know where they stand. Either they are profit-maximisers or they are bound by the rules of registered charities. If it's in the middle then who knows where in the middle it is?
I took his use of the word charity to mean “Treat this investment as a gift without any expectation of a financial return”.
Mixing the two objectives of increasing invested wealth and doing good for humanity are very much the trend in the investment world today. And even before ESG and impact funds were a thing, the idea of “double bottom line” has been around for awhile. I think your view that these objectives should be compartmentalized is more fringe and requires evidence.
I think the view that they should be compartmentalized is simply a reversion, back from utilitarianism to subjective, spiritualist, non-materialist ethics again, which denies that morality can be quantified, and claims that "material" and "spiritual" are separate magisteria.
Right now some EA groups' recommendations is that they will use billionaire money to take care of the obvious stuff, and that individuals with more normal amounts of money should spend it on smaller opportunities that they are uniquely placed to know about which the billionaires haven't found yet. If this drug has an X% chance of ending obesity, and I'm uniquely placed to know about it because I know a person who works there, I think it counts as a potentially EA-like thing that the billionaires haven't heard about yet.
(caveat: other organizations don't say this, and it's kind of complicated because the billionaires will only fund up to half of any charity's operating budget so it's always possible to increase the amount the billionaires will donate by donating yourself. This is my impression of what a few people have told me, nothing more)
It's tangential, but this seems backwards to me. Money is fungible, but time isn't. If I donate a relatively small amount, it's not worth my while finding niche donation opportunities. I should just give the money to EA funds or the top recommendation on GiveWell, which I can assume have sufficient capacity for my donation. Whereas if I were giving away a billion pounds, it would be worth spending time identifying particular giving opportunities, which I could then fully fund.
My suspision is that the position you refer to has its root in vanity: people don't like the feeling that their donation is insigificant compared with Dustin Moskovitz. But actually, it makes no difference to the impact. There's no need to be a hipster: just do the best thing, and if other people also do the best thing, that's great!
I could see an argument that it's not worth spending time hunting for unique opportunities, but you should still take advantage of any unique opportunities that happen to fall in your lap while you are going about your life.
Though I'm not sure that holds up, because even if you hear about a unique opportunity spontaneously, there's presumably still some due-diligence investigative work you'd have to do before putting money there made sense.
Big organizations like Open Phil don't have the capacity to vet hundreds of small (<100k) grants, so they prefer to give to organizations that can absorb large amounts of money. Since there are many opportunities for grantmaking in the 5k-500k range, and since the big funders are constrained in how many organizations they can vet, an individual donor that is prepared to do their own work can plausibly find a niche topic they know well that is competitive with many of the best giving opportunities.
The Open Philanthropy Project—which is about as EA as it gets—makes for-profit investments in biotech startups.
I make annual donations to a Children's Hospital in my town to support their ongoing research program. It is a registered charity and my donations are tax deductible. So, it is not impossible. OTOH, when I donate I donate, and when I invest, I invest.
The existing EA framework ≠ the be-all end-all EA mindset. One can be enough of a consequentialist utilitarian to agree with the EA mindset per se, but have slightly different terminal values from the EA orthodoxy to the extent that one's calculus about which charities should be prioritized will be different. For example, this might be true of a preference utilitarian who *hard* rejects the Repugnant Conclusion, and for whom guaranteeing a pleasant life to those already living is much more important relative to preventing deaths than the existing EA framework assumes.
While I understand your thought process, wouldn't it be even better to invest in companies that are making a difference?
Our feelings about electric cars or Musk aside. A company like Tesla, who's stated goal is to reduce green house gas emissions from vehicles sounds like a great place to invest for your future in both ways. You can make money, and potentially protect the environment. More so than buying your own electric car.
As another option, I've heard of investment funds that target green initiative companies (green energy and such). Again, why not make money and do what you can to protect the environment.
Maybe you're on top of this, but most of us just buy investment funds or ETFs. There's a chance that you're supporting companies that actually go against your charity donations. Nullifying or reducing your own altruistic effects (in so far as buying shares in a company tell it you're happy with what they're doing).
I'd argue that investing for change is the most Effectively Altruist way to invest. Your investments would reinforce your charity dollars.
I think I need to go double check where I'm invested.
I wonder if this is partly responsible for Tesla's stock boom, and whether institutional investors have already incorporated measures of altruism into their models. I tried googling, but was overwhelmed by results linking to stories about people who (supposedly) were entirely motivated by altruism and just ended up making lots of money, because karma.
I also wonder why we even have to talk about this. If people invest to maximize expected utility, and their utility functions include concern for other people--both of which I believe are usably correct--then it should have been obvious since the great post-Christian progressive/moral revolution of the 19th century that seemingly-altruistic companies have higher stock values than P/E-equivalent not-obviously-altruistic companies.
I doubt institutional investors have started using altruism as a metric in their models.
Firstly because they would advertise the hell out of it. It's a lot easier to forgive lower than expected returns in a fund if the argument is "but we did good too".
Secondly because we would see more investor activism on that front, and it would probably be advertised to all hell again.
I admit, I could just be missing the advertising on these funds, and socially conscious activist investors as I'm not exactly the target demographic for that news.
I wonder if billionaires could start buying up huge stakes in these companies in order to push them to pursue better long-term goals instead of just the best short term returns.
The problem is that the non-altruistic return from investing in those companies is then less than from investing in other countries, so all non-altruistic investors put their money somewhere else. Unless there are enough altruistic investors to fully fund the altruistic companies, return on investment goes back up to the market return, the companies are paying as much for capital as before so no benefit to altruistic objectives, and the altruistic investors get their altruism for free — but not really, since their investment doesn't benefit the companies.
So the altruists should either invest in companies that only altruists invest in or spent money on charity instead.
I have three issues with that reply.
1. Empirically, when a British Petroleum oil well polluted the Caribbean, BP's stock fell far below any market-rational value, and stayed low even after the reparations that would be demanded from it became known. The simplest explanation is that the market was punishing it for harming the environment.
2. Theoretically, an omniscient, non-altruistic investor would know when a stock had added utility to altruists, and that this should be factored into its expected market value. Investors don't care about the company's returns; they care about the market value of their investment. If a bunch of altruists will value the stock higher, then the stock really has a higher market value.
On the other hand, a non-omniscient, altruistic investor who doesn't know which companies are socially helpful or harmful will act just like a non-altruistic investor.
So the difference which motivates the behavior you describe isn't between altruism and non-altruism, but between knowing and not knowing about the ways companies help and harm others. Note that in my BP example, the harm done by BP was blared across all media nonstop for weeks, so everyone knew about it, and knew everyone else knew about it.
So perhaps social benefits would affect stock price more if Wall Street culture expected reporters and analysts to talk about the social harms and benefits of companies. This doesn't even require them to /care/ about them; merely to regard them as data that's useful to some investors. Once everyone believes that social net benefits are an important factor in stock value, they'll become an important factor in stock value.
3. I shouldn't have used the word "altruism", meaning "acting to benefit others at expense to oneself". I'm thinking rather of companies whose for-profit business happens to involve making stuff I think of as especially socially helpful, like Google, or the makers of coronavirus vaccine.
However, now that I think this through, as a good free-market economist I should accept that our best estimate of the social value of the stuff made is its market value, which represents its utility to its consumers. Hence, those companies with the largest gross income are those producing the most social value (except in non-free-market cases involving monopoly, regulation, confusopoly / private information, etc.). So if my investment strategy sought to maximize social utility, the only difference would be that I'd invest in companies with high gross rather than net income. But I'd go broke, because those companies are much more likely to go out of business than companies with high net incomes. (Note this doesn't apply to the preceding discussion of companies acting in ways which are socially perceived as beneficial; only to companies which are objectively socially beneficial as measured by market prices.)
The two strategies would give similar outcomes if the altruistic good-free-market investor considers the social utility that each company will produce over the life of the company.
A mountain of evidence that investing $X in a for-profit company can produce more social utility than giving $X to any charity: Google.
Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a post, Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately, which justifies giving to charity, but (IIRC) on the basis that giving to charity may increases social utility more through the fuzzies that you personally receive from giving to charity (as fuzzies are essential to life), than through the utility produced from your money by the charity.
Can you clarify how Google is a mountain of evidence for a for-profit company producing more social utility than giving $X to any charity?
Google's first round of funding was $25 million, which I think they operated for a few years. It kept the Internet usable. Yahoo and Ask Jeeves had curated approaches that didn't scale; Alta Vista bogged down on trying to tackle NLP; metacrawler relied on other search engines to do a good job.
I may be overrating Google's importance in search; their main effect may have been gaining a monopoly by eliminating all other competition by the dastardly trick of patenting their PageRank search algorithm, which was so stupidly simple and obvious that you couldn't really make a decent search engine without using it.
But I use Google's free email service; their free doc service; their free spreadsheets; their free speech-to-text program. So do billions of other people. Add up the utilons there. I embrace the "repugnant conclusion".
Of course, this may all be cancelled out when they create the first AGI and conquer or destroy the world. But, until a few years ago, that didn't seem inevitable.
Scott, seriously, talk to a lawyer about this. Don't assume you can figure out what's legal and what isn't; you're very smart, but the law can be very dumb.
Do you think he’s subject to some part of Reg D?
If he’s not receiving consideration for the promote, I’d be interested in hearing where you think this runs afoul.
If he promotes a startup belonging to someone who's involved with Substack, he's at risk.
I'm not following your legal theory
By involved with Substack, I mean someone who's either involved in Scott's income guarantee from Substack or directly involved in investing in the company itself.
The SEC investigation is a pain in the ass and there is no upside for doing this.
All it takes is one casual person swinging by because they heard about this Scott Alexander person somewhere, reading about "Magic Carpets is a swizzy new startup", deciding to sell the very shirt off their back to invest in Magic Carpets, then the thing goes "ka-blooey", they lose everything, and they get angry and go to law over it.
Doesn't matter if Scott never said "Sell your shirt to invest in Magic Carpets", there are plenty of dumb smart people out there.
Has any blogger (who doesn't normally blog about investments) been convicted in such a case?
This reads like a fully general argument against every communicating anything to anyone. There's no real obstacle to someone suing someone else for _any reason at all_ (or even no real reason).
Reg D only applies to issuers. And it only deals with 33 Act compliance. Non-issuers need to worry about BD regulation and 40 Act compliance as well. Reg D does not help with that.
If you are not receiving recompense, why run any risk?
I left a comment in the survey essentially saying that accredited investors need warnings, but it was probably too short to explain well. @bunnydogwalking already posted the excellent Matt Levine column, so I'll assume you've read that.
I completely agree that there is value in signal-boosting on this blog investments that genuinely interest you because /actual/ sophisticated investors read this blog. (And because you already realize that this only works if you ignore people asking you to pitch their business.)
However, "accredited investor" does not in any way mean "sophisticated investor". Random dentists or Google SWEs or whoever should not be investing in private placements. But, I'm libertarian enough to say that they just need a warning. "Don't invest in private companies if losing $250,000 would make you lose any sleep" or whatever. (Yeah, a company could accept a small investment, but that's a red flag.)
The point isn't to cover your ass -- the point is (1) to genuinely convince dentists that the opportunity is in fact targeted at more sophisticated investors and (2) to convince people complaining about all this that it was never a problem because you were only interested in bona fide sophisticated investors in the first place. (But obviously this won't help with people who are just vaguely offended by capitalism in general and large amounts of money in particular.)
I personally did NOT get the impression that the biotech company was targeting accredited but unsophisticated investors, but due to this becoming some big thing where you're soliciting general feedback about signal-boosting investments, I'm offering general feedback.
It was I who suggested that there were legal problems with suggesting an investment opportunity in your friends company.
In my time I was accounted to be a savvy practitioner of securities law. People paid me for my advice. Some of them heeded me. Some of them didn't. One of the guys who didn't is in durance vile still.
My free advice to you was don't do it. I saw downsides and you claimed you had no upside, so the conclusion was easy.
You have a constitutional right to commit journalism, but I thought the post in question crossed the line from journalism into solicitation.
In the future, I would say that it is proper and legal to report on development stage technology, and even to say that the developer is looking for funding. But I would cut it off at that. Let the unwary use their Google fu, to find the company.
Is there a difference between saying "Acme is making exciting rockets, and by the way it is looking for funding" vs. what I did (which you seemed to think crossed the line into making an investment pitch)?
You said Acme was a friend of yours, I think. That's where it got iffy.
Your original post made me uncomfortable. It is lawful and proper to practice science journalism. And I thought the original post went past that. I don't want to try spec out all of the possible variations. It is tedious and it would require me to do research that I do not have the tools for or the inclination to do. If I see something that makes me uncomfortable I will say so.
Would it be okay to mention "Magic Carpets is doing something along these lines, go here for more details"
DISCLAIMER: A friend of mine is involved with Magic Carpets and told me about it
EVEN BIGGER DISCLAIMER: I am not recommending this as an investment! Contact your broker for professional advice!
Can you point to an enforcement action which contains a fact pattern analogous to Scott's blog post?
My experience with securities lawyers has been that there are a ton who have academic legal theories (and will charge you a lot of money to share those opinions with you in fancy memos!) but few who have relevant enforcement perspective and can contextualize the risk.
We can probably agree that just about every real estate deal with multiple particpants and angel deal could be some sort of Reg D violation with a broad interpretation of solicitation. The value of legal advice is contextualizing risk - not restating the law into laymen's terms.
No. I am not doing research. I don't have the tools. I don't have the time. And, it is not enough fun to do for less than $1000/hr. I am not even going to drag in my friend who was general counsel of FINRA or my other friend who was general counsel of the SEC.
I think whether or not there is a risk of enforcement cracking down on Scott, one might think that if he's doing the *sort* of thing that they could *legally* crack down on, then that might be a sign that this post is *ethically* problematic, even if it's not likely to lead to actual legal trouble. (Of course, if someone thinks the regulations are badly written, then that might be less of a significant worry.)
"Accredited investors" doesn't actually mean people with any kind of education/credentials in investing; it just means people with $200k/year income or more. Scott, you're probably an accredited investor.
So yes, I do think that "even" accredited investors need warning. I have a relative who regularly puts his money in stupid things (like various shitcoins) and then loses most of it, and I think it's immoral to pitch investments to him without disclaimers (and yes, I suspect he's accredited - he has high salary, but achieved the high salary recently at age 60, and he's retiring soon with little savings).
I was wondering how you became an "accredited investor". So it's basically brokerage saying "show us your bank balance - okay, you have enough dough to make it worth our while to take your orders"?
There's a lot of confusion about what "accredited investor" even means, because it's an obscure point of US law.
It has nothing to do with "worth our while to take your orders". If you just want to buy Apple stock or whatever, you can open an account with $500 and have at it.
"Accredited investor" means "eligible to buy minimally-regulated financial products".
If I have a company that does not comply with the extensive requirements to be "publicly traded" (periodic public, audited financial statements and other public disclosures), I cannot make it available as an investment to the general public. If I accept a bunch of investments from regular people, $5k at a time or whatever, I have committed a crime and could go to jail.
However, I can accept investments from rich people, i.e. "accredited investors". It is my responsibility to confirm that they meet the criteria. I might have a minimum investment, but I'm checking their bank statements not so much to confirm that they're worth my while, but rather to confirm that I won't go to jail.
The theory is that startups need someone to invest in them, but regular people need protection. Regular people get more protection from dodgy investments than rich people, but rich people in turn get high-risk, high-reward opportunities along with the truly dodgy investments.
A somewhat more cynical take is that too many people qualify as "accredited investors":
Regular people: get regulated investments - publicly-traded companies, mutual funds, etc
Super-rich (> $50MM): also get interesting high-risk, high-reward investments like startups
Low-tier rich "accredited investors" (dentists, whatever): also get dodgy investments from slick salespeople
Of course, in reality the boundary between the categories is fuzzy.
Really rich can get hosed too. And you can make big money on publicly traded stocks. If you invested $1,000 in APPL 20 years ago and you held on to your investment, you would have more than $300,000 now. Of course if you had invested $1,000 in Hertz Renta Car back then, you have what is known in Bankruptcy Latin as bupkis.
Okay, I had no idea Hertz was doing so badly, and looking at Wikipedia makes me go "What the hell?"
"As of 2019, the company had revenues of US$9.8 billion, assets of US$24.6 billion, and 38,000 employees. The company filed for bankruptcy on May 22, 2020, citing a sharp decline in revenue and future bookings caused by the COVID-19 pandemic"
How do you go from "assets of 24.6 billion" one year to "sell the family silver, we're broke!" the next? This makes me think something more was going on there - like creative accounting? Not really anything like the assets they claimed? Or they really were living "from one paycheck to the next" so their revenues were covering the fleet expenses, and that doesn't sound like a good way to run a business.
More informed comment, I would welcome on this!
I've read further into that Wikipedia article and this makes me go - pardon the bluntness - "holy fuck". Plainly, I am not cut out for the heady heights of high finance!
"Hertz financed itself mostly by taking out loans secured by its fleet of cars, and if the cars fell in value, Hertz’s lenders had the right to demand an immediate payment reducing the amount of the loan, so it was still comfortably covered by the cars’ now-lower value. Because of the crisis, used-car values and sales volumes fell right as Hertz lost most of its customers. The bankruptcy filing started a 60-day clock, during which Hertz’s secured lenders must wait before they can foreclose on the 400,000 U.S. cars that were financed through such arrangements."
So let me see if I have this straight: they were leasing some at least of their fleet? so they were buying them on tick? and then borrowing against those? so they owed double payments on the cars? and then the used car market went kablooey?
I suppose it made some kind of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" sense at the time and so long as nothing happened it was workable, but they don't seem to have made provision for rainy days.
