Being good at business is the #1 skill for making money. The firm requires employees with other skills, including invention in some cases, but they don't make as much as the boss.
From of the point of view of which skill the firm needs the most, again it's management, because a poorly managed firm won't make good use of its other skills.
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." is a famous quote from Warren Buffet, and one I fully agree with.
From my experience, management and communication are grossly overestimated: no matter how good a manager you are, the performance of your teams is far more likely to depend of the quality of the people you are managing than your own.
A lot of this assertion depends on your definition of invention and how intellectually honest you feel the cohorts of invention versus “knowing how to make money” are. If those are the only two options, what would be rewarded more than “knowing how to make money”? That feels like a taxonomy created with an agenda in mind.
Capitalism rewards building stuff better than any other system we know of. Whether one thinks invention is undervalued or overvalued is more of a statement about one’s value system than about capitalism. It sounds like you think invention is very important and is undervalued.
I think a more accurate statement would be that we need far more people who are good at making money (e.g. running factories efficiently, lending money to the right people at the right interest rate, managing giant human enterprises well) than we need people who are good at inventing stuff. Most of what happens in an economy is just keeping the gears turning, moving things from here to there, building things we know how to build, making sure the electricity works, the cars start, the bus turns up on time, the check actually is in the mail, you get paid on time, et cetera. We don't *advance* if no one ever does invention, but if too many people are trying to invent too much of the basic wheels-go-round stuff doesn't get done and things fall apart.
Better, a quote I've heard attribute to Adrienne Rich (of all people): "If all of us contemplate the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera."
There are many kinds of things that need to be done. We need someone to invent new stuff. We need someone to find new clever uses for the recently invented stuff. We need many people to keep the wheels of the existing mechanisms running. We need someone to find problems with the existing mechanisms and fix them.
Asking which one is more important... dunno, seems to me that there are huge potential gains at every level. And also, we (as a society) can do all of that at the same time, by individuals choosing the place they feel they have a comparative advantage at.
For example, it would be nice if someone invented a new cure for cancer. But independently on that, it would also be nice to fix healthcare. Producing and distributing the existing pills cheaper would also help. And there is a lot of human work involved in just keeping everything as it is now.
Similarly with technical inventions: quantum computers would be nice, making better applications on existing computers is also nice, developing free alternatives to commercial software also helps people, and you also need someone to teach kids at schools to use the existing free software.
Yeah, people at some of these positions are better at capturing the value they produce than at other positions. But that would happen in any regime: it's either the money, or the decisions of the communist leaders, or the divine voice talking to the king.
Knowing how to make money in general is more valuable than knowing how to invent in general. But very few people have the general skill. Far more people know how to invent one thing, or know how to make money one way.
I am currently doing some data analysis regarding the difference in immunisation between a 1 dose and a 2 dose vaccination strategy (sponsered by a COVID microgrant from Zvi + anon donor).
I thought collecting some input from the community here might be worthwhile and the earlier, the better, so here goes:
It is still a work in progress and one would need to look into the whole repo to get a complete picture but the linked file basically explains the method.
If more information is needed I am happy to provide them. Also, you can contact me on various sites & the SSC discord, if you want to point out mistakes I made (or open a PR on Github).
Choose the correct answer from this official cognitive-functioning test question (you’ll want to commit to your final answer before reading further):
There are two women, Janet and Susan. Janet is attacked by a mugger just ten feet outside her front door. Susan is attacked by a mugger a mile away from her house. Who is more upset by the experience?
A) Janet
B) Susan
C) They are upset the same or it’s impossible to tell
This is from Michael Kinsley’s amazing piece in The New Yorker a few years back about living with Parkinson’s (“Have You Lost Your Mind?”). He was flabbergasted to discover that the literally accurate answer was deemed “incorrect.” The test-makers were purposely forcing respondents to choose between the most obvious answer, based in facile emotional intelligence that discerns the spirit of the narrative, or the one that relies on a closer, logical reading of semantics.
Kinsey interviewed the test-makers, who confirmed the gist of their intentions while remaining protective of their trade secrets, so there’s some speculation here: apparently they wanted to flag pedantic brains as functioning less than properly. Somewhere around 30% of all test-takers chose the pedantic answer, while most of the remaining 70% got it right. Interestingly, those figures were completely reversed among the Parkinson’s population.
I find it fascinating and opaquely illuminating that people who chose to interrogate the boundaries of the question were deemed to be incorrect. I wonder from what branch of science did the test-makers derive their confidence that a well-functioning brain should bias the gut, as it were, rather than getting bogged down in rules and semantics?
After I first read Kinsley's piece I polled ten acquaintances in a workplace environment of well-educated people, and true to the statistics, seven answered correctly, while three of us answered pedantically (coincidentally, all three of us had been diagnosed with differing neurological disorders). But wait, it gets weirder. I pressed a few of the 70% (none of whom seemed to wrestle a bit with the exercise) by asking: Would you have chosen Janet if your life depended on it? ALL said probably NOT (while still remaining perfectly untroubled by the mounting complications!).
This tells me that what the test-makers might have actually been looking for was an ability to discern correct CONTEXT. I had initially been considering the question in a pure vacuum, while others who chose Janet just seemed to “get” what the test-makers were looking for. One made a shrugging comment like, “Well it is just a test – not real life.” (How the hell am I supposed to know THAT??)
So, with this knowledge of the unsaid implications, can you think of any advice you'd like to offer us pedants who really can't imagine another way to answer such a question?
I've always been good at multiple choice tests. Always consider the source and don't overthink. There are often going to be questions that are somewhat ambiguous if you really think about it. But your goal is to give the answer the test-maker had in mind, not the technically correct one (unless you know the test-maker is also very pedantic!) The context of what material the test is supposed to be testing can usually tell you when you are solving the problem as expected and when you are overthinking it.
Also, this is more relevant to an educational setting, but, as a last resort, you can go "family-feud" style. If a question is really ambiguous, go for the answer you think most people are likely to guess - then you have the most chance of the instructor deciding to accept that answer as correct in response to student complaints.
This reminds me of a story from my school days. I was taking a math test and while I was working on a problem I realized that it was too hard for the current topic and I also knew what wrong answer the teacher was looking for. I considered my options and decided to go for the correct answer (I was going to get a good score anyway).
A few days later the teacher read the grades (out loud) but didn't return the tests. Then another couple days later he announced that there had been some corrections and some grades had gone up and some had gone down. My grade had gone up (and one other guy in my year too) and many others had gone down. The teacher had apparently figured out that if two kids both give the same unexpected wrong answer, something is probably going on.
Fortunately our classmates never found out what happened.
I think the question to ask yourself is "what is this question trying to ask?" Like this question isn't *really* about the head-space of two fictional characters, what the question is trying to ask is "are people generally more upset by negative experiences near to home, far from home, or neither?"
I think most people would find the latter question easier to answer, it's still asking for a generalization which you may or may not agree with, but I think far fewer people are going to get tripped up on the stuff like "well what if Susan is an easily upset person, while Janet is unflappable?" that might lead someone to say C.
You may ask "why didn't they ask that question in the first place" and I think that 1) discerning the intent of the question is often seen as an intentional part of test taking, 2) some more empathetic people actually may find the question easier to answer in the stated form - it feels "realer" with imagining real people, compared to my "decoded" version which is really dry, 3) it's just less boring to ask questions in this way.
It depends on the semantics of "tell". Janet is more upset, for most but not all values of Janet.
Under Boolean semantics, "it's impossible to tell" is True unless you can prove that either Janet is always more upset, or Susan is more upset, for all possible values of Janet and Susan. You can't; so the answer is C.
Under probabilistic or information-theory semantics, answer A (Janet) is the only one that gives you positive {predictive value / information}; so the answer is A.
Yeh. The last paragraph makes sense, although like a lot of commentary here, could be less opaque. I personally don’t think there is any reasonable way to read this question as anything other then probabilistic - what would the majority of women think in either case. Assuming and actual Susan and an actual Janet just wouldn’t occur to me.
The people answering c remind me of the time I tried the trolley problem with a group of people and one guy was adamant that the question was suspect. Who put the people on the tracks anyway, why not try stop or reverse the trolley. All good questions if that was anecdote rather than a thought experiment, but it wasn’t.
I see your point, but the pedant in me wasn't bringing in the complications. That was the test-makers, who included the option that "it's impossible to tell."
In your trolley example, your pedants are just really avoiding the question. The better parallel would be if your trolley narrator added a third possible option such as "You can't tell for sure, but you think maybe the train is travelling too fast for the diversion." Which would invite many more problems for one to consider.
I’m kind of stuck on the cognitive-functioning aspect of all this, but I’m assuming it’s related to social functioning. If so, should it really be a healthy norm for society to resist individuals who are unwilling (or unable) to privilege the meta-level narrative/game that everyone else somehow knows/wants to play? It seems the little kid who proclaims the emperor’s not wearing any clothes is really told to shut up and stop being silly, end of story.
Also, on a socio-political level, it’s scary to imagine what the world would look like without such pedantry. I’m thinking, for example, of the lone voice on a jury who sees everything differently – but correctly – while everyone else is more socially relaxed, easily forgetful of the real-life stakes, and just wants to get home in time for dinner. If the optimal brain is one that values going with the flow, being in synch with societal narratives, presumably enjoying the fruits of the resultant parasympathetic system involvement, then we’re doomed, right? Unless, maybe the test-makers weren’t actually thinking it’s optimal for a society’s individuals to have optimal brains?
Yes, I don't like the tyranny of "healthy norms" when it comes to cognitive function, particularly when we're talking about a 70/30 split and human variety has all kinds of social benefits.
I'm baffled that anyone could say this has a "right" answer when there are so evidently multiple possible interpretations, and how would one make a case that one interpretation is better than another?
I'm obviously a really pedantic person, working on it all the time I swear. I could see the test-writers probably meant for us to answer A (and that was my first answer), that some more precise reading would deliver C, and that a different set of emotional priors would yield B. In that way it seems more like a personality test than something with a right/wrong answer.
I support the anxious/obsessive/hyper-conscientious minority and their efforts at keeping us all safe, even if it means they need mouth guards to sleep at night.
Yes, but if I were taking a test labeled as measuring cognitive functioning (as opposed to a personality test) I would be totally stuck trying to guess what they were looking for. So I'd surely default to answer C, as this seems like the most streamlined, cognitively unassailable response.
So, it's easy to imagine the cases where the stickler is the one lone voice of sanity stemming a tide of madness and chaos.
But what is actually happening 99% of the time is that either human language is imprecise or a given model/metaphor/explanation only needs a certain superficial level of depth in order to serve it's purpose in communication, everyone else in the room accurately understood what was being conveyed and got the correct information they were supposed to out of it, and the one stickler is wasting everyone's time and actually making things less clear and more confusing, causing mistakes and misunderstandings.
So, of course, the pedant in me would ask where you got your 99% data point from, but I'm assuming it's merely a hardened assumption you carry around based on your life experiences.
I would probe this assumption on a couple grounds. First, if you think the "stickler" is purposely wasting everyone's time (i.e., they can actually see what the model in question is asking for, but they're choosing to muddle things up for ego or whatever reasons), I think you'd often be wrong. Often, someone has a perfectly relevant but perhaps outside-the-box approach, but can't get a hearing because of social resistance.
I've noticed that such voices tend to be ostracized from the get-go because their energy doesn't match "the room," which can lead to a vicious cycle of them not feeling heard, with "the room" more and more adamant about shutting them up. Since the room's natural tendency trends toward social cohesion, resistance is automatically troubled (so, for example, you might be interpreting stress energy as an anti-social intention).
While I'm guessing you'll disagree, I'm left widely supportive of alternative voices in principle, even though they tend to make the room less tidy. Systemic examples of such support include open invitations to diversity, voluntary relinquishing of leadership roles by "straight white male" -types who have historically kept the room organized, and even attendance to cries of "micro-aggressions" and other expressions that are easily ridiculed as shrill or off-point.
I'm super glad we've evolved culturally past the point where the elite voices who tended to pride themselves on a sort of pristine rationality have learned to listen better to discern the concerns of others. When I was young Norman Mailer et al. were still baiting feminists as hysterical and irrational. Black Lives Matter, Queer affiliation, etc -- these are welcome forms of pedantry that demand to be taken seriously by those in the room who would prefer their comfort not be riled. I've been in many leadership positions throughout my life, and every time I've checked my inclination to dismiss someone as irrational or whatever, I've discovered at the very least a nugget of valuable, relevant information about their perspective that I really needed to hear.
The article mentioned says 'C' is the pedantic one, because the question explicitly asks whether Janet or Susan feels worse, and we don't know enough about them or the mugging to say one way or the other. 'A' is the correct answer.
I got it wrong both ways by guessing 'B' (a mugging outside my house is anomalous, one in unfamiliar territory would make me more afraid of the outside world), which meant I found it a very confusing analysis.
My gut answer was A, my pedantic thought was C, then I thought B, since Janet getting mugged outside her door suggests her house is in a rough enough neighborhood she may be resigned to sporadic crime, while Susan could live in a safer neighborhood and be more upset when she encounters crime
I also initially guessed B, with the reasoning that Janet would probably complain about it more but ultimately can just walk back home after, which would be less traumatic than Susan having to find her way home with no wallet. But then I switched to C once I saw that option, since really there's no way to know.
Yeah, I could see it either way; I was staring at the question trying to find some missing word i.e. perhaps the mugger were sniping the women and literally a mile away while the women were near their houses and somehow mugging them that way, which would make a bigger difference?
Yeah, I would choose C because there are two factors, one is along the lines of "I was so close to having safely avoided this mugging and/or my phone turf area is unsafe for me" and one is "if I were mugged right outside my home, I might sooner be safely in my home calming down and emotionally recovering". I can't really assume I know how the factors shake out with only the information given.
If you allow that the word "know" can be applied to things for which you have *some* evidence but not absolute certainty, then you have to pick some threshold for what counts as "enough" evidence to use the word "know".
If your standard is "any evidence at all", then answer C would only be correct if there is NO statistical correlation between mugging location and upset-ness. Which I presume is not the case, or else we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Any other quantitative standard you choose is at least somewhat arbitrary, and no specific standard is included in the question. Which would make the pedantic answer "this question is ambiguous", not "C".
When I read the question, I interpreted "or it's impossible to tell" as meaning "the statistics are within experimental error". That interpretation was based partly on the context that it was grouped together with "they are upset the same" (why would you group "equal" and "unknowable" under the same answer otherwise?) and partly for the reasons I laid out above.
(I am pretty pedantic and still answered A. As evidence of my pedantry (if you needed any more), on another test I objected to the question "agree/disagree: Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs" on the grounds that obviously our country will be destroyed SOMEDAY no matter what we do.)
I'm not sure that objecting to that latter question is good evidence of pedantry. The logician's answer is "agree", because the question used "if" rather than "iff", and the consequent is (always) true so the conditional is true.
Yes, and my objection is that the question is constructed such that most readers will answer an implied question rather than the explicit question, and there's no way to tell which responses are answering which question.
Is the pedantic answer C, because it's impossible to tell what two people will think about a given thing, while the intended answer is A, because getting mugged right outside your house is probably more upsetting than getting mugged elsewhere?
Maybe part of the problem is that it sounds like an SAT reading comprehension problem or something to me, in which case C would be the right answer. If you asked it like "which is likely to upset someone more, A, B, or no difference", I wonder if you'd get a difference distribution.
Yes, sorry for the confusion. About thirty percent tend to answer C (pedantically), while 70 percent say A because of proximity to home. A was deemed officially correct.
Interestingly, I considered B, on the grounds that neurotypicals are a majority, they routinely do things that make no sense to my gut, and an awful lot of them get hysterically afraid of events they've heard about happening - once, among a national population of 100s of millions, and nowhere near their homes. It is thus plausible to me that the more common response is the one that seems least sensible to me, and that the goal of the question is to demonstrate that one is "normal" by producing the common (and thus better-by-definition) response.
So I'm seeing an unexpected hybrid population developing here: you seem to be right on track when it comes to sensing the KIND of emotion-based answer the test-makers were looking for -- but then you got bogged down in secondary-level pedantry!
My thinking was that something that happens in another neighborhood can be set aside more easily. Being struck so close to home causes a wound to the confidence about home and safety.
It's nebulous, but how 'wide' are the boundaries between neighborhoods in Australia? I'd think they're roughly the same as anywhere, e.g. the width of the street(s) (or some other 'natural' boundary) that divide any two neighborhoods.
Given that, _every_ possible pair of adjacent neighborhoods, anywhere, is only "blocks apart".
Maybe you live in the center of some neighborhood, but surely lots of others live closer to the edges.
And then of course 'neighborhood' is pretty nebulous itself. I've lived in several places where there _was no_ obvious 'neighborhood'. Maybe 'neighborhoods' are more of a thing in places with lots of historical gang activity and thus clearer territorial boundaries at the 'neighborhood scale'.
I have a bit of a problem with this. My naive guess is Janet - people tend to be more upset by things which happen closer to themselves. It feels more like a personal violation.
At the same time, people also tend to blame themselves for something bad happening to them if they could have had any control over the circumstances, and sometimes that will be forced on them: see "clothing worn by rape victims". In this case, being mugged 2 miles from your house implies some place you didn't need to be. "I could have gone to a different grocery store" can run through your head continually and cause suffering. "I could have avoided going outside, ever" is pretty much recognized as crazy.
These two emotional responses are in direct opposition to each other and knowing which one would predominate would require a bit more knowledge of the two people involved. Forced, I'd go with 'A', but that's a damn hard question.
I was in a similar position. I read between the lines and could tell that the test writers weren't going for pedantic reasoning, but when comparing the two people I could come up with too many competing narratives that could favor either one. In the end, I chose "it's impossible to know," thinking that's the answer of someone who correctly understands that that people's emotional states depends on their complex perspective, not on some external appraisal of their situation.
In short, my mistake was in thinking that the test was a test of empathy or social skills, whereas it's apparently a more basic test of "can you tell which of these two situations is meant to sound worse on first glance?"
i wonder if getting the "correct" answer correlates with GPA? The pedantic answer seemed most correct to me but I correctly guessed the desired answer, drawing upon my extensive practice at test taking in school, where on poorly written tests you are often being tested most on your ability to predict what the teacher wants
You are a very stable genius! It's this ability to predict the "desired answer" that I seem to lack. Again, I'm convinced it's about the ability to sense the correct context.
An amusing little anecdote:
Years back, in a psychological evaluation for a child custody court case, I was asked to draw a tree on a blank piece of paper. I asked the examiner how long I should take to draw it (the whole evaluation took most of the day, so I had no idea how to approach this one exercise). The examiner told me to take as long as I liked. So I spent maybe a half hour, detailing the veins on the leaves, the bark, etc – drawing what turned out to be a rather splendid tree, if I do say so myself. Later, the examiner’s report cited this particular exercise as evidence of my narcissism – which I thought was weird, considering the stakes of the test (which would impact how much time my three-year-old child lived with me). I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t draw the best tree of their life if their child’s welfare was on the line? THAT was the context running through my head, but the correct context apparently was to be cool.
