For me, libertarian is one end of the political axis with authoritarian on the other end. So in this regard I find the US with our first ten amendments to the constitution to be mostly libertarian. I think libertarian also gets mashed in with the Libertarian Party (which we can't discuss today... and I don't really know much about anyway.) and for me it's wrong to conflate the two.
Is there a good guideline for efficiently reading scientific literature to get a feel for if a "scientific consensus" exists and what does it say?
I had a couple swings at this before - once tried to see if literature supports caffeine+l-theanine, other time I tried to see if there is an empirically proven approach to modelling crowd psychology. I am neither a pharmaceutics researcher/psychiatrist nor a psychologist.
In both cases I walked away with the idea that papers in the field were very coopted by skewed incentives - some studies on caffeine+theanine were funded by nootropics manufacturers, and studies on crowd psychology were politically loaded, because crowd psychology is either pro-harsh-riot-control or anti-riot-control (mentioning this doesn't breach the odd-numbered rule, right?).
My best current conclusion was that when such cooptation exists, the waters are so muddled that you can either spend like half a year to do your own literature review, or accept that you know nothing and go ahead with this cartesian void in mind. Any alternative opinions?
Clarification - first paragraph refers to "efficiently and quickly". I.e. significantly faster than spending like half a year to do your own literature review.
@betulaster - I don't have a guideline for you, but second your question, and am equally interested.
The most recent case for me was trying to discover by web search what the scientific consensus is now about the 'Oumuamua asteroid - less about "it's an alien probe!" explanations, and more about the consensus on non-ETI explanations (what it was made of, how it formed, how to explain puzzling things like the acceleration kick but no visible outgassing, etc).
It's very hard to find this info, but very easy to find breathless journalistic articles of the form "Scientists have decoded the mystery of 'Oumuamua) with a link to a paper and explanation, and three months later a different breathless article with different explanation and paper.
I am not a credentialed expert in the field, but I thought your essay was excellent. Wisdom of the crowd of experts seems like a good idea. Difficult to implement as you say. There would have to be some kind of incentive to voicing your opinion. And scientists are hairsplitters and nuance hounds, so many would want to answer questions with qualifiers like sort of, yes but, it's complicated, we are beginning to believe etc.
Thanks! Yes, good point, I think the philosopher survey does something similar with a wide array of answer options. I think if you can get philosophers to agree on some voting system, getting scientists too would be a piece of cake.
How do you deal with preference falsification. If you are in some field, but hold a contrary view, there is a good chance you just keep your head down and don't say anything against the 'common' view. To do so risks your funding source. When I hear "95% of scientists think X" I think, "hmm maybe some preference falsification is going on."
I think making the survey or the account system anonymous would solve this problem. Identities would still have to be verified by site admins though. Otherwise I agree, public survey with real names attached to each vote would ensure trouble for contrarians.
A different problem is the widespread acceptance of the idea that there are true things which the public ought not to be allowed to know, and noble lies that should be spread instead.
Did you try to identify an expert or three in the areas you were interested in and asking them? If you can find people who actually study the things you're interested in, they're usually pretty happy to talk about them and could probably point you towards good sources for follow-up.
To give you a bit more practical advice, I find google scholar (https://scholar.google.com/) invaluable. Probably you know it well but just in case I'll lay out the steps I would take if I were to investigate your question
1) Copy paste caffeine+l-theanine into the search and see what comes up, no filters at this point. Open any article with ~10 or more citations from the first couple pages in a new tab
2) Repeat the search with a time restriction in the last few years, e.g., from 2017 onward to capture if there have been any major shifts in thinking since then
3) You mention the risk of research being coopted so the next step will be to sort the results by funding source. This is usually listed at the bottom of the article before the references.
Doing so I find the following which list only government or academic funding (my subjective analysis of those papers in parentheses):
4) Starting with the first batch of papers I'll scan the abstracts and conclusions for major findings,
I find from the non-commercial group
Kahathuduwa et. al., *note I discovered later on that this author was also on a Pepsi Co funded paper*
"Mean RVRT (recognition visual reaction time) was significantly improved by theanine (P = 0.019), caffeine (P = 0.043), and theanine–caffeine combination (P = 0.001), but not by tea (P = 0.429) or placebo (P = 0.822)."
"high doses of theanine and caffeine have acute effects of improving attention"
"Given the scarcity of randomized double-blind controlled trials, it is also necessary to explore the time-course of the acute effects of theanine."
"Our results also suggest that theanine and caffeine have additive effects in the doses equivalent to the amounts found in 6–10 cups of tea"
From the Williams et al., review
"Our findings suggest that supplementation of 200–400 mg/day of L-THE may assist in the reduction of stress and anxiety in people exposed to stressful conditions"
"Despite this finding, longer-term and larger cohort clinical studies, including those where L-THE is incorporated into the diet regularly, are needed to clinically justify the use of L-THE as a therapeutic agent to reduce stress and anxiety in people exposed to stressful conditions."
From the ambiguous
Giles et. al.,
"Caffeine accentuated global processing of visual attention on the hierarchical shape task (p < 0.05), theanine accentuated local processing (p < 0.05), and the combination did not differ from placebo. Caffeine reduced flanker conflict difference scores on the Attention Network Test (p < 0.05), theanine increased difference scores (p < 0.05), and the combination did not differ from placebo."
"Thus, under emotional arousal, caffeine and theanine exert opposite effects on certain attentional processes, but when consumed together, they counteract the effects of each other."
Haskell et. al.,
"l-Theanine increased ‘headache’ ratings and decreased correct serial seven subtractions. Caffeine led to faster digit vigilance reaction time, improved Rapid Visual Information Processing (RVIP) accuracy and attenuated increases in self-reported ‘mental fatigue’. In addition to improving RVIP accuracy and ‘mental fatigue’ ratings, the combination also led to faster simple reaction time, faster numeric working memory reaction time and improved sentence verification accuracy."
"The levels of l-theanine and caffeine used here are higher than those found in tea beverages, which are typically in the region of 40 mg caffeine and 20 mg l-theanine. In this initial study it was felt that the use of known psychoactive doses was important in order to establish a neurocognitive profile for l-theanine and to examine effects of a caffeine–l-theanine combination. "
"The only effect of caffeine not evident following the combination was an improvement to digit vigilance reaction time. Given that l-theanine is a ‘relaxant,’ and the effects of caffeine are usually attributed to its ‘stimulant’ properties, it is not clear why the addition of l-theanine should ameliorate the effects of caffeine."
From the commercial funded
Kahathuduwa et. al., (him again!)
"a 20-minute fMRI scan was performed while the subjects performed a visual color stimulus discrimination task. l-Theanine and l-theanine–caffeine combination resulted in faster responses to targets compared with placebo (∆ = 27.8 milliseconds, P = .018 and ∆ = 26.7 milliseconds, P = .037, respectively)."
"l-Theanine–caffeine combination was associated with decreased fMRI responses to target stimuli as compared with distractors in several brain regions that typically show increased activation during mind wandering. "
"Analysis of fMRI data did not reveal significant differences in BOLD responses in the caffeine condition compared with the placebo."
"However, because caffeine has a vasopressor effect on cerebral circulation [52] and as l-theanine may be counteracting this effect [48], [49], it is essential to examine these potential mechanisms in a study that controls for the effects of l-theanine and caffeine on cerebral blood flow."
"Therefore, our study provides preliminary evidence to suggest that oral consumption of 200 mg of l-theanine alone or in combination with 160 mg of caffeine may improve performance in tasks that require stimulus discrimination. "
Kelly et. al.,
"Subjects underwent 4 d of testing, ingesting either placebo, 100 mg of l-theanine, 50 mg of caffeine, or these treatments combined."
"We found an increase in hit rate and target discriminability (d′) for the combined treatment relative to placebo, and an increase in d′ but not hit rate for caffeine alone, whereas no effects were detected for l-theanine alone. "
" In terms of d′, improvements were seen for both caffeine alone and L-theanine plus caffeine, the latter having a larger effect size (0.55 vs. 0.42 calculated as Cohen's d)."
5) Synthesis: Overall I find modest evidence for there being some benefit to cognitive performance on attention tasks from the combo, but not sure if I buy that it's sig. better than caffeine alone. The studies overall are pretty small and Nestle etc. may not be so interested in publishing negative results. Ideally there would be a higher % of novel research findings to review articles. Hope this helps!
Thanks for that, it helps to see the research broken down so well so that I can replicate in my own research. Completely anecdotally and not science based for OP, I take caffeine/l-theanine capsules from time to time, and have previously taken pure caffeine and other energy drinks/coffee/tea. I find the difference in ingestion forms to be negligible, caffeine per mg is basically the same. However, when I take caffeine with l-theanine, the energy is more controlled and I get less jittery. When I take pure caffeine pills, I get a bit of a shaky energy and sometimes it induces headaches. Take that for what you will, but I try my best to be analytical of the effects of drugs or supplements that I take.
[Epistemic status: Current PhD candidate in biomedical sciences.]
The short answer is no, there is no such guideline.
The long answer is that scientific consensus is a really horrible way of judging the quality of evidence to begin with. Looking at the consensus view will filter out small cliques of kooks, and there are always far more kooks than visionaries, but it will also lock in any groupthink which has accreted to a topic over years or decades. In my own field I've seen claims in reviews which cite other reviews three or four deep before getting to the original papers, with suggestive results of a single experiment transmuted into definitive fact without any serious attempt to reproduce those results.
The best answer I can give is to practice epistemic humility. If you don't have the time or the training to evaluate the quality of the literature on a topic and you don't know anyone trustworthy who does, "I don't know" is the best and most honest answer that you can give. It's not terribly satisfying but that's life.
One thing that would help, and has been proposed, are grants explicitly to reproduce prior results with a higher standard of evidence: basically treating normal science as hypothesis-generating research and adding a layer of high-powered follow-up studies to test those hypotheses. I've seen that format called "preclinical trials" as way to distinguish it from standard preclinical research but can't find the exact source.
That fits with my view that usually it's just a question of allocating finite resources. There are a hundred projects I would like to do if I had unlimited time and money, but since I don't those constraints determine how deeply it's possible to investigate a topic.
Thanks for this. Another thing to consider is that journal articles are written once and read many multiples more times (especially if they are influential). The thoughts and opinions of the readers are not going to reflect back in the original text, and I think its a disservice to science that there isn't a place to dump/reference them.
I tend to just google '*topic* meta analysis' and go from there. It's not quite the same thing as 'consensus', but it may be better. Sometimes there can be a consensus despite the weight of evidence pointing in a different direction. Obviously, the results of meta- analyses are not sufficient evidence for truth, given the file drawer problem and related biases, but I think they are necessary: if there isn't sufficient evidence for a meta- analysis then I'm automatically sceptical of any claims to truth. I would also look for triangulated evidence that the effect is robust, i.e., findings from different types of evidence that point in the same direction. A good meta- analysis will point out if this is available.
(Context: I teach Psychology A Level (UK: 16-18 year olds) and the textbooks are very skimpy on evidence, often misleadingly so, and if I'm unfamiliar with a topic I like to be able to have a good reason to put forward an acceptable conclusion about each topic.)
I'll posit several problems with the goal of gathering scientific consensus via a literature review:
1. Scientific literature only incorporates the feedback of other scientists in the peer review process which can be exclusive. I wish there was a way to see the stuff the intended audience (scientists themselves) pencil in at the margins of papers when they consume them. (I vaguely recall hearing about an open source protocol for this. I'll try to dig it up if I'm pressed here).
2. There are often disagreements at the intersection of two disciplines, like psychology and psychiatry. Which consensus are you interested in at that intersection? Sometimes there are multi-disciplinary fields that yield multilateral disagreements. How can one weigh the differing groups?
3. Scientific consensus can also be a blunt instrument used to quell disagreements within a discipline. For many decades, any study whose results questioned the role of saturated fat in heart disease was discredited by the relevant journals. Do we really want the scientific consensus in this case or do we want to be able to draw our own conclusions from the data? I concede the latter opens up a whole other can of worms that I'm not prepared to deal with.
Lately I've been thinking about an idea where individuals can state their epistemological preferences clearly and groups of related people in that regard can be served by an information gathering organization. For example, I do not consider anyone who has ever (without apologizing) used argumentative fallacies intentionally to be credible. If there are enough people like me, could a nonprofit spring up to serve us that names and shames intellectuals who have done that and produce a body of knowledge that intentionally excludes their contributions and opinions from consideration?
Unsurprisingly, the "division" claim is not true. Folks in the comments of the Taleb post were pointing out it wasn't true there as well.
It bothers me that Taleb's examples all seem to fall apart once you actually look at them more deeply. The same was true of the claim about the Spartans.
The fascinating thing about the biggest new container ships like the Ever Given is that they' were kind of a boondoggle before the Pandemic. They were being built by heavily subsidized shipyards, for a dwindling number of shipping lines, and were already running into problems like being slow and time-consuming to unload at their destinations. Maersk actually fired their CEO back in 2016 because the company was taking a major financial hit from over-capacity in shipping.
But now the Pandemic has (at least temporarily) turned that around, and it's full steam ahead on ordering new big ships. I wonder if there's going to be another massive glut in shipping capacity in 2022-2023.