> Really rich can get hosed too.
True, I should have phrased that differently to be clear that super-rich also get dodgy investment opportunities, unless their staff keep slick salespeople away. My real point was that low-tier accredited investors are below the point where they realistically get access to interesting startups and whatnot.
My brother the doctor was approached by his investment adviser as to whether he would be interested in investing in private equity funds. He called me because he that I had some involvement in the field, and our other brother who is an executive in a PE owned company. We both told him to stay away.
Ask yourself we said: "Why do they need my money now?"
A story told by George J.W. Goodman, a financial writer and television personality (active from the late 60s until the turn of the century), is about the investor who visited a ranch to see the cattle that he had purchased as a tax shelter. He drives past acres of pasture where fat kine repose in rumination to the ranch house. He goes into the office excited find out which cattle are his. They say none of those, yours are down that road about a mile and the send one of the ranch hands out to escort him. The ranch hand drives him to the drives to the appointed spot where he see a bunch of sickly cows in a rocky scraggly pasture. The ranch hand says. Those are your cattle.
It does sound like a grey area. Most are probably honest? But if someone wants to go out and pluck some pigeons, this is also a nice way to do it?
30 years ago, I was a partner in a law firm. For a living, I wrote offering documents for private placements and public offerings. But, my income and assets did not meet the accredited investor test. I couldn't invest in the deals I had created. In the long run I was as well off. A lot of those deals didn't make money.
My understanding of these sort of investments is that you invest in 10 of them and you expect one of them to do well enough to pay for the other nine that tank.
This sort of record apparently makes you worth listening to, because you took a large fortune and failed to make it a smaller one.
"Other people thought it was a conflict of interest that my friend worked at the company. I'm...not sure this is true? I learn about a lot of things through my social network, and networking is a known way of doing and learning about things."
The tricky part here is that this is how pyramid schemes work - word of mouth recommendations from a friend of a friend. We know this is not you, but by the same token, you could be perfectly honest about this! Your friend could be perfectly honest about this! And somebody reading the recommendation sinks their life savings into this because they trust your word and when/if it goes belly-up (because this is a risk when starting any new venture), they've lost everything.
I suppose many of us are sensitive or even over-sensitive to such things as conflict of interest because of the jobs we work where we get it hammered into us about a higher standard of conduct than even Caesar's wife. There is a thin, let us hope bright, line between "a friend of a friend told me about this cool new thing" and "fill your boots".
And even with the best will in the world, some people *are* going to take "I heard about this cool new thing" as "hot stock tip make easy $$$$$".
I think Scott needs to come up with some definition of conflict of interest that is consistent and makes sense to him. Because it doesn't make sense as written. It's not a conflict because...learning about stuff through a social network is normal? Okay, but how does that connect to the concept of a conflict of interest? Is Scott assuming it's not a conflict because the friend didn't blatantly give him money to write about the company on the blog?
That said, I'm not really sure Scott is under an obligation to avoid conflicts of interest. He's a blogger, not a lawyer or financial adviser, so if he wants to use the platform to shill companies that his friends create, knowing he won't be able to objectively evaluate his friends' companies, I'm not sure there's an ethical problem as long as the relationship is disclosed.
I suppose "this is the shiny new thing a friend told me about" and then leave us to go and dig out the details for ourselves if we're really interested, and certainly no hint of "please send your bank account and credit card details to this email address"?
Yeah, I'm comfortable with the proposed approach of keeping the investment pitches to classified threads. But not because it's not a conflict, it definitely is, but I don't think the blogger/reader relationship is the sort of privileged relationship of trust where conflict of interest rules apply.
" I learn about a lot of things through my social network, and networking is a known way of doing and learning about things" – the fact that it is a known way does not mean it is a good way. To make a hyperbolic comparison, murder is a known way of solving your problems, established from the earliest days. Many people still disapprove of this venerable institution in a broad-based manner! It is the same with nepotism; like the poor, we have it always with us, but unlike the poor and murder, it's never good.
I saw the investment advice as potentially muddying the waters with regards to the medical advice. i.e. saying "you should invest in this" implies that the product is probably really great (and therefore maybe you should consider taking some even if it hasn't been through the whole FDA approval process that your readers know you're sceptical of). I'd rate this as relatively low risk, but I'd say the investment shilling was one of the factors that contributed to the perception that the product might be worth taking
That's a dangerous misreading!!
The company mentioned as investment opportunity is trying to make a new, completely different drug that use a completely different biochemical process to achieve mitochondrial uncoupling, with a goal of being much safer than DNP (which also works via mitochondrial uncoupling, but is very dangerous). The company is NOT trying to take DNP through the FDA approval process!
The fact that the company is trying to develop a different, safer drug should not indicate that the original drug is safe!
Quite aside the legality of it all, I have another view: There are few rules I live by more stringently than 'I give no investment advice.' despite having more than enough formal education in Finance.
I will even give relationship advice before I give investment advice. One exception: I will raise a flag - once - if a product is either objectively a bad idea (usually because of inordinate fees or carefully hidden risks) or looks like an outright scam.
You can find your way out of insomnia and into sleep by focusing in a counterintuitively alert way on your hypnagogic hallucinations, using them as a sort of biofeedback mechanism and following them as they change their characteristics in predictable ways:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GwGeksTkFQbm6Hbrx/how-to-use-hypnagogic-hallucinations-as-biofeedback-to
This was very neat and closely matches the meditation practice of the fire kasina. Usually when I would practice that, I would have more visual clarity for a short period of time and more vivid memories.
Thank you
Very interesting article. I've experienced hypnagogic hallucinations fairly consistently throughout my entire life and the general progression outlined from formless to distinct and from 2D to 3D aligns with what I've always experienced. I do have doubts as to how useful this advice is to a person not familiar with hypnogogia though. Even with my familiarity each different stage when I'm really struggling with a racing mind at bed time, trying to get out of "The Rut", just shifting my focus isn't enough. I usually have to do a full reset, get out of bed, cool off, even walk around some and that's what get's my mind to calm enough for the hallucination to start. Still, I'll be paying more attention and trying to follow the "guideposts" more mindfully now. Also, an element of my hypnagogia has always been aural. Hearing music or voices. This can start as early as what you call "The Lava Lamp". Is this something you've experienced or seen written about?
I haven't noticed much in the way of aural hypnagogic hallucinations, but I haven't gone out of my way to look for them either. Sometimes they show up at the closest-to-sleep guideposts when the microdreams begin. I've got tinnitus, too, so that might overwhelm any subtle aural hypnagogic hallucinations. I'm not surprised that for other people this could be as striking as visual hallucinations are for me.
For most of my life, I've been able to do the following, whenever I closed my eyes in a quiet place. I would visualize something with a pleasant and easy to visualize texture or pattern (such as, e.g., polished wood, velvet, snow, stained glass, leaves, embroidered material) and look at it for a while. Sometimes I mentally tug at the image just a little, sometimes I just let it sit there, and, after a while, it will begin to morph and become another picture, then that picture will become another picture, and so on. While I'm seeing this, I wouldn't be asleep yet and could talk and describe what I'm seeing, but eventually I would fall asleep if I stay like this. The only problem is, once in a while I will get a picture of something unpleasant and have to forcefully discard the image and start another sequence.
Other people told me they couldn't do this, so I guess this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but perhaps that's something that might come for some people if they tried.
Interesting! I wonder if this can be used to induce a lucid dream from waking.
My trick for falling asleep - including in the middle of the night - is always reading a book, which I guess is another way of focusing attention away from emotionally charged thoughts and getting out of the local minimum you mentioned. An e-ink reader with fully adjustable backlight (no minimum level) is amazing for this, as turning on the light in the room or, God forbid, looking at an LCD screen would make falling asleep more difficult.
Yes, this is a method of getting straight into lucid dreaming called a Wake-Induced Lucid Dream or WILD. The dreams will be very short and unfocused if you try this first thing at night, you need to have woken up at night during a longer REM cycle to get much value out of it.
Thanks for putting the time into writing this. Every tool in the insomnia wars is a valuable one.
But in your list of standard treatments I'm surprised you didn't mention sleep compression therapy. To me, this should be the first port of call for those with sleep issues.
https://www.painscience.com/articles/insomnia.php
I tried this last night and it seemed to be efficacious in getting me to sleep faster! Thanks for the link, it's a really interesting read, too.
Another comment feature request (somebody's probably asked for this already): the ability to collapse a certain comment thread. Especially in the open threads, it's much easier to collapse an long, uninteresting thread than to scroll all the way past it.
You should actually already be able to do this. There's a vertical line leading down from top-level comments; if you click on it, it collapses all sub-comments. It doesn't collapse the top-level comment itself, though, which means long top-level comments you're not interested in still need to be scrolled past, but it should help with unwieldy threads.
Does that work for you?
I was typing this just as you were - thanks for saving me the proofreading.
I would really like it if you could collapse the top-level comment as well - sometimes it's long and difficult to scroll past too. This is currently my #2 feature request, behind an edit button.
Wow, thanks! That is a very well-hidden UI feature.
Yeah, using standard UI conventions would be much better.
But I'm glad at least I know this now.
Reddit also does this.
Huh, hadn't realized that the new reddit UI does this. I guess that makes it a less bizarre design decision (though the highlighting on reddit is a lot more obvious and it collapses the parent comment as well).
Also, thanks for making me open reddit in a different browser and thereby reminding me how glad I am RES exists (new reddit looks awful).
Oh thank you! I didn't know you could already do that, and it's the comment feature I was most eagerly awaiting from the old SSC
I just love these modern, undocumented text-free interfaces with their essentially undiscoverable features. Congratulations to SubStack for contributing to the modern trend of prioritizing appearance far ahead of usability; I wonder whether they've been poaching UI designers from Apple.
As a longtime software developer trying to specialize in GUI design I concur in your bitter sarcasm. Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini at least gave it a try, but it seems to be a losing battle.
Thank you!
Thank you! A good affordance with a poor signifier.
Ooooh, it does! And I would never have thought of clicking on the line! I dunno, these modern apps with their fancy 'you should have imbibed this knowledge with your mother's milk' designs 😁
Thanks! I had no idea. I would like a design feature like a little downward pointing triangle at the top that made it more obvious, so that newbies don't have to explicitly hear about it, but can guess based on the visual representation.
But having the feature at all is the biggest thing.
That works well if the top of the vertical line is visible on the screen, but otherwise it collapses in a non-intuitive manner and you are now reading several comments below the top-level comment whose replies you ignored.
I hate clicking in that region. I have no idea what, specifically, I'm collapsing, and sometimes I just click because it's a wide open space and I need to get the window in focus.
One thing that would really be an important addition for me would be a 'collapse everything except top level comments' feature.
So I have a question for you smart and beautiful commenters. When assessing all the big COVID questions (was the whole lockdown worth it, how fast should reopening be, was it personally worth it for me) I think the biggest unknown is long-term cardiac effects. If I just spent 2% of my estimated remaining lifespan hiding from something that had a 0.03% chance of killing me, that’s pretty stupid. If COVID had a 0.03% chance of killing me but a 20% chance of significantly reducing my lifespan via heart damage, that’s entirely different.
Everyone quotes the same exact study proving frequent heart damage from COVID-19 (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2768916). This study has since undergone what Retraction Watch would call a “megacorrection”, and I feel like the effect size is so big it should have been reproduced many times by many hospitals. A more recent study of athletes looks far less threatening (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/2777308), but still indicates that COVID-induced myocarditis is a real phenomenon. The pandemic has been raging long enough that I feel like such damage should be detectable in the form of say, an increase in heart attacks in young people in Lombardy and NY over the last year, but I’m not a medical doctor and I don't know if it will take much longer for such effects to manifest.
FWIW I’ve been hiding long enough that I will continue to do so until vaccinated, so don’t worry that I’m looking for an excuse to be irresponsible.
I realize that nowhere in my comment did I actually write a question. The question is "how prevalent and serious is long-term cardiac damage from COVID, and does it occur in the absence of serious disease"?
My assumption is that max vax policy is the highest priority and there are few incentives to publish studies that may be interpreted as less than apocalyptic. So my non-answer is that we won't know soon... not that we have enough distance from the first cases to postulate quantities like 20% shorter lifespan.
That said, this article slipped through and I thought was interesting and balanced (https://www.vox.com/22298751/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-hauler-symptoms). It does not address intermediate or long term cardiac issues, specifically, which I believe are more prevalent with COVID (anecdotally within my friend circle).
The "long-term" in your question makes it impossible to have any COVID-specific data, but I'd wager that the body of evidence will build over time that COVID does cause significant (using this in the scientific way, not the "a lot" way) heart damage in a clinically meaningful way.
First, cardiomyocytes don't regenerate. Second, severe infections, such as influenza, strep, etc, can cause myocarditis that damages the heart in a long-term manner. Of course, CoV-2 isn't influenza, etc, but since the heart damage from these infections appears to be from the body's inflammatory response, I do think it's suggestive that we should expect something similar from COVID.
Here is a paper discussing the link between influenza and CVD. Many great citations in the opening paragraph of the intro. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5158013/
>Second, severe infections, such as influenza, strep, etc, can cause myocarditis that damages the heart in a long-term manner.
But that wouldn't occur in the absence of serious symptoms. A lot of the fear about long COVID is centered on the idea that you could get lifelong issues even if you didn't get seriously ill.
It's reasonable to assume that severity of illness and severity of damage correlate, but I also think that we should have some epistemic humility about where the breakpoints are. Does mild COVID (or influenza) increase your relative risk of a heart attack 25 years down the road by 0.1%? 1%? 10%? I don't know, but you might ask yourself what size of an effect over what time frame you personally care about, and if the over-arching research structure is well-suited to sort of that effect over that time frame.
Interestingly, there was a paper published today in Science with an abstract that ends: "raise concerns about the long-term consequences of COVID-19 in asymptomatic as well as severe cases." Published today so I haven't read in full. Link: https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/03/12/scitranslmed.abf7872
IANAP but I would think that the kind of heart damage that would show up less than a year later in a noticeable increase in fatal heart attacks among young-to-middle-aged people would be *severe* not moderate, still less mild. "Moderate" damage is presumably the kind of thing that combines with the usual infirmities of advancing age to snuff you at age 64 instead of 80, and "mild" damage might shave only 5-8 years off your life. But nobody will know if such things are happening for another 30 years or so.
A personal anecdote: my brother, healthy 39 year old, got covid and died of a heart attack 2 months after recovering. The cardiac risk is quite real.
>If I just spent 2% of my estimated remaining lifespan hiding from something that had a 0.03% chance of killing me, that’s pretty stupid.
You spent 2% of your estimated remaining life hiding to protect others with a much higher chance of dying. We are part of a collective whether we like it or not. If you don't want to be: return to monke
I've complied with the rules to the letter for the more than a year so I don't particularly appreciate your tone, but fine, let's take me out of the equation. We've forced everyone to spend ~1.25% of a human lifespan with drastically reduced freedom and pushed a hundred twenty million people in the developing world into extreme poverty. If COVID had been allowed to run unchecked, it would have killed ~0.5% of the developed world population (much lower in the developing world) with the average victim losing less than ten life years. Third world children are going malnourished so that American 78 year olds can live to be 84. The only way this made any sense is if heart damage/long-hauler syndrome are a real and widespread phenomenon.
There's also damage to the healthcare system if you let it rip, and also, death rate will rise once the healthcare system is overwhelmed, although maybe not by that much. And of course, it's not like restrictions have been maximally onerous everywhere all the time. In the UK for example, you could do many normal things during last summer/early autumn. Likely it'll be a very long time before we know whether restrictions were worth it in countries that couldn't pull off what Taiwan or New Zealand achieved.
I think this is fair too, and there's a lot of permutations to consider (e.g what if we'd declared victory after discovering dexamethasone and prone positioning, then let 'er rip)
On the opposite end of New Zealand and Taiwan I'd probably put the Indian subcontinent, where the lockdowns imposed dire suffering and the virus basically won anyway. Mentioned in this very good article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others
"We've forced everyone to spend ~1.25% of a human lifespan with drastically reduced freedom and pushed a hundred twenty million people in the developing world into extreme poverty. If COVID had been allowed to run unchecked, it would have killed ~0.5% of the developed world population (much lower in the developing world) with the average victim losing less than ten life years."
In the first sentence, you are comparing the economic conditions of the pandemic response to the economic conditions of 2019. In the second sentence, you are considering the health conditions of the pandemic response to the health conditions of an unchecked pandemic. It seems unfair to use a counterfactual for the second when you use the actual non-pandemic year for the first. Can we get any comparison to the counterfactual economic activities of a world *with* a pandemic but *without* government response?
This is a fair point, and very hard to know. I think back to this famous article, before views on the virus started sorting according to broader political views (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/02/covid-vaccine/607000/). If everyone had this "you can't outrun your Appointment in Samarra" attitude, which is more or less the attitude of earlier times, the economic effects would have been modest. But that might be impossible in this day and age. A major pandemic recession might have been inevitable.
"Can we get any comparison to the counterfactual economic activities of a world *with* a pandemic but *without* government response?"
Florida is a lower bound. Not zero restrictions, but in-person schools, large outdoor gatherings (including Super Bowl parties that amazingly failed to become super-spreader events as predicted by much of the media), and a much smaller economic hit, e.g. unemployment at 4.8% compared to 9% in CA.
As usual, I'd again want to be careful about using one place as a baseline, because each place has a unique set of economic conditions. I would at least want a broader comparison set among US states or regions (Los Angeles and San Francisco had largely similar restrictions, but extremely different health outcomes - I don't know whether their economic outcomes were similar or also different). You can get some of that here: https://carsey.unh.edu/COVID-19-Economic-Impact-By-State
But I'd also want to look at the difference between nations with very strong restrictions (like Australia and New Zealand) and those with weaker ones (like Sweden). And I would be very confused about where to put places like the UK on this chart, when they were restrictive in saying that partners that don't live together shouldn't visit each other's homes, but anti-restrictive in paying people to go eat inside restaurants.