Which is not to argue I'm not narcissistic, of course, but is this event an accurate barometer? One theory is that my hyper-focus on the tree was not properly respectful of the psychologist’s time, but he had been going back and forth to his office all morning, leaving me to work on specific tasks -- so it’s not like he was just sitting there watching me be narcissistic.
I think at the very least you made an unusual choice in going for a superbly detailed tree instead of a merely adequate one. Like someone said, part of any test is figuring out what the person administering it is looking for. In your case it wasn’t artistic talent but maybe a sense of what kind of tree would fulfill the request. Also, are you sure you weren’t being observed the whole time?
My ex-wife was an excellent illustrator, she had a real keen sense for lighting. I often wonder if my kid’s ever inherited her talent... but... ever since I lost the big art competition used to decide custody I haven’t seen them much.
Look, in no way do I defend my choice as smart, proportional, or constructive. But the experience does help me keep in mind that some of us get tunnel vision (less smart often) during times of stress. And this was far and away the most stressful time of my entire life. So as ridiculous as it sounds, I was in a state of mind where the future of my child felt directly connected to my level of effort, and I acted accordingly.
I find it helpful to recall this when I see others -- especially those who are historically, chronically stressed -- speaking or acting with a sense of desperation, ESPECIALLY when surrounded by a cool, calm, rational group that has collectively decided to mock their stressed attempts to seek equality, justice, etc.
I suspect that the tester was engaged in motivated reasoning.
If you had drawn a mere sketch of a tree, that would be evidence that you were a slacker.
If you asked what kind of tree you were supposed to draw, that was "proof" that you are a bigot, as shown by your reprehensible discrimination between tree species.
Drawing a Christmas tree clearly demonstrates that you must be financially irresponsible and want someone to provide for you.
Honestly, the tester struck me as a bit of a slacker (but, of course, I was biased). He didn't seem interested in or able to put himself in the position of someone in such a life-altering situation. My bet is he just looked at the fact that I'd spent a much longer time than average drawing more ornamentation than average, and labeled that a narcissistic tendency when it might well have just been situational narcissism.
And it seemed to me a bit of a dirty trick that he wouldn't answer my initial question about how long I should take to draw. I was clearly seeking context. Failing to get any, my feeling (charged with stress) was that I better just give it all I have.
As others have commented, the 'obvious' answer A does not seem obvious and the 'pedantic' answer C does not seem pedantic. There are various reasons being mugged nearer your house could feel better than far away, e.g.
--likely closer to friends/neighbours who can help
On the other hand, there are various reasons being nearer your house feels worse:
--may increase anxiety every time you leave your house / maybe want to leave your house
Perhaps, but the expert test-makers make the big bucks, so we have to presume there's method to their madness: forcing us to choose the sole "correct" answer.
My interpretation of the question is: if this had happened for real, do you think it would be more likely that Janet was most upset, Susan was most upset, or that they were so similarly upset that it would be impossible for to determine who was more upset. The pedantic interpretation of the question is: given only information about where the muggings occurred, is Janet definitely more upset, is Susan definitely more upset, or do you have insufficient information to say who is more upset? I think the pedantic interpretation is wrong because it ignores contextual clues about how to interpret the question. For example, "they are upset the same or it's impossible to tell" is a single option, so it's probably meant to express only one idea: that the two people are upset to similar degrees (i.e. impossible to tell because the difference is small), rather than express the logical union of two separate ideas: that either they're equally upset or it's impossible to tell for some reason (e.g. because you have insufficient information in the question). That being said, it's not a well-written question because the pedantic interpretation is more plausible than it ought to be, especially if you had a prior belief that this might be a trick question.
Putting pedantry aside, (A) seems like the obviously correct answer to me, because getting mugged near your house means that you're not safe in the one place you can't avoid traveling through when you leave the house, but if you get mugged a mile away, you can stay safe by avoiding that area. Obviously people react differently, so maybe Janet is a buddhist monk and Susan has frequent panic attacks, but I think the implication is that the question is about how most ordinary people would react, and I think most ordinary Janets would be noticeably more upset than most ordinary Susans.
So do you think the ability to discern the most relevant implications, as you have, is simply a result of intelligence? I don't get the sense the test-makers were targeting intelligence so much as mechanical functioning somehow.
Note that the Parkinson's population is a mirror image of the general public when it comes to getting the question wrong. (Most Parkinson's folks I've met have been super sharp.)
> So do you think the ability to discern the most relevant implications, as you have, is simply a result of intelligence?
No, I don't think it's a very good question to begin with. I think 70% of people answer (A) because that's what a quick, common-sense interpretation gives you, and 30% of people answer (C) because that's what a very literal, spot-the-trick-question interpretation gives you. The difference between the two groups is certainly not "intelligence", and drawing some conclusion about cognitive functioning differences between the two groups is probably an unjustifiable leap in reasoning. I was mainly explaining my reasoning because it seemed like a lot of other commenters didn't see why (A) should be the correct answer.
You may be right about it being a bad question. I don't know anything about test making. But my sense from Kinsley's interview with the test-makers is that any clumsiness to the phrasing, etc, was designed very intentionally.
For me, pedantry is more of a mood than a way of life. I used to be pedantic because that's just the way we had fun in my household (it was more fun than it sounded?); we would annoy my mother at the dinner table by responding "I don't know" to questions like "Would everyone like dessert"?
As I've grown up I've learned to dial down the pedantry and instead answer the question that I think is intended rather than the question that has _strictly_ been asked, because pedantry doesn't actually work out well for me in real life.
I think this is a good point. Pedantry is a "read the room" kind of thing. If you're writing a math paper, pedantry is required. If you're having a casual conversation with a stranger, pedantry is usually considered rude. This question, if it tells us anything, tells us whether or not respondents feel like pedantry is the right mood for a multiple-choice psych questionnaire.
And the ability to "read the room" comes from where? Family modeling? Native intelligence? And would certain neurological conditions block this ability?
Right, I do think some people have good control of their pedantry dial and other people don't know where it is, much less that it might be controlled. I imagine that's down to some mix of genetics and upbringing.
That dinner table anecdote would work better if, after everyone else had answered "I don't know", the final one to reply said that yes, everyone wanted dessert.
I know, right? I’m not actually as interested in the cognitive-function implications of this particular test question as the social/political implications
I guess I’m feeling this is a tiny piece of “official” evidence that there’s a sort of social consensus that The Rules (and even the facts?) are malleable according to context – and I can’t help thinking this spills over into populations that have to fight quite a lot harder for scraps of agency then us mere miserable pedants.
If I’m right, this malleability seems related to our human capacity for abiding horrific things with a shrug just because it’s always been that way; forcing, for example, African Americans into choosing between acquiescence or righteous Constitutional pedantry for more than 100 years after Reconstruction. Which is a pretty shitty deal.
So -- to your point -- I'm prone to losing my patience (and flexibility) in situations where it seems the other is operating/arguing from an unserious base of assumptions when it comes to things like "democracy" (for example); i.e. when their "context" (perhaps their habitual political affiliation) seems to be inadequate to address the stakes involved.
One thing you may want to consider is that "word problems" almost always include idealizing assumptions. That's because they're *phrased* in concrete terms, but are really *about* abstract models. (The rationale for concrete phrasing is usually some combination of "people understand stories more easily than abstractions" and/or "we want students to think about how the abstract models can be applied to real life".)
If I ask you about the travel time of a train that leaves city A at 8:00 traveling to city B that is 120 miles away, you are supposed to assume (unless specified otherwise) that the train travels at constant speed without stopping and that 120 miles is the length of the track, even though none of those assumptions are particularly realistic.
If I tell you that one person always lies and one always tells the truth, you are not supposed to worry that one of them might make an honest mistake or simply refuse to answer your question, and you certainly aren't supposed to ask whether "lying by omission" counts as a "lie" for purposes of this problem.
The ropes are massless, the pulleys are frictionless, the wires are lossless, the Turing Machine has infinite tape, etc.
We don't often call attention to these assumptions or explain how to tell which ones we're making. Among other unfortunate consequences, this means that sometimes the person asking the question changes the assumptions without telling you, and thinks that this means they're being clever (when actually they're just communicating badly).
There's a famous lateral thinking puzzle involving 3 light bulbs in a box connected to 3 switches that are outside the box but that will be locked once you open the box, and you're supposed to figure out which switch goes to which light. The accepted solution is to turn on one switch, wait for the corresponding bulb to get hot, then turn it off and turn on another switch before opening the box.
This answer directly violates a common idealizing assumption (i.e. ignore electrical losses). But if you're willing to break ANY idealizing assumption, then there are TONS of easy solutions, like "cutting a hole in the box" or "rewiring the circuits to bypass the locked switches". (Also, you can tell this puzzle predates the rise of LED bulbs.) IMO this is a broken puzzle with no *fair* solution--but the people who repeat it don't seem to notice this issue...
(You could probably rework it into a story where the lights are actually heat lamps, so that becoming hot is part of their core functionality. But then you're *calling attention* to the heat and the puzzle becomes easier...)
Sometimes it's not obvious what idealizing assumptions should be made. There's another famous logic puzzle that's usually phrased as having to do with eye color. It's more complex; here's one version: https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html
It's a clever puzzle, except it relies on the assumption that a public declaration creates mathematically-perfect "common knowledge", in the sense that everyone hears and believes, and everyone knows that everyone hears and believes, and everyone knows that everyone knows that... to infinite levels of recursion. You can kind of see how this might make sense as an "idealizing assumption", but it's not an idealizing assumption that most people will have encountered before; a good-faith listener could plausibly fail to make it. (And you can't make the assumption explicit without giving a really huge clue to solving the puzzle.)
I have Asperger's and this is one major lesson I had to learn as a kid. At first, I really struggled with word problems because of all the possible complications not stated in the problem, like you mention. However, I quickly learned to answer the question the test makers meant, rather than what they said.
I had the same experience. No diagnosis, but almost certainly Asperger's. I still recall thinking at a very early age "this answer is wrong, but it is the one they want."
One thing I've noticed about logic puzzles: if it's necessary for the puzzle to stipulate that the people involved are "perfect logicians," I will never, ever be able to wrap my head around it. (Even after reading Scott's story based on the same puzzle.)
All makes sense. But I'm not sure you're fully covering the problem inherent in this particular question, which is the addition of "it's impossible to tell." If that phrase were left out, I would certainly have chosen Janet as the best choice available, no problem.
While you may easily see that phrase as a distraction, it pops out to me in bright neon lights as the ONLY possible answer. I think that's why Kinsley was so flabbergasted. The test-makers seemed (to me) to purposely be signaling us away from idealized assumptions by providing an answer that is literally correct.
"The ropes are massless, the pulleys are frictionless, the wires are lossless, the Turing Machine has infinite tape, etc."-- UNLESS what if one of the questions specifically said "the ropes are old and frayed" and then gave the option C of "it's impossible to calculate" AND it's not a math test, but a cognitive-functioning test...
If the problem statement explicitly introduces non-ideal factors, then definitely you are supposed to take those into account.
But I don't see how offering "it's impossible to tell" as one of the possible *answers* is equivalent to that.
If I gave you a standard textbook physics problem involving ropes, never said anything one way or the other about the state of the ropes, and then offered "it's impossible to tell" as one of the multi-choice answers, would you select that answer on the grounds that the idealizing assumptions had not been explicitly articulated? Even if, under the typical ideal assumptions, you could calculate an exact answer?
Yes, if a physics problem included "it's impossible to tell", that seems, to me anyways, as a very obviously reasonable clue that it's the correct answer. Just the inclusion of that answer would be strong evidence that the problem is NOT in fact a "standard textbook physics problem" as none of them typically (or ever) include options like that.
I really don't like that Randall calls this the hardest puzzle in the world, as it can be solved via inductive reasoning. Now, the knight and knave puzzle by Boolos where there are three creatures (truthful, liar, random) that reply "yes" or "no" in a language you don't know and you have to identify them by asking three questions is hard enough you can't even explain the solution to a stranger in a bar, even less ask them to solve it.
I thought B was the most likely on a 'gut' level since Susan would be far from home, potentially injured, upset, still exposed after the attack and having much more of an obstacle to get somewhere warm and safe potentially with people she knows that can help. Then switched to C when considering the possibility that Janet might feel more lasting anxiety at the feeling of violation close to home.
I'm a pedant, but it seemed natural to me to pick A or B (and A seemed the more likely option, because a hyper-local mugging could shatter the victim's sense of security in and around their home). I think there are two reasons: first, I know that most people are less pedantic than me, and taking the maximally pedantic approach usually leaves me out of step with the world; second, and more specific to this question, if the intended answer was 'C' then the whole exercise would be quite silly. It's blindingly obvious that we don't know for sure which fictional character is more upset; I would only think to answer C if the context in which the question was asked made the 'extremely easy reading comprehension/deductive inference test' interpretation more plausible than 'not-quite-precisely worded empathy/social expectations test'.
I think there's an analogy to the Gricean maxims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle . If you assume the test-taker isn't trying to waste your time with silly trick questions, you will read the necessary implicit qualifications into the question rather than going with the one that is boringly obvious on a fully-literal reading.
(I do agree that C is obviously correct, though; whether marking it incorrect is itself an error probably depends on what exactly one's score is supposed to show.)
This seems like exactly the kind of survey that you can use to prove anything you want. At minimum, there are two possible ways to interpret the question: as a sociology question ("would most women be more upset about getting mugged close to home ?") or as a logic question ("given the parameters of the problem, and only those parameters, do we have enough information to pick A or B ?").
Color me cynical, but this sounds like one of the (many) reasons for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
Just to be super clear: if this question is from a cognitive assessment test to diagnose Parkinsons, and the response dynamics of Parkinsons populations are dramatically different from the response dynamics of control populations, then it is a good question.
These assessment tests are not arbiters of moral rightness or factual accuracy, they're diagnostic tools with a very specific job to accomplish, and if they accomplish that job well then they're good tools. I wouldn't try to read too much into their contents beyond 'this is what we found to work'.
Who says they derived it from science? Psychology can be taken in an arts degree.
I think the trick is supposed to be the word "just". This makes one of them sound more sensational than the other, and is otherwise incongruous with the style of test questions.
The problem is, the word isn't said by Janet - it's said by the narrator. Had I been asked which one the *narrator* thinks is more upsetting, I'd have answered A, but I (correctly) noticed that the narrator's feelings are not relevant to the question asked and excluded that from consideration.
Something similar to this (with less potential for theorising) would actually make a good way to test how easily people are led astray by unreliable narrators.
One failing of the US healthcare system I do not understand: Why is it so hard to *pay* them?
You'd think the one advantage of a mostly-privatized system would be that they'd make it easy for you to give them money. But it's always incredibly complicated even in simple cases. I have standard health and dental insurance, and whenever I go to get something basic - like a regular checkup or a filling - the doctor's office won't let me pay the copay up front, tell me they'll call the insurance, and call me again or send me a bill in the mail six months later (by which time I've forgotten what it was even about). Why is this? This seems like something they're strongly incentivized to handle efficiently.
There's your confusion. Nearly everything about the normal medical system is extremely regulated, especially payment. It's my understanding that things are a bit more flexible with concierge medicine, though I'm not sure how true that is.
For most office visits, I show my insurance card and swipe my credit card. I've only had a few weird cases where they send you an invoice 2 months later and then you have to either mail it back, or log on to an online payment system.
Surgery is horrible though. For an outpatient surgery, I payed an up front cost, then I got a bill from the surgeon a month later, a bill from the anesthesiologist a week after that, and then another bill from the surgeon because there was some issue with insurance and the cost ended up being more than expected. I was never told that those other bills were coming and the up front cost was not cheap (it was partially covered by insurance).
Not sure about this, but I think insurance companies have pretty strict rules about when and how you can charge the patient and also the insurance company. For example, you don't want a doctor's office secretly reimbursing the most lucrative patients their copays, so that all those patients choose that doctor and have no incentive not to overspend on care. I think some of these regulations mean that doctors need to carefully document exactly how they're charging patients and make sure it fits insurance company regulations, which might sometimes mean they want to talk to the insurance before they take your money.
Just for comparison, some really big companies are difficult to pay also. I used to work at [very small company] that was acquired by [very large enterprise]. We went from being able to sell our service to people directly with a credit card to having to send prospective customers to a salesperson who worked for a "partner" of [very large enterprise] who could facilitate a transaction (while taking a cut).
Yeah, this has been my experience as well. The larger an institution you're dealing with, the less you'll see money changing hands between individuals. Maybe it just cuts down on the graft potential?
That might be a factor, but I think the biggest reason is "back office software." At many companies, things don't *exist* if they can't easily be plugged into [enterprise management system]. And a lot of those systems are really old (1990s) and extremely difficult to work with - migrations take years and years.
I think it's honestly "it's too expensive to onboard a lot of payors into this system that runs the whole business; let's let smaller partners deal with it and we'll pay them so we don't have to deal with the pain of upgrading."
Most people's insurance at best covers 80% of dental care, but every insurance company may reimburse a different amount for different procedures and they may refuse to reimburse for some procedures altogether. That means a dentist has no idea what to charge you at the time they've seen you. They will bill multiple procedures for one visit and not know which ones will be covered until they actually pay.
Depending on the billing cycle for the dentist and the payment lag of the insurance company, it could take them a month or more to find out what your insurance company paid for your visit and another month to bill you for what's left. If the billing people for the dentist are part-time or inefficient and the insurance company sucks (which many do) that could stretch out to months.
Insurance companies don't get to tell a provider how to bill their patient, but it creates an accounting hassle for the dentist if they charge you what the *think* will be 20% of your bill and later it turns out they have to reimburse you because you overpaid based on what the insurance company actually paid. Cutting checks back to patients is a hassle, particularly if it would have to be done in a majority of instances.
Most insurance plans provide simple co-pays for doctor visits and mental healthcare visits -- like $25 per visit -- and that's regardless of what "procedures" were done. So it's much easier in that situation and those kinds of providers can usually just take payment at the time of the appointment.
Our insurance system is really broken. Speaking as a healthcare provider who owns my own business.
Clarification: when I said above an insurance company doesn't get to tell a provider "how" to bill the patient, I mean literally like when and how they collect payment from a patient. The provider IS required to charge the patient no more than the "contracted rate" for any given procedure.
So my dentist lets me pay my 20% at the time of the visit partly because I was a little pushy about it and I only realized later, being a provider myself though not a dentist, that I was actually making more work for them by wanting to do it that way, and they were essentially doing me a favor by being willing to take my payment knowing that it would have to be corrected later.
> Most people's insurance at best covers 80% of dental care, but every insurance company may reimburse a different amount for different procedures and they may refuse to reimburse for some procedures altogether. That means a dentist has no idea what to charge you at the time they've seen you. They will bill multiple procedures for one visit and not know which ones will be covered until they actually pay.