Possibly unfair view of Taleb, based on skimming a couple of his books, which I found intolerable to read: He really is smart, and thinks in a clever quirky way about the structure of things, but he is just CONSUMED by the idea of being a Great Thinker. Sometimes he is so busy looking in the mirror at himself laying out an idea that he doesn't have much attention left over for looking at the actual idea and wondering whether the examples he marshals are all real and valid, and whether his idea holds up to scrutiny if you put it under a bright light and rotate it (as Scott does in parts of his review).
He's so in love with himself he'd kiss himself passionately on the throat if he had the flexibility.
I think Scott's review was perhaps even too forgiving of the details. A lot of the examples of antifragility just don't hold up, like the taxi driver one. That's an extremely dangerous job, which I would think is quite fragile, especially if you're on the hook for vehicle damages as is sometimes the case.
It's possible that a given system is fragile with respect to certain stimulus and antifragile with respect to other stimulus. It feels like cheating to go multi-dimensional, but I too thought the examples were flawed. Or systems go through periods of general antifragility - an adolescence, trying everything - before settling into a pattern with less variability, more fragility. I've never read Taleb's work. I think dangerous things can benefit from considering a wide range of options - thinking outside the box - and if that's what antifragile means, it might be a generally beneficial approach to take to risky situations. Something like cooking can be fragile - this dish should taste the same every time. Taxi driving could be fragile - works best when certain things don't vary much, like work hours, rate, mood of customer, and yes vehicle damage. It could be antifragile if there is a wide variation in methods used to keep those other variables tightly controlled - some drivers want to be in the airport pickup line, some don't, for example. It definitely has fragility in terms of regions of operation; the economics of it made it profitable in only certain towns, so in terms of other towns, taxi companies didn't exist there or didn't serve some markets, opening the way for uber and lyft.
I frequently have the experience of reading a great new theory of everything that categorizes the world, only to find the actual takeaway modest: here are some new axes along which to think about some things, but none of the examples are cut and dried. This applies to most theories of everything that aren't absolutely worthless.
I remember in the Black Swan he said something about how quickly and easily he had written the book, and I wanted to scream, YES, IT SHOWS. It was so lazily put together that, coming from a less egotistical author, I would have considered it a cynical cash-in. But I think Taleb sincerely believes that his unfiltered brain-splurges are worth more than the carefully crafted, painstakingly expressed ideas of just about anyone else.
Do you think everyone whose ideas are prominent and discussed for years is a good thinker (let alone a brilliantly exceptional one)?
I'll stop now though, mine was a bit of a flamebaity comment. It felt justified because Taleb himself is so abrasive, but obviously that's kind of beside the point here.
Of course not. My point was simply that however unjustified in some abstract sense his claims to being an exceptional thinker may be, society has granted him this status anyway, unlike many of those who presumably deserved it more. This would imply that he has the right approach in the "instrumental rationality" sense, if not "epistemological". I'd say it's a common mistake of "rationalists" to overestimate the latter, when in the real world the former amounts to much more.
He's good at some things, like turns of phrase, and he's bad at other things, like explaining his ideas rigorously and interrogating his ideas.
I think it's all very intuitive to him, and he writes in a way that tries to convey his ideas via intuition rather than argumentation. I think he'd view that as a feature, not a bug.
My experience is in line with Eremoalos's. Some of the stuff he's says is interesting, but I'd take him more seriously if he spent less time jerking himself off and more time explaining exactly what he meant and fleshing out his examples.
Citations are fragile. If there's a replication crisis then you lose all your work. Taleb is antifragile. He writes down every shower thought and his baseline accuracy never changes.
How much of a problem is "being slow and time-consuming to unload at their destinations"? Doesn't it just matter how long it takes per container for the economics? Or is it now reaching the point where the process of loading and unloading all the containers is making more of an economic contribution than the travel time?
I believe that most of the cost happens around loading and unloading. It's not loading/unloading itself (although that can be expensive too, unions...), but things like document fees, terminal handling charges, port fees, export customs, bunker fees, import customs clearance, duties, vat, harbor maintenance fees, merchandise processing fees, warehousing and demurrage fees, security examination fees, destination trucking fees, marine insurance, wharfage, etc.
This is half remembered from a book I read years ago, but I believe that loading/unloading scales as the area of the vessel, while shipping capacity scales as the volume. I think it's also the case that the costs associated with being at port scale with the volume of the vessel. The other problem with loading/unloading times is that any time spent on this can't be spent on using the fantastically expensive ship to move cargo across the open ocean.
So I don't really know the first thing about crypto but recently experienced some fear of missing out on the whole thing. Is there something like a practical guide to what makes sense right now if I were willing to invest some small to medium amount of money? Any other essential resources?
I don't have any good resources in mind to link you right now but in terms of practical advice for someone new that wants to invest in Bitcoin I would suggest there are two primary paths: 1. Sign up at Coinbase.com and purchase some BTC using your bank account or credit card and hold the Bitcoin inside your Coinbase account wallet or 2. Wait until the first US based Bitcoin ETF is released (likely at some point this year) and invest in the ETF inside one of your existing investment accounts.
I would adjust this slightly. Coinbase Pro is a version of Coinbase owned by the same company but with dramatically lower costs. Why? I have no real good explanation other than Coinbase looks more friendly than CBP but it's not really that unfriendly.
Given that a Bitcoin ETF might have some unwanted side effects - capital gains you don't want to take, for example - I would advise investing directly with CBP, especially since the buying fees are reasonable (although not the cheapest out there by a long shot) and the fees/spreads are the best I've seen of the major players. Some places with good buying/selling fees have terrible transfer fees - I'm looking at you Kraken.
I got hit with that in November 2020 and did something similar to what MJ suggests. Coinbase is I think user-friendly for beginners. What's available to you in terms of platforms varies a little by country. The trading fees on Coinbase seem to be less than those for stocks, which makes it possible to not just lose all your money up front if you try to benefit from the crypto market volatility by trading a few times a day or even a few times a week. Make sure to read the fine print about how soon you can withdraw whatever dollars you put in, sometimes a few days. Then if you find this sort of thing entertaining, start watching the market fluctuations and try to read up on how the little charts are drawn. There seem to be the hodlers and then the ones in it to make money off the volatility, and from what I can tell there are good arguments in support of both of those strategies. Make a spreadsheet or several to track your trades. I have found that it's possible to withdraw from Coinbase via Paypal very quickly which can be helpful.
Margin trading on Kraken beckons me, neon-lit, however, I have some FOBS, fear of being stupid. The more googling I did, the more the psychological side of it becomes obvious; I liked watching the little charts on messari.io more than some others, you can see the fluctuations and there's a lot to it. Think and feel about your relationship to risk and adrenaline; when the little numbers go, You just made an unearned $20, have a plan, whether to stay in and how long to stay in. Twitter seems to be an information base, and reddit, which seemed odd to me at first. There are also new altcoins appearing very often and some of those have increased in value quite a bit. DeFi is an amazing idea. There's a lot out there, it isn't boring, and it can absolutely reward you if you put the time into learning how to do it - I have not found a central guide - and then watching the markets regularly. There are a whole range of "how to invest" or "how to invest in crypto" type things, which you can read and then compare. I think I came out a little bit ahead after the first few months and then had some unexpected bills and treated it like a savings account. I'm thinking about getting back in. The current financial system is absolutely not the only way to go about money.
Part of the trading market though is that those who are making money are getting it from those who are losing money, so it's like telling everyone your favorite fishing spot, people keep some strategies. Except for if crypto becomes the next economy, in which case having any of it will be necessary to participate. Anyway whatever you decide I hope it works out for you. I'm a beginner, this is just what I did and "should not be construed as advice."
I don’t know where to send someone interested in getting started in crypto. I will say that the blockchain is more interesting to me than any cryptocurrencies. I get most of my information from a few Discords, but they’re not for beginners. Chia Network is the blockchain that feels the most exciting to me. There’s a very low barrier to entry. Anyone who has extra space on their computer or smartphone can farm Chia Coin. I have zero idea of where the blockchain is going over the next 5-10 years, but I’d say there’s a better than 30% chance it will be built on either Ethereum or Chia, so that’s where I’m focusing until/unless a more functional blockchain gets designed.
It's been a while since I listed to it, but I recall this episode of The Tim Ferris Show to be a good introduction to crypto: https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/.
tl;dr No longer an option. You _can_ mine on a GameBoy[1] but Bitcoin is designed to get harder - and therefore more expensive in terms of electricity - to mine the more people mine it and as it stands you need specially-designed Bitcoin-mining chips hooked directly to a hydro dam to make any money today.
There's a newly created discord group for people in the intersection of rationalists and crypto enthusiasts that anybody reading this is welcome to join: https://discord.gg/3ZCxUt8qYw
Just chiming in that I went to my first SSC meetup yesterday! Was the youngest person by four years and probably younger than median by about 15, which was somewhat surprising. Good experience though.
Profound comment last week that might be termed "Scott's Razor." He said, "This debate (on Napoleonic reforms as economic stimulus) seems to have reached a level of complexity where I no longer feel comfortable having an opinion on it." That raises a beautiful, thorny, ironic question about blogs and about all other public communication: Ought most (all?) people remain silent almost always to free up attention for the relatively few communications that cut to the heart of issues of great import to a great many people? Could include incisive questions.
If I understand you correctly, "does that what most people contribute to the discourse mostly constitute noise, which makes the discourse worse instead of better?"
The obvious snarky answer is "yah, sure, have you ever been on Twitter?" The more nuanced answer is, "for the most part, yes, but there's a chance that even a less-informed opinion can contribute an important perspective or data point, and the question is how much nonsense you're think others are willing to sift through."
> Ought most (all?) people remain silent almost always to free up attention for the relatively few communications that cut to the heart of issues of great import to a great many people?
Suppose you create a forum with the rule "don't comment on an issue unless you deeply understand it, or want to ask questions." You have now accidentally created an Asshole Filter--a set of circumstances that rewards people who either ignore your rule or are wildly overconfident in their own understanding of issues. Humble and rule-abiding folks will remain silent almost always (other than asking questions), while the discussion will be dominated by everyone else.
That is a good point. It might be beneficial to make a good-faith effort to contribute to a productive conversation, even if you feel you don't have enough information, just to show the people who do have the information that there is interest in a productive conversation, and their input will not just be pearls before the swine.
In these examples, the approach works because there isn't really a collaborative discourse. We are asking experts to give summaries of their field. There are clarifications for details or side-topics, or even discussion of different schools of thought when appropriate, but no actual debate. It seems to me that there is a real strong need for these kinds of places, but also for open discussion. The caffeine+l-theanine thread above was a good example. And /r/askOrganicChemists or whatever would be a great resource. But it wouldn't be the right place to ask about the epistemology of reading emerging/fringe papers or self-experimentation or whatever.
I think there's a sweet spot for an implicit social norm about who should get to participate in discussions between "everyone can talk, far too much noise" and "only the World's Greatest Experts can talk, so everyone's silent", and the cutoff for that is somewhere around recognized-expert-credentials-or-slightly-below. But I'm not sure. I think that if we can find such a sweet spot we should just adopt it to maximize discussion quality.
I think it also depends on the context and how problematic it is when you turn out to be wrong.
To give an example: I thought about this, when I published a blogpost (https://curatedcuriosityj.substack.com/p/attacking-the-ivory-towers) on the value & future of higher education after doing maybe a handful of days of research on this topic, knowing that there are sociologists out there that spend years dealing with this. However, this is (1) a topic where there exists not one ultimate truth and (2) there are now life threatening consequences if many people were acting upon your opinion and it later turns out to be wrong.
On the other hand, if you publish something on the transmission mechanism of viruses & whether restaurants should be open or not without being an expert, the opposite holds true for (1) & (2).
So, in the latter case I would say that most people should remain silent or talk to an expert before publishing. But happy to hear other people's thoughts on this distinction.
I think that the last year hasn't been all that kind to the assumption that amateurs should step back and uncritically listen to the experts w.r.t. virus transmission.
> Ought most (all?) people remain silent almost always to free up attention for the relatively few communications that cut to the heart of issues of great import to a great many people?
Who would enforce that "ought"? People would self-coordinate? I find it unlikely. In which case, such a suggestion would remove all the well-meaning, self-doubting people, and leave the domain open to the few legimate communicators that "cut to the heart of the issue" and the millions that lack self-doubt or are scammers...
I find it interesting how that quote fits with previous blog posts about the benefits of picking a number and staking a claim (even a 50/50 guess) instead of remaining silent. I lean towards silence in uncertainty, and I wonder if Scott's thoughts on the matter may not be as solid as he previously indicated.
The problems with norms like that is that if there are two sides to a debate/issue, and everyone is supposed to follow a norm that prevents them from speaking unless they deeply understand the topic, then the entire discussion becomes dominated by whichever side has more low-conscientiousness or highly over-confident people.
In some discussions, the issue will be fully orthogonal to those personality traits and each side will have an equal amount of such people, and it's not a problem. But for a lot of issues, there will be a correlation, and you get into trouble.