I've thought about this for awhile, but if isolating is effective, why wouldn't it make more sense to have all the people with a much higher chance of dying to isolate and everyone else work to support them? I mean now they should get vaccinated, and we didn't know all the facts of the disease then (or maybe even now). But in line with the argument you are making, wouldn't it have made more sense to encourage everyone with a low chance of dying to intentionally not isolate while everyone with a high chance of dying *and those who need to have contact with them* isolate?
Empirically: most people with a much higher chance of dying cannot be effectively isolated from the general populace, either by themselves or with an additional caretaker cohort. A society might exist where this strategy could safely be implemented, but it is not any existing society.
Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm assuming you're referring to nursing home care and care for people currently experiencing medical issues that put them at higher risk. And they would need access to medical staff without fear of infection?
If not, sorry, my reply is going to be off on the wrong tangent.
We're already asking people to isolate as much as possible. Wouldn't it be easier to just tell the nursing home nurses and aides, and a subset of the hospital staff, to isolate instead of what we are doing now? We know now that surface contamination is a much lower risk factor for infection. With more healthy people encouraged to remain in the workforce, wouldn't we end up with more people able to make grocery and supply deliveries? Yes we'd be setting up to classes of people, but isn't that better than now where we end up sending someone to go work at a gas station who lives with fat diabetic grandma?
What empirical evidence do we have that this is not possible with our existing society? My family has lived without stepping into a store for this past year, and I understand some rural environments may not have the same choices we do, but we aren't particularly high risk and wouldn't that calculus change if we encouraged a bunch of 20-somethings to go out and get well-paid Instacart jobs instead of sitting at home?
TWO classes of people, UGH.
We *have* told nursing home nurses and aides, and people who want to visit their grandparents, to isolate. We have seen how effective that is.
If you want to propose a much *stricter* lockdown, that is actually enforced, for people in these classes, that might be interesting. But what would it look like?
We've told everyone to isolate/distance/go to some restaurants/wait don't go to restaurants. Constantly changing and applying across the board is what I feel is the eroding part of it. Creating a bright line seems like it would be easier to get compliance with. And if that's too much for a nursing home aide? Find a new career for awhile. I hear Instacart is hiring.
My wife's parents were very good at isolating for the first 8 months. They'd occasionally see a grandkid if the visitor had a 2 week isolation period ahead of time. But now they've just given up (and they haven't made plans to get the vaccine even though it's available in their area). They're inviting family to 6-8 household get-togethers. Going on road trips and visiting other people in other states. They're done.
But if instead all along they had full access to any other household in the "isolate" category, they would have had enough social interaction to keep them going. More "here are the conditions where this is okay" less "don't do this unless you absolutely have to".
As for how to implement and enforce this? That's difficult... but the current quarantine has been difficult to enforce as well.
Create avenues for employers to have tort against isolating employees that didn't isolate? Allow stores to ban people in the isolate category in exchange for requiring them to offer curbside for that same constituency. Allow some stores to designate themselves as an isolation store for senior citizens? Have the CDC encourage people to join third-party "circles of trust" apps as an approved way of dealing with the pandemic.
Too late now, but it would probably look like telling the people who are employed as caregivers for the elderly that they're going to be living on-site for the duration (probably renting out a nearby hotel), and using some fraction of the trillions of dollars we're spending to compensate them for their losses to instead give the caregivers a very generous incentive package. Or, if they don't go for it, offer the incentive package to anyone willing and able to step up as their replacements.
Then tell the rest of the world to go get it all over with, maybe compressing the first, second, and third waves into a few months. If the pandemic insists on dragging on anyway, as it might, you'd want to plan for maybe a four-weeks-on, four-weeks-off rotation for the staff, and put returning staff at the top of the priority list for whatever tests are available.
It seems from your further comments that your question is really whether it was collectively worth it to enforce social isolation, but there is also the question of whether it is personally worth it, which seems implied by your question of how much an infection may personally affect you.
Surely, the cost is not uniform per person. You're acting as if it was universally a bad thing for everyone, but I certainly didn't experience it as bad. Normalizing of work from home means I was finally able to get a cushy Silicon Valley job without needing to move to Silicon Valley, which means my wife gets to keep her job too. I was able to get rid of a car and don't have to commute any more, presumably ever again, freeing up an hour a day for the rest of my life. My job normally involves travel to sites to provide technical direction and assistance to customers, which I can now do without traveling, eliminating tremendous inefficiencies that were seemingly only ever there for purely cultural reasons, not because remote collaboration was actually any less effective. Reduced travel load for business travelers and increased scale from being able to work on more concurrent problems is potentially a permanent positive affect. We seem to have effectively eradicated the normal flu in this past season. If we keep up the behaviors that resulted in that, that's a permanent positive change for everyone.
I think the response clearly had tremendous social costs collectively, but I don't think it had no collective benefits. If we can really eliminate most business travel and commuting, that is a holy grail of futurism we accelerated by decades at least. The personal cost to you (as in, was it worth it to comply with social distancing?) entirely depends on whether you personally lost a job and to what extent you value regular in-person contact with people not in your bubble. It sounds like you value that quite a bit and miss being able to get out of the house more often, but not everyone misses this.
I realize I probably sound tone deaf because I personally don't care about physically interacting with people other than my wife, so I didn't lose much, but another issue is I have permanent spine injuries that restrict what I can do anyway, and it's a lot easier on me to work from bed than it is to travel anywhere for any reason at all (being there is fine, but getting there is miserable for me). Consider the impact it can have on the disabled community and society as a whole to normalize work from home if that means being unable to regularly and consistently get out of bed no longer means you can't work.
Yeah, I should have written this better. I felt like I could make the calculation for myself pretty easily and that this is an example of how to think about it (what percentage of your life do you hide vs. what's your odds of dying), trying to make the point that the heart damage frequency is a huge determinant for me and most other non-old people. I was mostly posting to see peoples' opinions of the heart damage theory.
What you've called me on is that this is basically an exercise in calculating QALYs, I can't just equate quarantine months with lost life months. Some people experienced huge utility loss, others (like you) basically lost zero or even gained. My personal circumstance is that I was stuck home with a stir-crazy miserable three year old in an apartment for the first two months. I would rate that period of my life as having a utility value of about 0 or possibly negative. After playgrounds and daycares reopened it got much closer to 1. I might have lost 0.3 QALYs all told so far. My wife suffered more and probably lost more like twice that. Calculating the population-wide average is daunting to say the least.
Does anyone have any sleep recommendations for not waking up at 4am EVERY DAMN NIGHT?
try turning your clocks ahead one hour
This morning I woke up and looked at the clock on my phone. It said 05:00. I hopped out of bed and went for a run*.
After I got home and showered, the rest of the household was still asleep. I got ready for my weekly trip to the grocery store - 06:00 on Sunday is my favorite time to shop during a pandemic.
As I turned on the car, I had a moment of disorientation: it said 05:00! I then remembered that DST had taken effect overnight, but up until that point I'd not even considered that I was awake an hour earlier than normal. I wasn't at all tired, but normally if I'd awakened at 04:00 I would have rolled over and gone back to sleep.
Chalk one up for the expectations channel: (1) Input: awake at what would have been 04:00, (2) Prior: the clock said 05:00. (3) Perception: it is 05:00.
---
*YT, if you're reading this, don't judge me
What my partner does: (1) download a guided meditation app, (2) when she wakes up earlier than expected, turn on one of the meditations, (3) if she falls asleep during the meditation - success! Proper rest has been attained. (4) if she doesn't fall asleep during the meditation - also success! Meditation practice has been reinforced.
Yeah i try that and sometimes it works. Also been reading Grapes of Wrath when I wake up in the middle of the night. It's a win/win.
Any advice on preference for guided meditation app?
I think she uses Headspace and is happy with it. I might try Waking Up, though the app's name is at odds with the goal...
Insight Timer also decent
This depends; do you have any theories what's waking you up? Some miscellaneous ideas, not all of which will be useful to you:
(1) Go to bed later; if your body thinks it's getting enough sleep to wake up at four for some reason, it might be good to retrain it.
(2) Don't drink anything for the last hour or so before bedtime, so you don't end up with a pressure in your bladder after some hours that might wake you up.
(3) Possibly try soundproofing your room a bit more. If there's a sound that happens at 4 AM that you're not consciously aware of (e.g. someone else's alarm, or some birds that happen to like 04:00 in particular), this could be waking you up.
(4) See if you can learn not to mind. Don't let it frustrate you; turn around, try to go back to sleep like you would in the evening. I realise this is very easy to say and tricky to actually do, I spent a while being really annoyed at waking up in the middle of the night myself, cognisant that the annoyance was making it worse, but struggling to fix my attitude about it. It did, however, eventually work - I just had to convince myself (and that was easy) that I'd still get enough rest. (What helped me here was reminding myself that lying in bed was in fact still restful to some degree even without actual sleep.)
No clue if any of those will help, but good luck in any case!
Thank you. Im honestly baffled as I've tried many different interventions. Supplements, no supplements, tea, no tea, meditation in the middle pf the night, leaving room, not leaving room, liquid consumptive, etc. Someone else posted an interesting article here about insomnia. Gave me a lot of good ideas. There are many intelligent people here. Thanks for your comment.
Make sure you get at least 10k steps a day. Even if you work out hard, you need to ambulate a above that level. I had a problem, where I would smash myself in the gym (think a hard sub 40 minute 10k row), but still couldn't sleep! Turns out I was deskbound the rest of the day and it just wasn't enough movement to tire me out etc.
Makes sense thanks
1. Change the time you go to bed
2. Sleep Mask + Ear Plugs
3. Start experimenting with caffeine dosage and timing.
4. Start experimenting with melatonin dosage and timing. (melatonin makes me depressed so be careful).
Light therapy glasses worn every morning when you awake.
I am interested in this bit may try other interventions first.
This is a very big issue, and the focus of at least one major science field.
I'd recommend 2 things:
1. Read a serious book on the subject. I did, and it rid me of a number of misunderstandings about sleep that I'm very grateful for. Sorry, I don't remember the title, but I'm sure there are many good ones (and probably more crap ones :).
2. Talk to a sleep specialist doctor. A single appointment can answer a lot of questions!
Matthew walker has a popular book on it. I've avoided it just cause I'm soo annoyed I have to read a book about it.
One thing about being sleep deprived is that it can be pretty damn hard to focus enough to actually read a book...
If can also be really hard to read without falling asleep, in which case you've found a way to get back to sleep :)
Apparently that book is bad: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/
Russ Dewey's "psychology: an introduction" has a part on sleep:
https://psywww.com/intropsych/ch03-states/index.html
I put a lot of trust into Dewey as in the few places where I know some backgound, he alway appears to be on the correct side of the controversy (e.g. the lart on Melatonin matches what Scott has to say)
One guy fixed this using the wim hof method after waking, then going back to bed
I have a similar problem except it's 2-3 AM, almost consistently, and how fast I can get back to sleep afterward varies.
I've found that forcing myself to stay up a bit later helps, and so does avoiding naps during the daytime. Also melatonin helps me sleep through the night, but occasionally give me bad dreams, so your mileage may vary on that.
My therapist recommended I try magnesium supplements, ZMA to be exact, but I'm not sure they're making a difference.
I'm exactly the same. I experiment with supplements and no supplements. Someone just posted this article here. Very insightful read. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GwGeksTkFQbm6Hbrx/how-to-use-hypnagogic-hallucinations-as-biofeedback-to
Two things:
1. Try going outside within 30-60 minutes of waking up (as long as it’s light out) for the day. Fifteen minutes in the sunlight is plenty, ten minutes is probably enough.
2. Try going outside for 30-45 minutes before dusk until dusk.
These things should help reset your circadian rhythms.
This is from Andrew Huberman. https://youtu.be/nm1TxQj9IsQ
This is my dog walk schedule, totally helps
Waking up earlier than expected is sometimes a sign of depression; if you're concerned that applies to you, consult a doctor. See https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ for more.
Can I suggest you change the font on that? The Lato font it uses is fine, but if the weight was changed from 300 to 400 the strokes would be thicker and I'd find it easier to read. I'd also find it easier to read if the text was darker (e.g. change the colour from #555555 to #000000).
If you are using Firefox you can use it's Reader view, which might help (it's an icon on the right side of the address bar)
Yes, I do sometimes do that. I also use the Stylus extension to write my own CSS. But i wrote the comment primarily for other people; not all of Scott's readers use FF or know how to write user CSS, and it would be nice if his website was accessible for as many people as possible.
Is 4am roughly halfway through your night? (Or closer to your rising time, but you're not giving yourself a full 8 hours to sleep?) Because for me, waking up in the middle of the night is normal and seems inevitable. The important things is whether I can get back to sleep quickly and get quality sleep for the second half of the night.So if you can't prevent the waking, maybe you can tackle it from that angle.
Sorry, can't edit out that accidental link. Currently it's dead but I suggest not clicking it in case something malicious is one day parked there. (If I were a malicious hacker, I would consider buying up as many of those sorts of domains -- a single word common at the end of sentences, at a TLD that is a word common at the beginning of sentences -- as possible.)
There's some evidence that this was the normal way to sleep before the advent of electric lighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep#As_historical_norm
Same problem - hit in my late 30s. My body seems to need 8 hours of sleep but only gets 7 with the nighttime interruption. I get back to sleep by reading without difficulty but it takes time away from sleep. Have tried:
- melatonin (didn’t feel any more well rested during the day)
- Magtein magnesium (after like 6 months finally gave it up as doing nothing)
- Steps / exercise
- Fifferent diets - Mediterranean, low carb, low fat, a bowl of pasta before bed
Just got l-theanine 200mg and planning to try taking before bed.
On the weekends I’ll wake up early (no alarm), take a shower, then read for an hour and go back to sleep. With that approach I feel rested and energized during the day. Unfortunately my job doesn’t allow that during the week.
I had the same problem. My psychiatrist tied it to my mental disease. I was prescribed meds against that disease, the sleep thing wasn't occurring that often. Then I was prescribed drugs specifically to solve this, and now I never wake up that early. If you're visiting therapist, ask him about it.
On more general advice, physical and mental activity. I used to walk a lot, up to an hour of fast walking. Mental activity is working on something/learning something. Getting the good-tired feeling was making wonders to me.
Oh, no edit button. I posted this comment and started wondering. If my issues with sleep were a symptom of a disease, then maybe the good-tired feeling wasn't causing me to sleep better, maybe it was simply a correlation. I feel slightly better -> I get healthy tiredness and healthy sleep.
Still, it doesn't hurt to try being more physically and mentally active.
I had a pretty bad sleep problem for a while. I believe it was significantly stress related. I had a month where I averaged 2-3 hours a sleep per night, despite giving myself 8-9 hours of time in which I could have been asleep. I had much longer periods of time when I would wake up early, like you describe, and just didn't get enough sleep. Melatonin briefly worked to move me from 2-3 hours to 5+, but only for a few nights. Stronger sleep medicine did work at getting me closer to 6-7, but I was worried about dependence and being groggy in the morning.
What really ended up helping me was lowering my stress. I changed jobs, since my job at the time was unnecessarily stressful, but I still had times at my new job where I was waking up early for stretches of time. I had to intentionally reconfigure how I approached my job. I set better limits on work time verses family time. I also made myself just let things go, both at work and in other areas that would cause me stress. This was hard, and it's difficult to describe. I would still do things, but maybe spend less time on it, or just told myself not to care as much about the task or the results. The funny thing is, I'm pretty sure that my quality of work is just as high or higher than it was when I was stressing myself out about it.
Exercise and better eating habits both helped, but only after I tried to reduce stress.
Thank you. I haven't worked in a year. That has it's own stresses and side effects most likely.
Mostly I go back to sleep. Very rarely, when I can't, I get up for an hour or two, usually spent on the computer, then go back to sleep.
> Substack has removed the "like" button from comments here, as per your feedback.
And yet they have not removed it from your posts - thus creating a permanent Upvote Underclass, toiling forever underneath the guaranteed-superior metrics of He, the Heartgetter; the Sole Possessor of Internet Metric Wealth; He, who is clearly more Liked than others; He, to whom all the Gratitude Button Clicks are funnelled – He, Known As "Scott"...
I'd click like on your comment but I can't, so...
Ditto. If only there were a button that would add the functionality for us to express simple agreement.
Ah well. Some day, someone will invent such a thing.
+1 (since there is no like button)
I like this comment
+1
I also wanted to say that! Maybe Substack could make hearts at the discretion of the reader? Then everyone gets what they want.
Well... Like... You know...
The reasons that the community asked for the "like" button's removal in the comments don't really apply to Scott's top-level posts. The consensus is that like buttons are bad because they push you towards being reddit and people optimizing for likes instead of good discussion. Scott could let the same factors drive him, but if he was going to do that, he could also do it based on other metrics like traffic numbers.
While I agree that "hearting" comments was a bit of a silly implementation in this context, the ability to acknowledge a comment without having to write a reply did serve a useful purpose. It was a nice way to signal that you found the comment thoughtful, useful, or of value in some way even if you didn't have anything specifically to add. Without that acknowledging mechanism you wouldn't even know if anyone even read your comment without replies. Maybe the community can think of a way to acknowledge comments that provide value without having to reply. Personally, I don't have a problem with "liking" comments in general. It's not a competition, just someone saying "thanks".