In my country the first sentence is true but the second and third aren't.
When I go to the dentist the receptionist scans my health care card on the way out, then there's some kind of automated system whereby her computer checks with the health insurance company's computer exactly how much they're going to pay, and within seconds the receptionist tells me the remaining amount that I owe.
This doesn't seem like a complicated system to build.
My dentist is able to do this mostly too, but I think it's because I'm part of a really big insurance company that the dentist has a lot of experience with and knows my insurance company will reliably pay X amount for Y kind of dental visit. But then some portion of their patients will have smaller or more dysfunctional insurance companies and they can't do that with them. Our system is really really fragmented.
Sometimes I wonder how many of the problems we have in general are because we are still this weird confederation of states. In the state in the U.S. where I live, one of the more common health insurance companies is a non-profit that exists only in my state. That seems cool on the surface, but they're not very well run. Private insurance companies are mostly regulated at the state level, so even though Anthem, say, is a HUGE multi-national insurance company, it is actually Anthem of Iowa or Anthem of Colorado here in the U.S., and all the regulations and procedures overseeing them are covered by state law. What a mess!
I think that's part of why my plan gets so complicated - In principle I have delta dental, which is super common. But my employer's headquartered in Chicago, so I get Delta Dental Illinois insurance, not Delta Dental New York, which is not as common for NYC dentists.
It is a *very* complicated system to build (Source: I work for a company attempting to build it).
Due to various reasons, insurance in the United States is an absolute tangle of regulations and contracts. The cost of a procedure will depend on:
1. the contracted rate between the provider and the insurance (this will vary from provider to provider and insurance to insurance)
2. The contract between the member and the insurance (this will vary from group to group, especially for employer-provided insurance)
3. State and federal regulations (which ought to be reflected in the various contracts, but you better double-check just in case)
4. Other claims the member has made (let's say Susie goes to a doctor on the 15th and the 16th of the month--if her visit on the 15th pushes her above her deductible, but the insurance hasn't been billed yet, then we can't correctly compute what she owes on the 16th)
5. Other insurance the member has, because they can carry multiple insurances and then stuff gets really weird
6. other crap I can't recall right now because I'm still waking up
Note that the contracts and regulations are *dense*, and they change yearly. The administrative burden to keep up with it all is high--none of these databases talk to each other, because nobody thought they would need to when they were first made, and the cost of transferring to a new system is high. And there are legal implications, potentially quite costly, of screwing up ("do not change this code without first consulting a lawyer" is commented liberally throughout our codebase).
As someone who works in healthcare insurance billing: this. Exactly this. We can only guess what insurance will pay, and for a lot of businesses that means they'd rather wait to bill. We try to err on the side of collecting payment up front (because when you send people a bill about 20-30% of the time they won't pay it) but that means we end up overcharging clients sometimes and then we have to sort out refunds. Which is a serious pain.
Some insurance companies (like Premera) have nice websites where you can input a client's ID card info and get a fairly accurate estimate on what Premera will pay. Not a perfect one (sometimes it says they still have money left to pay on their deductible, but by the time the claim reaches Premera the deductible is used up, for instance), but a pretty good one. But we have to regularly deal with about 6 different insurance companies, and they all have different methods of getting an estimate of benefits. Sometimes it means calling on the phone and sitting in a queue for 40 minutes. Sometimes it means navigating a robo-phone tree unti you get the option to have them fax you a benefits estimate. Some companies have a website, but they only give you overall benefits and not up to date details (such as, this client has a $1,500 deductible that may or may not be met, or an out of pocket for the year that may or may not be met). Some companies have a website that works, but only tells you if they're eligible, not what benefits are.
It's a real pain. On the other hand, if you put in the effort there is a lot of money to be made. I can see why a lot of doctors hate dealing with it though.
Our insurance system is a mystery to me as well principally because I was born to a military member in a military hospital and grew up in that system and went into the military myself and now as a retired military member pay a token ($50/mo) for 'everything' if I go to a military facility (which i do almost always and no, this is not VA healthcare). Occasionally I've strayed including for PT post-ACL surgery when going to the mil facility was a pain or for a simple skin issue to a local dermatologist that offered a same day appointment. Both times I was asked "what insurance do you have" but knowing I had no "referral" to a non-military provider, I just asked "What's your best rate for a cash payer?" and was given a number I though very fair and far less than I expected based on what I'd read about the ridiculous fees in some parts of our system. I know I'm highly atypical in this regard but it got me thinking about what a system with basic services provided for free to everyone might look like (like my healthcare) and what the cost of a parallel "private side" might be to augment that. Clearly the highly regulated system of employer provided healthcare isn't doing anything to keep costs down. Yes, I do understand the huge incentives and high pay for health care professionals is both a feature and a bug of the system. Yet, I keep coming back to the healthcare I've received all my life and for which I've paid either nothing or a pittance and thought "hey, it's been pretty good."
Like many other things, insurance is a set of algorithms so horribly complicated that it takes a significant effort to figure out what it would do in any particular case, and very few people are capable of that effort.
We have two identical twins who have the same insurance and who were getting identical therapy from the same provider. One of them was getting charged flat $25 for every visit, but the other one's bills suggest some algorithm that tries to exhaust a deductible and then cover some % of the charge - except this seems to happen more than once per year, so it doesn't make any sense.
You might think it is easy to figure out exactly what's different about the way those identical services were billed. I think this has been going on for over 4 months now, and the only help we could get was the suspension of the bills (for some time, or until they figure out what's going on, or until they can't suspend them anymore).
Now imagine if we had not two identical twins but only one kid. Would anyone even believe that anything was wrong with how those services were billed?
We've given too much power to bad code that nobody understands. Given the speed at which this has been escalating, it's my personal belief that stupid code will probably be the end of us much faster than super-smart AI.
The issue is there are too many third party payors involved between you & the doctor there is not really a pay for services setup with the exception of one or two hospitals.
I used to be a coffee drinker, then I gave it up and went years without much caffeine. Now I'll have coffee once in a while, and it is *really* nice. I feel happier, friendlier, and more energetic/ The effect is strong, but I know that if I do that every day, my brain will adjust and I'll need coffee just to get back to baseline.
So what's the solution? Only have coffee once a week? Twice a week? Alternate coffee with something else that has a similar effect through a different mechanism?
I don't know much about caffeine tolerance, but it might be interesting to use a random procedure that gets you coffee on average once per some given time period (roll a die, if it lands on a 6 have coffee?). This prevents your brain from getting used to it and sounds kind of fun.
My personal solution to this problem is to alternate between using coffee for a few days and chewing nicotine gum for a few days. That way I never build up a lasting tolerance to either.
I think of caffeine as borrowing energy/focus from the future to the next few hours. From that perspective it's a zero sum game, except if you steer the low energy phase to your sleep time.
Currently I'm on one cup at waking and one after lunch, and that works pretty OK for me.
Have you tried going half-caffeinated? I've been playing with my amounts lately. When I notice the caffeine isn't having as much of an effect, I'll dilute it a bit more for a week, or even take a day or two off, and then work up gradually again to fuller strength. It gives a lot of flexibility in how much caffeine you're delivering to your system.
Caffeine tolerance wears off pretty quickly, at least in my experience. If I take even one day off of caffeine each week, that dramatically slows how fast I build tolerance, and taking 2-3 days off seems like a complete reset.
I don’t try to regulate so precisely now but I have been successful in the past using coffee at a low steady state - about a third of a cup of strong coffee a day seems to be a good amount that picks me up but doesn’t push me to drink more.
the main issue i have is that if i have a bad nights sleep or something I’ll just drink more than that - and then I’ll need more and then more. Then when it stops being fun I’ll go cold turkey and sleep a 14 hour day.
I read somewhere that you won't build up a tolerance if you wait until 10am or later to drink your first cup. Something about how the tolerance is caused by interference with your natural wakefulness hormones, which will have subsided by later in the morning. Don't know if that's actually true, but it's what I've tried to do ever since reading that article, and it seems to work really well for me.
I've been running "one-to-three cups of coffee every day, no coffee every other weekend" for years and it seems to work pretty well. I still have tolerance relative to a non-drinker, but it gets reset to a baseline with just the weekend break. Of course I get withdrawal headaches every other weekend which sucks, but that's why god invented Advil.
My regimen allows serious caffeine two non-adjacent days per calendar week, with an option for nicotine lozenges if I need stimulants on back-to-back days.
But it's not the details of the regimen that matter, but the underlying attitude. If that's "caffeine is great, how can I maximize caffeine greatness, what's the bare minimum I have to go without it", you're probably going to wind up with a caffeine tolerance again on short order. If it's "caffeine is a special treat for rare and appropriate occasions", you'll probably do OK.
Also, get to bed on time. If necessary, cut things out of your life to make sure you get to bed on time.
Wow, thanks so much for all the replies. I don't use tobacco or modafinil, but besides those ideas, it looks like many of you are suggesting that I just take off a few days between each dose (or take off a couple days to reset after multi-day usage). Too bad, though as John Schilling pointed out, I need to just think of it as a special treat to have once or twice a week. (JS, since you asked, my sleep is fine.)
I drink coffee for the taste and the good mood; the wired energy is just a bonus and not point for me. For a while I only drank coffee maybe once or twice a week. But then I found a good decaff. So now I drink coffee anywhere from 2-5 times per week, alternating decaff and regular on thoughtful whims. i.e. if i drink regular 3 days in a row, I probably won't have anymore that week. Or if I drink decaff for 3 days, maybe the next day I'll have regular.
A couple weeks ago I posted here (and in some other places) some questions about the feasibility and best practices of developing friendships online. Here are some insights on the topic based on my "research" (and a surprise startup pitch at the very end):
ON ONLINE FRIENDSHIPS
Epistemics
I like friends who aren't inconvenienced easily. Some people are inconvenienced easily. They like things a certain way. They don’t like to have their routine disrupted. And they have every right to be that way. It’s just that they are unlikely to be my friends. Tragic loss for them, I know.
If I had a primary filter for friendships, this would be it. I know people whose primary filters are political, or aesthetic, or financial, or intellectual. They all make sense to me.
As you may intuit from my primary filter, my definition of friendship veers toward the romantic, or religious. I demand some level of sacrifice without accounting. If a friend shows up at midnight on my doorstep, unannounced, it’s a blessing.
I would assume that these values are becoming a bit antiquated today, but I don’t know, I haven’t done the research. Anyway, enough about me.
The Question
We’re all spending more and more time online - it seems about an hour/day more every decade. It’s not crazy that a cyberpunk virtual monopoly on our time will become the standard within the next couple of decades. If not for us, then for our kids and grandkids. So I was wondering, what will this do to friendships...
Interesting stuff. And it caught me surprise that the reasons behind your primary filter are spiritual, since my first thoughts were all centered on things like brain chemistry, energy availability, physicalized introversion triggers (like hyper-sensitivities)...
Of course the knowledge that someone who don't pass your filter may indeed share your values doesn't mean squat if your aesthetic criteria are not met by that someone, right?
(I absolutely adore the idea of being the type of person who loves friends showing up at my house without warning, but I've had to learn to accept that my limited energy streams just don't allow it.)
None of my insights actually help with the spiritual part... While I'm tempted to say that it would be borne out through experience (E), I'm not excluding the possibility of having a filter that would select for those types of interests (I). But as I was doing the exploration, I lost some interest in the self-serving angle and became more interested in the mechanics and possible tech solutions to the problem.
>I demand some level of sacrifice without accounting. If a friend shows up at midnight on my doorstep, unannounced, it’s a blessing.
I both can't understand what you mean here and I really can't simulate a worldview that would believe this. You're saying that if Johnny (or whomever) shoes up at 12:00 a.m. on a Tuesday you'd consider that a positive development to your day?
Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. In fact, as I read your question, a part of me got excited that Johnny is going to show up (unannounced). And I don't even know a Johnny.
That said, the rest of the article doesn't address my particular (or peculiar) preferences.
Ok - still confused. What in any way shape or form gets you excited about this? Have you ever actually had it happen? It's normally pretty shitty.
I'm thinking pretty hard. Over the course of my life I've had... 6 people show up at my door unexpectedly between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. (not counting people arriving at parties or other social gatherings at which people joining would be expected).
One of those instances was a crush of mine coming to announce they had mutually positive feelings for me. That was a fun night. The other five were all people who were chemical impaired and in the midst of some truly terrible situations and needed help. The two most exciting were "I'm currently running from the cops" and "I left the house because I thought I was going to kill my husband."
5/6 of these events were incredibly tiring and stressful situations to deal with. Talking drunk people down from the ledge isn't a fun pastime. What specifically about this situation excites you? Is it just unexpected social interaction? Do you really, really love helping people who are incredibly messed up?
Sorry if it seems like I'm badgering you, it's just that I find this really confusing. It's as if you said "I enjoy having sandwiches knocked out of my hand as I'm trying to eat" or anything else that's universally considered bad.
Ok. You've clearly had a very statistically significant trend of "negative" late night visitor experiences. So, the simplest way to help you map my world view is to imagine that you had 6 out of 6 positive late-night friend visitor experiences. It's not impossible, right?
The next line of reasoning is more dependent on age. 30 years ago, before cell phones, "dropping in" on somebody was much more common. There were even cliches like "I was in the area, so I thought I'd drop in." Today, this is odd because it's both impractical not to call/text ahead of time, and also much more likely to be considered rude/weird. But if my value system was already being developed 30 years ago, you might see how it did so different social norms.
I had a small experience in August that I could relate. I was visiting an old friend and we were in the back yard, BBQing and drinking beers. Around 11pm, a new face appeared. It was a neighbor from down the street. He said he heard music and came by (and brought his own beer). This was a very "small" event, but to me it stuck out as a wholesome breath of fresh air. The freedom of just showing up signals a combination of trust, informality, and conviviality that's often lacking in more modern friendships. It also introduces an unpredictability to life that's been "scheduled out". Personally, I often equate unpredictability to adventure, but I know it's not that way for everybody.
None of this make the experiences you listed any less unpleasant.
Ok, I get it. I'm biased towards believing that "anyone showing up after midnight is a massive hassle" and projected that bias when you said these kind of events excited you, but you weren't talking about those kinds of events.
Cool. I appreciate your perspective, thanks for engaging with me to help me get clarity.
See, the interesting thing about my thought process is that I would 1) love it if the situation with the neighbor happened to me and 2) would absolutely _never_ dream of doing that to someone else, in case that person felt differently. This is a common thread for me, where there are lots of things that, if a friend did/asked me to do etc., I would have no problem accommodating, would not feel any resentment, and in fact would be happy to help, but that I could never imagine imposing on a friend the same way. I realize the inherent contradiction, but I can't help the emotional response of "never impose on others unless you _absolutely have to_, but also be happy to help when imposed upon.
You can ask all of your friends if any of them enjoy being imposed upon. If any of them say yes, you can try to practice on them, and see how it goes. What if... it totally blows your mind!!!!
Not really related to your project, but in my experience (born in USSR, moved from Russia to the US as a teenager, have a PhD in math, work in an industrial research position), the closest I've come to the romanticized ideal of the Soviet-style friendship with dropping in on people unannounced at midnight was in high school at nerd camps, and as a college undergraduate. ("Dropping in" consisted of walking down the hall in the first case, and across campus in the second.) There was less of it for me as a graduate student (although I think that's accidental and it could've peaked in graduate school for some people), and dramatically less afterwards, not least because most everyone (myself included) had paired up and moved off campus. The question of how to have something approximating the community and camaraderie of a college undergraduate while living a standard-issue adult life with a husband, child, dog, and an 8-5 job is certainly interesting; the romanticized Soviet-style platonic ideal of friendship managed somehow. (Although according to my mother, overcoming the common adversity of daily life in the USSR was a large part of the experience for her.)
As a fellow soviet alum, it's nice to hear your story. While those relationships are more rare these days, I refuse to believe they are not impossible. Partially, the problem is of "standard-issue" (it just so happens that tightknit friendships were a part of the Soviet standard-issue). But if you have friends - even "standard issue" friends - who love you, then go ahead and surprise drop in on them. You'll make their week, if not month, if not year. (And maybe it's time that you left your husband to hold the fort for 24-72 hours. Sorry, I have no idea if your husband deserved that.)
I think part of the difference between my experience and my parents' (on which I'm basing my romanticized notions) is that, by my age, they had lived in one city their entire lives; I've lived in six. (I've definitely at times felt like I'm better at friendship by correspondence than at friendship in person.) I have good friends from all six periods, but (a) the ones in my city are the newest ones, and (b) I don't have many friends who are also friends with each other. I think having your friends also be friends with each other might actually be important to the project, not least because it makes it easier to interact with them more frequently; that feels like it was an important part of the success of my undergraduate experience.
Suppose that you own a business and you have a choice of either hiring a robot or a human. The expected worker turnover rate is 10 years and the robot also breaks down after 10 years. The nominal salary and the annualized cost of the robot are the same. So which do you chose? The answer is the robot - due to taxes. Capital is a business expenditure, you can deduct it from your tax burden. A human on the other hand incurs payroll taxes and income tax (and some others as well).
Much has been said about the declining share of labor relative to capital (in general, but particularly low skill labor). But I've never seen anyone comment on the fact that our tax system explicitly incentives businesses to choose capital over labor whenever possible. Is this is a good thing - an incentive to automate where possible? Or is it an economic inefficiency? Or both?
You deduct the robot's purchase price bit by bit, over the life of the robot. That's what depreciation is. The capital investment and depreciation are not two separate things that you get to deduct.
> Although we all unfortunately depreciate over time, I don't believe any tax code allows depreciation of their human workforce to be written off.
Although human bodies do age and break down, people tend to become *more* valuable as employees as they gain experience and knowledge over the course of their careers (though this trend breaks down when you get close to retirement age). Someone who has 1 year of job experience typically earns less and produces less valuable work than someone with 10 years of job experience, but a 10-year-old CNC machine is almost never more valuable than a brand new CNC machine.
As others have stated, depreciation makes buying a robot less advantageous given your scenario. The US tax code is extremely favorable to hiring and investment more broadly.
I’m confused. The robot depreciates to a value of zero over ten years. All of that is tax deductible. The human is paid an amount equal to that of the robot over ten years (with the same deduction) and then leaves. So far things are even - I’m assuming they both do the same job for those ten years. Add in payroll and income tax and that makes the human more expensive, not to mention healthcare, social security tax and more. Where’s the mistake?
You just need to google this. There’s a whole bunch of IRS guidance on how assets get depreciated. My strong guess would be that a robot isn’t any different than a milling machine. Depreciation is the robot tax consideration to compare the human tax considerations against. Depreciation isn’t mentioned in your post so that’s your biggest mistake.
Corporations get to write off all the employee expenses in the current tax year. Every year. That’s very tax advantageous.