Is there an evolutionary reason why babies and young children like putting non-food things in their mouths often enough that choking hazards on toys/toy parts have to be a concern?
It seems like small rock-hard things things that adults have never tried to feed you should be pretty recognizably distinct from food, and although modern toy parts aren't quite like anything in evolutionary history, you still have pebbles, sticks, shells, and soon coins, beads, etc.
(choking on food too is obviously possible too, but why put non-food things in one's mouth?)
Evolution did not have planned objectives like "my culture will tell what things are" in mind, because it does not have a mind.
I would hazard a guess that babies are curious because human beings in general are curious. If they were not, how come we had a culture in first place?
I could not find citeable research on this, lots of generic internet sources that say "it is normal exploration behavior" seem to agree with what I already thought:
Your mouth and tongue is by far your best sensory organ for learning about any given object's shape, texture and whether it is hard, soft, malleable, etc. (In addition to the obvious, namely, how it tastes like). If skeptical, you can easily experiment with this (recommend something safe, like foodstuffs). The superiority is especially heightened if you are a baby/toddler with limited manual motor control.
Additional hypothesis, which I think is also reasonable: Take a piece a paper in your fingers. Or a porcelain mug. Or some cloth. You know lots about how these items feel when you touch them, and what it is like. You can also imagine how it tastes like. A toddler, on the other hand, has no idea how the tactile feedback of paper corresponds to the "mouth feel" of paper. Only way to learn it, is to touch different things and also put them in your mouth and extrapolate the correspondence. I imagine this would help with "calibrating" your sensory organs.
That's a good question. Babies have the reflex to "root" which is to look for a breast to nurse on. If a baby gets used to breastfeeding, if another woman is holding the baby the baby may try to dive sideways to position itself to nurse, I don't know how they figure it out but they do, when my kids were young we used to joke about "feeders," since presumably the baby does not have the same categories of gender, but it has a way of telling who it might be able to nurse on. Seeing that made me wonder if babies and small children are somewhat wired to feed at all times, and the "put things in the mouth" pattern is a later stage of that, adding more motor skills to feeding at all times. They do get satiated temporarily and then fall asleep and wake up hungry again. As they get older the category of "not food" grows larger and they develop the ability to be intentional about eating, what, when, where. I don't know, though, good question.
It's interesting too that babies are so willing to put non food in their mouths while simultaneously being pretty hard to feed. As in, you are trying to get actual food in their mouth and they dodge the spoon, won't open their mouth, throw it, spit it out, etc. It seems like evolution maybe did give babies some instinct to be careful about what goes in their mouth? But for some reason it's wildly mis-calibrated?
Is it hard to put food in their mouths? Or just hard to make them swallow it? Seems like they might have a tendency to put objects on their lips and tongue and reject it from the throat, which we adults would think of as doing too much like eating for non-food, and not enough like eating for food.
Adding to what aqsalose said, I think babies have pretty poor eyesight and certainly much less experience of how to infer something's shape and texture by looking at it. This makes their mouth really good for investigating interesting objects.
And we evolved before there was a toy industry. There were no toys made from small injection molded or die cast parts that could become detatched in a toddler's mouth in Olduvai Gorge.
Maybe they instinctively recognize the mouthfeel of rocks and twigs and spit them out immediately, while strange objects get more study. I don't have any experience with toddlers; does this idea match their actual behavior?
I don't really either, but it makes sense. Rocks feel cold, twigs are rough, small plastic objects feel warm (due to low thermal conductivity) and are brightly coloured like sweets.
Breastfed infants have well developed muscles for controlling, positioning and ejecting things in their mouths. The vast majority of artificially fed infants do not have the same development of muscles in their mouths and throats and I have heard it explained that these infants do not therefore have the same ability to gag and spit out objects. So there is an artificially created vulnerability caused by avoiding normal (breastfed) development pathways.
Another dimension is that the tendency to put things in mouths may be related to the infants sense of safety (Winnicott's attachment theory). Emotionally attached infants when with their attentive caregivers are more likely to put things in their mouths.
If you know the medical system is too expensive in the US, is there anything to actually do about that? I recently broke my ankle, and despite knowing the expense, going to the ER still seemed like the best and only option. Is this like learning about trolley problems only to find out you’re the one on the track?
Yes, Urgent Care is pretty common, and seems to be growing quickly. They can't handle everything (even non-life-threatening), but can often provide basic services more quickly and cheaper.
It is worth remembering that cheaper-than-the-most-expensive is still not exactly cheap. Also, be alert for utterly shady insurance billing practices; in some states (I think New Jersey) these types of places are being investigated for fraudulent claims.
One way to solve this is on the insurance side: lay up-front prices on top of all medical services, and no matter the weird unpredictable number charged by the doctor/hospital, charge the consumer that up-front price. This is hard to do, and a lot of work, but it is possible - the company I’m with, Bind Benefits, is doing it now. All our members can see a price for every service they might get.
We’re only available to employees at specific companies right now, so this doesn’t exactly help you - but from the perspective of “is there anything anyone can do” - yes! We’re trying!
I routinely manage to obtain this information before I see the doctor. It's a big pain in the ass but it's possible.
First I confirm with reception that they take my insurance. Then I ask the receptionist for the medical codes for the services the doctor will likely provide. They almost always say they don't know what the doctor will decide to do, and I almost always just ask for the code for the services I think are likely (in your case, x-rays and maybe a cast).
Then I call my insurance company, give them the medical codes, and find out what kind of coverage I have for those services.
Finally I check with the billing department of the provider (or the front desk but they don't always have the information), and I find out what they charge for the service (this can vary wildly from provider to provider).
After all that, I decide: am I ok with this?
I have walked out before.
Despite the high variance in cost between doctor's offices, the ER is sadly always going to be far more expensive. They have to be stocked and prepared for every possible emergency, they staff 24 hours, and their patients often have no other choice. In my area, the room charge starts at $600, whereas an urgent care clinic charges $100. That doesn't even include the doctor's time. And my area is much probably cheaper than the Bay.
I don't blame you at all for going to the ER (I've been there and I hope you got excellent care). But you could take this opportunity to read up on urgent care centers in your area. The one I use provides orthopedic services.
It depends upon what you mean by "a reasonable cost". A quick look at a major Urgent Care company in my area shows costs "starting at" $119-$139 for people paying cash. The problem is that something like a "broken ankle" is potentially going to require a lot of extra services, like x-rays. And that's before you (potentially) need a consult with an orthopedic surgeon and possible surgery.
If you are just looking for someone who can run the Ottawa Ankle Rule for you and write a sick note for a few weeks of light duty Urgent Care centers are great. But if you have something more complex you are going to be entering into the standard hospital system in any case.
In my experience Urgent Care seemed pretty robust. When I had a kidney stone they were fully equipped to do so the necessary tests and prescribe some pills. Surgery would have been beyond them, but if that's the only part where you have to engage with the traditional medical ecosystem you've saved a good deal of money
Yeah, I've had nothing but excellent experiences at urgent cares. They're great for simple, common-place injuries and illnesses that need medical attention and can't wait for an appointment, and they're good at telling you when and if you need to go to the hospital. The "nurse chat" or online visits that many places are doing now work pretty well too.
Depending on which company they're with, the prices are...eh. Some things seem ridiculously expensive, and some things seem far cheaper than I'd expect. I wonder if there's some price leveling going on.
Why would you enter the hospital system for x-rays or orthopedics?
In Israel, an Urgent Care has an x-ray and nurses that can give vaccines and take a blood test (if its not urgent, you can go to a "medical center" which has the same capabilities, except it works by appointment instead of walk-in).
If you have a complicated medical problem but don't need medical attention *right now*, you go to an independent (specialist) doctor - each HMO has a free-to-patients basically-an-Uber-for-doctors website. If you need labs, they can refer you to a medical center.
If you need surgery, only then you see a hospital (they are the only place that has an OR and in-patient capability), but even then you don't go to the emergency room, but directly to the surgery, and then they try to get you out of the hospital system ASAP.
Yes, but they may not be as good (or maybe just practice defensively). Twice in the last five years I've been in the urgent care for a possible break (once for me, once for my daughter). Both times they took a look, said it looked fractured, wrapped the injury in a cast, and told us to get an ortho consult. Both times, the ortho took new films, took the cast off, and told us to take it easy, as it might be tender for a few days.
My takeaway is that urgent care is nice, but not really trustworthy.
Maybe not. Next time I have an injured and possibly broken bone I'll probably do the urgent care again. After all, I'm going to need ortho regardless, and you're probably right about the ER. And if you're not, I don't know how you'd find that out. I could do the ER instead of the urgent, but even if they called the injury correctly where the urgents erred on the side of caution, the sample size would be too small to conclude anything.
A lot of people are in love with the urgent care model. I guess I'm just saying to know what they're good for, and what they aren't.
I don't know if quality of urgent care really depends on the precise urgent care center and I've been unlucky, or if it's just universally bad, but from what I've seen of it, I think I want to stay away from it. (Can it be that in most areas anyone in the medical profession who is good can just go work at a hospital or a family practice and be better off doing that?)
Just a couple days ago, I saw a woman in the street walking as if her head was really hurting her, holding it with both hands. She made it to the door of her building and collapsed without making it through the door. Some guys carrying buckets of paint helped her up and to the sofa in the lobby, and the concierge called 911.
It turned out that she woke up with a debilitating headache and a fever. She somehow managed to stumble 3 blocks to an urgent care center, where they tested her for coronavirus and sent her home.
Thinking of what things that look like this might kill her rather fast (as opposed to coronavirus, which probably wouldn't kill someone in the 20s), I am pretty sure that going to urgent care as the first and the only step she planned was not a good move. This makes me think that going to urgent care is not a good move for a lot of other scenarios as well.
You can compare it to costs in other countries, of course. But then you'd have to do a full economic comparison of the broader labor and regulatory environment.
Alternatively, you could base it on personal valuation. If the cost is "too high", simply don't go to the ED and manage the injury yourself at home, much like most of our ancestors did up until about a century ago.
“Too expensive” means that you can face unavoidable financial ruin if you contract certain illnesses or injuries. I’m on my phone so I can’t cite directly, but medical debt is a major cause of financial ruin
If you're referencing Warren et al., it's unscrupulously misleading. Any bankruptcy with any medical debt was coded as a medical bankruptcy, even if it was $100 when the mortgage was $100k underwater. Loss of income (due to not being able to work while injured/ill) is a far larger factor.
The issue is the variance. Like you said above, a lot of additional services might be ordered - and the doctors ordering them will often have little idea how much those services will cost. The core issue is that Steven wants to buy "fix my ankle", and would like a price for that fix - then he can trade off against whether the price is too high. But he can't buy that - he can only buy some mystery number of facility charges, x-ray charges, physician-hours, and so on - and even worse, depending on the specific medical group and facility he goes to, these will vary by a lot for no clear reason.
There are a number of "simple" changes that would put downward pressure on prices of some medical services. (I am going to be pretty simplistic in these suggestions to keep it short).
1) Removing restrictions on what medical procedures can be done by what medical practitioners. In many states certain procedures must be done by a Dr and not a Nurse or Nurse Practitioner. Giving stitches for example (this may not be true but is just an illustration). Many Nurses are trained how to do the procedure but must be under the supervision of a doctor or the doctor has to perform some part of it.
2) In many states, to open a new hospital you must prove that there is need for a new hospitals and other hospitals in a region have an impact on "proving" if this is true or not. This is clearly a conflict of interest and absurd.
3) Some states do not allow the publishing of hospital prices. Public pricing would allow people to shop for non-emergency procedures.
4) Reduce federal and state regulations which encourage getting insurance through your employer. This is a huge, complicated topic that i won't go into here, but the American Medical Association has had a hand in drafting a lot of these regulations and these regulations have mostly been for the benefit of their members (Doctors).
5) Reduce the cost of developing new drugs through reforming the FDA procedures. This would include allowing human challenge trials (there fore getting drugs to actual humans earlier in the process) or not requiring drugs to get re-approved in the US if they have been approved in other markets like the EU or UK.
There is no single thing that can be done to "fix" this problem. Which is why "Medicare for All" or other similar proposals can be so alluring. They are simple and appear effective on the surface. None of the proposals above would make emergency medicine significantly cheaper. It will likely always be expensive to save someones life. However, if routine medicine is cheaper, medical insurance covering only catastrophes would be relatively cheap.
Twitter tells me that rationalists like to discuss global trade. I think of myself as a rationalist, and I've had some conversations with rationalists, and nobody has mentioned global trade.
So here's my question: What do we talk about, when we talk about global trade?
(My only opinion on global trade is this: free trade is good for the world on net, but it seems to be sort of bad for the US working class, and I'm not sure if that's an exchange the US should be making.)
I think a lot of smart people are re-thinking protectionism in light of the pandemic - e.g. if all the masks are made in a country whose government decides to hoard them when things get bad? But I'm still against trade barriers! I'd much rather see public funds dedicated to strategic reserves of capacity, inputs, and final products than have a permanent system of tariffs and subsidies.