Although liking comments is typically wholesome and sincere for the liker, it can affect the likee in negative ways. Paradoxically, in my original comment on one of this blog's first posts that we should remove the like feature, throughout the week I was getting emails about who had liked that post, and I could feel the same sweet release of dopamine that I get from all other sites with likes. In all such places, there is a strong incentive to post likeable comments rather than controversial ones, which is not always a bad thing, but I think a space like this benefits more from people playing with ideas without thinking too hard about how likeable those ideas are.
I agree with this, but I also think it's nice to have a ranking mechanism... which is why I still like the idea of "hidden" hearts that are only used for ordering the comments but are not visible anywhere (and certainly don't produce an email notification!).
Something else to consider: there are people who monitor Twitter users' likes. I don't think Substack exposes this information currently (but maybe there's an API that does), but knowing this about Twitter made me worry about, e.g. liking Scott's tweets.
Reasonable position, but I polled the commentariat on this a while ago and majority were against.
after some time without, you should poll again.
I wish there was a way for me to show agreement with your comment without spamming your email with a comment saying “I agree” that’s useless to you but potentially useful to other readers of this post.
Substack are gonna love us demanding code rewrites, but I think the main problem was "someone likes your post - gives it a heart" and you would have an inbox stuffed with emails about likes.
Personally, I would prefer a way to be notified about "someone replied to your post" but not "someone liked it". Likes are lovely, I'm not ungrateful! But I want to know if I have to lace up my boots to get into a fight over some comment versus "oh, thanks?"
So I suppose what we need is for those who are happy to get 20 emails about "someone liked your comment" to have a way to do that, and those who want to be notified about replies but not likes to have a way to do that.
This.
It's moot now, but the likes and replies came from different email addresses, and I set up a rule to filter the likes so I didn't have to see them. (That said, still against likes.)
This just needs to be a simple toggle on the account settings page:
-Notify me when someone replies to my comment [on|off]
-Notify me when someone likes my comment [on|off]
Almost every interactive website or forum has an implementation like this.
I dislike non-anonymous hearts. The API still lets you give hearts, but what stops me these days is that fact that the user gets an email telling them I did it. That email is often annoying, as many users say -- but even if it wasn't, I'd rather leave it like a happy little surprise.
♥️
The previous blog (obviously running for many years) didn't have likes, so I'd say that people were well informed in their opinion.
I dont believe the poll was restrcited only to readers of the old SSC
♥️
The poll was done on the old blog where we didn't have it. Really I should have polled again on the new blog where we did.
As an anti-liker, the like notifications were akin to mosquito bites: they made me feel infinitesimally emptier with each one.
For whatever it's worth, I prefer them gone. I suspect the anti-hearters aren't chiming in because the new status quo matches our preference.
I am a pro-liker, though I would prefer if we could toggle the email notifications. It was really useful to have a ranking of posts and also be able to quickly respond to high-quality posts without writing out a full comment. I would definitely have voted for likes if I had known about the poll.
I hope you realize that my response to SA would have gotten significantly more likes than your response.
Perhaps, but without an experiment, we'll never know. @Scott please reinstate the like-system to resolve this dispute.
I like this comment.
+1
People are naturally resistant to change, so in the beginning they would disfavor hearts.
But I think it's way better to have them. It's easier to skim the comments and spend more time on the insightful ones. And, yes, I think this community is very good at hearting the insightful comments.
♥️ Bring back the hearts! ♥️
I agree with this on a variety of exciting levels.
<3
I like not getting spammed when somebody likes my comment more than I like having likes.
There's a video game forum where the like button is explicitly labeled "Thank", and it seems to work pretty well. But it's also about a video game and not CW stuff, so I'm very not sure it would work well here.
Re DNP :
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2008.00407.x
They used very low doses in mice - 1 mg/L drinking water and had good results
1 mg/day in humans can't be dangerous
There's a big difference between "on average, increases lifespan in mice" and "is good for humans". For example, (most strains of) mice don't get DNP-induced cataracts, but humans do! Even if everything else carried over exactly, probably that would turn this from net positive to net negative in humans.
(also, mice can't accidentally overdose)
Paracelsus might point out that 1 mg/day is 1/2% of the lowest dose known to cause cataract - 200 mg/day. I've used 1 mg (in alcohol solution) for 2+ years.
Ah, I didn't catch that you were recommending such a low dose for humans in an absolute rather than relative sense.
Agreed that 1 mg is below any dose known to cause side effects, but it's also below any dose known to cause positive effects, unless you've really extrapolated out from this mouse study - in which case there are safer things that increase lifespan in mice.
No, the takeaway is that 1 mg/day causes sufficient uncoupling to prevent weight gain during aging. Plus, there's a metabolic factor of something like 7 mouse/human, so the effective dose in humans would be expected to be sub mg. This is important. Read the paper, ignoring lifespan.
"1 mg/day in humans can't be dangerous"
Famous last words. Either it's really not dangerous, in which case it's probably also not doing anything, so you shouldn't bother taking it or it *is* dangerous, in which case you shouldn't bother taking it.
After listening to the "All our mice are broken" podcast by Eric and Bret Weinstein I'm suspicious of mouse studies. (Quick summary of 'broken' mice. Lab mice unwittingly selected for having long telomeres. Result of long telomeres, much better at repairing cell damage, much more susceptible to cancer in later life.)
Don't the labs have a control group of mice that makes clear whether the longer lifespan is genetic or from whatever drug they're testing? Or is the claim that drug effects on mice don't generalize at all to humans because the mice are so genetically weird from the long history of breeding for science?
There is a reason "....in MICE" is a common joke about medical research.
It is, as I understand it, an ongoing debate: there are concerns that mice and other common animals are poor proxies for humans, and so are inappropriate to use in many contexts, and there are concerns that science conducted with mice is being done in an inappropriate manner, and the issue is not the mice per se but poor experiment design. An extraordinary number of drugs fail to translate from mouse to human--a paper here (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrclinonc.2011.34) is alleging a 95% failure rate for cancer drugs that were promising enough in animal models to start clinical trials, and it holds up an 80% attrition rate in cardiovascular disease drugs as good. Part of that is certainly just that new drugs are hard to find, but part of it is that animal models aren't great. Do we have anything better? Unfortunately, not really.
Sure, broken mice are probably worse. Lab mice from Europe don't have this problem.
Not that I know of. This seems like a good summary
https://oncobites.blog/2020/07/29/modeling-aging-and-cancer-are-lab-mice-different-from-their-wild-cousins/
I noticed that there is now a response from the Jackson lab.
https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/2020/july/telomere-length-in-mice
So what I'm hearing is that research causes cancer in lab mice.
Grin. One thing from the Weinstein brothers interview, C. Greider said something to the effect of, "you know it's weird but if we let the mice live long enough and then do an autopsy, they have lots of cancers." Or something like that... don't quote me.
Since there is no politics allowed in this thread, I thought this might be a fitting question and I thought many people here may have a similar experience. If this crosses the line, feel free to remove and I apologize but I hope it is sufficiently meta.
Since I was a teenager, I have been interested in political issues, social issues and anything related to the culture war. I have diverse interests but topics usually only interest me if they relate to social and political philosophy. I have accumulated a lot of information and ideas related to stuff that is controversial.
As many of you probably have, I have developed eccentric and controversial opinions which socially isolate me from my peers. Sometimes I really wish that I had just took up an interest in physics, chemistry or history. I maybe wish I just looooved sports maybe.
I feel like this is kind of a wasteful accumulation of information if I do not actually use it to further advance my career or life in anyway. It seems like it just turned me into a weirdo. I am certain others have felt the same. Has anyone tried these approaches?
(1) Intentionally develop non-weird non-controversial interests as replacement.
(2) Abandon pursuing intellectual things and just watch Netflix or play video games.
(3) Just passively consume information and keep opinions to yourself and accept that.
(4) Try producing content in some way. (Currently considering this the most)
I very much enjoy interacting with people and producing content based on my ideas. But I am concerned about cancellation. I want to do Youtube or blogging the most. I am concerned about getting the wrong person upset and what they could do to my "real life." I can be anonymous for a while but that doesn't seem to work out so well even for very careful people. I am thinking I want to do youtube with my face but not my name and have no public profiles that could be used to identify me. This could at least make it so that someone has to work hard to get me in trouble. Could still happen though. Is this stupid?
Any personal experiences in this area? Thoughts? Thanks so much.
I recommend disengaging from conversations that are about virtue and affiliation - who is hypocritical, who is a threat, who is a coward, who is a dumb idiot, and so on. In my experience the vast majority of misery that comes from involvement in the, uh, “politics fandom” comes from this, and I’ve gotten happier as I’ve worked to not engage in it and miserable when I’ve lapsed.
Weird opinions on policy questions and the like is fine, and unrelatedly someone needs to have them for us to find new good policies, but you have to work on cutting out toxoplasma. Hate is the mind-killer, even, or especially, hate that would seem to be justified.
If people depend on you for their sustenance (spouse kids etc) and you work in a field where people cancel each other, then I’d probably dial it back.
My experience here is basically I have a good life and career that got kinda sorta jeopardized once by some of my opinions. Nothing huge but the writing was on the wall. I had to evaluate how much these opinions about “shit that doesn’t put food on my table” actually matters.
A few hard questions for you to answer:
1- are your opinions that unique? Is it possible to enjoy the company of a community that shares some of your opinions and advance your contributions to society on some other axis than being a public contrarian?
2 - what’s the upside of broadly sharing unpopular opinions? Of course it is your right but if there’s little upside and lots of downside then...
3 - in the case that you feel this is your duty or calling, are you sure you aren’t confusing your civic/humanitarian duty with the emotionally engaging pastime of talking shit as a form of entertainment?
4- are you prepared for this endeavor to succeed and have your life picked apart by haters?
This is great advice.
You seem uncertain about your goals. Are you looking for:
- expressing your ideas and getting feedback on them
- more social interaction, making friends and so on
- finding activities that aren't "wasteful"
Whatever time you already spent thinking about politics is a sunk cost. Possibly, it might be useful someday, but probably not in any direct way.
With respect to getting feedback on your ideas, I don't think YouTube makes much sense? It's more work and higher risk. You might learn more posting pseudonymously if you can find the right forum.
I'm curious why you can't just be a weirdo into esoteric things? From what you wrote, it seems more like you want validation or acceptance into a group of people than to do anything exactly. I often feel similar, but I've come to accept I'm just the weird one with mix-match opinions. Nothing wrong with being eccentric.
I would suggest seeing if you might not find either an advocacy group with narrowly targeted goals if you have specific political-ish passions. Or perhaps local government. City commissions and small local non-profit boards are often easy to get on to, and they let you affect your local community. You could also seek out places that encourage heterodox thinkers.
Think through your security situation. If you do what you are thinking of and get de-anonymized, what are the risks? How can you mitigate those risks? I'm thinking of Bruce Schneier's list of questions, from "Beyond Fear."
Step 1: What assets are you trying to protect?
Step 2: What are the risks against these assets?
Step 3: How well does the security solution mitigate the risks?
Step 4: What other risks does the security solution cause?
Step 5: What trade-offs does the security solution require?
If you become the target of an internet hate mob, it'll be terrible. It'll be terrible regardless. But if you're in a situation where the haters can't really jeopardize your income source, you'll be a lot better off.
I've mostly gone with passively consume. I can also highly recommend turning off Facebook or other culture-war aggregation devices.
It is not wasted time if you enjoyed researching the questions. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a weirdo. My peer group hasn't stopped hanging out with me just because I spend a lot of weirdness points on wacky ideas, in fact they sometimes ask for my input on things (sometimes even in a non-joke way).
This "I must change something" idea just seems premature to me. Do you have any other reasons for wanting to change things (e.g. you have information with important ethical implications)? Break your 'Ugh field' and REALLY think about it.
Get a hobby. Meet people through that hobby; keep the focus of conversation on hobby-related topics and interpersonal stuff.
The correct solution, if you are capable of it, is to learn what normal people believe, and get good at telling them things from your own beliefs that are only one inferential step away from that, and framed in their own language and terminology.
If you do this properly, you will seem interesting and insightful, and people will be interested in coming to you for your take on things. It can be a big help to your career and social life.
However, it takes being really, really focused on modeling the other person's thoughts and knowledge and thinking about how what you say will interact with that and what the result will be, rather than being focused on talking about your own cool ideas and showing how much you know. If you aren't both dedicated to and competent at doing that, it won't work.
This is a very useful answer (I'm a little sad I can't signal boost it with a ❤️!)
You could imagine a grid of opinions, with one axis being "irritating to likeable" and another axis being "unhelpful to useful."
It's not noteworthy to generate unhelpful irritating takes, nor very useful to generate likeable pablum that everyone nods along to without actually being helpful. What about true novel takes that nobody will believe?
Maybe there's a third axis that's key here. A good contrarian needs to have ideas that are novel, helpful, and just approachable enough.
Either way you want to find that sweet spot in the upper right quadrant, or high top right octant, and that multi-variable function is why finding a great contrarian is so damn hard. You can't just say things people think are crazy but happen to be secretly right, that's probably not even half of the work.
There might some other axis to maximize, being able to frame and package and communicate your opinions well is critical too.
Hitchens' Letters to a Young Contrarian is on the whole a pretty good book to encourage you not to abandon the contrarian spirit, but to get better at doing it in an actually convincing way.
But insofar as that is teaching you the importance of contrarianism, and you already know that, you might want to settle in to the tradesman-like skill building of forcing yourself to go to toastmasters or some sort of clubs or activities that praise you specifically for honing your abilities at communication.
That's why I got into nerding out about alcohol. I could use that to relate to normal people and was particularly useful in business settings.
I also joined a discord with that share similar weird (and accept other weird) ideas about political/social issues. And strangely enough, most of the active posters share my same first name.... The discord is one structured around a podcaster that shares roughly similar ideas and openness, but I'm primarily there for the community more than the podcaster (even though I like the podcaster).
I too have Controversial Opinions™*, but I'm a math nerd and I spend a large proportion of my time socializing with other math nerds. I think that the math community generally doesn't cancel people, so I feel safe there. I.e. I've taken the first option as cancellation insurance.
Options (2) and (3) sound great from an individual perspective but are probably not sustainable in the long run and also contribute nothing to the world, so probably rule them out for a life plan. Option (4) sounds possibly feasible as a life plan, but I think that in order for this to be cancellation-proof you're going to have to be rich enough to have "FU money" like Elon Musk or whatever.
*Hopefully this isn't a real trademark. If it is, sorry.
Very happy to see likes gone. Reward signal proliferation is the herald of Moloch.
(Has anybody made a tumblr demetricator like they have for twitter or facebook? I wouldn’t go on the latter two even with it, but I’d head back to the former happily with it.)
What’s the best resource for finding out the risk of a particular medical procedure? Not looking for anything super esoteric here, just statistics on basic procedures like an appendectomy.
This is maybe a bit more complicated than what you intend in that it gives specific population rather than average stats: https://riskcalculator.facs.org/RiskCalculator/
This is awesome. Really appreciate it.
In the 1990s and early 2000s (if you were at least in your teens back then), what were your expectations for how the Internet would shape human society? Did things pan out the way you expect?
Personally, I was somewhat of an Internet utopian. I thought putting all of humanity's knowledge at everyone's fingertips would make everyone more rational and stamp out superstitions. I thought enabling instant worldwide communication would reduce mistrust between countries, ethnicities, and religions, because everyone would have friends from all over the world. Clearly I was naive, but I still think the Internet has done orders of magnitude more good than harm for the world: the instant access to information, the huge range of creative content, the easy access to TV shows, movies, games, the ability to navigate around any city in any foreign country as if it were my home town...life without the Internet seems unimaginable.
The Internet came along late in my life, I was in my 30s. From that point of view, there were several serious negative effects I did not anticipate, and I don't think anyone did. Two of the less obvious (to me at least):
(1) Everyone is instantly a small fish in a big pond, whatever he tries to get good at, and the gentler experience of being a big fish in a small pond for a while is no longer available. When I was young, if you were the best among your friends at riding a bike, or best in the school at writing, it was a big deal, because so far as you could tell there was no one better. You would learn better in time, of course -- but in time you would also be better yourself, and arguably the scope of your competition increased in rough pace with the increase in your abilities. With the Internet, you can't *not* be aware the moment you start trying to do something well that there is always someone better, often much, much better (if you are a newbie). I have seen this effect be discouraging to young people. They have a potential talent, and they try to develop it, but are discouraged because they are so promptly made aware of an entire planet of competition, and the 50 million people who are already far better.
(2) The increasing ability of people to delude themselves about the popularity of their opinions or ideologies. It's said that the human mind can't really comprehend group dynamics much past the Dunbar Number (about 150 people), and this may play into it. What I see happening is that as soon as people can find a few hundred people who agree with them on some viewpoint -- and the Internet makes this easy-peasy, no matter how weird your opinions there are surely 150 people on Facebook who agree with them -- then people tend to kind of "round up" that 150 to some huge number, certainly a substantial fraction of everyone, often a majority. So in the face of what they consider *direct* proof of the popularity of their point of view ("me and *all* my 150 FB friends agree!") they tend to dismiss any *indirect* evidence of its unpopularity (e.g. the election didn't go the way me and my 150 friends were sure it would), either with skepticism or paranoia ("must be some giant fraud!"). This seems to have led not just to the intellectual ghettoization that was predictable when everyone could talk to everyone, but to a significantly *higher* level of inter-group suspicion and paranoia. People find their sympatico support group, courtesy of the Internet, but then they have a hard time believing other groups as large or larger legitimately exist, I think just because the human mind isn't capable of grasping the concept of a billion people dividing into tens of thousands of distinct viewpoints. It's just too complex -- so we react as if word of mouth were still setting our event horizon, which is to say pretty inappropriately and dysfunctionally. This operated much less pre-Internet simply because *all* we had was indirect evidence of how many people had a certain viewpoint or ideology, and to the extent that indirect evidence was legit (i.e. elections were fair) we had no choice but to accept it.