Also, employee payroll (besides the 7.5% Social Security contribution) and income taxes are irrelevant to the corporation’s tax burden. Those fall on the employee.
but are we specifically looking at the incentives due to taxes? the OP seems to be narrowly looking at if this incentive is mostly due to taxes. overall cost I assume includes somethings which are not taxes.
A robot. If all things are equal (I suppose payroll taxes are included in this calculation), the robot is probably more predictable. It can break down but the probably has a service agreement with the manufacturer. Whereas a human may quit, get sick, go on strike to demand better pay or otherwise sabotage your business. Also, employment costs can be expected to rise while the technology costs tend to decrease over time or getting better for the same price.
I don't understand the premise of your argument. *Businesses* don't pay payroll taxes, income taxes, or corporate income taxes. Businesses are merely pass-through devices that assign those charges to various human beings, id est payroll taxes and income taxes are paid by the worker, sales and corporate income taxes are paid by the customers. Every businessman knows the true total cost of an employee is a certain percentage higher than his take home salary, and every employee knows his "true" salary (what gets put in the bank that he gets to spend) is only a percentage of his nominal gross salary. Some business make an explicit note of the sales tax that is inherent in the their final selling price, but in other cases they do not, and in any event they almost never give more than the tax on the final transaction, they don't give a complete accounting of all the taxes paid, e.g. sales taxes on the raw materials, payroll taxes for the employees who made the widget or provide the service.
Anyway, there is a very good reason (from labor's point of view) for tax policy to favor capital investment: because it makes labor more efficient, and rising productivity is the *only* way real wages can rise over time -- each hour you work has to actually produce more widgets, so that the real value of your labor (measured in widgets) goes up. Capital investment, e.g. technology, is the only way that can happen.
Assume that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is true. According to it, Nature is inherently probabilistic; it is only until a measuring device (not necessarily a human) makes a quantitative measurement of X that X can be said to have that measure. Does anyone know whether all the results of measurements are due to the foundational random generator of Nature? And if this is true, then does this mean that our actions are not ultimately determined or free but random?
It is my impression that this is more-or-less how quantum mechanics is supposed to be interpreted. However I am unsure about how much quantum physics relates to whether our actions or free or not (although I am inclined to think that, metaphysically, none of our actions are free; also see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07884.pdf for a description of how the deepest underlying physics of everyday phenomena has been essentially completely characterized).
I believ it doesn't really matter if the underlying dynamics are governed by classical chaotic systems or quantum randomness, both could mean our actions are not "determined", but neither will provide "freedom" in a meaningful way. If there is "free will", it is to be found on another level of abstraction.
> I hold that all interpretations of [quantum mechanics] are just crutches that are better or worse at helping you along to the Zen realization that QM is what it is and doesn’t need an interpretation. As Sidney Coleman famously argued, what needs reinterpretation is not QM itself, but all our pre-quantum philosophical baggage—the baggage that leads us to demand, for example, that a wavefunction |ψ⟩ either be “real” like a stubbed toe or else “unreal” like a dream.
I'll check it out. For anyone who is interested, here's an interesting comment I just found on a video ("Chris Langan - How Free Will Works - CTMU") about free will:
> You still can't escape the logical limits on individual choice that most people would instinctively reject as "free will" if you pointed them out to them. We each inherit our genetics and epigenetics, which have massive influence on everything we do or think. Our environment is set for us the moment our primordial fertilization occurs. The large-scale structures of the human body are generated by our genetics and environmental input, and the environment itself is structured without our influence, at least initially. The large-scale structures obey Newtonian mechanics and are thus deterministic, and that's where it ends. However, if you try to work around that by suggesting that there may be quantum events that are not deterministic, and the outcome of that event is amplified into a thought or action, then the implication that our actions are not they themselves deterministic may be correct. However, this doesn't escape the problem at base, because the quantum event itself is purely random. The wave function describing a series of quantum events is deterministic in aggregate, but the individual event's outcome along that aggregate distribution is quintessentially unpredictable, regardless of whether or not you can add intervening layers of probabilistic descriptions of an outcome. Fundamentally, the only logically possible categories are events that are predetermined, completely random, or random within given limits that they themselves are predetermined. This is the "automaticity" Langan refers to here when discussing coordination that occurs "automatically" during our free will process, and the "automaticity" is what people have no control over ultimately. However, because this automaticity is the basis of every conscious act of will, and it itself is subject to these logical restrictions, one can see how our acts of free will are really nothing more than amplifications of quantum events which they themselves are random. Is this free will? The only sense in which it is free is that the origination comes from within the bounds of your physical body, but that doesn't make it any less subject to the predictability of mathematics and the randomness of the universe. It is in this sense that one cannot, ultimately, take full credit for one's own actions in the sense that everything we are, do, and even will does not come from anything that is not ultimately predetermined or random, because even if you amplify a quantum event through a series of ever-increasing structures of bodily organization that channel the outcome of the event into an increased probability of a certain kind of outcome, the chain of causation itself still remains arbitrary and random at base.
I don't really like the free will debate because I think it tends to focus on a meaningless question (is the made-up term "free will" compatible with the universe we live in?) while ignoring a meaningful distinction (to what degree are a person's actions free from coercion in a given situation?). There is a meaningful difference between someone committing premeditated murder because of a personal grudge, vs. a child soldier being forced at gunpoint to kill someone. The murderer's choice was "free" in a way that the child soldier's wasn't. You could even imagine a third scenario where someone was knocked unconscious and physically manipulated into pulling a trigger to kill someone. All three scenarios have the common feature that they occur in a world governed by the laws of physics, but there are very good reasons to treat the cases differently in our legal system, in our personal judgements, and in how we want to structure society. Teasing apart the nuances of coercion is difficult (e.g. what if the murderer had a brain tumor that impaired higher cognitive functions?) and how we make those judgements can deeply affect our lives. I don't think our approach to these issues should be contingent on whether we live in a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics, quantum randomness, divine predestination, or ineffable metaphysical entities.
> All three scenarios have the common feature that they occur in a world governed by the laws of physics, but there are very good reasons to treat the cases differently in our legal system . . .
Right, I agree; but the practical component and the purely intellectual component of these discussions seem to be at odds with one another when one is trying to comes to terms with either component. Practically, a society can have any set of laws of a huge number of possible laws (arguing about which is best is the task, some would say, of ethics); whereas the Universe has one set of ultimate principles worth discovering. It's worthless (or so I think) for a society to use the laws of physics to determine its law, just as it's equally worthless for scientists to keep in mind the practical consequences of the laws they're trying to discover. But my original question is more about determining the actual state of the second component; it's what I want to know about, not so that it can influence me or help me influence society, but so that I have more knowledge of the foundation of reality.
> just as it's equally worthless for scientists to keep in mind the practical consequences of the laws they're trying to discover
I don't mean this to be as cold-hearted as it seems; of course there are situations where a scientist wants to be concerned about the practical implications of his discoveries. What I meant (in the specific context of free will) is that the pure scientist should not be worried about the consequences of his discoveries, because regardless of the discoveries, it's not going to change the fact that societies shouldn't - and won't - simply adduce the laws of physics to make their legal system a self-destructive or foolish system. They will (usually) have a complex system designed around higher-level concepts such as justice, fairness, etc. (But perhaps that is a naively positive view of the humanity and its use of science.)
> Does anyone know whether all the results of measurements are due to the foundational random generator of Nature?
Which experiments? In theory, you should be still able to approximate determinism using large, non-chaotic systems. In practice, whatever was predictable before is still predictable -- it adds up to normality.
I think you're over-interpreting the Copenhagen interpretation. It says nothing about what actually is true about a system, it only says what can be measured, and it says for systems in a state which is not an eigenstate of the operator corresponding to what you want to measure, you cannot know what the value of the measurement is before you make it -- that is, you cannot *predict* it. But does the system, nevertheless, have some value just before you measure it that is equal to the value you measure? Current science has no answer to that question, because we have no way of knowing anything without a measurement, or a trajectory -- meaning some 100% reliable theoretical way of connecting a measurement *in the past* with the result of a measurement in the present. Unfortunately a fundamental property of QM is that classical trajectories (those with just one path from past to future) are the exception, not the rule, and in most cases don't exist.
That is, what QM says is you cannot *predict* the value of some measurements in the present, even with all possible information about the past. That is not the same thing as saying the system does not have *some* value at all possible times.
A classic example would be measurement of the location of a bound particle (say an electron in an atom) which is in an energy eigenstate. We cannot predict its exact position at a given time, all we can predict is the probability of it being various places (the usual wavefunction you see graphed). Of course, when we actually measure its position, we do get a specific position, as precisely as we wish -- we see a particle at a specific location. *Every* time we measure the position, we get a specific answer. What happens in between measurements? Does the particle "have" a specific position, or not? Again, current science cannot answer this question, because QM cannot predict a precise position at time X given any number of measurements at earlier times. It's possible that's a weakness of the theory, of course, but no one has come up with a better theory.
Carl Pham: You asked “But does the system, nevertheless, have some value just before you measure it”? That sounds like a hidden-variable theory, and it has been proven (the Bell inequality) to be false. Unless you want to allow for faster than light travel or some implausible explanation.
Aggregated random processes don't necessarily result in a random process. We can see this obviously with, say, organic evolution. Point mutations can effectively change any base pair to any other, but due to constraints thanks to embryology and other factors, all mutations can't be expressed, and ones that can be but don't confer any reproductive advantage won't necessarily be passed on. That greatly simplifies the process, but point being the end result is much more predictable than the underlying cause.
With animal action, at some quantum level, maybe a random fluctuation (if the universe is truly fundamentally random at that level) can cause some ion in an ion channel in a neuronal membrane to bounce a few degrees more than can be accounted for by electromagnetism alone, but it would take many, many such random events occurring at the same time and in a correlated way so as not to cancel each other out to measurably impact action potential across a synapse and thus possibly influence behavior. The net result in terms of muscle movement is no less random than if the universe had no randomness in it at all.
Sorry if this is too random/off-topic but are there any martial artists in this community? I've been practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for about 2 years now, but am thinking of quitting because I've been hearing a lot of anecdotal stories lately of BJJ athletes having strokes at young ages, possibly due to the chokes putting pressure on arteries in the neck. So I'm trying to look for another martial art to switch to. Looking for something fun and involving a good cardio workout, but without any long-term negative impact to health. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Huh. Never heard of those anecdotes, and I've been doing BJJ for 18 years now. If the stories involve pro athletes, you should consider that a) they're doing a LOT more training than most hobbyists, and b) they're probably juicing as well.
Regarding recommendations: "without any long-term negative impact" rules out all full-contact sports, because they will either cause direct damage or wear and tear. Many of the non-competitive "martial-artsy" disciplines like Aikido are out as well - not much of a cardio workout to be had there. It might sound stupid, but if you find a boxing or kickboxing gym that lets you practice without sparring (or with only very light contact sparring), that might be worth a try.
Capoiera is a lot of fun (probably less of a “serious” martial art than Jiu Jitsu), and if you’re in a region with a significant Brazilian population you should be able to find a rhoda.
Thirding Capoeira being a lot of fun. It also has the benefit of having a lot less mysticism and authoritarian structures than eastern martial arts, although there is still hierarchy in it a lot of the structure of classes and actually playing Capoeira encourages mixing of ranks.
Totally! IMO it's one of the few disciplines where sparring between people of vastly different skills can be rewarding for both parties. I've seen super fun games between absolute masters and people who can only really ginga.
Many avid BJJ practitioners in the community. Have never heard the stories of young strokes. You should see if these are actually statistically significant before giving up a beloved hobby. Lots of people have strokes, athletes on gear especially.
And if the problem is regular application of chokes, either get better or tap sooner (or both).
Judo is a lot of fun, has a lot in common with Jujutsu, but focuses more on standing throws and techniques. It does also include ne waza, but applications of joint locks and chokes are rare in actual tournaments.
Basically every martial art is less chokey than BJJ, it's generally understood that choking someone out is extremely dangerous and unpredictable as to consequences in all of human society *except* BJJ practitioners, who insist it's perfectly safe. Switch to literally anything.
My personal suggerstion would be for Wudang/Practical Tai Chi Chuan, the TCC that caves your face in. It's obscure and so it's very likely there might not be a club where you are, but if there is, do that.
That's an interesting statement. Allow me to paraphrase: "This activity is considered dangerous by everyone except the people who do it every day and observe no negative effects. Obviously, these people are idiots, and you should not do it." Could there be other explanations, maybe?
No, not really. You're deliberately simplifying the issue by eliding the extensive actual information available on this topic from myriad sources (possibly due to BJJ-related brain damage? /s). I didn't write "all other martial artists, who are feebs by implication, and only speculating", I wrote *all of human society*, because that's what I meant. There is ample data to confirm the dangers of choking and the unpredictable but potentially grave effects of brain oxygen deprivation. This is like if there were a subculture of chicken-race enthusiasts who insisted that car crashes are "not observed harmful" and claimed that "we've never seen anything like that". Any sane person regards such testimony with skepticism, to put it mildly.
Okay, the last time I looked into the topic was a couple of years ago, when the consensus was that when a choke is done to a healthy individual, in a competent manner, and let go quickly, it is safe and leaves no lasting damage. That was supported by various studies and the experience from roughly a century of judo competion. I now found some stories from the last years that indicate that strokes may be triggered by chokes occasionally, so it would be at least be worthwhile to study this systematically, collect statistics, and be aware of the possibility. Still not a reason to freak out (compared to, say, the dozen or so people who die of brain injuries after boxing matches each year).
I've had to quit temporarily due to time pressures, but I can recommend HEMA. It's definitely heavy cardio if you make it and fun in a way a lot of other martial arts aren't (even if that's mostly because of the expensive toys you're playing with). Technically I'm not sure how to rate it on health impacts, obviously injuries have the potential to be much worse, but realistically the most common injury is heatstroke, followed by ankle injuries from poor form. It also has the added advantage of your increasing skill over the years being able to offset any losses from physicality that comes with aging. Longsword clubs are easy enough to find, especially in America, though I personally prefer singlesword systems.
I've read quite often the slogan "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences", but that seems poorly thought-out, because in a sense, that's what it should mean.
"You're free to say what you want, but if we don't like it, we will abduct you and your family and torture you to death. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
...doesn't quite work for me.
"You're free to say what we want, but if we don't like it, we will scream at you what a terrible person you are and that you should burn in hell, and we will pester your employer to fire you and your prospective employers to never give you a job ever again. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
...still seems wrong.
"You're free to say what you want, but you should consider how it reflects on us, your employer/ teammates/ friends, and if we find it completely inacceptable, we may have to cut you loose to preserve our own reputation. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
...seems kinda reasonable. But is it really? Where should you draw the line between 2 and 3? Should you draw it somewhere else? Should the fact that there's a mob of obviously loony fanatics raging on twitter influence the reaction of employers, coworkers, friends?
Should freedom of speech apply to general statements that may or may not hurt someones feelings? Should it also apply to personal attacks, bullying etc? Whose right, and whose duty, is it to "hold others accountable" for objectionable statements?
Freedom of speech as a legal concept only applies to the government.
Thus any non government agent can react in any way that isn't illegal for other reasons as a response to any speech.
"You're free to say what we want, but if we don't like it, we will scream at you what a terrible person you are and that you should burn in hell, and we will pester your employer to fire you and your prospective employers to never give you a job ever again. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
The government cannot prevent individuals from doing that, this response to peoples speech is protected by freedom of speech.
Do you think freedom of speech *should* be a guiding principle of a free society, no matter whether it is right now?
Also, states generally impose limits on the freedom of speech, and they draw the lines in different places. Screaming at someone that they should burn in hell may be legally protected free speech in the US, but it might be considered an illegal insult, or constitute illegal harrassment, in other countries.
I think governments are likely to fulfill that role badly.
The places i choose to be tends to be reasonably far in the free speech direction. While the speech norms are informal and a by product of the people there.
I think there's a big difference between 'make speech more free' as a guiding heuristic, and 'free speech is an absolute, inviolable right.'
Take two otherwise identical cultures, and the one where speech is 1% freer is likely better off. But that doesn't mean that the country with 100% free speech (defined in the most extreme and absolutist way possible) is better off than the country with 80% free speech, or 60% or w/e.
If free speech is recognized as a public good that we should value, then we can makes sensible trades with it against other values. If we treat it as an absolutist right, then we can only ever either enforce it or abandon it. Both of those choices have real bad consequences, and the arguments over when to do which create massive strife and elide actual productive discussion of the object-level issues.
I think you mean, the first amendment of the U.S. constitution constrains the federal government, and through an amendment (14th?) state and local governments. The liberal principle of free speech was the motivation for creating the 1st amendment, but is not identical to it.
Being good at business is the #1 skill for making money. The firm requires employees with other skills, including invention in some cases, but they don't make as much as the boss.
From of the point of view of which skill the firm needs the most, again it's management, because a poorly managed firm won't make good use of its other skills.
"When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." is a famous quote from Warren Buffet, and one I fully agree with.
From my experience, management and communication are grossly overestimated: no matter how good a manager you are, the performance of your teams is far more likely to depend of the quality of the people you are managing than your own.
A lot of this assertion depends on your definition of invention and how intellectually honest you feel the cohorts of invention versus “knowing how to make money” are. If those are the only two options, what would be rewarded more than “knowing how to make money”? That feels like a taxonomy created with an agenda in mind.
Capitalism rewards building stuff better than any other system we know of. Whether one thinks invention is undervalued or overvalued is more of a statement about one’s value system than about capitalism. It sounds like you think invention is very important and is undervalued.
The distinction between being able to invent and to make money is a false dilemma.
I think a more accurate statement would be that we need far more people who are good at making money (e.g. running factories efficiently, lending money to the right people at the right interest rate, managing giant human enterprises well) than we need people who are good at inventing stuff. Most of what happens in an economy is just keeping the gears turning, moving things from here to there, building things we know how to build, making sure the electricity works, the cars start, the bus turns up on time, the check actually is in the mail, you get paid on time, et cetera. We don't *advance* if no one ever does invention, but if too many people are trying to invent too much of the basic wheels-go-round stuff doesn't get done and things fall apart.
Better, a quote I've heard attribute to Adrienne Rich (of all people): "If all of us contemplate the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera."
There are many kinds of things that need to be done. We need someone to invent new stuff. We need someone to find new clever uses for the recently invented stuff. We need many people to keep the wheels of the existing mechanisms running. We need someone to find problems with the existing mechanisms and fix them.
Asking which one is more important... dunno, seems to me that there are huge potential gains at every level. And also, we (as a society) can do all of that at the same time, by individuals choosing the place they feel they have a comparative advantage at.
For example, it would be nice if someone invented a new cure for cancer. But independently on that, it would also be nice to fix healthcare. Producing and distributing the existing pills cheaper would also help. And there is a lot of human work involved in just keeping everything as it is now.
Similarly with technical inventions: quantum computers would be nice, making better applications on existing computers is also nice, developing free alternatives to commercial software also helps people, and you also need someone to teach kids at schools to use the existing free software.