I think people underrate how well globalism worked during the pandemic (because the pandemic was bad, so it's hard to say "not as bad as it could have been" convincingly). But it was really good! We had a massive contraction of the global economy and millions of people not working, and we still didn't have any real shortages of foods or essential goods.
Maybe. It might be some time before we can have a competent post mortem on what went right and what went wrong, but lack of PPE and lack of ability to do testing early on were definitely problems. Also, had the outbreak in China been handled as badly as in the US and EU, we (I’m in the US) might have had had much much worse supply problems.
That's basically my take. Had this been the 1918 flu, I think the economy would have been hurt in a qualitatively different way than it was this time. It's definitely increased my desire to see multiple, independent supply chains for various key industries across the world. Maybe one per continent? And government intervention is the natural (only?) way to make this happen though I wouldn't pretend to know how it should be done.
Not at all - despite initial worries that there would be huge famines or shortages in the third world, none of the expected catastrophes ended up happening.
When there is a serious threat, all production capacity will be used for one's own population first. You already see a lot of that with this pandemic, aside from the EU, which is rather telling in a way.
You can't stockpile vaccines and it's almost impossible to predict what will be needed in case of a real emergency, so then you need production capacity.
(But in case this doesn't get moderated into oblivion, here's my extremely unsophisticated opinion on this topic: global trade is generally good because that's how people can buy things from distant countries.)
I've been very interested in the recent posts on Bayesian analyses of mental illness - partly because I find the whole predictive coding framework fascinating in its own right, but also because it's turned out to be very much relevant to my own struggles.
In particular, it seems to very accurately describe my own struggles with OCD. I've had a lot of the classic OCD symptoms during my life - checking things, hand washing, fear of contamination, etc. - and to a large extent I still have these things, although many of them are under control to the point where they don't impact my life in a huge way. My primary issue at the moment, instead, is mostly a mental one: a crippling fear of *being wrong about things*. This started to get really bad a couple years ago, although it's been a thing for pretty much as long as I can remember.
I was talking in the Discord server about this a few days ago, and someone brought up a paper that was relevant to this (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02497-y). It's behind a paywall, but it proposes two competing theories of how OCD works. First, it could be that experiences which are supposed to produce a feeling of certainty about something (e.g. seeing that the stove is off, which should make you believe that the stove is off) fail to produce that feeling of certainty. Second, it could be that OCD involves a pathological feeling of UNcertainty: some cognitive mechanism responsible for monitoring uncertainty is hyperactive, resulting in a constant need to appease and disconfirm this uncertainty.
Putting these two theories together, it sounds an awful lot like a trapped prior. The second theory could be interpreted as a high prior in favor of uncertainty (I'll address what this might mean in a little bit); the first theory could be interpreted as experience/evidence perpetually failing to update this prior (and the failure to update being interpreted as further evidence in favor of it). This fits the definition of a trapped prior, as Scott explained it in a recent post.
What I'm unsure about is what exactly the trapped prior is. For mood disorders like depression and anxiety, it's easier for me to understand: it's a trapped prior in favor of the world in general being bad or scary. For PTSD and phobias, it's also relatively easy for me to understand: it's a trapped prior in favor of some specific past or current experience being bad or scary. For OCD, I'm not quite sure.
I described it earlier as a prior in favor of "uncertainty". But I'm not really sure how to interpret that, and it isn't necessarily introspectively obvious to me as a person with OCD. To give an example of what I mean, let's just abstractly say that there are two beliefs, G and B (for "Good" and "Bad", respectively). In the stove example, G could be "the stove is off, everything is fine"; B could be "the stove is still on, that's bad, you need to turn it off". What I want to understand is what the trapped prior is: what exactly it is that causes me to still worry that B is true despite what should be sufficient evidence in favor of G.
I can see two meaningfully different possibilities here. One, it could be a strong prior *in favor of B being true*. Meaning: my prior could be (say) 99% in favor of B, 1% in favor of G. And due to a combination of strong priors + weak sensory signal, the evidence in favor of G (e.g. me seeing that the stove is off) isn't enough to update the prior in the direction of G, and may even make me feel like B is MORE likely to be true (after all, if I saw that the stove was off, why would I not be convinced by such supposedly strong evidence?). This is a more typical case of a trapped prior, similar to what you see with other mental disorders like anxiety, depression, phobias, and PTSD.
The other possibility is that it could be a very *uncertain* prior: that is, close to a 50-50 split between G and B. In this case, it's not that I instinctively believe that B is true; it's that I'm *not sure* whether G or B is true. And once again, the weak sensory signal from the evidence (e.g. seeing that the stove is off) fails to update the prior, and might even make me even *more* uncertain. Since B is upsetting and demands action, I end up doing some Pascal's Wager type thinking and act as if B is true just to be safe.
Both of these possibilities involve a similar idea: priors on upsetting beliefs being inflated beyond their actual likelihood. The question is basically *how much* these priors are inflated: are they inflated to the point of being *more likely than not*, or are they only inflated to the point of creating a *lack of confidence*?
It's hard for me to tell introspectively. One thing that inclines me somewhat toward the former is that, in many cases, I end up entertaining *insanely* unlikely possibilities in order to "avoid" ruling out the feared belief. For example, if an extremely trusted friend assures me that G is true (for any arbitrary G and B), I might start worrying that they're lying to me to spare my feelings, or that they've somehow misunderstood my question in some unlikely way that I can't prove. These alternate scenarios have abysmally low probabilities - and I *know* this - but I end up entertaining them anyway as serious possibilities. It's easy to interpret this as "I find it so unlikely that things are okay, that I sooner believe these insanely unlikely things before I actually believe that things might be okay". I'm not sure about this, though - even if the probability of B is only being inflated to 50%, then any condition necessary for B to be true could also have its probability inflated.
There's a third possibility as well - that this doesn't have anything to do with the probabilities of G or B, but rather with an intolerance of *risk*. The second possibility, again, involves a Pascal's Wager type of reasoning breaking the tie in conditions of uncertainty: I'm not sure whether G or B is true, but B is upsetting and demands action, so I don't want to take the risk. But would the probability of B even need to be inflated in order for this to happen? It seems like a sufficiently low risk tolerance could create this situation even with low probabilities of B - hence, ANY amount of uncertainty would be unacceptable. And this low risk tolerance sounds an awful lot like the "better safe than sorry" processing strategy associated with depression, anxiety, etc. (i.e. a trapped prior in favor of "things are bad/scary in general"). I'm not sure how OCD would even be distinguished from regular anxiety in this case, though.
Overall, I'm just really uncertain about this. And yes, I appreciate the irony of this - my uncertainty regarding this question is almost certainly *itself* a case of OCD going awry. But if anyone has any thoughts on this, I would very much appreciate it.
I don't know any of this technical stuff beyond what Scott has talked about (and even then I struggle sometimes) so the majority of your comment sounded like another language to me, I'm sure your explanation was fine but I'm just too dumb lol
"What I want to understand is what the trapped prior is: what exactly it is that causes me to still worry that B is true despite what should be sufficient evidence in favor of G."
A previous experience where you thought it was G but it turned out B was true? And then you were negatively impacted by that - be it a very bad scolding by a parent/authority figure in childhood, or someone in later life in a position of authority over you, or even "the stove *was* left on, the house *did* burn down" - these create anxiety over repetition of the 'fault' so you double-check to make sure.
And then you start triple-checking. And the double-checking spreads to encompass other things. And if you were wrong about B before, how can you be sure that you are not being wrong about B now when it's an opinion/an estimate of how things are going? Better to check, just to be sure, because if you're wrong, then bad things (that angry yelling that belittled you for an honest mistake) will happen again.
I elaborated on this question more in the rest of the comment - basically, I'm wondering whether I subconsciously think that B is *more likely than not to be true*, or if I just think that *G and B are equally likely* and am not willing to take the risk, or if I still understand that B is unlikely but still just don't want to take the risk.
I can't speak to OCD but I do have some familiarity with anxiety (it's kinda a thing in the paternal side of the family) and not to get all Freudian here but for my parent's generation it definitely was associated with hypercritical parent in their case (along with other environmental and genetic influences).
*Something* is there telling your subconscious "B is more likely than not to be true" and of course the question is "what?" Some people are simply wired to be more anxious than others. I think anxiety disorders are a combination of that, and then an over-sensitive reaction to "I thought G but it was B then bad thing happened" which makes them more likely to do the "am I sure I locked the door? but am I really sure? am I really really sure?" three times checking thing.
All it takes is "the one time I didn't double-check that the door was locked, I did leave it open, anyone could have walked in and burgled the place" and then that reinforces the anxiety forever, which then spills over onto other things where even if that little rational voice in your mind is saying "no, it's okay", the bigger, deeper down, anxious voice is nagging "but are you sure? are you sure? are you sure?"
Yeah, it's the kind of vicious circle, isn't it? Anxious parent is hypercritical of everything kids do, which along with whatever genetic component has been passed on, results in kids being anxious about doing everything absolutely correctly or else ☹
Specifically about "being wrong about things": I've found that noticing some of your own thoughts and conclusions in the writing of others can go a long way to boosting confidence in your reasoning.
To put it another way, seeing that some people have thought of the same things as you (independently) did is a pretty good indicator that you're doing something right.
...Well, I'm unsure about how much that can help with something OCD-related, though, since (as you say) it seems to be a more fundamental misfire in predictions.
Regarding general questions on how predictive processing applies to mental illnesses: there's a subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing and I plan to add notes to a few of the papers here, maybe also on ones discussing theories on mental illnesses. I don't feel qualified to do so yet, but I'll probably have a discussion of the Erdmann & Mathys paper on the formation of delusional beliefs added in the next days.
What is the forecast for the next ten years of flu after this last year's disruption to it's usual cycle?
The flu could be exceptionally mild for a long time: the population seeding rate is low, genetic diversity was lost, the mutation rate was low (because the case rate was low), and there was selection pressure against highly symptomatic strains.
Or the flu could be very bad in a few years because there was selection pressure for virulent strains, low immunity prevalence strains, and strains like COVID that are infectious before they are symptomatic.
I don't have the knowledge to weigh the possibility of these outcomes. Perhaps no one has good predictive power here and this will be a telling natural experiment.
Or we have the hypothesis that Scott Adams has been blathering on about: flu death numbers aren't based on anything real, they're basically just the catch-all for excess deaths in general. This year all the excess deaths got swallowed by the pandemic, and as a result it looks like no one died of the flu.
The prediction for future flu deaths, then, hinges on what the excess death numbers look like for the next few years, and to what extent those deaths continue to be blamed on now-endemic COVID strains.
(My cynical take on the latter is that Biden's in office, so those people are obviously dying of flu, not COVID, which is now under control due to his fine leadership! Which in turn suggests increased "flu deaths" for the next few years. But that's a political prediction mating with a biological one, and as such should be ignored unless you need a good laugh.)
Incidentally, I'd love an analysis of Adam's hypothesis here: is it plausible that annual flu death numbers are wildly inflated due to the mechanism of attributing excess deaths to the flu?
In the case of excess deaths being blamed on the flu, I would expect fewer "flu" cases for a few years. Many/most of the COVID deaths were people who were older and generally unhealthy (multiple co-morbid conditions), such that they were among the most likely to die with or without a pandemic. That should reduce excess deaths in future years as they died "prematurely."
Look at positive flu tests and number of flu tests being done. It looks like number of tests being done is stable or up, and positive tests are way down (at least, when I've glanced at these - I haven't dug deeply), which suggests that there's something real here, even if it's hard to figure out where deaths are.
That matches my experience. In a typical year, I'll have three or four colds, but I've had no respiratory illness since last February, I'm guessing because I'm no longer in an office where people try to come in to work when they're sub-par.
Slightly less anecdotally, I've a few friends who are doctors and PAs, and they're reporting that they're seeing far fewer positive influenza swabs than in a normal year
The population of this country has gone from utterly careless to mostly quite paranoid with masks, hand sanitizer, and various measures for minimizing the need to touch things many people touched before you.
I would expect flu numbers to be way down this year under the changed conditions. Anything else would imply that paranoia is useless or worse.
I wouldn't attempt to predict that the trend will continue, though. Once everyone got vaccinated from coronavirus, a lot of people will be back to their careless selves, and it's not clear how much paranoia will stick.
He makes a pretty serious and philosophically rigorous case for the classic "woo-woo" theory of metaphysical idealism -- basically citing the hard problem of consciousness to argue that idealism (that consciousness is the fundamental component of reality) is more parsimonious than physicalism (that matter and the laws of physics are the fundamental components of reality).
I haven't exactly been convinced by his ideas, but I have updated my belief from "obviously physicalism is true" to "physicalism is probably true, but idealism is plausible".
Kastrup has written a number of (academically-rigorous) books on the same subject, well worth checking out, and also has a blog. I'm not sure what you suggest here by "woo-woo" (Americanism?) but he's essentially a follower of advaita vedanta, traditional non-dualism, which also found in a number of Buddhist texts, except he approaches the subject from a scientific perspective. His argument is the traditional one, though, thousands of years old, that the only thing we can be sure of is sense data, and all that we can be sure that exists is consciousness. Whilst it is interesting to envisage the possibility of a material world full of hard things outside consciousness, there's no proof it does exist (and proof strictly speaking is impossible) and more reasonable to suggest that it doesn't.