I think 2) is correct. Another part of it is that due to technology (starting at the Walkman and continuing) we can separate from groups more easily, almost at will. The feeling of a large group of people who might agree or disagree but were still a group - not a self-selected group with a "common interest," but a physically present large number of people - is no longer familiar to everyone. Without that experience of what groups feel like and what they do, it's easier to attribute conditions to them that are true of only a few people we know. It's partly because "another person" is like a cypher, or a list of opinions, or some digital imaging. With this diminished frame of reference for "person," why wouldn't people think everyone is like them; or, that a change of a few characters on a screen means the other person is so unlike you. I'm not familiar with the Dunbar effect but I think some of what you describe is a side effect of personal tech. We were both adults before this stuff took off and I think I assumed most people were not serial killers, and had feelings, but in terms of assuming what people think, it pretty much stopped there. I did not assume people would like what I liked or think what I thought. Now there seems to be a long list of text that indicates what is or isn't human, and that list can be copied. Honestly I worry about it.
On the second point, I think many people do the opposite - they assume any other group they find troubling instances of is equally large as the mainstream. It's easy to come to the conclusion that every Republican is anti-mask anti-vax right now, despite both of these being minority views among Republicans.
I remember moving to San Francisco in my late 20s. It was 2002 and everywhere I went, people were talking loudly into cell phones and ignoring everyone else around them. It had not been possible before to tune out everyone around you while still interacting socially, to that degree. Another thing that disappeared was the awkward line. Nowadays, people innocently line up and stare at their phones and don’t interrupt each other. Back in the day, you could sort personality types by who would or would not strike up a conversation with the strangers in the line. There was a collective aspect to daily life which was felt as somewhat inevitable. I think it’s gone; we don’t have to feel that collective anymore, with the right tech, there is a socially acceptable way to dissociate from the group.
We underestimate the cost of this. People with few or no priors of membership in groups of physical strangers will - do - relate differently to actual individual strangers. More judging in some dimensions and far less in others. Things are soaked for every trace of symbolism and then abstracted. The presence of the physical other human is then secondary.
I did not think any of it would get this far. I was so wrong. However, the social fabric will never be the same, and that has cascading consequences. Soon people will have forgotten, or been born after and not know.
Honestly, I would still describe myself an Internet utopian - although admittedly not with the ideas of rationality and superstition-stamping, "just" with the ideas of better mutual understanding and better communication, a bit like your "would reduce mistrust between countries, ethnicities, and religions, because everyone would have friends from all over the world," except changing "would" with "could". And it's clearly happening for some kinds of people! And the others become more visible, so they can at least in theory be avoided.
I reckon the internet is still a fairly recent invention as far as history is concerned (what with it really only taking off near the turn of the millennium) and there's a lot to get wrong about it. Before my mum died, I would report to her on how social media has been evolving with "we're still learning the ropes," which I guess says a lot about my expectations. ;) But, seriously, I do observe a lot of interesting discussion happening today about how discourse can go wrong and how it can go right (both on bubbled internet, and on non-bubbled non-internet channels) and how we can encourage more of the latter, and I'm interested in how it'll look in another ten years. (It might be fairly stable as it is now, I don't mean to discount that, I just have a prior that it won't be.)
Regardless what one thinks about the communication angle, though, I agree with "I still think the Internet has done orders of magnitude more good than harm for the world." Very useful invention!
I thought that the Internet would be chopped up between a small handful of large corporations as soon as the technology became good enough to be genuinely valuable instead of just a curio. My classmates got angry at me for not playing along with their utopian visions of a better tomorrow.
I wrote an article in 1996 looking at the potential for a world of strong privacy enabled by encryption, but I didn't take it for granted that it would go that way, so the present mix of private and public is consistent with what I wrote. I did mention the potential criminal uses of encryption. I expected an anonymous digital currency (Chaumian — the idea of something like Bitcoin never occurred to me) to be here by now. I correctly predicted VR interactions along the general lines of Zoom, although a little sooner than they happened. For anyone curious, here is the link to the article:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Strong_Privacy/Strong_Privacy.html
A couple of years ago I heard a recording of me and a computer science buddy of mine chatting during the gab-session portion of a Terence McKenna conference at Esalen in 1996. I was amused at how keenly we saw the potential pitfalls ahead:
Me: I see a couple of possible paths that the effect the new media is going to have on people could go:
One would follow the model of what happened to Europe when the Church stopped becoming the sole interpreter of the Bible, and the Bible was printed so that anyone could read it and interpret, and many people did, and started different interpretations, and that sort of caused an explosion of different ideas and different ways of looking at the world.
The other would be... this is a little more difficult to express. There's a terrific Buddhist magazine called "Tricycle," and one of the things that's terrific about it is that it's not sectarian. It has a whole lot of viewpoints; it talks about all sorts of different flavors of Buddhism that people respect. [And this is] because there aren't enough Buddhists in America to have really cool magazines for all these different sects. Now if that were to change tomorrow, and there was a different magazine for every sect, then each magazine would have a single viewpoint, the other viewpoints would be portrayed maybe but seen as sort of heresy and talked down about.
I can see that sort of thing happening on the web, or with web-like media, where people start pursuing ideas that they're interested in and they care about, [and] they may end up digging themselves a niche of their own preconceptions and the prejudices they already have about information, and going to information sources that support that and prop up things that may or may not be valid.
The other option is that they could be exposed to so many different types of information -- from the original sources, not filtered through the mass media -- that they'll actually become more informed about more different points of view.
I can't tell right now which way it's going to go. Or maybe it's going to go in both directions for different people.
Him: You can't keep ignorant people ignorant because there's too much access to the other knowledge.
Me: Only if you want it, though. It's not like now: today if you turn on CNN, you get not only the information you're interested in; you're getting information that CNN thinks that a large audience of people is going to be interested in. So you're inevitably going to be confronted with things that mess with your prejudices. Now the downside of this is that CNN is mapping the societal prejudices of its market share onto all of its audience, and because there are so few media sources, there are only a few selected branches of prejudice that you're allowed to tap into. But whether the future's going to break that up, or just mean that there are going to be tighter groups and smaller groups of predispositions that are reinforced...
Him: That's choice -- those that wish to insulate themselves in only that information they want to see that supports their inner worldview, will insulate themselves excellently. And those that wish to just throw themselves into the unknown constantly will have a readily-available source of unknowns...
Do you think mathematical proofs are important, or do you think you were tortured into learning them when the important stuff was in application? I am writing an article on the field of the history of science, and this question winds up being an essential question for understanding the difference between learning science and doing science, between learning math and doing math, between a philosophical and an engineering approach to knowledge.
Here is a three question survey where you can air your grievances. https://57vimme6sku.typeform.com/to/jFZDAkHY
I think there's a lot to unpack in this question, here's some quick thoughts:
* What is a "proof"? Is it strictly a chain of logical inferences from a set of axioms? Or does a really convincing human argument count as a proof? Almost no one actually writes out formal proofs, even though in pure math, they should exist in principal once you unwind the human proofs. "Really convincing" arguments are sufficient for most real-world applications.
* Important when and to whom? Formal proofs can be useful for software validation; human high-level mathematical proofs are useful when establishing correctness of models or algorithms. Only a small fraction of people will pursue careers where proofs are useful, but for those who do, proofs are an indispensable tool.
* What's the role for proofs in education? Even if a lot of people will never use proofs for their career, they have benefits for brain-training and as part of a comprehensive liberal arts education. On the other hand, I might argue that the brain skills for programming overlap a lot with proof writing, and that programming is a better place to invest time in modern education.
* Can math be useful without proofs? Yes, there are a bunch of theorems that are useful even if you don't know the proof. However, knowing the proofs often improves your understanding of the mathematics and therefore its usefulness; and you can't really add new theorems without doing proofs. I'd make the analogy to computer software and programming: you don't have to know programming to use software, but knowing a little programming will enable you to do more, and knowing a lot of programming is necessary to develop new software.
For what it's worth, I wrote a paper on the first question: https://academic.oup.com/philmat/article/17/3/341/1588307?login=true
(The .pdf is available for free on my website if you don't have access to the journal: http://www.kennyeaswaran.org/research)
I argue that the convincing human argument is actually what proofs are for, and that the role that they are used for, rather than formal derivations, explains why mathematicians don't like statistical or probabilistic arguments. (That is, the statistical argument asks the reader to trust the author, while a human argument gets the reader to convince herself that the conclusion is true.)
This paper is wild fun! I need to slow down and read it in full.
Stephen Wolfram was the first to convince me of your claim "convincing human argument is actually what proofs are for". There's a _huge_ portion of 'theorem space' that's un-explored, even ignored, because it's just not interesting to humans. And that's fine! But it's also a very unique _perspective_ !
And just like proofs, software _code_ is for people too.
It depends a lot on what *kind* of math (or science) you are doing. If you're programming a factorization program to solve packing problems, all you care is that the method works. If you're designing a cryptographic program that relies on the difficulty of factoring larger numbers, the existence (or nonexistence) of proofs on how hard factoring is, and your ability to understand those proofs, is extremely important.
Yes and no. I spent years using Cauchy's residue theorem with no real understanding of why it worked. Years later (reading Penrose) my lack of understanding was apparent, and I had to go back... I'm still fuzzy about some parts of complex integration.
I've only really retained (some of) the core intuitions from my undergrad (Real) Analysis class, but I still get a visceral thrill thinking of the awesome intellectual ride it was to actually follow the logic 'all the way up'!
For people who have been shoved through the science/rationality training course for decades, I think that things like the scientific method and logical reasoning and evidential proofs and so forth can come to feel like common sense or natural thought patterns. I think it can be hard for some people to remember just how unnatural and difficult these methods of thought really are and how much work it takes to make them feel natural and second-nature.
Things like working through proofs are small but essential parts of this long process of thought-shaping. It doesn't matter that you're never going to do a proof again in your life, what matters is that you have the experience of working through assumptions, deductions, and conclusions in a controlled, supervised setting, where your mistakes are caught and nuances are taught.
This process doesn't *have* to happen in math class, using mathematical proofs - it could be done in other ways - but it's good for it to happen as many times as possible in as many different contexts as possible, for the patterns to solidify and generalize, and proofs in math class seems like a really good and powerful and synergistic candidate.
This is a great point. I am stupidly shocked too often at people's lack of desire to quantify important decisions into simple expected value expressions. And I am currently confused by how difficult it is for these habits to be formed. Even people of very average intelligence can become numerate according to Edward Cokely's research, but how long does it take?
I think knowing why something is true is important. You get that from the sort of proof that can be done in a few minutes and held in your head thereafter. Examples would be the simple proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus (that taking an integral and taking a derivative are inverse operations) or the square inside a square proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
A proof that you can follow step by step in a book, and possibly memorize the steps but don't actually understand and will have forgotten in a few months, is of very little value. It doesn't even show you that the conclusion is true, since you could easily be fooled by a step that's wrong in a not-obvious way, as in the "proof" that 2=1 (algebra) or that a right angle equals an angle slightly larger than a right angle (geometry).
Proofs are extremely important for mathematicians because that's what mathematicians do: write rigorous proofs. Learning proofs in math class is necessary practice for anyone hoping to become a mathematician.
For other fields, like my own, physics, you can get away with doing hand-wavy "proofs" and "derivations". Learning how to do things rigorously is less important. Your hand-wavy proofs will occasionally be wrong because you accidentally include an invalid assumption somewhere. This is a problem, but not a big one, because you can check it with experiment, simulation, or by having a mathematician come back through and prove things later. The more mathematically savvy you are, the less likely you are to miss this sort of thing, but that also makes you less likely to quickly get a probably good enough answer.
Mathematicians (and their rigorous proofs) do play an important role in science by going back through and making sure we didn't miss anything important. Rigorous proofs are even more important in pure math because you don't have the other to experimentally check your results. The only standard to compare it to is the rigorous proof, so it had better be done exactly correct.
For your survey: Looking at the history of science yields all sorts of people who didn't have the expertise you'd think was necessary, but still made important contributions. So yes, you can become an expert in a field without formal math (Faraday), or without lab experience (a lot of theorists), or without understanding history (probably most scientists).
You are right that history of science reveals that raw intelligence is not the driving factor, but instead experience and persistence of investigating (Faraday) or even being at the right place at the right time (James Watson).
Well said, thanks. I often say that I use the circuit I've built to check my math. (which is usually right after I made a sign mistake somewhere.) As a practical matter, I hardly use calculus anymore. I know a bunch of approximations, which will let me reduce the problem to algebra, which gives me some sort of guess as a first try. My favorite course in grad school was solid state (it might have been the prof.). After all the exacting integrals of mechanics, E&M, QM, here was a course where you had to make the right approximation. It wasn't so much about getting the math exactly right and more how to think about the world. Purcell's 'back of the envelope' calculations.
Re survey: I'm not sure how proofs, history and labs are related. Are proofs, doing the integral? If so then yes essential. The history of physics is interesting, but mostly distracting to learning it. And I think everyone should do labs, though it's not necessary. Labs are an important part of learning for most people. I bought my son (2nd yr, college engineer) a ~$20 Sterling engine for Xmas. Once he got it working we spent hours figuring out how it worked and tracing out the engine cycle. Great fun, 'cause I'd never figured out a Sterling engine before.
One side of this is that weird abstract math often has practical applications. This is true when the abstractions are based on things that occur in real life like circles, etc., but it is also true for things that were originally pursued as intellectual curiosities like imaginary numbers or non-Euclidean geometry. Part of this is that abstract math stretches out in many different directions and the universe has many nooks and crannies so there's bound to be some collisions, but I think this is an inadequate explanation for how the universe seems to line up with math sometimes even when math is trying very hard to define something unreal.
The flip side of this is that mathematicians who believe their work is safe from any negative real world implications may find down the line that there is in fact some way to use their math in some type of weapon.
I enjoyed the post on Trapped Priors, and while I thought it had some insights into the problems, I didn't quite buy that (1) priors are trapped, (2) they can be trapped *without* an emotional response, and (3) any faulty Bayesian reasoning is necessary to describe what is going on.
For the case of dogs being scary, an emotional response is being confused with a factual statement. There is a difference between "Dogs are dangerous" and "Dogs will make me feel scared". The brain is predicting 'Dogs will make me feel scared'. When you see a picture of a dog, and it makes you feel scared, this is a legitimate positive example. It is correct to update that dogs make you feel scared. But, you need the emotional response to conflate this with 'Dogs are dangerous'. It is only when you do not separate the emotional response from the factual statement do you commit an error. For example, I can be emotionally scared of flying, but rationally accept that it is very safe. All the evidence that flying is safe won't change my prior that it will make me feel scared; partly because I already have a high prior that it is safe.
The second example is that of the polar bear. In this case, we are leaving out the priors on the friends evidence. Basically, how do you update on weak evidence? For example, I have a prior that there are no polar bears.
Day 1: I see no polar bears.
How do I update my prior?
Day 2: I see no polar bears.
How do I update?
Day 3: Friend says she sees a polar bear, but I do not see one. How do I update?
Day 4: Friend says she sees a polar bear, but I do not see one. How do I update?
....etc.
Eventually, I need to update that my friend is very unreliable. So say on Day N, my friend says she sees a polar bear, *and* shows me photographic evidence. The evidence is not just 'friend saw polar bear and has picture', the evidence is 'friend who was previously wrong for N days now has a picture'. It is correct Bayesian updating to require stronger evidence from this friend.
We mostly aren't doing math as part of everyday reasoning, so I guess it comes down to what comes naturally? That seems like something cognitive scientists might study, not something we can figure out based on armchair logic or intuition.
If I had to guess, though, it would be that we aren't constantly updating our beliefs based on everything that doesn't happen. Instead that would happen later, when the subject of polar bears comes up and we think about when we've seen one.
I agree that your first point is a good distinction to make. I think most of the time the emotional reasoning centers are a kind of tail that wags the dog, and that this is possible to break, but not as helpful as you'd like.
A common pattern in therapy is something like a patient saying "I won't interact with dogs, they're too dangerous". Then we spend a lot of time questioning and challenging that belief and proving that most dogs aren't dangerous at all, and then the patient says "Fine, I won't interact with dogs because I get too scared when I do it", keeping the exact same emotional response and pattern of dog-interacting.
In politics, this sometimes looks like someone saying "I'm against gun control because guns save lives on net", then spending a lot of time proving guns cost lives on net, then someone saying "Fine, I'm against gun control because it makes it easier for a tyrannical government to oppress people".
(I'm not trying to attack gun rights in particular, just give a - possibly false - example)
I agree that separating out a rational from emotional response is a good first step, but it's not something most people naturally do, and it doesn't always get very far.
I think your second example is an error. If you see your friend has a picture of the polar bear, you should go back and update any previous estimates you made of your friend being unreliable for saying there's a polar bear. I'm not sure if people would actually do this. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.
The gun control argument reminds me of the Yudkowsky post "Is that your true rejection" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TGux5Fhcd7GmTfNGC/is-that-your-true-rejection. But it seems the emotional aspect is important to getting a trapped prior.
The 'picture of the polar bear' was not meant to be conclusive evidence; just stronger evidence than saying you saw one. (i.e. the picture could be fake, photoshopped, etc.). I agree with you if the evidence was overwhelming and conclusive, you should update as you suggested. But if it is stronger without breaking that threshold, it would be correct to discount it, if it was from an unreliable source.
I think there's a distinction between "friend could be honestly wrong" and "friend could be lying", and the picture is proof positive that the first one is false (P(picture|friend honestly wrong about polar bears) ~= 0 since it is essentially impossible to fake a picture by accident, therefore P(friend honestly wrong about polar bears|picture) ~= 0 also, regardless of what it was previously).