Yeah, people at some of these positions are better at capturing the value they produce than at other positions. But that would happen in any regime: it's either the money, or the decisions of the communist leaders, or the divine voice talking to the king.
Knowing how to make money in general is more valuable than knowing how to invent in general. But very few people have the general skill. Far more people know how to invent one thing, or know how to make money one way.
I am currently doing some data analysis regarding the difference in immunisation between a 1 dose and a 2 dose vaccination strategy (sponsered by a COVID microgrant from Zvi + anon donor).
I thought collecting some input from the community here might be worthwhile and the earlier, the better, so here goes:
https://github.com/oerpli/FirstDosesFirst/blob/master/writeup/analysis.md
It is still a work in progress and one would need to look into the whole repo to get a complete picture but the linked file basically explains the method.
The calculations are done here:
https://github.com/oerpli/FirstDosesFirst/blob/master/FDF.py
If more information is needed I am happy to provide them. Also, you can contact me on various sites & the SSC discord, if you want to point out mistakes I made (or open a PR on Github).
Contact infos & the likes can be found here: oerpli.github.io/
Here’s something that’s been on my mind lately.
Choose the correct answer from this official cognitive-functioning test question (you’ll want to commit to your final answer before reading further):
There are two women, Janet and Susan. Janet is attacked by a mugger just ten feet outside her front door. Susan is attacked by a mugger a mile away from her house. Who is more upset by the experience?
A) Janet
B) Susan
C) They are upset the same or it’s impossible to tell
This is from Michael Kinsley’s amazing piece in The New Yorker a few years back about living with Parkinson’s (“Have You Lost Your Mind?”). He was flabbergasted to discover that the literally accurate answer was deemed “incorrect.” The test-makers were purposely forcing respondents to choose between the most obvious answer, based in facile emotional intelligence that discerns the spirit of the narrative, or the one that relies on a closer, logical reading of semantics.
Kinsey interviewed the test-makers, who confirmed the gist of their intentions while remaining protective of their trade secrets, so there’s some speculation here: apparently they wanted to flag pedantic brains as functioning less than properly. Somewhere around 30% of all test-takers chose the pedantic answer, while most of the remaining 70% got it right. Interestingly, those figures were completely reversed among the Parkinson’s population.
I find it fascinating and opaquely illuminating that people who chose to interrogate the boundaries of the question were deemed to be incorrect. I wonder from what branch of science did the test-makers derive their confidence that a well-functioning brain should bias the gut, as it were, rather than getting bogged down in rules and semantics?
After I first read Kinsley's piece I polled ten acquaintances in a workplace environment of well-educated people, and true to the statistics, seven answered correctly, while three of us answered pedantically (coincidentally, all three of us had been diagnosed with differing neurological disorders). But wait, it gets weirder. I pressed a few of the 70% (none of whom seemed to wrestle a bit with the exercise) by asking: Would you have chosen Janet if your life depended on it? ALL said probably NOT (while still remaining perfectly untroubled by the mounting complications!).
This tells me that what the test-makers might have actually been looking for was an ability to discern correct CONTEXT. I had initially been considering the question in a pure vacuum, while others who chose Janet just seemed to “get” what the test-makers were looking for. One made a shrugging comment like, “Well it is just a test – not real life.” (How the hell am I supposed to know THAT??)
The question has an implied "all else being equal". Pedants figure that since it's not actually stated, they can't assume it.
So, with this knowledge of the unsaid implications, can you think of any advice you'd like to offer us pedants who really can't imagine another way to answer such a question?
I've always been good at multiple choice tests. Always consider the source and don't overthink. There are often going to be questions that are somewhat ambiguous if you really think about it. But your goal is to give the answer the test-maker had in mind, not the technically correct one (unless you know the test-maker is also very pedantic!) The context of what material the test is supposed to be testing can usually tell you when you are solving the problem as expected and when you are overthinking it.
The SSC survey is basically the pedantic test, isn’t it? You find yourself scanning for instances of “the the”.
Also, this is more relevant to an educational setting, but, as a last resort, you can go "family-feud" style. If a question is really ambiguous, go for the answer you think most people are likely to guess - then you have the most chance of the instructor deciding to accept that answer as correct in response to student complaints.
This reminds me of a story from my school days. I was taking a math test and while I was working on a problem I realized that it was too hard for the current topic and I also knew what wrong answer the teacher was looking for. I considered my options and decided to go for the correct answer (I was going to get a good score anyway).
A few days later the teacher read the grades (out loud) but didn't return the tests. Then another couple days later he announced that there had been some corrections and some grades had gone up and some had gone down. My grade had gone up (and one other guy in my year too) and many others had gone down. The teacher had apparently figured out that if two kids both give the same unexpected wrong answer, something is probably going on.
Fortunately our classmates never found out what happened.
I think the question to ask yourself is "what is this question trying to ask?" Like this question isn't *really* about the head-space of two fictional characters, what the question is trying to ask is "are people generally more upset by negative experiences near to home, far from home, or neither?"
I think most people would find the latter question easier to answer, it's still asking for a generalization which you may or may not agree with, but I think far fewer people are going to get tripped up on the stuff like "well what if Susan is an easily upset person, while Janet is unflappable?" that might lead someone to say C.
You may ask "why didn't they ask that question in the first place" and I think that 1) discerning the intent of the question is often seen as an intentional part of test taking, 2) some more empathetic people actually may find the question easier to answer in the stated form - it feels "realer" with imagining real people, compared to my "decoded" version which is really dry, 3) it's just less boring to ask questions in this way.
There is also an implied "most likely outcome".
You haven’t told us what the correct answer is. I assume Janet.
It depends on the semantics of "tell". Janet is more upset, for most but not all values of Janet.
Under Boolean semantics, "it's impossible to tell" is True unless you can prove that either Janet is always more upset, or Susan is more upset, for all possible values of Janet and Susan. You can't; so the answer is C.
Under probabilistic or information-theory semantics, answer A (Janet) is the only one that gives you positive {predictive value / information}; so the answer is A.
Yeh. The last paragraph makes sense, although like a lot of commentary here, could be less opaque. I personally don’t think there is any reasonable way to read this question as anything other then probabilistic - what would the majority of women think in either case. Assuming and actual Susan and an actual Janet just wouldn’t occur to me.
The people answering c remind me of the time I tried the trolley problem with a group of people and one guy was adamant that the question was suspect. Who put the people on the tracks anyway, why not try stop or reverse the trolley. All good questions if that was anecdote rather than a thought experiment, but it wasn’t.
I see your point, but the pedant in me wasn't bringing in the complications. That was the test-makers, who included the option that "it's impossible to tell."
In your trolley example, your pedants are just really avoiding the question. The better parallel would be if your trolley narrator added a third possible option such as "You can't tell for sure, but you think maybe the train is travelling too fast for the diversion." Which would invite many more problems for one to consider.
Yes, please say which answer gets 70% and which 30%.
I assume A- 70%, C- 30%. But I'm not at all sure.
I guessed Janet only because the mugger could steal her keys and then proceed to steal everything inside her house.
I’m kind of stuck on the cognitive-functioning aspect of all this, but I’m assuming it’s related to social functioning. If so, should it really be a healthy norm for society to resist individuals who are unwilling (or unable) to privilege the meta-level narrative/game that everyone else somehow knows/wants to play? It seems the little kid who proclaims the emperor’s not wearing any clothes is really told to shut up and stop being silly, end of story.
Also, on a socio-political level, it’s scary to imagine what the world would look like without such pedantry. I’m thinking, for example, of the lone voice on a jury who sees everything differently – but correctly – while everyone else is more socially relaxed, easily forgetful of the real-life stakes, and just wants to get home in time for dinner. If the optimal brain is one that values going with the flow, being in synch with societal narratives, presumably enjoying the fruits of the resultant parasympathetic system involvement, then we’re doomed, right? Unless, maybe the test-makers weren’t actually thinking it’s optimal for a society’s individuals to have optimal brains?
Yes, I don't like the tyranny of "healthy norms" when it comes to cognitive function, particularly when we're talking about a 70/30 split and human variety has all kinds of social benefits.
I'm baffled that anyone could say this has a "right" answer when there are so evidently multiple possible interpretations, and how would one make a case that one interpretation is better than another?
I'm obviously a really pedantic person, working on it all the time I swear. I could see the test-writers probably meant for us to answer A (and that was my first answer), that some more precise reading would deliver C, and that a different set of emotional priors would yield B. In that way it seems more like a personality test than something with a right/wrong answer.
I support the anxious/obsessive/hyper-conscientious minority and their efforts at keeping us all safe, even if it means they need mouth guards to sleep at night.
Yes, but if I were taking a test labeled as measuring cognitive functioning (as opposed to a personality test) I would be totally stuck trying to guess what they were looking for. So I'd surely default to answer C, as this seems like the most streamlined, cognitively unassailable response.
Agreed on this. If I knew what kind of test it was, my answer would likely have changed.
So, it's easy to imagine the cases where the stickler is the one lone voice of sanity stemming a tide of madness and chaos.
But what is actually happening 99% of the time is that either human language is imprecise or a given model/metaphor/explanation only needs a certain superficial level of depth in order to serve it's purpose in communication, everyone else in the room accurately understood what was being conveyed and got the correct information they were supposed to out of it, and the one stickler is wasting everyone's time and actually making things less clear and more confusing, causing mistakes and misunderstandings.
So, of course, the pedant in me would ask where you got your 99% data point from, but I'm assuming it's merely a hardened assumption you carry around based on your life experiences.
I would probe this assumption on a couple grounds. First, if you think the "stickler" is purposely wasting everyone's time (i.e., they can actually see what the model in question is asking for, but they're choosing to muddle things up for ego or whatever reasons), I think you'd often be wrong. Often, someone has a perfectly relevant but perhaps outside-the-box approach, but can't get a hearing because of social resistance.
I've noticed that such voices tend to be ostracized from the get-go because their energy doesn't match "the room," which can lead to a vicious cycle of them not feeling heard, with "the room" more and more adamant about shutting them up. Since the room's natural tendency trends toward social cohesion, resistance is automatically troubled (so, for example, you might be interpreting stress energy as an anti-social intention).
While I'm guessing you'll disagree, I'm left widely supportive of alternative voices in principle, even though they tend to make the room less tidy. Systemic examples of such support include open invitations to diversity, voluntary relinquishing of leadership roles by "straight white male" -types who have historically kept the room organized, and even attendance to cries of "micro-aggressions" and other expressions that are easily ridiculed as shrill or off-point.
I'm super glad we've evolved culturally past the point where the elite voices who tended to pride themselves on a sort of pristine rationality have learned to listen better to discern the concerns of others. When I was young Norman Mailer et al. were still baiting feminists as hysterical and irrational. Black Lives Matter, Queer affiliation, etc -- these are welcome forms of pedantry that demand to be taken seriously by those in the room who would prefer their comfort not be riled. I've been in many leadership positions throughout my life, and every time I've checked my inclination to dismiss someone as irrational or whatever, I've discovered at the very least a nugget of valuable, relevant information about their perspective that I really needed to hear.
I'm a bit confused, what's supposed to be the correct answer? And what's supposed to be the pedantic answer?
The article mentioned says 'C' is the pedantic one, because the question explicitly asks whether Janet or Susan feels worse, and we don't know enough about them or the mugging to say one way or the other. 'A' is the correct answer.
I got it wrong both ways by guessing 'B' (a mugging outside my house is anomalous, one in unfamiliar territory would make me more afraid of the outside world), which meant I found it a very confusing analysis.
Ha, you're such a rare bird you don't even seem to show up in the stats!
My gut answer was A, my pedantic thought was C, then I thought B, since Janet getting mugged outside her door suggests her house is in a rough enough neighborhood she may be resigned to sporadic crime, while Susan could live in a safer neighborhood and be more upset when she encounters crime
I also initially guessed B, with the reasoning that Janet would probably complain about it more but ultimately can just walk back home after, which would be less traumatic than Susan having to find her way home with no wallet. But then I switched to C once I saw that option, since really there's no way to know.
Yeah, I could see it either way; I was staring at the question trying to find some missing word i.e. perhaps the mugger were sniping the women and literally a mile away while the women were near their houses and somehow mugging them that way, which would make a bigger difference?
Yeah, I would choose C because there are two factors, one is along the lines of "I was so close to having safely avoided this mugging and/or my phone turf area is unsafe for me" and one is "if I were mugged right outside my home, I might sooner be safely in my home calming down and emotionally recovering". I can't really assume I know how the factors shake out with only the information given.
I thought "A" immediately, can't imagine another answer.
That seems like it's riding entirely on ambiguity in the word "know". (Well, the word "tell", in the original phrasing.)
If you define "knowing" something as having a posterior probability of 1, then no one can ever know anything because 0 and 1 are not probabilities https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QGkYCwyC7wTDyt3yT/0-and-1-are-not-probabilities
That's obviously silly.
If you allow that the word "know" can be applied to things for which you have *some* evidence but not absolute certainty, then you have to pick some threshold for what counts as "enough" evidence to use the word "know".
If your standard is "any evidence at all", then answer C would only be correct if there is NO statistical correlation between mugging location and upset-ness. Which I presume is not the case, or else we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Any other quantitative standard you choose is at least somewhat arbitrary, and no specific standard is included in the question. Which would make the pedantic answer "this question is ambiguous", not "C".
When I read the question, I interpreted "or it's impossible to tell" as meaning "the statistics are within experimental error". That interpretation was based partly on the context that it was grouped together with "they are upset the same" (why would you group "equal" and "unknowable" under the same answer otherwise?) and partly for the reasons I laid out above.
(I am pretty pedantic and still answered A. As evidence of my pedantry (if you needed any more), on another test I objected to the question "agree/disagree: Our country will be destroyed someday if we do not smash the perversions eating away at our moral fiber and traditional beliefs" on the grounds that obviously our country will be destroyed SOMEDAY no matter what we do.)
I'm not sure that objecting to that latter question is good evidence of pedantry. The logician's answer is "agree", because the question used "if" rather than "iff", and the consequent is (always) true so the conditional is true.
Yes, and my objection is that the question is constructed such that most readers will answer an implied question rather than the explicit question, and there's no way to tell which responses are answering which question.
Is the pedantic answer C, because it's impossible to tell what two people will think about a given thing, while the intended answer is A, because getting mugged right outside your house is probably more upsetting than getting mugged elsewhere?
Maybe part of the problem is that it sounds like an SAT reading comprehension problem or something to me, in which case C would be the right answer. If you asked it like "which is likely to upset someone more, A, B, or no difference", I wonder if you'd get a difference distribution.
Yes, sorry for the confusion. About thirty percent tend to answer C (pedantically), while 70 percent say A because of proximity to home. A was deemed officially correct.
Interestingly, I considered B, on the grounds that neurotypicals are a majority, they routinely do things that make no sense to my gut, and an awful lot of them get hysterically afraid of events they've heard about happening - once, among a national population of 100s of millions, and nowhere near their homes. It is thus plausible to me that the more common response is the one that seems least sensible to me, and that the goal of the question is to demonstrate that one is "normal" by producing the common (and thus better-by-definition) response.
So I'm seeing an unexpected hybrid population developing here: you seem to be right on track when it comes to sensing the KIND of emotion-based answer the test-makers were looking for -- but then you got bogged down in secondary-level pedantry!
My thinking was that something that happens in another neighborhood can be set aside more easily. Being struck so close to home causes a wound to the confidence about home and safety.
I got stuck on this because here in Australia, being one mile from home isn't really "another neighbourhood" at all.
Then I remembered that in big US cities it's quite common for good and bad neighbourhoods to be just blocks apart.
It's nebulous, but how 'wide' are the boundaries between neighborhoods in Australia? I'd think they're roughly the same as anywhere, e.g. the width of the street(s) (or some other 'natural' boundary) that divide any two neighborhoods.
Given that, _every_ possible pair of adjacent neighborhoods, anywhere, is only "blocks apart".
Maybe you live in the center of some neighborhood, but surely lots of others live closer to the edges.
And then of course 'neighborhood' is pretty nebulous itself. I've lived in several places where there _was no_ obvious 'neighborhood'. Maybe 'neighborhoods' are more of a thing in places with lots of historical gang activity and thus clearer territorial boundaries at the 'neighborhood scale'.
I have a bit of a problem with this. My naive guess is Janet - people tend to be more upset by things which happen closer to themselves. It feels more like a personal violation.
At the same time, people also tend to blame themselves for something bad happening to them if they could have had any control over the circumstances, and sometimes that will be forced on them: see "clothing worn by rape victims". In this case, being mugged 2 miles from your house implies some place you didn't need to be. "I could have gone to a different grocery store" can run through your head continually and cause suffering. "I could have avoided going outside, ever" is pretty much recognized as crazy.
These two emotional responses are in direct opposition to each other and knowing which one would predominate would require a bit more knowledge of the two people involved. Forced, I'd go with 'A', but that's a damn hard question.
Well, as long as you chose A in the end your brain is functioning just fine!
I was in a similar position. I read between the lines and could tell that the test writers weren't going for pedantic reasoning, but when comparing the two people I could come up with too many competing narratives that could favor either one. In the end, I chose "it's impossible to know," thinking that's the answer of someone who correctly understands that that people's emotional states depends on their complex perspective, not on some external appraisal of their situation.
In short, my mistake was in thinking that the test was a test of empathy or social skills, whereas it's apparently a more basic test of "can you tell which of these two situations is meant to sound worse on first glance?"
i wonder if getting the "correct" answer correlates with GPA? The pedantic answer seemed most correct to me but I correctly guessed the desired answer, drawing upon my extensive practice at test taking in school, where on poorly written tests you are often being tested most on your ability to predict what the teacher wants
You are a very stable genius! It's this ability to predict the "desired answer" that I seem to lack. Again, I'm convinced it's about the ability to sense the correct context.
An amusing little anecdote:
Years back, in a psychological evaluation for a child custody court case, I was asked to draw a tree on a blank piece of paper. I asked the examiner how long I should take to draw it (the whole evaluation took most of the day, so I had no idea how to approach this one exercise). The examiner told me to take as long as I liked. So I spent maybe a half hour, detailing the veins on the leaves, the bark, etc – drawing what turned out to be a rather splendid tree, if I do say so myself. Later, the examiner’s report cited this particular exercise as evidence of my narcissism – which I thought was weird, considering the stakes of the test (which would impact how much time my three-year-old child lived with me). I mean, who in their right mind wouldn’t draw the best tree of their life if their child’s welfare was on the line? THAT was the context running through my head, but the correct context apparently was to be cool.
Which is not to argue I'm not narcissistic, of course, but is this event an accurate barometer? One theory is that my hyper-focus on the tree was not properly respectful of the psychologist’s time, but he had been going back and forth to his office all morning, leaving me to work on specific tasks -- so it’s not like he was just sitting there watching me be narcissistic.