"Whilst it is interesting to envisage the possibility of a material world full of hard things outside consciousness, there's no proof it does exist (and proof strictly speaking is impossible) and more reasonable to suggest that it doesn't."
Amongst other things in my job, I handle invoices. There is a local business named after its founder. He died a little while back. I was thinking about this the last time I did a payment run. He is gone, but the business continues under his name. He remains in physical memories of people that knew him and interacted with him, and as we in our turn die, that experience will be lost.
But the building will remain. The business will remain. The street where it is located will remain. These elements have existed prior to my birth, his birth, and will continue to exist after we die. The world keeps on turning. You were very important last week, you died this week, and next week things will go on with little to no disruption.
Physical universe outside our sense experiences exists, else how could there be something there for me to experience if I wasn't alive when it was created/built/founded/named? Something that tangibly and demonstrably exists after the death of the person sense-experiencing it?
This seems to be on the order of "I refute it thus!". There is, by definition, no way to know whether things actually exist when they are not being observed. What we know is that observations seem to correlate in predictable ways.
There may be no way to know if things actually exist when they are not being observed, but I'm going to assume that Australia still exists even though I've never been next, nigh or near it (they'll be in the Eurovision in May, for goodness' sake!)
If I really did the "yeah but how do we know?" bit, then I would have to take it that something - say, a building - sprang into existence when I first beheld it. How did we all come to agree that Number 24 Mulberry Lane exists, if that is a building I never visited before and am now seeing for the first time? If I see that it has a red door, and the instructions to get there included "look for the house with the red door", and the passerby in the street I stopped to check the directions with said "oh yes" and pointed to the red door - how did it percolate into all our consciousnesses simultaneously that this building which is two hundred years old and putatively existed before we of this current generation were born has a red door? Is there at that address?
That's the more curious thing: if nothing exists until perceived, how do we the observers all get the same perception at the same time (e.g. we all look at the landmass on the horizon which, up to now, has not been observed by anyone)? Why isn't it that I see a building and you see a bunch of bananas?
This is way more mystical than plainly believing in God, as the solution to the problem of "who does the perceiving?"?
We don't know that all observers get the same perception at the same time. There's an old, infamous problem which basically says: if someone had the perceptual qualities of red and green reversed, how would we know? Given that we only know the *words* for colour by example, not by inherent association of the word with the perception, someone with the perceptions reversed would learn the words the "wrong" way around and therefore no anomaly would present in conversation.
I have heard of Kastrup, his book "idea of the world" has been on my reading list. Given that I haven't read his full argument yet, I'll refrain from judging his theory to harshly, but from my current understanding I feel much as you do -- not convinced but idealism seems more plausible.
To be honest I'm not sure how inconsistent a lot of his ideas are with materialism. Perhaps there is some unknown property of matter related to consciousness/experience, everything is conscious but only some things are arranged in such a way as to be able to compute, thus having full sentience. Something like that is a more materialist friendly way of expressing what seems like the same end result, though arguably I've just reinvented epiphenomenal dualism.
> I haven't exactly been convinced by his ideas, but I have updated my belief from "obviously physicalism is true" to "physicalism is probably true, but idealism is plausible".
More or less agreed, perhaps a bit more on the sceptical side.
If I understand correctly, his proposition boils down to matter being a function/projection of mind, rather than the other way round.
It strikes me that there aren't many patterns indicating this in what appears to be physical reality. If the mindshard represented by my body feels like/is about to trip out, why does it have to go through the trouble of projecting my body as ingesting specific chemical substances? Whereas the structure of matter shows comparably little resemblance to the structure of mind, the structure of mind quite well mirrors the incentives given by the physical process of evolution on earth.
There's a good chance I'm making some shortsighted error here, but I think one would have to address this elephant in the room to make Kastrup's case.
A fun idea though. I'm remaining open to evidence.
(Disclosure: I am without taking a look myself assuming he's misrepresenting - intentionally or not - the physics stuff. I'd be super interested in claims to the contrary)
I recently noticed that reductionism can be rephrased in a poetic and mystical way that seems to have a remarkably Vedic flavour.
First of all, here is the "conventional" way of describing reductionism:
Common sense concepts that we use to describe the mind and the physical world, like dogs, trees, clouds, faces, feelings of happiness, thoughts and motivations, "the self", are not features of the ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is a lawful system that is currently best approximated by fundamental physics. Common sense concepts arise when some subsystems of reality begin categorizing, making representations of, and modelling themselves and other subsystems of reality. Common sense concepts are best viewed as features / representational elements of simplified higher-level models and descriptions of reality. It is very common for people to confuse the map with the territory, i.e. to confuse elements of these models and descriptions with the ultimate reality itself.
Alright, so here is the poetic and mystical way of describing it:
Both the mental and the physical worlds are illusions that arise when the ultimate reality looks at itself a certain way.
This way of describing it has quite a Vedic flavour. Both the mental and the physical worlds are presented as illusions that appear to the monistic ultimate reality. We can gain some degree of liberation from those illusions by learning to clearly distinguish the ultimate reality from the constructed realities.
You could say "But the physical world is real!", to which I would reply: The world that fundamental physics studies is so far removed from what most people mean when they say "the physical world" that it's not worth calling them by the same name. I think that fundamental physics is about as far away from the concepts of the common-sense "physical world" as it is from the concepts of the common-sense "mental world".
Higher-level models (e.g. biology to chemistry) don't have any concept of lower level phenomena at all.
Lower-level models (trivially, physics to everything else) can in principle model higher level phenomena, but it's computationally expensive and almost never done.
This is a fundamental asymmetry that privileges lower-level models, though it doesn't really matter in practice.
It's a computational issue? My understanding was that the current state of physics fundamentally isn't accurate enough to explain complex chemistry. Presumably more advanced physics in the future will be better.
Actually, "It's a computational issue" is probably to some degree fundamental, because the kinds of high-level patterns that can arise upon a simple low-level pattern can be irreducibly complex, meaning that there is no general-purpose method for obtaining the higher-level patterns faster than just simulating the low-level pattern.
(For a metaphorically somewhat similar thing to this: the hierarchy theorems of computational complexity theory, e.g. P != EXP)
The inaccuracy is _because_ of the "computational issue".
Even Newtonian gravity can't be solved 'analytically' (i.e. with a formula or equation) for just three masses (e.g. one star and two planets). All of the 'practical' calculations in physics (and much of the rest of science) are just 'good-enough' approximations (and some of them are _very_ good enough).
Complex chemistry is hard in part just because it consists of a Vast number of objects, i.e. molecules, atoms, atomic constituents.
And then there are additional 'edge cases', e.g. the color of gold being due to _special relativity_.
I agree that physics is the ultimate reality and the rest is an illusion. I interpret the Sequences as agreeing also. I get my information from science, and the fact that physics is the ultimate reality is a scientific fact, Vedic or not.
I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but I'm going to try anyway.
What is the stance of the rationalist community (loosely speaking) on psychotherapy? I find myself lost among the myriad approaches and I would like some evidence-based criteria to decide, even though I'm aware it's a very subjective experience.
My impression is that it's poorly understood and can be very effective, but that its effectiveness depends on the skill of the individual practitioner far more than the theoretical approach. By analogy, think of Olivier asking of Hoffman why the dear boy can't just act.
And just add that in addition to the skill of the practitioner, its effectiveness also depends on the willingness of the client to confront, experience and express difficult emotions.
Theories of psychotherapy aren't scientific (even CBT!) They were all thought up by some single person who then used them with success. The personality of the theorist tended to be an important part of their success. You'll hear stories of even the most bizarre theories getting results because of the skill of the practitioner. Therapy is tradecraft rather than a science. All good therapists are good at establishing relationships and listening.
Thank you all for your comments. They overeall confirm my original idea on the matter. I was hoping there would be at least a bit of insight from scientific literature, but I'm not surprised it is not like that.
Coincidentally I'm reading the book "Science Fictions" by Stuart Ritchie right now, as a result my prior on trusting psychology studies has changed significantly.
It sounds like you're looking for some data here distinguishing the effectiveness of different therapy methods. I'm sorry I don't have a reference, but I'm pretty sure Scott has written about this before, noting that no single approach seems to have a clear advantage over the rest, and what really helps is just talking to someone. The right someone.
But here's a strategy anyone can (and should) use in choosing a therapist: find someone whose approach and personality that matches well with you. It makes all the difference in the world. I say this as someone who's seen a few.
You can get a consultation with a few people before you decide who you'll go with long term. You should feel like you're seeing a therapist who speaks your language, who understands how you express yourself and what you need in your life. You should feel at ease with them, and you should feel like you can tell them anything. It might take a little work to achieve that level of trust, but making a solid therapist/patient match in the first place will give you a head start.
There are therapists who take their work very seriously in the sense that they approach it in a deliberate and methodical manner. They'll use film of session to go over sessions to improve their skill in self, group, & individual supervision. Here's one of the best I've seen discussing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GISdNxZ9JI
I know Scott isn't keen on providing psychiatric advice that I should be getting from experts. But I have faith that the commenters here might have good advice for me.
Like everyone else in the world, I'm struggling to waste less time and organise my life a bit better.
A big part of this is that I'm a very classic case of ADHD (officially via real psychiatrists etc.).
I've come to the conclusion that willpower is either meaningless as a concept or simply something I really suck at.
The solution I've determined is to structure my life in a way that out-thinks my future self who I know I can't trust.
An easy example is adding apps that limit social media use etc.
My biggest challenge is time management and todo list-building.
There's an endless library of options and advice, but most of them seem to come from people who are already naturally organised and clearly have no issues with focus.
So here's the question:
Anyone have useful tips or advice specifically for someone very ADD?
(side note 1: Of course I medicate as well for this, doesn't help)
(side note 2: Out of desperation I'm posting this on both the open and paid threads).
Depends on what the goal of "not being distracted" is. Having a habit of veering off into interesting sidebars can be potentially fruitful.
I don't have ADD/ADHD, but my wife does, and she has described a few of the coping mechanisms that allowed her to nonetheless be successful in school and career. Academically, she did all of her studying in libraries, strictly with no access to network-connected computing devices. Paper only. She also had headphones on to keep her from hearing anything else in surrounding conversation. The device feeding the headphones, of course, has to be something with a fixed capacity of music and not something with an Internet connection. This was likely a lot easier due to us being kids who entered college in the 90s. Books as a source of information and music playback devices with no networking capability were still the norm.
Professionally, I think it has worked to her great benefit that she has only ever worked in defense and intelligence and the work is almost entirely conducted on air gapped networks. So she has "network" access from her workstations, but what she can access is limited to information that is mostly relevant to her job. She might be able to go track down obscure specifications for an interface that is very hard to find, or dig through commit histories and old Jira comments to find out the history for why a specific design or implementation decision was made, which may be a distraction and an endless rabbit hole, but it's a distraction that at least peripherally adds value to what she is being paid to do, as in going down the rabbit hole makes her more of a domain expert. It's better than being distracted by Twitter.
Most valuable strategies that work for me (and the people I learned them from):
1) There is no 'limiting' social media. Anything that involves browsing posts, you have to completely quit cold turkey. Sorry. They aren't compatible with your brain. Delete the apps, delete the bookmarks. Twitter, reddit, instagram, facebook. This shit is ruinous for the attention-deficient. Allow any compromise and it'll take over. But after quitting you'll discover you're not actually missing out on anything.
Beware of anything that delivers you short-form content in a feed. Youtube is highly suspect, but potentially manageable since you're unlikely to pull it out of your pocket on a whim.
Blogs are definitely manageable; so are ACTUAL social/meetup/dating apps for real-life stuff. But you have to check these things at the end of the day AFTER you're done working. Not before, not during.
2) Massively helpful: keep a physical notebook with you. (Not a phone app. Phone has too many other options. You will space out and automatically open a different app more times than not.) Any time an idea, question, curiosity, task, activity you want to do, item you need to buy, etc occurs to you, write it down. Then let it leave your mind. Come back to it later, not now. Incredibly freeing.
3) If you struggle with ADD, making comprehensive to-do lists and time schedules is doomed. You will daunt yourself with the long list, and start a failure-spiral when you inevitably fail to keep up with your schedule. You need to just get your shit done by entering a natural flow state.
Enter a flow state by staring with the SIMPLEST possible task. The trick to doing a task as SIMPLY as possible is to fully embrace doing it badly. Give yourself permission to half-ass it. This will massively help to un-daunt yourself. Once you've done the thing badly, you will feel a compelling urge to fix it and do it better, and then you have momentum. One task leads to the next. You will be working as efficiently as you can and no other time management
strategy is going to add anything helpful.
4) At NO point before you start work, or before you end your workday should you entertain/reward yourself. Do NOT start your morning by waking up and checking a social app. Don't check it till after work. No phone games.
Breaks are important, but breaks are for eating, taking to people, moving around physically, and following up on the most doable things written in the notebook. (Cross them off.)