(It doesn't have much of an effect on P(friend lying about polar bears), though, for basically the reasons you state. Hopefully, you pick your friends such that P(friend lying for no obvious reason) is very small.)
A question for the women here (if any?): Do you find Tom Hanks' character from "Saving Private Ryan" to be attractive?
https://youtu.be/LvAIBDGIYE0
https://youtu.be/UTuUlSHk9Pg
https://youtu.be/oCsW70annps
No, but I tend toward asexual and find very few people attractive.
No, but I don't find Tom Hanks very attractive in particular. He has a kind of potato face, an Everyman look which probably helps with his popularity, but he's not the type that gets me going "oh yes, handsome!" (or indeed "pretty!")
Like C MN below, I'm asexual so I lean very heavily towards aesthetic (rather than sexual/romantic) attraction.
Not very much, although the character seems like a good guy probably... I think he's very cute in his early movies though. Why?
As a straight man, I have usually have trouble discerning what men women find attractive. It randomly occurred to me that Tom Hanks' character seemed to have qualities that might make him attractive (leader, empathetic, fighter, "dad-like"), so I decided to ask about it.
Dude, my best advice is to be yourself. There is no discerning women's taste in men, it runs the gambit. I was really skinny when young, and could never 'bulk up'. Turns out there are some women who like skinny guys. That said, from what I can tell Tom Hanks is a mensch (Dan Carlin interview) honesty and character, I think that's important... and then give good foot/ back rubs. :^)
Ha ha! I wasn't asking for romantic advice, but I guess from the feedback to my thread, it preemptively torpedoes any attempt on my part to get my Tom-Hanks-from-Saving-Private-Ryan game on to score ladies at parties.
Oh, sorry. In the voice of Gilda Radner, "never mind".
Here is some accordion music: https://youtu.be/ZrnNAOc82iU
nice - parts remind me of Pachelbel's Canon, the chord progression.
And back at ya, here's my latest fave discovery - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGVMR9eiubw
Thank you for that, my late father would have appreciated it (he loved accordion music). A live recording of the late (died just this year) and great Joe Burke, Irish traditional musician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6SXMvfvCgQ
This is great music! Thanks for commenting.
I really enjoyed this. Thanks for sharing.
Are there any cogent theories out there as to how our sense of smell developed from an evolutionary perspective? Last time I checked, the biochemical foundations of how our sense of smell works in the first place are not entirely understood, but no one seems to care that much at all.
Why would it be any different than chemotaxis, which even single-celled organisms have?
Strange thing to puzzle over indeed, when it’s the only sense shared by every organism on earth.
With the possible exception of some birds, but there's recent research challenging the idea that birds don't have a sense of smell.
Have you ever wondered how we can identify thousands of unique scents - including novel scents made in a laboratory? How can this possibly work on a molecular level? And how did this ability evolve? I have not seen any good answers to how this works and has evolved on a molecular level.
If molecular interactions are distinct enough, i.e. there's some molecules (that can be made by an evolved organism) that can respond in some way _very_ differently for different molecules (e.g. being 'smelled'), and if that can be 'wired up' so that another molecular system can receive the distinct signals/signatures/info, then feedback (e.g. natural selection) can iterate to select _anything_ that's useful.
That is pretty distinctive about smell (and taste, tho much less so) – it's so distinctive and, while there are possible 'combination' smells, it's so hard to group or categorize smells. They _all_ are much more distinct than other sensations or forms of perception. (Hence my thinking of it as a 'hash function'.)
Given all that – and I'm really just making this up on the spot, tho I have thought about it extensively before – I have a hunch that each smell might have just been _accumulated_ one by one. Maybe it's less the case that 'our noses smell' as that 'the nose is where all of our specific-molecule detectors are located'.
I think it's an interesting question!
I'm a programmer so I'm biased to always think in terms of information. But, from that perspective, smell seems _obviously_ like a 'hash lookup', it just uniquely (or mostly uniquely!) identifies things. I _think_ of smell as – basically – answering 'what molecule is this?'. I'm very sure it's actually much more complicated, but, AFAIK, it's a good one-sentence approximation.
So you're saying there are unique receptors in the nose for each potential molecule that humans can smell - even novel ones that have never existed before? Or is there some "molecule identification mechanism" that's not receptor based?
FWIW, there's a book based on this - "Emperor of Scent"
The 'unique receptors per smell' is the simple version – but note that it's _per smell_, not per-molecule. I would expect that receptors generally react to 'similar' molecules – molecules that react with whatever mechanism a specific receptor uses in the same or similar ways.
I'd _also_ expect that a lot of smells are a combination of a number of receptors being activated, so novel smells would be a new combination of existing receptors.
There _are_ 'molecule identification mechanisms' that aren't "receptor based" but I don't think that's how human smell (or animal smell, or maybe most living thing thing's smell) works. I don't think any living thing smells in a way similar to molecular spectroscopy. I'm pretty sure it's always a kind of 'molecular touch' – and different molecules 'feel' differently to different receptors.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I'll add it to my ever-growing reading list :)
FWIW, Wikipedia seems to confirm my basic understanding:
> It [olfaction] occurs when an odor binds to a receptor within the nasal cavity, transmitting a signal through the olfactory system.
That's from:
- [Olfaction - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfaction)
I also found this:
> There are a large number of different odor receptors, with as many as 1,000 in the mammalian genome which represents approximately 3% of the genes in the genome. However, not all of these potential odor receptor genes are expressed and functional. According to an analysis of data derived from the Human Genome Project, humans have approximately 400 functional genes coding for olfactory receptors, and the remaining 600 candidates are pseudogenes.
That's from:
- [Olfactory receptor - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_receptor)
So it seems like any particular smell is more accurately a 'combo' of some number of up-to about 400 different receptor signals and "... each individual odor receptor is broadly tuned to be activated by a number of similar odorant structures."
I've been brainstorming about ways that marking "∼new∼" posts should work.
Mostly because I had a long-unscratched itch to write software (since I don't do it at my job any more), I wrote a sample interface for new comments that is currently in this state:
1. Comments dynamically populated because of background loading (which can be turned off) get the ∼new∼ label, so you can control-F through them.
2. It has the classic "set the time for marking posts as ∼new∼ we had with bakkot's script at the old blog. See https://i.imgur.com/QRCkUR8.png for an example.
3. You can manually set that time to "now" or "latest time of any comment currenty on the page".
4. If you are not on a tab and it gets new posts, the icon gets a blue dot added to it. (Oops, Firefox-only for now. Why must Chrome be so difficult?)
5. I also make up new letter-based avatars for people who haven't uploaded a pic yet. https://i.imgur.com/NKhC0DC.png I wasn't sure it worked with accented characters until I saw Etienne's comment below!
Is this useful? Is this a good start for "hey Substack, something like *this*?" You can look at the code (all on Github) if you want, but it's not as elegant as Pycea's. (I have this bad habit of falling back on
plain JavaScript when I should be using jQuery.) Hopefully something useful for people to steal.
It works with Chrome-based browsers and Firefox. There is now a Firefox extension you can install directly from the Github release page: https://github.com/EdwardScizorhands/ACX-simple
Is there a way to set the time to "when the computer felt like refreshing the browser"?
It could definitely be set to work the way bakkot's worked on the old blog: whenever you reload the page, the timer is set to your last load time.
Any gardeners around? Starting to get my seeds started and excited for the season. Going to try to grow kajari melons and quinoa as my weird experiment plants this year, and also making a second attempt at ghost peppers (plus all the humdrum beans and tomatoes and such). What are you guys growing?
Do chickens count? (referencing the comments upthread, they certainly can't spell..)
I just gave away my impulse-bought quinoa after deciding I wasn't ever going to plant it. My experiments for the summer are going to be digging plastic bottles into the bed for deep watering (pretend ollas), and a ground cover (I'm thinking sweet alyssum).
We're doing sweet alyssum too- good luck!
A bit too cold to actually get the plants in the ground, but we've got a bunch of stuff propagating in a grow-rack I built in the basement out of zip ties, led lamps, and cheap garage shelving. We have half a dozen raised beds set up for the back yard and a bunch of soil/compost ready to go. A few kinds of peppers, green onions, snap peas, zucchini, various herbs, garlic, probably something else I'm forgetting. We're also doing tiered flower beds in the front yard- but that's 100% my wife's project. She built the tiers out of paving stones and filled in the soil about a week ago, so it's ready to go as soon as we're past last frost.
I've got about half a dozen species of passionflower soaking before I sow them, some physalis, a few trees waiting to germinate. No idea if anything will actually grow and bear fruit.
I've dabbled with ... plant care? I don't consider caring for potted plants to be quite 'gardening'.
I wasn't planning on taking on any other new living things! I wanted to limit myself to one plant to start (having moved, and being stuck in a tiny apartment).
But it _was_ really nice having some basil, and mint, and rosemary that I could just _pick_, right there, a short walk away. And it's _so_ good right off the plant!
Last week after watching Paths of Glory, I ended up on Stanley Kubrick's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Kubrick). Perhaps some people here are immersed enough in Wikipedia controversies to know where this is headed.
The first thing you will notice is that the page rather conspicuously lacks an infobox, that wonderfully convenient and standard portion of prominent Wikipedia articles which gives readers a place to look for generic biographical information such as dates and locations of birth and death, cause of death, relatives, years active, and often a very brief summary of work. Instead there's just a picture of him (from before he was even a director, but that's another issue) with his signature below. This irritated me. It is the most prominent biographical page violating this standardized format I've ever seen. But I thought, ok, maybe it was recently edited by someone unfamiliar with Wikipedia. Perhaps someone accidentally removed it with a recent edit. I headed to the edit history page, and MAN OH MAN was I unprepared for the rabbit hole I was going down.
Turns out this is a long-standing and incredibly bitter controversy on Kubrick's page which has been mentioned in the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-wikipedias-bickering-editors-go-to-war-its-supreme-court-steps-in-1525708429) and the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/us/wikipedia-harassment-wikimedia-foundation.html). Practically any reader familiar with Wikipedia will recognize the current state of the page to be a clear aberration. And yet, citing "lack of consensus", the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee has declared the subject off-limits until September of 2021 and has instituted harsh sanctions against anyone trying to edit the page to normalcy or even discussing the issue. I was quite dismayed by this, but I became truly appalled after I dug into the edit war and discovered that just a few obsessive, megalomaniacal editors have been lording over the page and trying to impose their anti-"idiotbox" (their term) philosophy on whatever pages they get their hands on. There were similar efforts by one such prominent editor to remove the infobox on Frank Sinatra's page (as of now they've lost that fight, thankfully) among others. All the while they've been coordinating amongst one another to vote brigade on polls concerning the question and to get opposing users banned, often successfully, for continuing to make the absurdly obvious case that Kubrick's page should have its infobox, like the pages for every other as-prominent person in the arts.
As I said, there will be no further discussion allowed on the issue until September of 2021. They originally pushed for a 3-year ban - THREE YEARS! - but were not granted that request. So for now I just wanted to bring some attention to this unimportant issue which nevertheless has been driving me crazy. I will post about this again in a later open thread once the ban has been lifted so that anyone else who is bothered by the current page can come join the effort to get this fantastic director the infobox he so deserves.
Also, I highly recommend Paths of Glory. It's a beautiful film.
What a RIDE. There's an arbitration that's literally "Civility in Infobox discussions", Frank Sinatra's talk page alone has over 12000 words (!?) on whether to collapse its infobar or not.
> I'll comment one (hopefully last) time to reassert that a compromise is illusory nonsense. What is the reason that we should care more about the feelings of a few Wikipedians than about ease of use to the reader? Nobody here should give a rat's a** what some Wikipedians want (in comparison to utility of the article) and nobody should give even a moment's thought to making a "compromise" based on personal preferences. Those editors could stop editing tomorrow and disappear- what will be left then? An article catered to the aesthetic desires of particular individuals who will not always be around. Many of the opposers have made it clear that they don't care about collapsing this infobox in particular, but rather that this is one of the last battlegrounds for them to make their stand that infoboxes are bad, and this is one of the last places where that argument might still win. This is an example of local consensus, battleground behavior, and is against Wikipedia policy. This argument needs to stop being about what individuals personally want to see happen with all infoboxes, and it needs to start being about why THIS PARTICULAR INFOBOX ought to remain collapsed in a manner that contrasts with almost every other Wikipedia article. Not a single reason has been put forth yet
What feedback mechanism would cause Wikipedians to have to care about the ease of use of Wikipedia for causal users?
I think in general most Wikipedians do care about ease of use for casual users, and that's why this page's layout is such an anomaly. My opinion of Wikipedia initially went slightly down after learning about this, until a friend pointed out that another way of looking at it is that every other as-significant article I've seen does follow the infobox convention. That's pretty impressive, given how large an encyclopedia it is and how apparently there exists an opinion out there that they are distracting or reductionist or whatever.
What I'm wondering about now is how the Arbitration Committee members are selected, whether they can be overruled, whether they have any relationship to the bad editors, and similar practical questions regarding Wikipedia's structure. How did this anomaly arise? And how did it get resolved the other way for Sinatra? I really can't bear to dig in much further though. It's mind-numbing reading and anything attempted before September will be futile.
Wikipedia is a fascinating view into the human mind.
Wow, most of the arguments that oppose the infobox seem to be centered around the idea that the 'lede' or the introductory paragraph contains all that information, and that it would simply be recapitulated... why the hell is the lede so long? I looked at other comparable directors, and they do not have these orgastic waterfalls of text. It's unpleasant. It's not easy or quick to read. If the information could be put into an easily formatted infobox, why the hell is it in this mess of prose?
There's a pretty prominent post at the top of /r/slatestarcodex right now that opposes prose, and while I think it's a fun but mostly insipid thought experiment, I may have to update seeing this insanity.
I just checked out that /r/slatestarcodex post and I think "fun but mostly insipid thought experiment" is right. A key difference of course is that a Wikipedia infobox doesn't tend to *replace* its article's prose, like the OP was arguing for. Most of that info would still be there in prose form in the lede or body of the article. It's just nice to have a regular place to hold the information least reliant on prose. And yeah, the lede is long and awkward. One wonders if they felt like they worked so hard on writing up this article that they just wanted people to read it in its entirety as a unified piece of art or something. Well too bad. If they want to write a biography of the guy, be my guest. But Wikipedia articles serve a different purpose.
Some other opposing arguments I saw suggested that Kubrick's body of work is too hard to summarize in an infobox. I'm not sure I'd agree with that either, but even if you were to grant that point, it isn't much of an argument against having any infobox whatsoever for basic things like birthday, death day, cause of death, etc.
It's just such an obvious decision that I'm surprised the Arbitration Committee didn't close discussion the OTHER way and leave the infobox up until September. Seems like overriding the default page layout should require a pretty extraordinary argument, and none of the arguments opposed are even halfway decent.
These infobox arguments are some of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever read. I hate you for sending me down this rabbit hole, but I can't look away.
It really does show how blind stubborn stupid humans can be, as a small minority digs in its heels and vows that Sinatra and Kubrick will be the hills that they die on, clutching their anti-infobox banners.
Sorry for damaging your sanity. I also wish I had remained ignorant of the Infobox Wars. But alas, I am now driven mad by an obsession: not just to see Kubrick's infobox restored, but to see these warped, contemptible editors lose the whole war and die on all of their hills in vain, never to edit a Wiki article again.
Ahhh – thank you! It does seem all rather interesting, in the way almost everything is when you look at it closely enough!
But I need to mind my own corners of The Internet! There are so many wrong people! :)
I’ve really enjoyed reading one of your book review posts after I have read the book. It helps me see things in a different light and I rarely have anyone around me offline where I can continue the conversation around the ideas presented in the book.
Was curious if the group could help craft a go-to list (3-5 should do it) of some of the most impactful books (as defined by him) Scott read and reviewed.
It’s been a while since I read most of them, so I don’t have the best sense of Scott’s view of the relative impactfulness of the different book reviews, but here’s a few contenders (leaning in large part on my view of the impactfulness of each):
Inadequate Equilibria (and if Meditations on Moloch were a book review it would be right up there)
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
The Mind Illuminated
Seeing Like a State
Raise a Genius
I liked the Albion's Seed and the Two Income Trap reviews
Possibly interesting idea for determining whether chickens are conscious.
tl;dr: Are you a chicken? If not, then chickens are likely not conscious.
Slightly longer version: string together the [[self-sampling assumption]] with some stats on how many chicken-moments exist vs. humans-moments. If chickens are conscious, it's unlikely you'd find yourself in a human body, you're much more likely to be a chicken. Therefore, the fact that you're not a chicken has to be evidence against the idea that chickens are in the class of conscious entities.
If the numbers for chickens aren't large enough to be interesting (ok, maybe it's unlikely you'd be a human, but not possible), then at the very least this is an argument against insects being conscious, and *definitely* an argument against panpsychism (you're almost certainly not going to be experiencing existence as a human of everything is a little bit conscious, since humans make up a vanishingly small amount of matter in the universe)
does this prove that chickens don't even exist?
They definitely seem to exist as far as I can tell.
It's hard to tell whether they exist or not strictly by taste....
Less flippantly, it does provide some evidence that chickens don't exist. If you're not a chicken, you can't ever be 100% sure they don't exist. But the very small amount of evidence this provides for chickens not existing seems to be swamped by direct sensory evidence they exist.
Whereas, "are they conscious?" I don't have a lot of other evidence for that, so maybe this funky anthropic argument is the best I can do for now.
They don't because no birds exist.
Wait- but- you- I'm so confused.