I think at the very least you made an unusual choice in going for a superbly detailed tree instead of a merely adequate one. Like someone said, part of any test is figuring out what the person administering it is looking for. In your case it wasn’t artistic talent but maybe a sense of what kind of tree would fulfill the request. Also, are you sure you weren’t being observed the whole time?
It seems alarming that narcissism could be gleaned from such a task....sounds like you're a talented tree artist.
My ex-wife was an excellent illustrator, she had a real keen sense for lighting. I often wonder if my kid’s ever inherited her talent... but... ever since I lost the big art competition used to decide custody I haven’t seen them much.
Look, in no way do I defend my choice as smart, proportional, or constructive. But the experience does help me keep in mind that some of us get tunnel vision (less smart often) during times of stress. And this was far and away the most stressful time of my entire life. So as ridiculous as it sounds, I was in a state of mind where the future of my child felt directly connected to my level of effort, and I acted accordingly.
I find it helpful to recall this when I see others -- especially those who are historically, chronically stressed -- speaking or acting with a sense of desperation, ESPECIALLY when surrounded by a cool, calm, rational group that has collectively decided to mock their stressed attempts to seek equality, justice, etc.
I suspect that the tester was engaged in motivated reasoning.
If you had drawn a mere sketch of a tree, that would be evidence that you were a slacker.
If you asked what kind of tree you were supposed to draw, that was "proof" that you are a bigot, as shown by your reprehensible discrimination between tree species.
Drawing a Christmas tree clearly demonstrates that you must be financially irresponsible and want someone to provide for you.
Etc., etc..
Honestly, the tester struck me as a bit of a slacker (but, of course, I was biased). He didn't seem interested in or able to put himself in the position of someone in such a life-altering situation. My bet is he just looked at the fact that I'd spent a much longer time than average drawing more ornamentation than average, and labeled that a narcissistic tendency when it might well have just been situational narcissism.
And it seemed to me a bit of a dirty trick that he wouldn't answer my initial question about how long I should take to draw. I was clearly seeking context. Failing to get any, my feeling (charged with stress) was that I better just give it all I have.
You were there and I wasn't.
Perhaps I've seen too many "gotchas" in such situations.
every so often the teacher would intentionally go for a 'gotcha' question though
As others have commented, the 'obvious' answer A does not seem obvious and the 'pedantic' answer C does not seem pedantic. There are various reasons being mugged nearer your house could feel better than far away, e.g.
--likely closer to friends/neighbours who can help
On the other hand, there are various reasons being nearer your house feels worse:
--may increase anxiety every time you leave your house / maybe want to leave your house
They all seem to me bad answers, compared to "Probably but not necessarily Janet".
Perhaps, but the expert test-makers make the big bucks, so we have to presume there's method to their madness: forcing us to choose the sole "correct" answer.
My interpretation of the question is: if this had happened for real, do you think it would be more likely that Janet was most upset, Susan was most upset, or that they were so similarly upset that it would be impossible for to determine who was more upset. The pedantic interpretation of the question is: given only information about where the muggings occurred, is Janet definitely more upset, is Susan definitely more upset, or do you have insufficient information to say who is more upset? I think the pedantic interpretation is wrong because it ignores contextual clues about how to interpret the question. For example, "they are upset the same or it's impossible to tell" is a single option, so it's probably meant to express only one idea: that the two people are upset to similar degrees (i.e. impossible to tell because the difference is small), rather than express the logical union of two separate ideas: that either they're equally upset or it's impossible to tell for some reason (e.g. because you have insufficient information in the question). That being said, it's not a well-written question because the pedantic interpretation is more plausible than it ought to be, especially if you had a prior belief that this might be a trick question.
Putting pedantry aside, (A) seems like the obviously correct answer to me, because getting mugged near your house means that you're not safe in the one place you can't avoid traveling through when you leave the house, but if you get mugged a mile away, you can stay safe by avoiding that area. Obviously people react differently, so maybe Janet is a buddhist monk and Susan has frequent panic attacks, but I think the implication is that the question is about how most ordinary people would react, and I think most ordinary Janets would be noticeably more upset than most ordinary Susans.
So do you think the ability to discern the most relevant implications, as you have, is simply a result of intelligence? I don't get the sense the test-makers were targeting intelligence so much as mechanical functioning somehow.
Note that the Parkinson's population is a mirror image of the general public when it comes to getting the question wrong. (Most Parkinson's folks I've met have been super sharp.)
> So do you think the ability to discern the most relevant implications, as you have, is simply a result of intelligence?
No, I don't think it's a very good question to begin with. I think 70% of people answer (A) because that's what a quick, common-sense interpretation gives you, and 30% of people answer (C) because that's what a very literal, spot-the-trick-question interpretation gives you. The difference between the two groups is certainly not "intelligence", and drawing some conclusion about cognitive functioning differences between the two groups is probably an unjustifiable leap in reasoning. I was mainly explaining my reasoning because it seemed like a lot of other commenters didn't see why (A) should be the correct answer.
You may be right about it being a bad question. I don't know anything about test making. But my sense from Kinsley's interview with the test-makers is that any clumsiness to the phrasing, etc, was designed very intentionally.
For me, pedantry is more of a mood than a way of life. I used to be pedantic because that's just the way we had fun in my household (it was more fun than it sounded?); we would annoy my mother at the dinner table by responding "I don't know" to questions like "Would everyone like dessert"?
As I've grown up I've learned to dial down the pedantry and instead answer the question that I think is intended rather than the question that has _strictly_ been asked, because pedantry doesn't actually work out well for me in real life.
I think this is a good point. Pedantry is a "read the room" kind of thing. If you're writing a math paper, pedantry is required. If you're having a casual conversation with a stranger, pedantry is usually considered rude. This question, if it tells us anything, tells us whether or not respondents feel like pedantry is the right mood for a multiple-choice psych questionnaire.
And the ability to "read the room" comes from where? Family modeling? Native intelligence? And would certain neurological conditions block this ability?
Right, I do think some people have good control of their pedantry dial and other people don't know where it is, much less that it might be controlled. I imagine that's down to some mix of genetics and upbringing.
That dinner table anecdote would work better if, after everyone else had answered "I don't know", the final one to reply said that yes, everyone wanted dessert.
I think something like this may partly explain the 13 comment deep disagreements on seemingly simple statements of fact that occur on this site.
I know, right? I’m not actually as interested in the cognitive-function implications of this particular test question as the social/political implications
I guess I’m feeling this is a tiny piece of “official” evidence that there’s a sort of social consensus that The Rules (and even the facts?) are malleable according to context – and I can’t help thinking this spills over into populations that have to fight quite a lot harder for scraps of agency then us mere miserable pedants.
If I’m right, this malleability seems related to our human capacity for abiding horrific things with a shrug just because it’s always been that way; forcing, for example, African Americans into choosing between acquiescence or righteous Constitutional pedantry for more than 100 years after Reconstruction. Which is a pretty shitty deal.
So -- to your point -- I'm prone to losing my patience (and flexibility) in situations where it seems the other is operating/arguing from an unserious base of assumptions when it comes to things like "democracy" (for example); i.e. when their "context" (perhaps their habitual political affiliation) seems to be inadequate to address the stakes involved.
This is one example of why I'm skeptical of the meaningfulness of IQ tests at scores above the median score of the committee that made the IQ test.
One thing you may want to consider is that "word problems" almost always include idealizing assumptions. That's because they're *phrased* in concrete terms, but are really *about* abstract models. (The rationale for concrete phrasing is usually some combination of "people understand stories more easily than abstractions" and/or "we want students to think about how the abstract models can be applied to real life".)
If I ask you about the travel time of a train that leaves city A at 8:00 traveling to city B that is 120 miles away, you are supposed to assume (unless specified otherwise) that the train travels at constant speed without stopping and that 120 miles is the length of the track, even though none of those assumptions are particularly realistic.
If I tell you that one person always lies and one always tells the truth, you are not supposed to worry that one of them might make an honest mistake or simply refuse to answer your question, and you certainly aren't supposed to ask whether "lying by omission" counts as a "lie" for purposes of this problem.
The ropes are massless, the pulleys are frictionless, the wires are lossless, the Turing Machine has infinite tape, etc.
We don't often call attention to these assumptions or explain how to tell which ones we're making. Among other unfortunate consequences, this means that sometimes the person asking the question changes the assumptions without telling you, and thinks that this means they're being clever (when actually they're just communicating badly).
There's a famous lateral thinking puzzle involving 3 light bulbs in a box connected to 3 switches that are outside the box but that will be locked once you open the box, and you're supposed to figure out which switch goes to which light. The accepted solution is to turn on one switch, wait for the corresponding bulb to get hot, then turn it off and turn on another switch before opening the box.
This answer directly violates a common idealizing assumption (i.e. ignore electrical losses). But if you're willing to break ANY idealizing assumption, then there are TONS of easy solutions, like "cutting a hole in the box" or "rewiring the circuits to bypass the locked switches". (Also, you can tell this puzzle predates the rise of LED bulbs.) IMO this is a broken puzzle with no *fair* solution--but the people who repeat it don't seem to notice this issue...
(You could probably rework it into a story where the lights are actually heat lamps, so that becoming hot is part of their core functionality. But then you're *calling attention* to the heat and the puzzle becomes easier...)
Sometimes it's not obvious what idealizing assumptions should be made. There's another famous logic puzzle that's usually phrased as having to do with eye color. It's more complex; here's one version: https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html
It's a clever puzzle, except it relies on the assumption that a public declaration creates mathematically-perfect "common knowledge", in the sense that everyone hears and believes, and everyone knows that everyone hears and believes, and everyone knows that everyone knows that... to infinite levels of recursion. You can kind of see how this might make sense as an "idealizing assumption", but it's not an idealizing assumption that most people will have encountered before; a good-faith listener could plausibly fail to make it. (And you can't make the assumption explicit without giving a really huge clue to solving the puzzle.)
I have Asperger's and this is one major lesson I had to learn as a kid. At first, I really struggled with word problems because of all the possible complications not stated in the problem, like you mention. However, I quickly learned to answer the question the test makers meant, rather than what they said.
There's a scene in Cryptonomocon that basically follows this same logic, leading the Navy to decide that a mathematical genius character is a moron.
I had the same experience. No diagnosis, but almost certainly Asperger's. I still recall thinking at a very early age "this answer is wrong, but it is the one they want."
One thing I've noticed about logic puzzles: if it's necessary for the puzzle to stipulate that the people involved are "perfect logicians," I will never, ever be able to wrap my head around it. (Even after reading Scott's story based on the same puzzle.)
All makes sense. But I'm not sure you're fully covering the problem inherent in this particular question, which is the addition of "it's impossible to tell." If that phrase were left out, I would certainly have chosen Janet as the best choice available, no problem.
While you may easily see that phrase as a distraction, it pops out to me in bright neon lights as the ONLY possible answer. I think that's why Kinsley was so flabbergasted. The test-makers seemed (to me) to purposely be signaling us away from idealized assumptions by providing an answer that is literally correct.
"The ropes are massless, the pulleys are frictionless, the wires are lossless, the Turing Machine has infinite tape, etc."-- UNLESS what if one of the questions specifically said "the ropes are old and frayed" and then gave the option C of "it's impossible to calculate" AND it's not a math test, but a cognitive-functioning test...
If the problem statement explicitly introduces non-ideal factors, then definitely you are supposed to take those into account.
But I don't see how offering "it's impossible to tell" as one of the possible *answers* is equivalent to that.
If I gave you a standard textbook physics problem involving ropes, never said anything one way or the other about the state of the ropes, and then offered "it's impossible to tell" as one of the multi-choice answers, would you select that answer on the grounds that the idealizing assumptions had not been explicitly articulated? Even if, under the typical ideal assumptions, you could calculate an exact answer?
Yes, if a physics problem included "it's impossible to tell", that seems, to me anyways, as a very obviously reasonable clue that it's the correct answer. Just the inclusion of that answer would be strong evidence that the problem is NOT in fact a "standard textbook physics problem" as none of them typically (or ever) include options like that.
This comment really makes me miss an 'upvote' function.
I really don't like that Randall calls this the hardest puzzle in the world, as it can be solved via inductive reasoning. Now, the knight and knave puzzle by Boolos where there are three creatures (truthful, liar, random) that reply "yes" or "no" in a language you don't know and you have to identify them by asking three questions is hard enough you can't even explain the solution to a stranger in a bar, even less ask them to solve it.
I thought B was the most likely on a 'gut' level since Susan would be far from home, potentially injured, upset, still exposed after the attack and having much more of an obstacle to get somewhere warm and safe potentially with people she knows that can help. Then switched to C when considering the possibility that Janet might feel more lasting anxiety at the feeling of violation close to home.
I'm a pedant, but it seemed natural to me to pick A or B (and A seemed the more likely option, because a hyper-local mugging could shatter the victim's sense of security in and around their home). I think there are two reasons: first, I know that most people are less pedantic than me, and taking the maximally pedantic approach usually leaves me out of step with the world; second, and more specific to this question, if the intended answer was 'C' then the whole exercise would be quite silly. It's blindingly obvious that we don't know for sure which fictional character is more upset; I would only think to answer C if the context in which the question was asked made the 'extremely easy reading comprehension/deductive inference test' interpretation more plausible than 'not-quite-precisely worded empathy/social expectations test'.
I think there's an analogy to the Gricean maxims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle . If you assume the test-taker isn't trying to waste your time with silly trick questions, you will read the necessary implicit qualifications into the question rather than going with the one that is boringly obvious on a fully-literal reading.
(I do agree that C is obviously correct, though; whether marking it incorrect is itself an error probably depends on what exactly one's score is supposed to show.)
This seems like exactly the kind of survey that you can use to prove anything you want. At minimum, there are two possible ways to interpret the question: as a sociology question ("would most women be more upset about getting mugged close to home ?") or as a logic question ("given the parameters of the problem, and only those parameters, do we have enough information to pick A or B ?").
Color me cynical, but this sounds like one of the (many) reasons for the replication crisis in the social sciences.
Just to be super clear: if this question is from a cognitive assessment test to diagnose Parkinsons, and the response dynamics of Parkinsons populations are dramatically different from the response dynamics of control populations, then it is a good question.
These assessment tests are not arbiters of moral rightness or factual accuracy, they're diagnostic tools with a very specific job to accomplish, and if they accomplish that job well then they're good tools. I wouldn't try to read too much into their contents beyond 'this is what we found to work'.
Who says they derived it from science? Psychology can be taken in an arts degree.
I think the trick is supposed to be the word "just". This makes one of them sound more sensational than the other, and is otherwise incongruous with the style of test questions.
The problem is, the word isn't said by Janet - it's said by the narrator. Had I been asked which one the *narrator* thinks is more upsetting, I'd have answered A, but I (correctly) noticed that the narrator's feelings are not relevant to the question asked and excluded that from consideration.
Something similar to this (with less potential for theorising) would actually make a good way to test how easily people are led astray by unreliable narrators.
One failing of the US healthcare system I do not understand: Why is it so hard to *pay* them?
You'd think the one advantage of a mostly-privatized system would be that they'd make it easy for you to give them money. But it's always incredibly complicated even in simple cases. I have standard health and dental insurance, and whenever I go to get something basic - like a regular checkup or a filling - the doctor's office won't let me pay the copay up front, tell me they'll call the insurance, and call me again or send me a bill in the mail six months later (by which time I've forgotten what it was even about). Why is this? This seems like something they're strongly incentivized to handle efficiently.
> mostly-privatized system
There's your confusion. Nearly everything about the normal medical system is extremely regulated, especially payment. It's my understanding that things are a bit more flexible with concierge medicine, though I'm not sure how true that is.
For most office visits, I show my insurance card and swipe my credit card. I've only had a few weird cases where they send you an invoice 2 months later and then you have to either mail it back, or log on to an online payment system.
Surgery is horrible though. For an outpatient surgery, I payed an up front cost, then I got a bill from the surgeon a month later, a bill from the anesthesiologist a week after that, and then another bill from the surgeon because there was some issue with insurance and the cost ended up being more than expected. I was never told that those other bills were coming and the up front cost was not cheap (it was partially covered by insurance).
If you don't mind answering, what insurance network are you on? I'm curious if this varies between insurers
Cigna
It's absolutely the same with Blue Cross.
Aetna here - and also the same process
Not sure about this, but I think insurance companies have pretty strict rules about when and how you can charge the patient and also the insurance company. For example, you don't want a doctor's office secretly reimbursing the most lucrative patients their copays, so that all those patients choose that doctor and have no incentive not to overspend on care. I think some of these regulations mean that doctors need to carefully document exactly how they're charging patients and make sure it fits insurance company regulations, which might sometimes mean they want to talk to the insurance before they take your money.
Just for comparison, some really big companies are difficult to pay also. I used to work at [very small company] that was acquired by [very large enterprise]. We went from being able to sell our service to people directly with a credit card to having to send prospective customers to a salesperson who worked for a "partner" of [very large enterprise] who could facilitate a transaction (while taking a cut).
Yeah, this has been my experience as well. The larger an institution you're dealing with, the less you'll see money changing hands between individuals. Maybe it just cuts down on the graft potential?
That might be a factor, but I think the biggest reason is "back office software." At many companies, things don't *exist* if they can't easily be plugged into [enterprise management system]. And a lot of those systems are really old (1990s) and extremely difficult to work with - migrations take years and years.
I think it's honestly "it's too expensive to onboard a lot of payors into this system that runs the whole business; let's let smaller partners deal with it and we'll pay them so we don't have to deal with the pain of upgrading."
Most people's insurance at best covers 80% of dental care, but every insurance company may reimburse a different amount for different procedures and they may refuse to reimburse for some procedures altogether. That means a dentist has no idea what to charge you at the time they've seen you. They will bill multiple procedures for one visit and not know which ones will be covered until they actually pay.
Depending on the billing cycle for the dentist and the payment lag of the insurance company, it could take them a month or more to find out what your insurance company paid for your visit and another month to bill you for what's left. If the billing people for the dentist are part-time or inefficient and the insurance company sucks (which many do) that could stretch out to months.
Insurance companies don't get to tell a provider how to bill their patient, but it creates an accounting hassle for the dentist if they charge you what the *think* will be 20% of your bill and later it turns out they have to reimburse you because you overpaid based on what the insurance company actually paid. Cutting checks back to patients is a hassle, particularly if it would have to be done in a majority of instances.
Most insurance plans provide simple co-pays for doctor visits and mental healthcare visits -- like $25 per visit -- and that's regardless of what "procedures" were done. So it's much easier in that situation and those kinds of providers can usually just take payment at the time of the appointment.
Our insurance system is really broken. Speaking as a healthcare provider who owns my own business.
Clarification: when I said above an insurance company doesn't get to tell a provider "how" to bill the patient, I mean literally like when and how they collect payment from a patient. The provider IS required to charge the patient no more than the "contracted rate" for any given procedure.
So my dentist lets me pay my 20% at the time of the visit partly because I was a little pushy about it and I only realized later, being a provider myself though not a dentist, that I was actually making more work for them by wanting to do it that way, and they were essentially doing me a favor by being willing to take my payment knowing that it would have to be corrected later.