When the workday is over, have fun. Your brain will learn to associate the productive workday with the rewards afterward, and it'll get waaay stronger at sustaining your motivation and focus during the work part.
just to push back against the "cold turkey or bust" thing for social media: i have had reasonably good success constraining my social media use for specific platforms to specific hours of the day.
So far I've found success limiting all Twitter and Reddit to just 10 minutes a day. I'm not 100% cut off but end up not logging on since I can't do anything very engaging in less than 10 minutes.
Drop everything into an external brain of some sort. Google calendar for meetings and events, Obsidian for notes (and hey, maybe todos if you want). Keep all work you want to do visible and in reach - materials on hand (maybe all of them in a box, and the box in a very visible shelf) for DIY projects, workspaces in your favorite electronic tool, etc. There is no such thing as 'time management' for us, just the environment nudging us in the right direction. Commit to things you actually want to do, with other people, ideally teammates - they'll bug you and you won't want to disappoint them.
I also recommend working in your own hours (find them by trial and error, if you don't know what they are).
Willpower is for rare emergencies only and will burn you out fast if you abuse it.
It's hard to to separate cause and effect, but I am definitely most effective when I follow strict (albeit often arbitrary) rules about how and when I use my phone. At some point though, I inevitably make an exception or loosen the rules, and before I know it I'm back to square one. The Freedom app is also helpful in restricting which websites I can visit. Following the prescriptions in Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism book was an effective strategy for me for a time.
My first post here. Most people that use the internet suffer from the same problem you do. I use a windows app called cold turkey that does and excellent job of limiting my internet time. I do not use social media at all but other sites - such as Wikipedia can be an immense distraction. Cold turkey let me lock out sites and apps with a time lock so I can't access them until the timer ticks down. It doesn't take to long for the addiction to break. (I do block blogs.)
The other posters are correct in that calendar and reminders are the only way to really stay organized, even after all distractions have been blocked.
I'll note that the actual study is about people in prison having a much higher proportion of brain injuries than people outside prison. It might be that people with brain injuries are more likely to commit the sort of crimes with a higher risk of prison and/or more likely to get caught and/or more likely to be suspected of crimes in addition to plausibly being more likely to commit crimes.
Brain injury sounds more like nurture than nature (genetics). I've been trying to read "The Bell Curve" but I'm really bogged down in the second section. Which describes how 'bad' outcomes are associated with lower intelligence. It's all so depressing.
There is a huge confounder there, right? The kind of lifestyle, culture/upbringing, and genes that correlate with crime also correlate with getting knocked on the head hard enough to do permanent damage. I don't doubt that TBI makes you more likely to commit some kinds of crime, but it's also clear that some kinds of crime make you a lot more likely to suffer TBI, and that some kinds of upbringing and some kinds of parents also make you a lot more likely to suffer TBI. Untangling the causality requires more than just noticing that there are a lot of guys in prison with some past head trauma.
Would you pick the power of *flight* or *invisibility*?
Additional info, you fly at a maximum speed of ~1000 MPH, and altitude of ~10,000 feet, you don't experience any negative effects from wind or cold but otherwise have no other powers. You can't carry anything beyond what you can carry normally
You and your clothes will turn invisible but anything you pick up is still visible. You can still see as if you were not invisible.
I enjoy asking this question because people tend to respond very strongly for one or the other option, then vacillate a bit weighing out the pros and cons of each, before returning to their initial choice. In the closed thread I asked this previously, the balance was mostly towards flight, with a few invisibility partisans making their case.
Invisibility has an obvious law enforcement/military use: spying on the bad guys. I don't want to actually do something that dangerous, but if I'm the one person with superpowers I might feel obligated to put them to good use.
Flight sounds a lot more fun, and a lot less useful to anyone other than me.
Not many people can fly above the sound barrier. Even the ones who need planes to do it tend to be compensated pretty well.
You could get a telephoto lens and do aerial observation or you could courier around super high value items (e.g. the one Maersk hard drive that survived the Russian cyberattack).
I too am on the fence. As a current remote high-school student, invisibility has no use for me (and its exciting uses are either highly illegal/dangerous/unethical/etc or stuff like observing wildlife). Flight would not really be useful for me either, because I'm mostly stuck at home both of regulatory necessity and of the fear of contracting/spreading SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, and with the energy thing that Adam pointed out earlier in this thread, going anywhere much farther than the nearest grocery store or whatever would be a *ginormous* pain in the ash. But if someone was to force me to pick one at gunpoint, or something, I guess I would pick flight, because travel is fun, and doing immoral things is generally not fun.
I don't see any uses for invisibility other than illicit activity and the potential for better observing wildlife. Sitting in the front row of the theater without blocking the people behind you (applies to tall people only)? I'd say extra protection when walking home at night, but flying home at 1000 mph would be even better.
Being able to return to my hometown whenever I want to in under an hour would be delightful, even ignoring the other potential advantages. I feel like you need to balance the options a bit more closely.
1000 MPH is probably much too high to make this a valid comparison. Being able to make it from the US East Coast to Europe in two hours makes that a weekend trip for free, even if you have to do it alone.
I would probably pick flight just because it's fun! Additionally, even at 100 MPH you could get to most destinations much faster than you would in a car or other land transportation, and comparable to many flights (after considering check in, security, etc.)
Being invisible could be cool for some scenarios, but if you were not doing anything illegal and not working for a government, the times you could really use it in a functional sense would be more limited. Unless I was up to no good, I can't see myself using it all that often. Maybe if I were an magician or wanted to do parlor tricks for people. For my own use, not that much going on there.
Of course, if you were a spy or had any interest at all in being one, invisibility would be amazing! It's be like the NBA looking at a 7'2" high school basketball player. Even if he's not that good, they would still take him. You could pretty much pick which type of spy or law enforcement you wanted to work for, and they would get you whatever training you needed.
Even if you plan to use your new powers to become a supervillain, flying seems to open up more possibilities. If you *aren't* bent on villainy, it's even more of a win. And while uniquely having it would be a goldmine, it's still useful even if lots of people have it.
All of the fun things I would do with invisibility would probably be illegal and fairly easy to discover through non-visual evidence. A hundred years ago I would definitely pick invisibility.
These days I'd go with flight for sure. It would certainly be a lot more fun.
Being invisible sounds a bit creepy. If I was a cave man I'd choose flying. If given the choice today... where I can already fly (in a way) , I'd pick invisible... but anything I might do still sounds creepy. Can we have an option of some third super power?
Yes i would choose Wolverine's regrowth power (from x-men) before flight or invisibility. He basically heals/regrows very quickly and is more or less invincible. After that i would choose slowing down or stopping time. Probably even super strength or telekinesis over either of the two options. Or seeing the future (even just a few days out). I would choose flight out of these two mostly because the best things to do with invisibility are amoral (even though i would probably do them at least once...)
One reason for the common reaction ("respond very strongly for one or the other option, then vacillate a bit weighing out the pros and cons of each, before returning to their initial choice") could be that people have thought about the question before and have that cached, but maybe don't have the full argument cached in the same way.
For example I already know I would pick flight and my wife would pick invisibility, but that doesn't mean there is no interesting conversation to be had about it.
I think by making the "things you pick up are not invisible" restriction you really nerf invisibility. This makes my first thought of using invisibly: Robbing cash from drug dealers and other people who have no real legal claim to the cash, not really viable. Seems like the flight actually is better suited to robbing drug dealers. Since obviously they aren't going to be on the lookout for flying humans.
Flying at 1000MPH? Not quite Superman-level but I'll take it. Besides, most fun uses of invisibility are illegal or immoral, not so with flying (as far as I know FAA regs do not apply to anyone flying under their own power)
I'd be nervous about flying at full speed. If I'm up high enough to not worry about running into trees or buildings, I'd worry about running into aircraft.
I think flight raises more questions than invisibility as to whether or not it’s feasible. I’ve been asked this question enough times to have some standard questions (could you really do it legally/are you immune to bugs/do you have decent acceleration/does it consume calores, etc). Because of that, I’d probably pick invisibility because it has a higher chance of working, even though the benefit to me is smaller.
I'm not actually sure I'd care for either the more I think about it. My first instinct is invisibility, but I actually work in intelligence. Just a lowly engineer, not a spy, but I could possibly be a spy with this power. The issue is all the places I might want to get into don't rely solely on visual signatures and can detect invisible animal bodies.
Flight doesn't really sound appealing, though. Unless the energy source is magic, now I need to eat what? 30,000 calories in a day to fly across the country? I watched the documentary on the guys who ran across north Africa and it didn't look appealing doing nothing eating, moving, or sleeping all the time and ending up 40 pounds underweight with 3% bodyfat at the end of it. So sure, you can go to Europe without getting windburn, but the effect on your body from energy expenditure is still going to be like climbing Mt. Everest four times in a row.
I'd have to pick invisibility. Being able to fly would make you the most famous person in the world, and I really wouldn't like that.
And I agree with Clutzy - invisibility would be a much better power if things you picked up could turn invisible too - when I'm walking around I always seem to carrying something. Better still if you could also turn any object or person temporarily invisible by touching it/them!
But I'd still choose invisibility. There are times when it might be useful to avoid being seen.
Flight. It seems obvious. What in the world would I do with invisibility? But if I could fly, then I could visit my parents for Sunday dinner, even though they're 1,400 miles away. Also I could get to work much faster. And I could sell one of my cars, since I won't need one to commute! I could zip down to the bookstore and back on my lunch break without worrying about traffic making me late.
Even more so, I could quit my job and make lots of money promoting products. The human jet prefers X brand sports drink! Oh, and I bet I could rescue people too. Lost hikers maybe? I'm not sure how many people need rescuing from a flying man, especially since I could only carry one person on the smallish size. Of course, I could work out and get buff enough to carry big people too.
What in the world would I use invisibility for? I guess I could promote products as the invisible man as well, but it would be harder to show off. How would anyone know what brand of sports drink paid me to wear their logo when I'm invisible?
No controversial topics in this thread. Also, here's an interesting comment about a Jewish transgender immigrant cop shooting a black doctor while he was was performing an abortion on a Muslim with Tourette's, who's constantly saying the n-word.
This is not a political comment... it's just a "does anyone have a link to this article that I read 20 years ago" comment.
I remember (c. 2000) reading an article online in a somewhat lefty publication about abortion. They tried to address when a fetus has brainwaves (vs random electrical impulses) and proposed that this be used as a cutoff for when it's legal to have an abortion. The author also attacked the idea of looking at heartbeats instead of brainwaves. They then claimed that this is how much of Europe legislates this issue, and that since many people there regard this as a rational approach, abortion is not the political hot button issue it is in the US.
I've googled this many times and have never been able to track down the article. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I've been amazed in the past at the web hunting skills of this group in the past.
I have certainly never heard of brainwaves being used in European abortion laws, and given the heated debates over here about it, I'm fairly sure that would have been brought up. This is an overview of abortion provision in European countries from 2009, and there is nothing there about brain waves or heartbeats, but there is viability: "Foetal viability depends on the scientific standard of the neonatal care unit. The limit has decreased considerably during the last decades. It stands at about 23-25 weeks, but this is not a sharp limit. "
I was going to say I'd never heard of a 22-week delivery surviving, but I was amazed to find a 2019 article stating that 1/3 may survive with aggressive medical support. Oddly enough, it helps if they're twins; something about twinning seems to spur earlier development in utero. The viability limit is really a moving target.
I have a pet theory about physics and cosmology that would explain both matter/antimatter asymmetry and dark energy.
The theory is this: matter and antimatter have a repulsive gravitational force with eachother, much like how they have opposite electric charges. During the big bang, an equal amount of matter and antimatter are created, but most of the antimatter coalesced into a single, enormous anti black hole. All matter was repulsed by this enormous anti gravity well and was pushed out in every direction, with very little anti matter mixed in. This anti black hole continues to exert an outward force on all matter in the known universe, accounting for the accelerating expansion of the universe, aka dark energy.
Alright, now to some potential problems with this theory.
1: We don't know if matter and antimatter have attractive or repulsive gravitational force to eachother. They would definitely be attractive to themselves, I don't think any physicist would argue otherwise, but the majority of physicists think that they are attractive to eachother as well. (According to wikipedia and my experience with the few times I've brought this up). People have given me complicated answers about the level of energy being positive in an antiparticle therefore it must go downward on the slope of curved space time, or something like that. To be honest I don't really understand the arguments against.
2: I have no idea if the expansion rate fits. It fits with the vague assertion that the universe is acceleration outward, but this theory would predict that acceleration would decrease over time. Having data on this seems like the easiest way to disprove this theory.
3: There would be signs of matter/antimatter annihilation near the edges of the anti-black hole in the form of gamma rays. I don't think this would actually happen for long after the big bang, since the gravity well would be deep enough to prevent anything other than hawking radiation from escaping, but I'm less confident. Also, if there were antimatter galaxies orbiting the anti black hole that were outside of the gravity well they could produce this radiation as well. I'm unsure how likely this is? Maybe it could be related to cosmic background radiation? I don't know.
While doing my due diligence on this comment I found this article that agrees with me https://phys.org/news/2011-04-antimatter-gravity-universe-expansion.html but it seems to be a dissenting opinion from everything else I've read. To be honest I'm simultaneously miffed and vindicated that this has existed the whole time, since the couple of times I've brought it up before the response has been along the lines of "that doesn't even kind of make sense, all theories predict this not happening".