Google 'Birds Aren't Real', it's a trip
This seems a little too fully general. Doesn't it also argue that there is no non-human conscious life anywhere in the universe? Or more locally, that say, non-Americans aren't conscious?
The strength is in proportion to the reference class you choose. If the reference class is americans, and you're american, then the chance of being you is proportional to num_americans / num_humans which is not 1, but also not unreasonable. You should add some small weight to the idea that non-americans aren't conscious, but not much.
If you find yourself elon musk, this is very strong evidence for solipsism.
Overall though, anthropic arguments definitely tend to lean towards the overly general side. I wouldn't put a ton of epistemic weight on this idea.
In order for the self-sampling assumption to make any sense, the reference class can't include observers who are incapable of asking the question "are chickens conscious". For the purposes of the anthropic principle, there is no difference between a conscious but unintelligent animal and a grain of sand.
This seems like an argument for solipsism. More generally, an argument that low probability events never happen.
It's not arguing low probability events don't happen, just that they happen infrequently. In the extreme case, where all matter in the universe is conscious, it would be very surprising to find yourself a human. It's not zero probability though.
Additionally, this is just one way of reasoning in the absence of other kinds of evidence. Without really knowing what consciousness is, this argument is better than nothing. If you happen to know what consciousness is, and how it works, you can rely on that and just assume the fact that you're human is just good luck.
I am a chicken and I'm conscious, but I can't read this comment.
I think your argument is a bit like drawing a random number from a pot of {1,...,1000} (let's assume a uniform distribution), seeing that you got 561 and then going on to say "Did the pot actually contain all the numbers from 1 to 1000? I think not, for if it did, I would have been very likely indeed to pick a number other than 561!"
Isn't this a fully general proof for solipsism?
EG, if anything else in the universe were conscious, you'd probably be something other than you?
It's evidence for solipsism certainly. The fully general problems come out because it's really hard to determine what the appropriate reference class is. We don't really know what qualifies you for self-selection. Is it actually consciousness as I'm kind of implying here? Or is it "have read this comment" in the way that "we can assume the universe is fine tuned for reading this comment because otherwise you couldn't be reading this comment"
I have no idea how seriously to take this argument honestly.
Even in a universe in which chickens are conscious, humans who use this reasoning would end up concluding that they are not.
Also try: are intelligent aliens concious? There are (I believe) definitely many more conscious intelligent alien entities than conscious human entities, but once again this leads us to conclude that there are not.
Here's a life hack that's not as popular as it deserves to be.
If you are in the US and not feeding yourself from a CSA, it might be worthwhile for you to try out an irregular produce delivery service, i.e. Hungry Harvest, Imperfect Foods, or Misfits Market.
I tried all 3, and I currently get a weekly Hungry Harvest box and an occasional Imperfect Foods box. (My experience with Misfits Market was very limited, since Hungry Harvest seems better in every way possible.) In my experience, all 3 are perfectly legitimate businesses - no obligation, will let you either cancel entirely or skip deliveries at any time, will resolve problems really fast and in your favor. I've had just about no quality issues with the produce (but I did get some fruit that was way too tiny). With Imperfect Foods, I did have some issues with how the groceries were packed.
Hungry Harvest and Imperfect Foods currently allow you to completely customize your box. Misfits Market seems to allow it in some areas, but not in others. Hungry Harvest will deliver your groceries for free if they are worth more than $30, and Imperfect Foods will deliver them for free if they are worth more than $60.
I found Hungry Harvest to be by far the best, but it is the one that doesn't deliver to all that many places. (And also it's hub-based, and I have no way of telling whether the other hubs are as great as the one that's near me in Maryland. But the fact that it's hub-based might be part of why it's so good.) The website says it currently delivers to "Maryland, Washington, DC, Virginia, Greater Philadelphia, Southern New Jersey, Northern Delaware, South Florida, The Triangle Area & Charlotte in North Carolina & the Detroit Metro Area." If you are lucky enough to be in one of their delivery areas (and if you don't have a CSA), I'm pretty sure you won't regret trying them out.
What's so awesome (besides the fact that you help farmers, suppliers, and other businesses sell perfectly good groceries that would otherwise be wasted)? A lot of things. You spend less time at supermarkets. You get to try things you never tried or never even knew existed and at very good prices. That was how I first tried dragonfruit and romanesco. At some point I had 6 kinds of oranges on my counter because fancy restaurants in DC area refused their deliveries due to the pandemic, and Hungry Harvest picked them up. You get all kinds of nice extras from local businesses who just realized some of their groceries were too close to the sell-by date or who decided to change their packaging.
> that would otherwise be wasted
AFAIK that's a myth to upsell low-grade produce to environmentally concious members of the middle class. Irregular fruit and veg is processed into fruit juice, tinned soup, frozen vegetable lasagne, etc. They don't just throw it onto the compost heap if it doesn't look perfect.
Significant amounts are also donated to food shelves, at least near where I live. I've spent hours sorting some very "ugly" apples into 5-lb bags at a place near me that processes industrial-scale food waste into "consumer" packaging (think imperfect crops, or factory screw ups that are still safe to eat like misshapen tortillas or mislabeled soups). Not sure if it's a nation-wide thing though.
Aldi in Ireland sell 'bacon offcuts' which are random mis-shaped chunks of bacon - every sort, could be large pieces or gammon or rashers, most likely a mix - put in a bag and sold at EU1.99 for a kilo. This one is definitely for cheapskates who like bacon :)
I was pleasantly surprised to find a version of this where I lived. It was slightly more tricky to handle, but it tasted just fine.
And you are both absolutely right about the wrongness of "would otherwise be wasted". My bad. I blame late night.
My point was not being environmentally conscious - I am not even entirely sure how you would make that point. My point was "improve your life while helping farmers and other businesses recover their costs". I can vouch for "improve your life", and I personally know farmers who are very happy to have an extra customer to sell their imperfect-looking stuff to.
It might be true in some cases that irregular produce will get used up anyway, but it's by far not always true. You need the people who are willing to take the produce off your hands at the very last moment, and they will probably pay you worse money than customers who want the produce unprocessed. (Also, many of the extras they sell, such as short-coded milk products, cannot be reprocessed.) The irregular produce vendors are there for when things go wrong with the supply chain, and that's a good thing.
Food pantries are a valid point, but a farmer donating food to a food pantry doesn't get to recover his costs, which is a problem. Again, I would say it's good to allow them to have the option to recover part of the cost, rather than forcing them to take a loss they may not be able to afford.
I use Hungry Harvest too. It is pretty cool to have a guaranteed supply of vegetables even if you don't make it to the grocery store. You do have to be pretty good about keeping on top of your vegetable collection to avoid waste.
I was originally going to write something snarky here about dang millennials paying more for messed up veggies... but the pricing on Hungry Harvest looks pretty good.
You've convinced me to try at least one box.
Glad I convinced you to look! You're lucky you're in their delivery area. Make sure you check out the add-ons.
I very much enjoy the Book "S." by Dough Dorst and JJ. Abrams. It's presented in the form of a old library book with wide margins, with one story being the original book text and another one told in comments written on the margin by two readers (communicating via this book). See this picture here for an idea: https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/sites/default/files/2014/May/openbook-markings.jpg
This made me wonder: Are there versions of this concept for real literature? Like a novel by Joyce or Hemingway or a philosophy text by Kant or Plato, with comments, interpretations and discussion added on the margins? I'm not looking for a scholarly discussion, more like a book club-style commenting to read along with the main text. If the text is very dull, I'd like very fun-to-read comments as a counter to keep me interested.
The closest to this concept I've found so far are bible comments (which I find very enjoyable to read, I found a good one in German that suits me) and a philosophy seminar I visited at university where our lecturer would discuss a text (Blaise Pascal) by reading one or two sentences, then taking 10-15 minutes of time to comment on these, then move on to the next sentence. It took us one semester to read less then 10 pages, but it was really interesting.
Any suggestions?
https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Vacuum-Stanislaw-Lem/dp/0810117339
I know this isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but a “highbrow” equivalent to S. is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which is written as a poem by a fictional author + commentary from a different one.
If you're German: "Die Wahrheit über Arnold Hau" has on the inside cover page (so probably only the hardcover https://www.amazon.de/Die-Wahrheit-%C3%BCber-Arnold-Hau/dp/B003CO5ZVK , not the paperback edition) a page from Goethe's Faust, with hilarious comments by Arnold Hau.
Example:
Schau' alle Wirkenskraft und Samen, [A.Hau: "Na!"]
Und tu' nicht mehr in Worten kramen. [A.Hau underlines "Worten" and comments: "besser: Tüten (?)"]
Yup, I'm german. One page of fun sounds OKish but I'd really like to see this for the whole book....
I'm midway through "House of Leaves" by Mark Z Danielewski. It's got a parallel structure somewhat like that, expressed through footnotes.
I think you have just described the Talmud — the Mishnah plus the interpretations by various sages. Also legal texts from Imperial China, with the statutes in one color and the commentary in another. I think there could be multiple layers of commentary, but I'm not sure.
Hey everyone, thank's for the comments so far! These are all good (as I wasn't aware of them before or didn't make the connection in case of the Talmud).
There appears to be a lot of fictional options (everything you suggested except the Talmud) and I can think of a few additional ones, the most obvious one being the princess bride (one of my all-time favorites).
But why one earth is there not the same as a comment for original works??? Copyright shouldn't be an issue for older material and I can't imagine I'm the only one who would like to read a commented version of various classics.
There are annotated versions of many classics, although not to the extent you're asking for. Generally they just explain context for words whose meanings have changed, or cultural artifacts that are no longer known to a modern audience.
As for why more don't exist: I would assume most who are interested in analyzing classics at that level would simply write their own book about the classic, without the text of the classic itself contained. Part of that is probably down to length and what publishers are willing to publish. Part of it might also be that a lot of literary analysis is more interested in being at the structural level than the line level--if you're going to explain the light in Great Gatsby, it makes more sense from a rhetorical perspective to write "the light in Great Gatsby represents the unobtainable, as seen in X, Y, and Z scenes" than to write a little footnote or parenthetical at each instance the light appears.
On a Facebook group for professors, someone linked to some site that allows you to post .pdfs for your students to read this way with each other. It sounded like a good idea, but I didn't check it out myself. I expect there are a few implementations.
The Dictionary of the Khazar's is a historical novel/dictionary kind of like this, and is even more meta, very fun.
Ian Stewart's Annotated Flatland is great for it's wild foray's into tangential topics, like that Pascal lecturer.
The Green Lion Press publishes well annotated works of science. I strongly recommend their Principia by Isaac Newton which features Newton's words in red and many different levels of commentary on the same page, all perfectly and divinely formatted.
The Landmark History series does this with works of classical history and is amazing. I own them all.
Norton Critical Editions provide extensive commentary on everything.
The math writer Martin Gardner did an annotated version of Alice in Wonderland, which if it's anything like his annotated The Man Who Was Thursday would be very good.
Unofficial book review survey: https://forms.gle/1aU6BdcAt5ZKit7n7
I'll send the results to Scott.
I recommend this.
I'd like the 'founding member' icons to be removed from commenter's avatars. They are distracting.
At the very least, they ought to be more visually distinct from the author mark. A different color or something.
Also, they seem like they're meant to award some sort of recognition, but I would guess that most of the people with those icons would rather blend in than stand out for this features.
If we still had hearts, I'd give you one for this comment :-)
But yes, as a "founding member" I have a weak preference for my contribution to be anonymous. Not a big deal, and at least they aren't blue checkmarks.
Yes!
A question about assurance contracts:
The citizens of an ancient city state needs to build a wall around their city this year, or else they will be enslaved by invading barbarians, making everyone very unhappy. Building the wall is going to cost 1000 gold coins. The citizens are libertarian and want to solve the problem without taxation. You have been summoned from the future to organize the funding with assurance contracts.
Wealth in this society is unequally distributed according to a Pareto distribution. There are a few wealthy people with thousands of gold coins, a bigger group with smaller fortunes, many people with one or two coins and a large group of people who are completely destitute.
A simple solution would be to have people pledge to pay for the wall, and collect the money once enough money have been pledged. But this would incentivize free-riders to wait with their pledge and hope that others pledge enough so that they don't need to. Another option is to collect pledges from all citizens, and then return the excess gold. But what's a fair formula for returning the excess gold?
More generally, if anyone knows a good popular write-up on the practical implementation of assurance contracts (especially dominant assurance contracts) I would be very grateful.
There's the not technically taxation solution, where libertarian Nehemiah takes all the gold (or else the Ammonites invade and everyone loses everything), plausibly comitting to do nothing if even a single person tries to freeride. Then you give them each back 90% of their gold or however much is left over.
Sure, I think that's my second example. "Another option is to collect pledges from all citizens, and then return the excess gold.". But then the problem becomes how to give back the leftover gold. Do you give it back in proportion to the pledges wealth? Or in proportion to the size of their pledge? Or do you give everyone the same amount? Or do you do some kind of progressive system where poorer people are returned a higher proportion of their pledge?
It seems like this would create lots of political conflict. Preferably we could have a more elegant contract somehow that avoids this kind of politics?
My rather jaundiced view is that if the rich people aren't willing to stump up for a wall to protect them from the invading barbarians, they deserve to be pillaged and plundered.
But this also reminds me of that Cavafy poem:
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
I should have guessed that if there was someone else here familiar with that poem it would probably be you.
Ah, thank you! I sound more cultured than I am!
I'm pretty sure that can't possibly be true :)
You think there is a learned and sophisticated person typing this reply, when it's actually a sack of potatoes in a nightgown 😉
Well then, I just have to update my prior about the possible learnedness and sophistication of sacks of potatoes!
(Tho maybe a more specific exception should be made for sacks of potatoes capable of donning articles of clothing.)
The solution is to depend on a privileged minority. Make a list of everyone believed to have more than a thousand gold coins. Draw up a contract by which everyone on the list agrees to chip in a number of gold coins equal to 1000/N, where N is the number of people on the list, if and only if everyone else on the list so agrees.
Provided that N is large enough so that the individual contribution is well below the value to the individual on the list of having the wall and small enough so that there is nobody on the list who is in favor of the barbarians or doesn't believe in the threat, it should work. "Greater than a thousand" is a useful Schelling point, to avoid people on the list insisting it should have more names on it.
Nehemiah's solution was pretty libertarian. Every family that owns a house along the edge of the city is expected to build the portion of wall in front of their own house. When the barbarians come, you don't want your section of wall to the weakest spot, or they will break in there and wreck your household in particular. This works best if the edge of the city is the most valuable, so the wealthiest families live there and the poorer families live in the center.
Tie wall-financing to a high-status-but-low-pay sinecure.
> 32,872 people on the ACX mailing list
So you can banish just 104 subscribers and get to a nice round 32,768 subscribers.
Or get 128 new subscribers for an even nicer round 33,000 subscribers!
That's not a round number at all unless you arbitrarily decide to display everything as multiples of ten for some reason.
(The joke Oleg is, presumably, making is that 32,768 is 1000000000000000 in binary)
"I am still trying to find the right balance between helping people make good choices vs. trying to be a level more sophisticated than "police officer teaching a D.A.R.E. class to high schoolers"
Good luck with that, there are always people who take "do not do this highly dangerous thing as it will end very badly for you" as a personal challenge 😀
I'm just a sliiightly bit afraid about the degree to which Scott worries about the negative consequences of his posts. (Zvi would say something about asymmetric justice, I think). I hope it doesn't end up paralyzing him, or worse, stop him from saying what he really believes in his natural truthful style out of fear of the decisions 1% of his readers might take with it -- which in absolute numbers is significant when you have a big readership. He shouldn't forget the benefits also scale with the numbers, even if they are harder to see.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the desire to write well enough that absolutely everyone understands exactly what you mean. Personally, I would be overwhelmed and paralyzed, but I'm no Scott with words. But I would start feeling uneasy if "woe, 1% of people misunderstood the content; I'd better improve my communication skills" turns into regular "woe, 1% of people decided to do something I think is a bad idea partly as a consequence reading the information and my opinions; I'd better reiterate that they shouldn't do it and exaggerate one side of the info next time around."
+1
I'm an adult. I'd like to hear what Scott actually knows, believes, suspects, etc., without him trying to shade it to keep me from making bad decisions. I think a clear statement like "Don't use this stuff, it's really dangerous!" is sufficient.
ISTM that the world currently has a surplus of people who feel that responsible use of their platform requires them to lie overtly or by omission, to shade the truth to avoid saying upsetting things, to avoid some topics lest someone get the wrong idea, etc. This is great when you're writing articles for the Weekly Reader (a newspaper-like thing distributed in schools for young children), but not so great when you're reading for competent adults who'd rather know what the world looks like than be protected from it.
I do like that Scott tells us about strange and interesting things that I would never approach with a ten-foot bargepole 😁 Trouble is that within this community there are those who are interested in trying strange and interesting drugs for themselves, and who also think that warnings are for little crybabies. He mentioned that 5 people read his post on THIS WILL SET YOU ON FIRE FROM THE INSIDE and thought "That's the stuff for me!"
So trying to stay on the right side of the line about "strange and interesting things but people will not take them and set themselves on fire from the inside" is tough, and probably safer to err on the side of caution.
Or maybe just a big notice at the very start about DO NOT DO THIS, I MEAN IT, I'M SERIOUS, THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION TO DO/TAKE/BECOME THIS THING 😀
I'll admit that I kind of feel like, if you read Scott's writeup and it made you decide to rush out and take some of that medicine, your risk tolerance is probably already so high that the added risk of cooking yourself from the inside is a small part of your daily risk budget. (I'm imagining some guy whose hobby is drag racing on a motorcycle during thunderstorms.)