> Most people's insurance at best covers 80% of dental care, but every insurance company may reimburse a different amount for different procedures and they may refuse to reimburse for some procedures altogether. That means a dentist has no idea what to charge you at the time they've seen you. They will bill multiple procedures for one visit and not know which ones will be covered until they actually pay.
In my country the first sentence is true but the second and third aren't.
When I go to the dentist the receptionist scans my health care card on the way out, then there's some kind of automated system whereby her computer checks with the health insurance company's computer exactly how much they're going to pay, and within seconds the receptionist tells me the remaining amount that I owe.
This doesn't seem like a complicated system to build.
I'm with you! Yes, seems like should be possible.
My dentist is able to do this mostly too, but I think it's because I'm part of a really big insurance company that the dentist has a lot of experience with and knows my insurance company will reliably pay X amount for Y kind of dental visit. But then some portion of their patients will have smaller or more dysfunctional insurance companies and they can't do that with them. Our system is really really fragmented.
Sometimes I wonder how many of the problems we have in general are because we are still this weird confederation of states. In the state in the U.S. where I live, one of the more common health insurance companies is a non-profit that exists only in my state. That seems cool on the surface, but they're not very well run. Private insurance companies are mostly regulated at the state level, so even though Anthem, say, is a HUGE multi-national insurance company, it is actually Anthem of Iowa or Anthem of Colorado here in the U.S., and all the regulations and procedures overseeing them are covered by state law. What a mess!
I think that's part of why my plan gets so complicated - In principle I have delta dental, which is super common. But my employer's headquartered in Chicago, so I get Delta Dental Illinois insurance, not Delta Dental New York, which is not as common for NYC dentists.
It is a *very* complicated system to build (Source: I work for a company attempting to build it).
Due to various reasons, insurance in the United States is an absolute tangle of regulations and contracts. The cost of a procedure will depend on:
1. the contracted rate between the provider and the insurance (this will vary from provider to provider and insurance to insurance)
2. The contract between the member and the insurance (this will vary from group to group, especially for employer-provided insurance)
3. State and federal regulations (which ought to be reflected in the various contracts, but you better double-check just in case)
4. Other claims the member has made (let's say Susie goes to a doctor on the 15th and the 16th of the month--if her visit on the 15th pushes her above her deductible, but the insurance hasn't been billed yet, then we can't correctly compute what she owes on the 16th)
5. Other insurance the member has, because they can carry multiple insurances and then stuff gets really weird
6. other crap I can't recall right now because I'm still waking up
Note that the contracts and regulations are *dense*, and they change yearly. The administrative burden to keep up with it all is high--none of these databases talk to each other, because nobody thought they would need to when they were first made, and the cost of transferring to a new system is high. And there are legal implications, potentially quite costly, of screwing up ("do not change this code without first consulting a lawyer" is commented liberally throughout our codebase).
As someone who works in healthcare insurance billing: this. Exactly this. We can only guess what insurance will pay, and for a lot of businesses that means they'd rather wait to bill. We try to err on the side of collecting payment up front (because when you send people a bill about 20-30% of the time they won't pay it) but that means we end up overcharging clients sometimes and then we have to sort out refunds. Which is a serious pain.
Some insurance companies (like Premera) have nice websites where you can input a client's ID card info and get a fairly accurate estimate on what Premera will pay. Not a perfect one (sometimes it says they still have money left to pay on their deductible, but by the time the claim reaches Premera the deductible is used up, for instance), but a pretty good one. But we have to regularly deal with about 6 different insurance companies, and they all have different methods of getting an estimate of benefits. Sometimes it means calling on the phone and sitting in a queue for 40 minutes. Sometimes it means navigating a robo-phone tree unti you get the option to have them fax you a benefits estimate. Some companies have a website, but they only give you overall benefits and not up to date details (such as, this client has a $1,500 deductible that may or may not be met, or an out of pocket for the year that may or may not be met). Some companies have a website that works, but only tells you if they're eligible, not what benefits are.
It's a real pain. On the other hand, if you put in the effort there is a lot of money to be made. I can see why a lot of doctors hate dealing with it though.
Our insurance system is a mystery to me as well principally because I was born to a military member in a military hospital and grew up in that system and went into the military myself and now as a retired military member pay a token ($50/mo) for 'everything' if I go to a military facility (which i do almost always and no, this is not VA healthcare). Occasionally I've strayed including for PT post-ACL surgery when going to the mil facility was a pain or for a simple skin issue to a local dermatologist that offered a same day appointment. Both times I was asked "what insurance do you have" but knowing I had no "referral" to a non-military provider, I just asked "What's your best rate for a cash payer?" and was given a number I though very fair and far less than I expected based on what I'd read about the ridiculous fees in some parts of our system. I know I'm highly atypical in this regard but it got me thinking about what a system with basic services provided for free to everyone might look like (like my healthcare) and what the cost of a parallel "private side" might be to augment that. Clearly the highly regulated system of employer provided healthcare isn't doing anything to keep costs down. Yes, I do understand the huge incentives and high pay for health care professionals is both a feature and a bug of the system. Yet, I keep coming back to the healthcare I've received all my life and for which I've paid either nothing or a pittance and thought "hey, it's been pretty good."
Like many other things, insurance is a set of algorithms so horribly complicated that it takes a significant effort to figure out what it would do in any particular case, and very few people are capable of that effort.
We have two identical twins who have the same insurance and who were getting identical therapy from the same provider. One of them was getting charged flat $25 for every visit, but the other one's bills suggest some algorithm that tries to exhaust a deductible and then cover some % of the charge - except this seems to happen more than once per year, so it doesn't make any sense.
You might think it is easy to figure out exactly what's different about the way those identical services were billed. I think this has been going on for over 4 months now, and the only help we could get was the suspension of the bills (for some time, or until they figure out what's going on, or until they can't suspend them anymore).
Now imagine if we had not two identical twins but only one kid. Would anyone even believe that anything was wrong with how those services were billed?
We've given too much power to bad code that nobody understands. Given the speed at which this has been escalating, it's my personal belief that stupid code will probably be the end of us much faster than super-smart AI.
The issue is there are too many third party payors involved between you & the doctor there is not really a pay for services setup with the exception of one or two hospitals.
Any advice on avoiding caffeine tolerance?
I used to be a coffee drinker, then I gave it up and went years without much caffeine. Now I'll have coffee once in a while, and it is *really* nice. I feel happier, friendlier, and more energetic/ The effect is strong, but I know that if I do that every day, my brain will adjust and I'll need coffee just to get back to baseline.
So what's the solution? Only have coffee once a week? Twice a week? Alternate coffee with something else that has a similar effect through a different mechanism?
I don't know much about caffeine tolerance, but it might be interesting to use a random procedure that gets you coffee on average once per some given time period (roll a die, if it lands on a 6 have coffee?). This prevents your brain from getting used to it and sounds kind of fun.
My personal solution to this problem is to alternate between using coffee for a few days and chewing nicotine gum for a few days. That way I never build up a lasting tolerance to either.
I've been having success alternating coffee and Modafinil, I'd love to have variety to break it up further though (that isn't nicotine 😅)
I think of caffeine as borrowing energy/focus from the future to the next few hours. From that perspective it's a zero sum game, except if you steer the low energy phase to your sleep time.
Currently I'm on one cup at waking and one after lunch, and that works pretty OK for me.
Have you tried going half-caffeinated? I've been playing with my amounts lately. When I notice the caffeine isn't having as much of an effect, I'll dilute it a bit more for a week, or even take a day or two off, and then work up gradually again to fuller strength. It gives a lot of flexibility in how much caffeine you're delivering to your system.
Caffeine tolerance wears off pretty quickly, at least in my experience. If I take even one day off of caffeine each week, that dramatically slows how fast I build tolerance, and taking 2-3 days off seems like a complete reset.
I don’t try to regulate so precisely now but I have been successful in the past using coffee at a low steady state - about a third of a cup of strong coffee a day seems to be a good amount that picks me up but doesn’t push me to drink more.
the main issue i have is that if i have a bad nights sleep or something I’ll just drink more than that - and then I’ll need more and then more. Then when it stops being fun I’ll go cold turkey and sleep a 14 hour day.
I agree with you . My approach is to only have coffee a few times a week, with at least 2 or 3 days in between.
I read somewhere that you won't build up a tolerance if you wait until 10am or later to drink your first cup. Something about how the tolerance is caused by interference with your natural wakefulness hormones, which will have subsided by later in the morning. Don't know if that's actually true, but it's what I've tried to do ever since reading that article, and it seems to work really well for me.
https://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#caffeine may be useful
I've been running "one-to-three cups of coffee every day, no coffee every other weekend" for years and it seems to work pretty well. I still have tolerance relative to a non-drinker, but it gets reset to a baseline with just the weekend break. Of course I get withdrawal headaches every other weekend which sucks, but that's why god invented Advil.
My regimen allows serious caffeine two non-adjacent days per calendar week, with an option for nicotine lozenges if I need stimulants on back-to-back days.
But it's not the details of the regimen that matter, but the underlying attitude. If that's "caffeine is great, how can I maximize caffeine greatness, what's the bare minimum I have to go without it", you're probably going to wind up with a caffeine tolerance again on short order. If it's "caffeine is a special treat for rare and appropriate occasions", you'll probably do OK.
Also, get to bed on time. If necessary, cut things out of your life to make sure you get to bed on time.
Wow, thanks so much for all the replies. I don't use tobacco or modafinil, but besides those ideas, it looks like many of you are suggesting that I just take off a few days between each dose (or take off a couple days to reset after multi-day usage). Too bad, though as John Schilling pointed out, I need to just think of it as a special treat to have once or twice a week. (JS, since you asked, my sleep is fine.)
I drink coffee for the taste and the good mood; the wired energy is just a bonus and not point for me. For a while I only drank coffee maybe once or twice a week. But then I found a good decaff. So now I drink coffee anywhere from 2-5 times per week, alternating decaff and regular on thoughtful whims. i.e. if i drink regular 3 days in a row, I probably won't have anymore that week. Or if I drink decaff for 3 days, maybe the next day I'll have regular.
A couple weeks ago I posted here (and in some other places) some questions about the feasibility and best practices of developing friendships online. Here are some insights on the topic based on my "research" (and a surprise startup pitch at the very end):
ON ONLINE FRIENDSHIPS
Epistemics
I like friends who aren't inconvenienced easily. Some people are inconvenienced easily. They like things a certain way. They don’t like to have their routine disrupted. And they have every right to be that way. It’s just that they are unlikely to be my friends. Tragic loss for them, I know.
If I had a primary filter for friendships, this would be it. I know people whose primary filters are political, or aesthetic, or financial, or intellectual. They all make sense to me.
As you may intuit from my primary filter, my definition of friendship veers toward the romantic, or religious. I demand some level of sacrifice without accounting. If a friend shows up at midnight on my doorstep, unannounced, it’s a blessing.
I would assume that these values are becoming a bit antiquated today, but I don’t know, I haven’t done the research. Anyway, enough about me.
The Question
We’re all spending more and more time online - it seems about an hour/day more every decade. It’s not crazy that a cyberpunk virtual monopoly on our time will become the standard within the next couple of decades. If not for us, then for our kids and grandkids. So I was wondering, what will this do to friendships...
Continued at https://www.protopiac.com/post/on-on-line-friendships
Interesting stuff. And it caught me surprise that the reasons behind your primary filter are spiritual, since my first thoughts were all centered on things like brain chemistry, energy availability, physicalized introversion triggers (like hyper-sensitivities)...
Of course the knowledge that someone who don't pass your filter may indeed share your values doesn't mean squat if your aesthetic criteria are not met by that someone, right?
(I absolutely adore the idea of being the type of person who loves friends showing up at my house without warning, but I've had to learn to accept that my limited energy streams just don't allow it.)
None of my insights actually help with the spiritual part... While I'm tempted to say that it would be borne out through experience (E), I'm not excluding the possibility of having a filter that would select for those types of interests (I). But as I was doing the exploration, I lost some interest in the self-serving angle and became more interested in the mechanics and possible tech solutions to the problem.
>I demand some level of sacrifice without accounting. If a friend shows up at midnight on my doorstep, unannounced, it’s a blessing.
I both can't understand what you mean here and I really can't simulate a worldview that would believe this. You're saying that if Johnny (or whomever) shoes up at 12:00 a.m. on a Tuesday you'd consider that a positive development to your day?
Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. In fact, as I read your question, a part of me got excited that Johnny is going to show up (unannounced). And I don't even know a Johnny.
That said, the rest of the article doesn't address my particular (or peculiar) preferences.
Ok - still confused. What in any way shape or form gets you excited about this? Have you ever actually had it happen? It's normally pretty shitty.
I'm thinking pretty hard. Over the course of my life I've had... 6 people show up at my door unexpectedly between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. (not counting people arriving at parties or other social gatherings at which people joining would be expected).
One of those instances was a crush of mine coming to announce they had mutually positive feelings for me. That was a fun night. The other five were all people who were chemical impaired and in the midst of some truly terrible situations and needed help. The two most exciting were "I'm currently running from the cops" and "I left the house because I thought I was going to kill my husband."
5/6 of these events were incredibly tiring and stressful situations to deal with. Talking drunk people down from the ledge isn't a fun pastime. What specifically about this situation excites you? Is it just unexpected social interaction? Do you really, really love helping people who are incredibly messed up?
Sorry if it seems like I'm badgering you, it's just that I find this really confusing. It's as if you said "I enjoy having sandwiches knocked out of my hand as I'm trying to eat" or anything else that's universally considered bad.
Ok. You've clearly had a very statistically significant trend of "negative" late night visitor experiences. So, the simplest way to help you map my world view is to imagine that you had 6 out of 6 positive late-night friend visitor experiences. It's not impossible, right?
The next line of reasoning is more dependent on age. 30 years ago, before cell phones, "dropping in" on somebody was much more common. There were even cliches like "I was in the area, so I thought I'd drop in." Today, this is odd because it's both impractical not to call/text ahead of time, and also much more likely to be considered rude/weird. But if my value system was already being developed 30 years ago, you might see how it did so different social norms.
I had a small experience in August that I could relate. I was visiting an old friend and we were in the back yard, BBQing and drinking beers. Around 11pm, a new face appeared. It was a neighbor from down the street. He said he heard music and came by (and brought his own beer). This was a very "small" event, but to me it stuck out as a wholesome breath of fresh air. The freedom of just showing up signals a combination of trust, informality, and conviviality that's often lacking in more modern friendships. It also introduces an unpredictability to life that's been "scheduled out". Personally, I often equate unpredictability to adventure, but I know it's not that way for everybody.
None of this make the experiences you listed any less unpleasant.
Ok, I get it. I'm biased towards believing that "anyone showing up after midnight is a massive hassle" and projected that bias when you said these kind of events excited you, but you weren't talking about those kinds of events.
Cool. I appreciate your perspective, thanks for engaging with me to help me get clarity.
See, the interesting thing about my thought process is that I would 1) love it if the situation with the neighbor happened to me and 2) would absolutely _never_ dream of doing that to someone else, in case that person felt differently. This is a common thread for me, where there are lots of things that, if a friend did/asked me to do etc., I would have no problem accommodating, would not feel any resentment, and in fact would be happy to help, but that I could never imagine imposing on a friend the same way. I realize the inherent contradiction, but I can't help the emotional response of "never impose on others unless you _absolutely have to_, but also be happy to help when imposed upon.
You can ask all of your friends if any of them enjoy being imposed upon. If any of them say yes, you can try to practice on them, and see how it goes. What if... it totally blows your mind!!!!
Not really related to your project, but in my experience (born in USSR, moved from Russia to the US as a teenager, have a PhD in math, work in an industrial research position), the closest I've come to the romanticized ideal of the Soviet-style friendship with dropping in on people unannounced at midnight was in high school at nerd camps, and as a college undergraduate. ("Dropping in" consisted of walking down the hall in the first case, and across campus in the second.) There was less of it for me as a graduate student (although I think that's accidental and it could've peaked in graduate school for some people), and dramatically less afterwards, not least because most everyone (myself included) had paired up and moved off campus. The question of how to have something approximating the community and camaraderie of a college undergraduate while living a standard-issue adult life with a husband, child, dog, and an 8-5 job is certainly interesting; the romanticized Soviet-style platonic ideal of friendship managed somehow. (Although according to my mother, overcoming the common adversity of daily life in the USSR was a large part of the experience for her.)
As a fellow soviet alum, it's nice to hear your story. While those relationships are more rare these days, I refuse to believe they are not impossible. Partially, the problem is of "standard-issue" (it just so happens that tightknit friendships were a part of the Soviet standard-issue). But if you have friends - even "standard issue" friends - who love you, then go ahead and surprise drop in on them. You'll make their week, if not month, if not year. (And maybe it's time that you left your husband to hold the fort for 24-72 hours. Sorry, I have no idea if your husband deserved that.)
not impossible = not possible
I think part of the difference between my experience and my parents' (on which I'm basing my romanticized notions) is that, by my age, they had lived in one city their entire lives; I've lived in six. (I've definitely at times felt like I'm better at friendship by correspondence than at friendship in person.) I have good friends from all six periods, but (a) the ones in my city are the newest ones, and (b) I don't have many friends who are also friends with each other. I think having your friends also be friends with each other might actually be important to the project, not least because it makes it easier to interact with them more frequently; that feels like it was an important part of the success of my undergraduate experience.
Suppose that you own a business and you have a choice of either hiring a robot or a human. The expected worker turnover rate is 10 years and the robot also breaks down after 10 years. The nominal salary and the annualized cost of the robot are the same. So which do you chose? The answer is the robot - due to taxes. Capital is a business expenditure, you can deduct it from your tax burden. A human on the other hand incurs payroll taxes and income tax (and some others as well).
Much has been said about the declining share of labor relative to capital (in general, but particularly low skill labor). But I've never seen anyone comment on the fact that our tax system explicitly incentives businesses to choose capital over labor whenever possible. Is this is a good thing - an incentive to automate where possible? Or is it an economic inefficiency? Or both?
You deduct the robot's purchase price bit by bit, over the life of the robot. That's what depreciation is. The capital investment and depreciation are not two separate things that you get to deduct.
> Although we all unfortunately depreciate over time, I don't believe any tax code allows depreciation of their human workforce to be written off.
Although human bodies do age and break down, people tend to become *more* valuable as employees as they gain experience and knowledge over the course of their careers (though this trend breaks down when you get close to retirement age). Someone who has 1 year of job experience typically earns less and produces less valuable work than someone with 10 years of job experience, but a 10-year-old CNC machine is almost never more valuable than a brand new CNC machine.
I've seen people say this - it's one argument I've seen brought up against both income taxes and the employer-sponsored healthcare system
The worker's wages are also deductible. Basically any money that you spend in order to make money is deductible.
The overall cost of the worker is still more. The incentive to chose the robot remains.