I've had this idea mulling around for a few years now, and I was hoping there might be some more knowledgeable physicists that could chime in on the points of contention and the overall validity of this idea.
I've created an account to tell you this as a physicist (knowledgeable or not remains to be seen): we in fact do know that antimatter and matter are gravitationally attracted to each other.
> Based on our data, we can exclude the possibility that the gravitiational mass of antihydrogen is more than 110 times its inertial mass, or that it falls upwards with a gravitational mass more than 65 times its inertial mass
Which is some pretty wide error bars. Is there a better study you can link to?
Grin, I had the same thought when I was learning physics. I think it's common. I skimmed the phys.org article, and I'm just going to shrug and say IDK.
But let me try this argument for why gravity is always attractive.
There are particles, antiparticles, and then energy which is not a particle or an antiparticle. Think of a photon. or the binding energy of an atomic nucleus. Now it's hard for us to hold a bunch of antiparticles and measure the gravity. But it's easy to do with energy. You can look at an iron nucleus, add up the mass of all the neutrons and protons, and see that the nucleus is less massive by an amount equal to the binding energy of all the bits. Energy is gravitationally attractive. (Famous experiment of measuring how light waves bend around the sun works here too.) So now if I think that matter and energy is always attractive, but anti-matter is repulsive... does light bend the other way when going around an anti-matter star? This also means that an antimatter nucleus would have to have a mass that is different from it's matter cousin by an amount equal to twice the binding energy. (Which maybe people have tried to measure? Make anti-deuterium and measure mass?)
I might be totally wrong here, I'm a little out my depth, but isn't the curvature of light around the sun just about following the geodesic lines of the curved space time, rather than actual attraction.
For the binding energy example, when you say mass is decreased do you mean gravitational, inertial, or both? If both that would mean no gravitational effect for energy, right? It would have to be only inertial mass loss, which means elements with more binding energy would actually fall faster (interesting if true!)
Light is gravitationally attracted to the sun. If you want to call it 'following the geodesic' that is fine. But it means the same thing. We have black holes from which the light can't escape. In your model what would a black hole made from anti-matter look like?
More binding energy is less mass, because energy is given up when the nucleus is made. (Note we can never take all the neutrons and protons and put together a nucleus... it's just a thought experiment.) We have never found any difference between inertial and gravitational mass... so the same here. Nuclear fission and fusion is all about using the different binding energies of the nuclei.
Look, it's a fun idea. Think about it more... Have you read the Feynman Lectures? They are free online.
To answer the first question I would expect light to behave the same as in a normal black hole, since spacetime would have the same curve, except "positive" instead of "negative". I don't have a good enough grasp on black hole topology to fully see why light can't escape, but from what I understand it has something to do with the space time manifold looping in on itself, which shouldn't dramatically change just because it's in the opposite direction.
I haven't read the Feynman Lectures, though I probably should have given how much they are recommended. It's been a couple years since the last time I really studied any physics and it would be a good way to get back into it. I appreciate your feedback on all this.
Yeah, I don't grasp black hole topology either.. doesn't matter. If you look at classical Newtonian gravity and solve for the escape velocity, or the velocity of an object in circular orbit around the mass you get an expression.
V^2 = M*G/R (with maybe some factor of 2 floating around)
If V is greater than c (the speed of light) it's a black hole.
Positive curvature would mean that the photons were repulsed by the antimatter black hole. It would be a white hole... it couldn't exist.
My guess is there is a deeper reason for this. Gravity looks similar to electrostatics, but there are no poles in gravity.. it's all attractive.. it's energy deforming space. Oh, if you agree that energy has 'positive' gravity like normal matter. Then try this. Take a piece of matter and anti matter. (kinda near each other.) you are far away, what does the gravity look like to you a distant observer?
Now those two pieces merge/ annihilate and turn into pure energy.
What does the gravity look like to you now?
In my world view it has to be the same.
Re: Feynman. Start with chap.1 vol 1. Feel free to ask questions here. The only problem with Feynman is he makes it look too easy.
Escape velocity feels like a weird way to think about light, given that it can't decelerate. But that formulation exactly matches the Schwarzschild radius, so I suppose it has some merit. Maybe the light redshifts down to nothing as it tries to escape the gravity well? But where would does the energy go? Some questions to answer, but maybe not particularly relevant to the problem at hand.
I think I have heard the argument about "annihilation in the distance" before, but your formulation of it made it click. There would have to be an anti-photon separate from a photon released (which we would have found by now I think), or else physicists would have to be wrong about light having a gravitational pull (quick research makes that seem unlikely, there seem to be solid experiments showing this). This tips the scales to more likely antimatter gravitates normally for me.
Started reading the Feynman lectures. At a few chapters in, impressed at how quickly I've gotten new insights on concepts I am mostly already familiar with.
> ... the geodesic lines of the curved space time, rather than actual attraction.
There is no 'attraction' apart from "the geodesic lines of the curved space time" – that's what General Relativity claims anyways (and it seem to be true!)
I remember learning that everything in the universe is getting further from us (Doppler red-shifted), and objects that are currently further are moving away *proportionately* faster, and these observations are uniform in all directions. This is consistent with everything starting out in the same place and getting different initial velocities (an explosion), or with space itself expanding in some uniform way (such that the increase in distance is proportional to how much distance you started with).
I don't see how it could be consistent with an inverse-gravity point mass at the center of the universe, since that would apply ongoing acceleration to things at different rates depending on how close they are. It seems like you should end up with an empty space at the center and an expanding shell, rather than a uniform cloud. Also, relative movement between bodies on the axis pointing directly away from the singularity seems like it ought to be different from the orthogonal axes.
Yeah I think this is an even stronger counterargument than you phrased it as.
Imagine three galaxies, A, B, C, where that's their sorting in space, so if you stand on the antihole you see A closest, then B past it, and then C past it. From the antihole you'd see all of them fleeing you, with A fleeing the fastest, B slower, and C slower still. However, if you think of it from B's perspective, it'd see A and C coming *toward* it. So unless you were very close to the antihole, you wouldn't see an expanding universe, you'd see a (mostly) *contracting universe* (unless you could see on the other side of the antihole).
So you'd only see an expanding universe if we happened to be located at the inside of the shell. Even then though, we'd see farther galaxies retreating slower than nearby ones. In reality we see that farther galaxies retreat faster than nearby ones, so even if we were near the antihole, we have good enough observations to rule out this theory.
I think the only way this can work is if antimatter isn't just repulsive, but it's not even inverse square. I think you'd probably need g ~ r^(+1) instead of g ~ r^(-2), which is a much bigger ask from physics.
> this theory would predict that acceleration would decrease over time.
I also have a crackpot cosmology theory (the value of the Hubble parameter is the inverse of the age of the universe - predicts cosmic inflation) which also predicts the Hubble parameter would decrease over time. Unfortunately for both of us the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is increasing.
Interesting, didn't know acceleration was increasing. Do you have a good source for that? The main reason I wasn't sure was because anytime I try to look up something like "is the acceleration of the expansion of the universe increasing" it gives a result that says yes its accelerating, yes the rate of expansion is increasing, but then doesn't say anything about change in acceleration. It's very frustrating.
This looks like another nail in the coffin for this theory, dark energy would remain unexplained.
> During the big bang, an equal amount of matter and antimatter are created, but most of the antimatter coalesced into a single, enormous anti black hole. All matter was repulsed by this enormous anti gravity well and was pushed out in every direction, with very little anti matter mixed in.
Matter and antimatter are generally symmetric in many aspects for each other, so if the antimatter could coagulate into a big black hole, there must be some weird symmetry-breaking phenomenon that would prevent the matter from also coagulating into a big black hole. (Unless it already did, in which case I think the event horizon surrounding us protects us from our evil twin.) Also, the repulsion of the antimatter black hole and the matter black hole would be very strongly directional, whereas dark energy (I think) is not directional to any considerable extent.
I'm not sure that this really a big problem for the theory. The idea is that it was in unstable equilibrium, and happened to tip toward the side of antimatter being in the center. Just like if you try to balance something and it falls left or right it doesn't mean there was something fundamentally different about one side or the other.
Another potential is that the universe does seem to be isotropic on the large scale. Once you adjust for our motion relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background the velocity distribution of others stars is the same on average everywhere you look. I'm pretty sure this would not be the case if there were some central spot that was driving all the expansion. It is consistent with every point expanding away from every other point uniformly as described by the usual cosmological model.
Here's a relatively simple argument that antimatter shouldn't be gravitationally repelled from matter (or at least that I think the smart money is on this idea being wrong):
The claim that antiparticles repel particles gravitationally amounts to them having negative gravitational mass.
We know antiparticles have positive inertial mass. One illustration of this: look at the trajectories followed by an electron and a positron in a magnetic field - they will follow opposite, curved trajectories because they have opposite charges. If the positron had negative inertial mass as well, it would follow the same path as the electron (because those minus signs would cancel out). Since this is not what we observe, the positron must have positive inertial mass.
We also know that inertial mass = gravitational mass for everything we've been able to test so far. Granted, everything we've tested has been made of matter, not antimatter. But I think it would be very strange if this equivalence principle were violated for antimatter, and can't think of a particularly good justification for believing it would be violated.
So probably antimatter has positive gravitational mass as well, and so is gravitationally attracted to matter. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be tested though (and so far as I'm aware, there are experiments at CERN involved in trying to test this, I think).
Interestingly, an electron with a negative inertial mass would be attracted to an ordinary electron, much like a positron. Unlike a positron, the regular electron would still be repelled by the negative electron. Interestingly, a system with just the two of those starting at rest would just continue to accelerate at the same rate indefinitely in the direction of the ordinary electron, remaining the same distance apart. Definitely violating conservation of energy with that setup.
No nonconservation of energy there. The negative electron's negative inertial mass gives it negative kinetic energy, which precisely cancels that of the normal electron. Same applies for momentum.
My pet theory is that there was created the same amount of matter and antimatter, and in the areas where they meet you see a lot of action and drama. But the universe is vastly bigger than the part we can see (therefore, we haven't measured any curvature of space), and we don't happen to be near any of these drama areas. So we sit in our zero-antimatter bubble and wonder why there's no antimatter.
Hi Scott. I think you should issue a correction for your statement that "Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones." The two most obvious interpretations of this statement are that Apple and Google blocked Parler from their mobile hardware, or that they blocked Parler from their mobile operating systems. In neither case is this true--they removed Parler from their mobile app stores. In Google's case, that just means you have to download it directly or get it from some other app store. In Apple's case, it's a bigger deal because they don't allow competing app store or sideloading; but you of course can still access the Parler website from an iPhone, so I still don't think it makes sense to say they "blocked Parler from their phone".
I think your statement could easily mislead someone into thinking Apple and Google took much more aggressive action against Parler than is in fact the case.
The significance of this distinction is that you can still access Parler without much trouble on any Apple or Google phone, which I think someone could easily infer from the original statement not to be the case.
While having a native app in the official app store is certainly advantageous to a growing social media platform, it is hardly essentially--indeed, Substack seems to be doing fine with no native apps at all.
"Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones." is the second sentence of the 19th paragraph of the post currently. The whole paragraph is:
> But other fields have higher entry barriers than cars do. Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones. But these are the only two major smartphone companies. It would probably take at least a decade to set up another one, and although I think there's some demand, I'm not sure that demand can coordinate itself into a phone company that doesn't do this kind of thing.
I found a compelling explanation for both the Lizardman's Constant[1] and the North Dakota constant[2]:
Basically, there are people who are "professional" survey-takers who are motivated primarily by money, and will speed through surveys as fast as possible without thinking too hard about the answers, so they can get paid for as many completed surveys as they can.
Pew Research[3] has a fascinating in-depth article about this phenomenon. Their finding of "percent bogus" (between 4%-7%) lines up well with Lizardman's Constant.
> It is a consequence of the field’s migration toward online convenience samples of people who sign themselves up to get money or other rewards by taking surveys. This introduces the risk that some people will answer not with their own views but instead with answers they believe are likely to please the poll’s sponsor. It also raises the possibility that people who do not belong in a U.S. poll (e.g., people in another country) will try to misrepresent themselves to complete surveys and accrue money or other rewards.
I think so, but it's not really obvious. I've found that it's very easy to just read about rationality without learning to apply it. Learning about rationality has made it easier to recognize exactly why a past poor decision was poor, but so far I haven't had much success in actually making good decisions. What I hope is that being able to see exactly what kind of error I made in the past - and why - will also make it easier to recognize in the future: "ah this belongs to X class of failure modes, better avoid that."
One thing that has unambiguously improved is my ability to talk with weird acquaintances that have very different world-views than mine without pissing them off.
I also think reading about rationality is just fun on its own.
I studied logic and critical thinking as well as popular brain heuristic failure modes well before I ever heard of "rationality" as it pertains to the specific community that eventually coalesced around Less Wrong, and mostly found it interesting but it's difficult of any tangible life improving things it resulted in as opposed to just increasing enjoyment directly.