Guys! I got 8hrs of sleep last night! I did wake up a few times but got back under the veil pretty quickly with tje hypnagogic hallucination method posted in this thread. Thank you whoever posted that link!
Good job I guess. Now try it again. If you can keep it up for half a week or so, I think you can keep it up indefinitely.
Coming out of an obnoxious cold, I have a few interrelated questions:
1. What determines whether a cold gives you a runny nose, or a sore throat, or a cough, or all of the above? Is it a feature of the virus (so that if I hear you coughing, and then catch your cold, I can expect mine to involve a lot of coughing too), or does it vary based on the person (some interaction of virus genetics and person genetics, say), or is there a way to nudge a particular cold (e.g. if I have a strong preference for stuffy nose over sore throat, is there medication I can take that will shift the symptoms accordingly)?
2. Why is coughing a thing? It makes good sense from the virus-spreading point of view, of course, but how come a near-involuntary process that causes the infernal racket of a coughing fit hasn't been selected out of the population?
Non-sickness related coughing happens when you get something stuck in your throat. It stops you from getting bad things in your lungs. I assume it is difficult to evolve to prevent that instinct from getting hijacked while still keeping the functionality intact. It wouldn't help the individual so much as those around the individual who are not yet infected. Those people are potentially competition anyway.
But in general I don't think you should be surprised that a disease is able to cause symptoms that are not beneficial to the host. Bacteria and viruses mutate at a much faster rate than mammals, so they are always going to have the edge in the game of coming up with ways to hack the hosts body vs trying not to be hacked.
But why doesn't e.g. my dog have coughing fits? Do they (a) not know how to cough at all (maybe they somehow don't get things stuck in their throat)? (b) not get tons of upper respiratory tract diseases, or they don't make them cough (e.g. because group dynamics are different and there's no point for the virus)? (c) don't change position from vertical to horizontal during the day, so have an easier time keeping their airways clear?
I can attest that dogs (and cats, and bunnies, and probably most other animals) are capable of coughing. It does seem like they cough less frequently than humans, but I wouldn't make that claim with any degree of confidence. I don't claim to know much about animal (or human for that matter) respiratory health, but (b) seems likely for pets, and (c) or something similar seems likely for many animals. Maybe something like having a stronger instinct to not breath with food near your throat, which humans lack because of speech?
When you're sick with a cold, the bacteria (or virus) gets in your lungs and start to multiply. Your lungs respond by cutting off normal sodium transmission which leads to a buildup of fluid in the lungs. The purpose of this fluid is to help wash the invaders out of the lungs: as fluid builds up, we cough to remove the fluid, and the fluid carries the bad guys out of the lungs. When it's working it keeps the lungs from being overwhelmed while your immune wipes out the infection. When the immune system isn't doing a very good job of that, then fluid keeps building up and you can potentially end up drowning in your own fluids.
Sauce: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090210133918.htm#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIf%20you%20get%20a%20bacterial,bacteria%20and%20wash%20them%20out.
I just finished reading UNSONG and really enjoyed it (I know, I know - I'm late to the party).
Scott, have you given any thought to changing it or writing an adaptation for a different medium? It would make a pretty great graphic novel, and I can see it appealing to the same crowd that likes Douglas Adams, Pratchett, Gaiman etc.
I suspect UNSONG is a bit too niche for an adaptation to make financial sense. It's also going to be really hard to translate a lot of the insanely complex references and Kabbalistic interpretations of things to a different medium. I suppose graphic novels are at least a lot cheaper to produce than a movie/tv-series and you have a bit more breathing room than you would trying to cram everything in a two and half hour movie, but still.
Scott is/was [editing](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/02/editing-unsong/) UNSONG to be published as a full novel at some point, which I think makes more sense as a first step towards getting more people to enjoy it.
I also liked Unsong, and I think it's fine as is in its current format. However edits 2, 4, 5, 7 (in the link above) would delete chapters, which would upset the kabbalistic structure of the book (see https://unsongbook.com/tosefta/ for an abundance of spoilers). Otherwise I feel mostly neutral about the proposed edits.
Also @above Substack doesn't support Markdown. I think that Substack should support Markdown, unless this would be extremely inauspicious or something like that.
I can't imagine Scott deleting chapters without restructuring the story such that the Kabbalistic structure stays intact. Should be pretty easy to split chapters or add shorter chapters in between others.
Substack does support markdown if you have the snazzy [browser extension](https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks) Pycea made for ACX. Until substack gets their shit together I'm using markdown formatting for quotes and links because it looks better for the people that have that extension and doesn't interfere too much with readability for the people that don't.
I am still very sad about #5. The Like button is nearly a strict positive IMO, and the complaints about it seem to boil down to "a friend of a friend once believed something because it had a heart next to it" urban legends. I neither understand nor appreciate this strange local custom.
The usual justification is that it incentivizes prioritizing upvotes, at the expense of quality. Like if you look at Reddit, half the time you have good contributions, half the time it's cheap jokes. At least the hearts didn't allow downvote brigading.
Which makes even less sense. Reddit is far and away the best of the big social media sites, exactly because of their karma system being the primary sorting tool. And this isn't one of the default subreddits - do we really think that **ACX readers** are going to upvote cheap jokes over serious effortposts on a regular basis? (The occasional really good joke, sure. But that's quality content too, and also worthy of being higher in the ranking. )
I stopped blogged because I realized I got more positive feedback when I got frustrated and wrote anti-Other posts. That's part of it - upvotes create some nasty incentives. It's a large part of why Reddit is such a hostile and ugly place, "best of the big social media sites" as it may be; there are always people who are happy to see it being stuck to The Other, and they will tend to drown out all other forms of upvote (because eventually everyone in whichever group is the minority The Other will pick up on this and go somewhere else).
The other part is that the culture here is antithetical to the idea of consensus truth; the truth lays with whoever has the truth, not whoever wins the voting contest. Upvotes, however, turn truth into a voting contest, which erodes a lot of the community - I'm a lot less likely to post under those conditions, because I generally try not to post unless I think what I have to say is unlikely to be said, which often means I'm posting stuff that would be downvoted or at least not upvoted - but not always, as in the case of this comment, where I am being unusually explicit about something I don't think most people have bothered to formalize their thoughts about.
So upvotes erode the community norms, and also the community. So no, glad to see them gone.
People also tend to consider the upvote button an "I agree with this" button and a significant portion of what makes the SSC/ACX comments great is that we have a bunch of civil, intelligent people here that have unusual/non-mainstream opinions. The last thing you want is to bury those at the bottom of the page.
It makes you optimize your messages for likeability, even subconsciously, and turns the community into a popularity contest.
That's pretty far from a strict positive.
Is there a way to remove the blue circles?
Run this JS from the console:
document.getElementsByClassName("profile-img-badge").forEach ( function(e) { e.style.display = "none";})
If you load jQuery,
$(".profile-img-badge").hide()
This is pretty easy to roll into the plugins, too.
(You might be able to even modify the CSS itself but that's always been scary for me. And that would stop any new comments that get loaded from having it.)
Adding ".profile-img-badge { display: none; }" anywhere that can inject css should do it. Maybe I should add it to the extension... Though this only does it locally of course.
Wait what's the purpose of the blue circles? If they're purely a status thing then I think they should be removed, but if they're more than purely a status thing then Chesterton's Fence suggests that they should stay.
They indicate someone who is a "founding member", which is someone who pays more than $200 a year to subscribe.
Oh, ok, this sounds a lot like it's purely a status thing. Please remove.
Lorien psych has a new page on alcoholism. Interesting like most pages there, thanks Scott! Some (possible) typos I found:
> Your primary care doctor should be fine; if your case is very unusual, you could seek a psychiatrist or addictionologist but if for some reason they’re not up to the task you could also find a psychiatrist or addictionologist.
Shouldn't one of the "a psychiatrist or addictionologist" occurrences be smth else, e.g. "an addictionologist or psychiatrist"?
> Please don’t let rehab’s advertising campaigns
rehabs' ?
(6.)
> sSome studies
Some studies
> and you can probably yourself find
find yourself
People love to talk about IQ here. Have you ever taken an IQ test (given by a psychologist, not online)? For what reason and what was your score?
Yes. Given as a psychologist as part of a mental health screening. Apparently they like to do various tests to make sure you don't have a learning or intellectual disability that might be underlying mental illness. My score was 135.
It was actually a very strange experience. The psychologist was so excited about my score that it made me a bit uncomfortable, and she was gushing about how "it might even be *higher*, since your results also show you're severely depressed and that might be impeding your cognitive performance." We barely even talked about the thing I was there for! I suppose it is a rare result from her perspective, like a doctor discovering a patient has a rare genetic condition, but it was creepy from mine.
The one positive consequence of lockdown for me has been learning to cook, which has been facilitated by the plethora of excellent information about cooking available from such sources as reddit, YouTube and books (largely books recommended by helpful bits of reddit and/or written by YouTubers).
Now that I'm looking at buying my first solo residence later in the year, I would like to learn about interior design in the same way so as to be able to make it look nice in keeping with my taste. However, so far I have not been able to find online resources or communities of anywhere near the same quality as for cooking. Is this because they don't exist, or because I'm looking in the wrong places? Are there good books but no good subs? Is there a Kenji Lopez-Alt of interior design? Any help much appreciated.
Q: What do we think the economic ramifications of a jubilee (where we forgave all unsecured personal debt every 50 years or so) would be?
Nobody wants to lend on the 49th year
I mean, I guess it becomes a lot harder for people to lend/borrow money over longer time periods. What is the benefit you'd want to achieve with this policy?
Historically, jubilees have been used to reduce functional debt-slavery, and to ensure social stability and economic mobility. The English kings would sometimes do this when a new one took the throne (James I is the example that springs to mind), as well as plenty of kingdoms in the Ancient Near East.
I am asking because I think there's an ongoing crisis in America of unsecured personal debt, the effect of which is to entrench the powers-that-be at the cost of the little guy. I'm wondering if a jubilee (and the expectation of future jubilees) could solve that problem (e.g. by encouraging more sustainable lending practices, freeing the middle and lower classes from debt periodically so they don't become de facto indentured servants).
Ok, well I suspect the details are going to depend a lot on the exact implementation and how easy it is to work around, but one thing that does come to mind is that you're going to see a lot of difference between people based on how close to a jubilee they were born.
For instance, people that get to college age in the decade leading up to a jubilee are going to find it near impossible to get a student loan, whereas people that are a few years younger are going to find it super easy. For whom this is better depends on your view of how useful a college degree is, but you're going to get some bitter generational envy either way.
Might it not be better to tax the hell out of anyone that is offering loans?
I think college degrees are very useful, but also that student loans are predatory. Frankly, I think a regular jubilee would smash that system (who in their right mind would lend 10 years out from a jubilee? Who can afford to shudder their business for 10 years?), and a system that didn't involve generational debt cycles would rise from the ashes.
I don't see why a tax on loans wouldn't just get passed on to the lendee most of the time. Also, I think loans (even unsecured personal loans) are undeniably useful as debt-leverage, but I think they're abused. A jubilee might allow us to get rid of abused loans without penalizing good loans, whereas a blanket tax would penalize everybody (and I think be easier to game).
> Who can afford to shudder their business for 10 years?
I was assuming the loans are granted by banks and other financial institutions that can just use the money to invest in something else during this period. Is that not the case currently?
Good point about the taxes just getting passed on to the lendee most of the time.
If you want to "reduce functional debt-slavery" or anything like that, just making it illegal to ever loan anyone money would do that. What you're proposing makes it illegal to loan (as opposed to give) money some of the time, but I don't see how the loans your system allows (e.g. 30-year mortgages the year after the jubilee) are better than the loans it prohibits (30-year mortgages the year before the jubilee).
Also, I don't think arbitrarily telling a bunch of people they can't borrow money this year (or decade) is going to "ensure social stability and economic mobility" nearly as much as you think.
1. Unsecured personal loans are useful but abused. They are probably also practically inevitable (people will loan their friends money). A jubilee, unlike the outright ban, acknowledges these facts, but still tries to mitigate the negative consequences of widespread, massive, long-term debt. Fwiw, I think it would also change the incentives of lenders for the better.
2. I proposed the jubilee for unsecured personal loans. Most mortgages are secured on the collateral of the house. Also, I'm proposing debt forgiveness on the last year, not that loans are not allowed on that year.
3. Historically, jubilees have done this. For example, this was done when James the I took the throne in England, and it helped to usher in the Jacobean era. It was also used (only once) in West Germany after WWII, and it's a big reason why (a) they recovered so fast, and (b) rich Nazi lenders did not keep as much power in recovered West Germany.
I was mainly wondering (a) how the commentariat thinks the incentives would change for lenders (and lending institutions) long-term, (b) what the long-term effect on lendees would be. I also think the societal effects of such a change would be interesting to see. E.g. Would it periodically serve as a ballast for trust in the government?
Has the proliferation of the Simulation Hypothesis led to a rise of simulation themes in cases of psychosis?
Learned recently about the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, and its possible role as tinder for the Palestine/Israel conflict. I'm fuzzy on the details, and not sure how settled* the history is, but it felt like it touched favourite SSC/ACT themes like James C. Scott's stuff re: state bureaucracy trying to govern peasants, and David Friedman's stuff re: a positive account of property rights.
Very roughly: small-time Palestinian farmers had been farming their land for generations, often communally owned (also it sounds like there might have been some kind of distinction between right of ownership + collecting tax, and right of residency+ working it, or something?). The Ottoman Empire wanted to make taxing it easier, so started requiring land be registered under a clear name / deed of ownership.
For various reasons, the small-time farmers often didn't end up registered on their land. This included communal land ending up registered to powerful individuals; not wanting your name on it so your son wouldn't be conscripted to the military; etc., but also there was a feeling that this was mostly just the Empire's formality, it won't *really* change anything, we're still going to keep working our land like our ancestors did and like our descendants still will. (Also the new landlords were sometimes local, but also often foreign e.g. Christians? But I'm not sure how that worked.)
But the new officially-Empire-recognized landlords disagreed, and did consider the land theirs to e.g. sell if they wanted—for instance, to sell it to immigrating European Jewish people wanting to escape the pogroms and other anti-Semitism and start a Jewish homeland there.
*The book I'm reading is Harms and Ferry (2008) - The Palestine Israel Conflict: A Basic Introduction (2nd ed.); and I skimmed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Land_Code_of_1858
Literally this is happening 150 years later in Slovakia. Since the authorities distributing EU agricultural subsidies don't check with the land registry who actually owns and/or farms the land, people can apply to receive subsidies for land that isn't theirs, just on their say-so. Organized crime has sprung up around this loophole, and corrupt public servants tip them off about unclaimed land for a kickback. When the farmers who actually own and/or work the land try to apply for the subsidies, are refused and complain, the police shows up to intimidate them. Multiple farmers killed themselves because of that.
You probably know this given the reference to James Scott, but this pattern is literally an example given in Seeing Like a State: complex traditions of communal land usage get steamrolled by a government looking from on high, who wants a simplified view of who “owns” the land, so that they know who to tax or whatever. Chaos ensues.
What is the explanation for the low covid-19 infection numbers in China?
It seems almost certain they're lying by orders of magnitude, but how come it's not showing?
My prior is that they're clearly not lying, especially when they have conducted rave parties in Wuhan. The answer is China has handled the Coronavirus by instituting harsh lockdowns properly and driving the reproduction rate to 0, something very few other countries have managed to replicate
There are asymptomatic spreaders, and foreign reintroductions from travellers (who can likewise be asymptomatic). Singe-digit daily cases in the world's most populous country is IMO self-evident BS.
China has greatly reduced foreign travel and has enforced quarantine (14 days) on every inbound traveller. I doubt disease reintroduction is impossible to stop. China primarily stopped the spread of disease to the rest of China by restricting travel from Wuhan (in spite of the Chinese New Year Festival). Whether China has single-digit or double-digit cases is impossible for anyone who doesn't have actual data that you can trust to prove, but it is quite clear that they do not have overwhelming cases (that's affecting their hospitals) and it is also apparently low enough that China has not only reopened its economy but removed compulsory mask mandates by last year August (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-beijing-masks-idUSKBN25H0H8). I have a very hard time believing, that a country that tied people to light-poles and used drones to spy on people not wearing masks is somehow still facing any serious threat from Covid after they decided even Mask mandates are not required.
Scott, not sure if you'll see this...but telling us to leave comments instead of emailing in the 4th bullet point of a newsletter is not going to work. I mean, it worked on me, here...but generally speaking you probably should just make the email address on the list autorespond with your explanation, or no one will ever see it in the right context.
Why don't we use a space ship to grab defunct satellites orbiting the Earth, and carry them off to the Moon to drop them on its south pole? That way, when astronauts land there to build the first Moon base, there will be a lot of spare parts lying around that they can use as scrap materials.
I'm sure this sounds like a joke, but follow my reasoning: A big problem with building a Moon base is that it costs a fortune to transport building materials there from Earth's surface. However, there are literally tons of potential building materials already in space in the form of disused satellites. A lot of money has already been spent getting those satellites off the surface. For just a little more (I'm guessing), the satellites could be sent to the Moon. All we'd have to do is get an unmanned space ship with a grabber arm and some long-endurance propulsion system (solar sail, ion engine) into space, have it grab dead satellites, turn on its propulsion, and slowly move them out to the Moon. It wouldn't matter if it took a year for the duo to reach the Moon and for the reusable space ship to drop the satellite on the south pole like a bomb.
This would kill two birds with one stone: the amount of space debris around Earth would diminish, while the amount of scarce scrap materials made of aluminum, titanium and silicon would build up within walking distance of the Moon base site. Astronauts could refashion it into useful objects.
The "bomber" space craft would go back and forth between the Earth and Moon until it finally fell apart.