As others have stated, depreciation makes buying a robot less advantageous given your scenario. The US tax code is extremely favorable to hiring and investment more broadly.
I’m confused. The robot depreciates to a value of zero over ten years. All of that is tax deductible. The human is paid an amount equal to that of the robot over ten years (with the same deduction) and then leaves. So far things are even - I’m assuming they both do the same job for those ten years. Add in payroll and income tax and that makes the human more expensive, not to mention healthcare, social security tax and more. Where’s the mistake?
You just need to google this. There’s a whole bunch of IRS guidance on how assets get depreciated. My strong guess would be that a robot isn’t any different than a milling machine. Depreciation is the robot tax consideration to compare the human tax considerations against. Depreciation isn’t mentioned in your post so that’s your biggest mistake.
Corporations get to write off all the employee expenses in the current tax year. Every year. That’s very tax advantageous.
Also, employee payroll (besides the 7.5% Social Security contribution) and income taxes are irrelevant to the corporation’s tax burden. Those fall on the employee.
Seta did mention depreciation, indirectly. "Capital is a business expenditure, you can deduct it from your tax burden."
but are we specifically looking at the incentives due to taxes? the OP seems to be narrowly looking at if this incentive is mostly due to taxes. overall cost I assume includes somethings which are not taxes.
A robot. If all things are equal (I suppose payroll taxes are included in this calculation), the robot is probably more predictable. It can break down but the probably has a service agreement with the manufacturer. Whereas a human may quit, get sick, go on strike to demand better pay or otherwise sabotage your business. Also, employment costs can be expected to rise while the technology costs tend to decrease over time or getting better for the same price.
I don't understand the premise of your argument. *Businesses* don't pay payroll taxes, income taxes, or corporate income taxes. Businesses are merely pass-through devices that assign those charges to various human beings, id est payroll taxes and income taxes are paid by the worker, sales and corporate income taxes are paid by the customers. Every businessman knows the true total cost of an employee is a certain percentage higher than his take home salary, and every employee knows his "true" salary (what gets put in the bank that he gets to spend) is only a percentage of his nominal gross salary. Some business make an explicit note of the sales tax that is inherent in the their final selling price, but in other cases they do not, and in any event they almost never give more than the tax on the final transaction, they don't give a complete accounting of all the taxes paid, e.g. sales taxes on the raw materials, payroll taxes for the employees who made the widget or provide the service.
Anyway, there is a very good reason (from labor's point of view) for tax policy to favor capital investment: because it makes labor more efficient, and rising productivity is the *only* way real wages can rise over time -- each hour you work has to actually produce more widgets, so that the real value of your labor (measured in widgets) goes up. Capital investment, e.g. technology, is the only way that can happen.
What business are you in where worker turn over (for the same task) is 10 years?
Obviously it's a spherical and frictionless business that sells widgets at the optimal point along the supply-demand curve :)
Assume that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is true. According to it, Nature is inherently probabilistic; it is only until a measuring device (not necessarily a human) makes a quantitative measurement of X that X can be said to have that measure. Does anyone know whether all the results of measurements are due to the foundational random generator of Nature? And if this is true, then does this mean that our actions are not ultimately determined or free but random?
It is my impression that this is more-or-less how quantum mechanics is supposed to be interpreted. However I am unsure about how much quantum physics relates to whether our actions or free or not (although I am inclined to think that, metaphysically, none of our actions are free; also see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07884.pdf for a description of how the deepest underlying physics of everyday phenomena has been essentially completely characterized).
I believ it doesn't really matter if the underlying dynamics are governed by classical chaotic systems or quantum randomness, both could mean our actions are not "determined", but neither will provide "freedom" in a meaningful way. If there is "free will", it is to be found on another level of abstraction.
Thanks for the link. I watched a similar lecture by Sean years ago and have forgotten most of what he said.
> Assume that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is true.
I think you should check out this recent blog post by Scott Aaronson, "The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics": https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5359
His position (which I agree with) is:
> I hold that all interpretations of [quantum mechanics] are just crutches that are better or worse at helping you along to the Zen realization that QM is what it is and doesn’t need an interpretation. As Sidney Coleman famously argued, what needs reinterpretation is not QM itself, but all our pre-quantum philosophical baggage—the baggage that leads us to demand, for example, that a wavefunction |ψ⟩ either be “real” like a stubbed toe or else “unreal” like a dream.
Thanks for the pointer; I'd missed this post of Aaronson's. Bonus: he links to an apparent debunking of the claim that RSA is broken:
https://twitter.com/inf_0_/status/1367376526300172288
I'll check it out. For anyone who is interested, here's an interesting comment I just found on a video ("Chris Langan - How Free Will Works - CTMU") about free will:
> You still can't escape the logical limits on individual choice that most people would instinctively reject as "free will" if you pointed them out to them. We each inherit our genetics and epigenetics, which have massive influence on everything we do or think. Our environment is set for us the moment our primordial fertilization occurs. The large-scale structures of the human body are generated by our genetics and environmental input, and the environment itself is structured without our influence, at least initially. The large-scale structures obey Newtonian mechanics and are thus deterministic, and that's where it ends. However, if you try to work around that by suggesting that there may be quantum events that are not deterministic, and the outcome of that event is amplified into a thought or action, then the implication that our actions are not they themselves deterministic may be correct. However, this doesn't escape the problem at base, because the quantum event itself is purely random. The wave function describing a series of quantum events is deterministic in aggregate, but the individual event's outcome along that aggregate distribution is quintessentially unpredictable, regardless of whether or not you can add intervening layers of probabilistic descriptions of an outcome. Fundamentally, the only logically possible categories are events that are predetermined, completely random, or random within given limits that they themselves are predetermined. This is the "automaticity" Langan refers to here when discussing coordination that occurs "automatically" during our free will process, and the "automaticity" is what people have no control over ultimately. However, because this automaticity is the basis of every conscious act of will, and it itself is subject to these logical restrictions, one can see how our acts of free will are really nothing more than amplifications of quantum events which they themselves are random. Is this free will? The only sense in which it is free is that the origination comes from within the bounds of your physical body, but that doesn't make it any less subject to the predictability of mathematics and the randomness of the universe. It is in this sense that one cannot, ultimately, take full credit for one's own actions in the sense that everything we are, do, and even will does not come from anything that is not ultimately predetermined or random, because even if you amplify a quantum event through a series of ever-increasing structures of bodily organization that channel the outcome of the event into an increased probability of a certain kind of outcome, the chain of causation itself still remains arbitrary and random at base.
I don't really like the free will debate because I think it tends to focus on a meaningless question (is the made-up term "free will" compatible with the universe we live in?) while ignoring a meaningful distinction (to what degree are a person's actions free from coercion in a given situation?). There is a meaningful difference between someone committing premeditated murder because of a personal grudge, vs. a child soldier being forced at gunpoint to kill someone. The murderer's choice was "free" in a way that the child soldier's wasn't. You could even imagine a third scenario where someone was knocked unconscious and physically manipulated into pulling a trigger to kill someone. All three scenarios have the common feature that they occur in a world governed by the laws of physics, but there are very good reasons to treat the cases differently in our legal system, in our personal judgements, and in how we want to structure society. Teasing apart the nuances of coercion is difficult (e.g. what if the murderer had a brain tumor that impaired higher cognitive functions?) and how we make those judgements can deeply affect our lives. I don't think our approach to these issues should be contingent on whether we live in a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics, quantum randomness, divine predestination, or ineffable metaphysical entities.
> All three scenarios have the common feature that they occur in a world governed by the laws of physics, but there are very good reasons to treat the cases differently in our legal system . . .
Right, I agree; but the practical component and the purely intellectual component of these discussions seem to be at odds with one another when one is trying to comes to terms with either component. Practically, a society can have any set of laws of a huge number of possible laws (arguing about which is best is the task, some would say, of ethics); whereas the Universe has one set of ultimate principles worth discovering. It's worthless (or so I think) for a society to use the laws of physics to determine its law, just as it's equally worthless for scientists to keep in mind the practical consequences of the laws they're trying to discover. But my original question is more about determining the actual state of the second component; it's what I want to know about, not so that it can influence me or help me influence society, but so that I have more knowledge of the foundation of reality.
> just as it's equally worthless for scientists to keep in mind the practical consequences of the laws they're trying to discover
I don't mean this to be as cold-hearted as it seems; of course there are situations where a scientist wants to be concerned about the practical implications of his discoveries. What I meant (in the specific context of free will) is that the pure scientist should not be worried about the consequences of his discoveries, because regardless of the discoveries, it's not going to change the fact that societies shouldn't - and won't - simply adduce the laws of physics to make their legal system a self-destructive or foolish system. They will (usually) have a complex system designed around higher-level concepts such as justice, fairness, etc. (But perhaps that is a naively positive view of the humanity and its use of science.)
> Does anyone know whether all the results of measurements are due to the foundational random generator of Nature?
Which experiments? In theory, you should be still able to approximate determinism using large, non-chaotic systems. In practice, whatever was predictable before is still predictable -- it adds up to normality.
I think you're over-interpreting the Copenhagen interpretation. It says nothing about what actually is true about a system, it only says what can be measured, and it says for systems in a state which is not an eigenstate of the operator corresponding to what you want to measure, you cannot know what the value of the measurement is before you make it -- that is, you cannot *predict* it. But does the system, nevertheless, have some value just before you measure it that is equal to the value you measure? Current science has no answer to that question, because we have no way of knowing anything without a measurement, or a trajectory -- meaning some 100% reliable theoretical way of connecting a measurement *in the past* with the result of a measurement in the present. Unfortunately a fundamental property of QM is that classical trajectories (those with just one path from past to future) are the exception, not the rule, and in most cases don't exist.
That is, what QM says is you cannot *predict* the value of some measurements in the present, even with all possible information about the past. That is not the same thing as saying the system does not have *some* value at all possible times.
A classic example would be measurement of the location of a bound particle (say an electron in an atom) which is in an energy eigenstate. We cannot predict its exact position at a given time, all we can predict is the probability of it being various places (the usual wavefunction you see graphed). Of course, when we actually measure its position, we do get a specific position, as precisely as we wish -- we see a particle at a specific location. *Every* time we measure the position, we get a specific answer. What happens in between measurements? Does the particle "have" a specific position, or not? Again, current science cannot answer this question, because QM cannot predict a precise position at time X given any number of measurements at earlier times. It's possible that's a weakness of the theory, of course, but no one has come up with a better theory.
Carl Pham: You asked “But does the system, nevertheless, have some value just before you measure it”? That sounds like a hidden-variable theory, and it has been proven (the Bell inequality) to be false. Unless you want to allow for faster than light travel or some implausible explanation.
Aggregated random processes don't necessarily result in a random process. We can see this obviously with, say, organic evolution. Point mutations can effectively change any base pair to any other, but due to constraints thanks to embryology and other factors, all mutations can't be expressed, and ones that can be but don't confer any reproductive advantage won't necessarily be passed on. That greatly simplifies the process, but point being the end result is much more predictable than the underlying cause.
With animal action, at some quantum level, maybe a random fluctuation (if the universe is truly fundamentally random at that level) can cause some ion in an ion channel in a neuronal membrane to bounce a few degrees more than can be accounted for by electromagnetism alone, but it would take many, many such random events occurring at the same time and in a correlated way so as not to cancel each other out to measurably impact action potential across a synapse and thus possibly influence behavior. The net result in terms of muscle movement is no less random than if the universe had no randomness in it at all.
Sorry if this is too random/off-topic but are there any martial artists in this community? I've been practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for about 2 years now, but am thinking of quitting because I've been hearing a lot of anecdotal stories lately of BJJ athletes having strokes at young ages, possibly due to the chokes putting pressure on arteries in the neck. So I'm trying to look for another martial art to switch to. Looking for something fun and involving a good cardio workout, but without any long-term negative impact to health. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Huh. Never heard of those anecdotes, and I've been doing BJJ for 18 years now. If the stories involve pro athletes, you should consider that a) they're doing a LOT more training than most hobbyists, and b) they're probably juicing as well.
Regarding recommendations: "without any long-term negative impact" rules out all full-contact sports, because they will either cause direct damage or wear and tear. Many of the non-competitive "martial-artsy" disciplines like Aikido are out as well - not much of a cardio workout to be had there. It might sound stupid, but if you find a boxing or kickboxing gym that lets you practice without sparring (or with only very light contact sparring), that might be worth a try.
Capoiera is a lot of fun (probably less of a “serious” martial art than Jiu Jitsu), and if you’re in a region with a significant Brazilian population you should be able to find a rhoda.
Came here to post this. Capoeira is tons of fun, on the spectrum of being more low-impact and arguably even better cardio than BJJ.
Thirding Capoeira being a lot of fun. It also has the benefit of having a lot less mysticism and authoritarian structures than eastern martial arts, although there is still hierarchy in it a lot of the structure of classes and actually playing Capoeira encourages mixing of ranks.
Totally! IMO it's one of the few disciplines where sparring between people of vastly different skills can be rewarding for both parties. I've seen super fun games between absolute masters and people who can only really ginga.
Capoeira is great, but be sure to take good care of you joints!
Many avid BJJ practitioners in the community. Have never heard the stories of young strokes. You should see if these are actually statistically significant before giving up a beloved hobby. Lots of people have strokes, athletes on gear especially.
And if the problem is regular application of chokes, either get better or tap sooner (or both).
Judo is a lot of fun, has a lot in common with Jujutsu, but focuses more on standing throws and techniques. It does also include ne waza, but applications of joint locks and chokes are rare in actual tournaments.
The criteria of Good workout + lifetime sport is tough to find in contact sports. Maybe kickboxing/muah Thai/karate but without hard sparring?
Cynically I think competitive BJJ players are having strokes because there’s a culture of being juuuuuuiccccy and the sauce isn’t good for your heart.
Basically every martial art is less chokey than BJJ, it's generally understood that choking someone out is extremely dangerous and unpredictable as to consequences in all of human society *except* BJJ practitioners, who insist it's perfectly safe. Switch to literally anything.
My personal suggerstion would be for Wudang/Practical Tai Chi Chuan, the TCC that caves your face in. It's obscure and so it's very likely there might not be a club where you are, but if there is, do that.
That's an interesting statement. Allow me to paraphrase: "This activity is considered dangerous by everyone except the people who do it every day and observe no negative effects. Obviously, these people are idiots, and you should not do it." Could there be other explanations, maybe?
No, not really. You're deliberately simplifying the issue by eliding the extensive actual information available on this topic from myriad sources (possibly due to BJJ-related brain damage? /s). I didn't write "all other martial artists, who are feebs by implication, and only speculating", I wrote *all of human society*, because that's what I meant. There is ample data to confirm the dangers of choking and the unpredictable but potentially grave effects of brain oxygen deprivation. This is like if there were a subculture of chicken-race enthusiasts who insisted that car crashes are "not observed harmful" and claimed that "we've never seen anything like that". Any sane person regards such testimony with skepticism, to put it mildly.
Okay, the last time I looked into the topic was a couple of years ago, when the consensus was that when a choke is done to a healthy individual, in a competent manner, and let go quickly, it is safe and leaves no lasting damage. That was supported by various studies and the experience from roughly a century of judo competion. I now found some stories from the last years that indicate that strokes may be triggered by chokes occasionally, so it would be at least be worthwhile to study this systematically, collect statistics, and be aware of the possibility. Still not a reason to freak out (compared to, say, the dozen or so people who die of brain injuries after boxing matches each year).
I've had to quit temporarily due to time pressures, but I can recommend HEMA. It's definitely heavy cardio if you make it and fun in a way a lot of other martial arts aren't (even if that's mostly because of the expensive toys you're playing with). Technically I'm not sure how to rate it on health impacts, obviously injuries have the potential to be much worse, but realistically the most common injury is heatstroke, followed by ankle injuries from poor form. It also has the added advantage of your increasing skill over the years being able to offset any losses from physicality that comes with aging. Longsword clubs are easy enough to find, especially in America, though I personally prefer singlesword systems.
Freedom of speech - what does it mean?
I've read quite often the slogan "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences", but that seems poorly thought-out, because in a sense, that's what it should mean.
"You're free to say what you want, but if we don't like it, we will abduct you and your family and torture you to death. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
...doesn't quite work for me.
"You're free to say what we want, but if we don't like it, we will scream at you what a terrible person you are and that you should burn in hell, and we will pester your employer to fire you and your prospective employers to never give you a job ever again. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
...still seems wrong.
"You're free to say what you want, but you should consider how it reflects on us, your employer/ teammates/ friends, and if we find it completely inacceptable, we may have to cut you loose to preserve our own reputation. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
...seems kinda reasonable. But is it really? Where should you draw the line between 2 and 3? Should you draw it somewhere else? Should the fact that there's a mob of obviously loony fanatics raging on twitter influence the reaction of employers, coworkers, friends?
Should freedom of speech apply to general statements that may or may not hurt someones feelings? Should it also apply to personal attacks, bullying etc? Whose right, and whose duty, is it to "hold others accountable" for objectionable statements?
I've explained my position on this at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/is-it-possible-to-have-coherent-principles-around-free-speech-norms/
That's quite helpful, thanks!
Is it helpful? He admits "I don’t know if this position is coherent" in the piece itself.
Freedom of speech as a legal concept only applies to the government.
Thus any non government agent can react in any way that isn't illegal for other reasons as a response to any speech.
"You're free to say what we want, but if we don't like it, we will scream at you what a terrible person you are and that you should burn in hell, and we will pester your employer to fire you and your prospective employers to never give you a job ever again. But hey, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences, amirite?"
The government cannot prevent individuals from doing that, this response to peoples speech is protected by freedom of speech.
Do you think freedom of speech *should* be a guiding principle of a free society, no matter whether it is right now?
Also, states generally impose limits on the freedom of speech, and they draw the lines in different places. Screaming at someone that they should burn in hell may be legally protected free speech in the US, but it might be considered an illegal insult, or constitute illegal harrassment, in other countries.
I think governments are likely to fulfill that role badly.
The places i choose to be tends to be reasonably far in the free speech direction. While the speech norms are informal and a by product of the people there.
I think there's a big difference between 'make speech more free' as a guiding heuristic, and 'free speech is an absolute, inviolable right.'
Take two otherwise identical cultures, and the one where speech is 1% freer is likely better off. But that doesn't mean that the country with 100% free speech (defined in the most extreme and absolutist way possible) is better off than the country with 80% free speech, or 60% or w/e.
If free speech is recognized as a public good that we should value, then we can makes sensible trades with it against other values. If we treat it as an absolutist right, then we can only ever either enforce it or abandon it. Both of those choices have real bad consequences, and the arguments over when to do which create massive strife and elide actual productive discussion of the object-level issues.
I think you mean, the first amendment of the U.S. constitution constrains the federal government, and through an amendment (14th?) state and local governments. The liberal principle of free speech was the motivation for creating the 1st amendment, but is not identical to it.