But I think the activities that tangibly made my life better were plain domain-specific education in fields of study I was eventually able to obtain paid work in, and exercise/physical training. This includes formal, state/school sponsored, company sponsored, and individually driven aspects of each of these (I played sports and served in the military, so plenty of my working out was also school/state/employer sponsored and had a specific end goal in mind).
Transhumanism made my life - and my view of the future - a lot more interesting, and I have to credit EY and Scott. Their writing let me go outside of 'common sense' for long enough to get an unbiased perspective.
I'm in progress of a career change, from well-paid but boring (software eng) to poorly paid but incredibly interesting (biomedical science). We'll see how it goes in a few years.
The greatest benefit for me was exposure to the rationalist community. But for the lessons themselves, there were three useful ones, in random order:
1) People really become stupid when they start debating politics. It is a human universal, not just specifically about my country or about the website I usually read. It's not just my impression; other smart people see it too. -- As a consequence I stopped debating politics online (which was something I previously spent a lot of time doing).
2) Do not underestimate the trivial inconveniences. If you want to actually do something, and there is a change that could make it 10% easier for you, do that change. -- Instead of going to gym (once in a long while), I bought weights and installed a pull-up bar at home (this became unexpectedly useful during the COVID season). I bought a cheap printer and scanner. I print recipes on small pieces of paper, put them on kitchen table as a reminder what to cook tomorrow, take them to shop as lists of ingredients.
3) Most benefits come from doing the simple things right. Complicated plans are less likely to be useful; but they feel more important, because they are better for signalling intelligence. Focus on winning, not signalling. -- Now I am a simple person: I lift weights, eat vegetables, buy bitcoins when they are cheap and then hodl. (If I had more money, it would go to a passively managed index fund.)
Here's a meta question (non-political): If everything is political, as I learned dutifully in grad school, then how are we supposed to discriminate adequately against political discussions in odd-numbered open threads? I'll bet this has come up before, but, since the criteria are so vague, it's probably a worthwhile topic to revisit?
If the answer is sort of "you know it when you see it" -- the way senators used to define pornography -- then that seems patently inadequate. Of course Scott could just play the authoritarian, deleting whatever he likes, but that's not very helpful either in a communitarian sense. Frankly, the distinction just seems impossibly arbitrary to me.
I actually don't mind fuzzy rules, at least in contexts like moderation. Things don't always fall into neat conceptual buckets, and trying to pretend that they do by making hard and fast rules that approximately put them into buckets just leaves you with poor generalizations. For any given definition of politics, there are plenty of benign things that fall into the category and inflammatory things outside that category, whereas the whole purpose of banning politics is to prevent inflammatory conversations from happening.
So, are you saying the main purpose is to avoid "inflammatory" discussions on odd days? (With the presumption that, as Adam says, anything "partisan" or related to the passage of laws or campaigning for some sort of change is likely to lead to heat that might hijack the thread? Is that the fear in play?
Regardless, I still insist that the distinction is elitist. When I hear about a "Concept C2 Rower," my mind -- at least today -- goes to all the people who could never afford it, who get their exercise collecting others' garbage. Not that there's anything wrong with rowing in one's house, and certainly I'd likely just pass by such a discussion without comment (unless I was interested in getting into the sport of indoor rowing), but that might actually depend on whether the thread's unstated implications provoke deeper societal questions which perhaps I could further with my own particular insights.
Seems to me most thinking people come to a place like this largely to FREELY examine the broader underlying connections between diverse aspects of life and society, exploring consequences in whatever realms are most relevant to the participants on that particular day.
With this in mind, I offer the following very cute suggestion for henceforth referring to "Odd-numbered" threads as "Let Them Eat Cake" threads.
> So, are you saying the main purpose is to avoid "inflammatory" discussions on odd days?
Odd weeks, but otherwise basically, yes. Also it helps when there is a big political thing happening that not literally all discussion can be on that topic (which tended to happen back on SSC around, for instance, the US elections)
> When I hear about a "Concept C2 Rower," my mind goes to all the people who could never afford it [..] I'd likely just pass by such a discussion without comment, but that might actually depend on whether the thread's unstated implications provoke deeper societal questions which perhaps I could further with my own particular insights.
The point of the rule is that some people might occasionally want to discuss rowing machines without having to deal with those deeper societal questions right that minute (seeing as how discussions around deep societal questions are prone to being frustrating, fruitless and taking over the original discussion).
Topics where clusters of beliefs map closely to partisan identities. So, I'm looking at a Concept C2 Rower I have leaning against my wall. Presumably, users of this device have beliefs and disagreements about the optimal way to use it, or beliefs and disagreements about whether or not we even should use it, and what the best way to exercise and train actually is. But nobody campaigns for offices that allow them to make or execute laws by appealing to one side or another in these discussions.
This doesn't, of course, mean they never could. Anything can be politicized. But not everything already has been. So discuss the things that haven't been yet.
This might be an unhelpful answer (apparently that's what I'm doing today) but just getting people to temporarily drop the "everything is political" framing in order to participate would in itself be extraordinarily valuable.
"No discussion of politics or religion" is a precondition for people of differing political persuasions and faiths to work or play together peacefully. Civility is much-maligned in certain circles, but without it you're left with an endless cycle of escalation and conflict. Not to mention it's more intellectually honest considering how uncertain political and religious propositions are.
TL;DR: Give being civil a try, and if you can't manage it then just avoid these threads.
I hear you. And I do respect your perspective. And I have nothing against civility per se. My issue -- which still hasn't been clearly resolved by any of the responses here so far -- is that the "politics" rule is too vague and elitist to be helpful.
Now, you may insist that it's quite helpful to YOU, and that YOU appreciate its effects. But you have already pretty much equated "politics" (as a topic) with "civility" -- so your position is biased by self interest, not by principle, since others here view the rule differently.
Nancy believes the rule is entirely about steering clear of "culture wars." Magic seems to equate politics with the "controversial." Adam seems more locked into traditional notions of politics, like "campaigning," passing laws, and partisan affiliation. Newstork is confident the rule is entirely to avoid "inflammatory" discussions, which tracks well with your "civility" requirement -- and I'm gaining some confidence that this is, in fact, likely the key area of putative concern for most (with, I suppose, "politics" seen as the best rough indicator of turbulence?). You wrap in "religion" alongside the troublesome "politics," so perhaps you align even better with Nancy's "culture wars" conflation, which she seems to be able to identify based entirely on how well SHE can predict the responses to a topic.
So I will now purposely say something UNcivil -- not just to demonstrate the imprecision of the politics tool, but because it helps flesh out the reasons for my particular concerns: Too often this place feels like a privileged frat house, with norms, idioms, and rules that many inhabitants may find quite cozy and stabilizing, while striking others (such as me) as incredibly tone-deaf and unproductively exclusionary. Overwhelmingly, the references and examples cited here when discussing the validity of myriad systems are elitist, with arguments routinely based on assumptions of resources that many people simply don't have. (Economic, biological, social, educational, etc.) Concerned about deregulation? Don't be! Just be sure to read your monthly copy of Consumers Reports! You'll be just fine. No need for hysterics.
Too often, historically, and on a continuing daily basis, the notion of "civility" has provided one of the biggest barriers to participatory justice, because those who are oppressed will almost always, by definition, need to rely on very different sets of tools. Those "in power" (think of the Old South, which is fast becoming new again) have learned well how to maintain even their neurological-level equilibrium by dismissing those whose sympathetic nervous systems are in chronically elevated states (those who can easily be labeled as hysterical, or, simply, "not rational, yet still have much more skin in the game than the decision makers).
When you state that civility is "more intellectually honest considering how uncertain political and religious propositions are," you are contributing to a default conservatism (tending toward motionlessness) by putting a stamp of approval on broad-scale false equivalencies that serve to undermine action -- with the pretense that, well, it's really too complex and factional to tackle as unambivalently and efficiently as we'd really love to if only we could. Such positions are definitionally privileged (when they don't impact the position-taker in an existential way), they are conservative by default (not neutral, which is how they are advertised), and they are clouded in bias (since they tend to be self-preservative).
Sometimes the most productive voices are those willing to cry out, "Wake up!" Sometimes we are simply, collectively, allowing very wrong things to happen to our fellow citizens. Sometimes, even, the very survival of our democracy is threatened. And communitarian forums such as this need to be called out when they slump into their luxurious cerebral fortresses (while Rome burns).
If you repeat that in a CW thread, I'll try addressing it.
Meanwhile, I admit I have some issues about anger, so I tried looking at the CW issue from the redundancy angle. If people are just saying the usual things, it pretty much isn't what folks here are looking for.
Are there discussion spaces that you like? Would you name them?
Thanks for the response. I do enjoy this space, because, as you suggest, there's plenty of original, provocative thought. (I do read a lot, absorbing and learning without comment.)
But there are recurrent blind spots in parts of the culture (in my opinion, obviously) -- and those blind spots intersect with particular concerns of mine, so I am critical sometimes, "outraged" occasionally (in quotes because no blog is worth ruining one's day over), and I try to be constructive sometimes, pointing out the blind spots as I see them, knowing full well that some people will dismiss my concerns as predictable or boring. (I don't see them that way; if I were simply trying to wage political warfare I wouldn't come here to do it -- but, I admit, sometimes when encountering a certain smug dismissal of the welfare of whole swaths of the population I tend to want to point it out in a simple and defiant manner -- for the record, as it were.)
"Too often this place feels like a privileged frat house, with norms, idioms, and rules that many inhabitants may find quite cozy and stabilizing, while striking others (such as me) as incredibly tone-deaf and unproductively exclusionary. Overwhelmingly, the references and examples cited here when discussing the validity of myriad systems are elitist, with arguments routinely based on assumptions of resources that many people simply don't have. "
They are elitist because we are the elite. No group of people who are overwhelmingly nerdy and educated, overwhelmingly live in developed countries in the 21st century, and therefore live like kings relative to the vast majority of the human population (and better than actual kings from before ~1700), can rightfully claim not to be elitist. And as a member of this elite, I support the stabilizing norms, idioms, and rules.
"Such positions are definitionally privileged (when they don't impact the position-taker in an existential way), they are conservative by default (not neutral, which is how they are advertised), and they are clouded in bias (since they tend to be self-preservative)."
Great, I'm a conservative because I like ACX as it is and want it to stay the same. If you want to post about politics on every thread, almost anywhere else on the Internet would suit your needs. We have the right to jealously guard one of the last remaining bastions that are (sometimes) free from the plague of politics.
"And communitarian forums such as this need to be called out when they slump into their luxurious cerebral fortresses (while Rome burns)."
A luxurious cerebral fortress is what I want ACX to be. We're not the Roman vigiles (fire brigade). The 70 year old Roman senators are not the ones you want putting out fires.
Well, assuming you wanna be a good, wise, and moral senator, then I would expect you'd welcome listening to what the rabble has to say, -- particularly in your favorite, comfortable, and, ahem, public forum -- digesting our concerns and alien perspectives with the sagacious knowledge of the fact that your elite position necessarily exposes you to significant blind spots that could impact the entire empire in ways that are perhaps difficult to detect from such an invulnerable and cozy distance.
I think listening to the rabble's concerns is worthwhile, and demanding that the rabble learn how to compose their argument using classical rhetoric in order to be heard by the Senate would be a mistake. But I also think it would be a mistake to allow the rabble to show up and punch out the senators who disagree with them.
Well, luckily for you, we have a regularly scheduled "Listening to What the Rabble Have To Say" session! We call it even numbered open threads. But you are barging into a holiday retreat and demanding we change it into a Rabble Listening Session.
I also find it flattering but amusing, fellow Roman, that it matters to you whether my group of elites is good, wise, and moral or bad, stupid, and depraved. This is the Dominate, fellow citizen. We don't live under the consuls anymore. We still call ourselves a Republic, but surely you're not so naive as to think we run the empire.
But you must certainly still possess the wisdom of the ages to recall that all your actions are political, even if we're just talking about, say, where you invest your wealth or how you protect it -- or whether (and how) you participate in the voting process. Even if you imagine yourself "free from the plague of politics," your choices, fueled by your ideas, affect the world around you in tawdry political ways -- whether you like it (or accept it) or not.
I ask myself before posting, "am I saying something no one else is going to say? Am I simply repeating someone else's opinion?" That's a good test of whether something is political. If you can ask a question and get 20 different responses it probably isn't political. If the responses coalesce around one or two poles, it is.
I think you're on to something -- but perhaps more addressing Nancy's predictability issues. (And we all do value original ideas!) Your test could trigger a no-comment response with any number of topics that should easily pass thru the odd-numbered mandate. If you know the semantics, you'll squeak through just fine; which is because the problem really isn't originality, is it? There's plenty of unoriginal thought going around here, let's get real.
I also think the no-politics or no-culture-war threads are about not having discussions about controversial topics[1] in every thread. If I wanted to propose a discussion of, say, whether approval voting or IRV should replace our current vote-counting scheme, that would be politics in some sense, but probably wouldn't be culture warry and probably wouldn't lead to an angry argument.
[1] Controversial is measured based on the commentariat and maybe the surrounding community. Many matters are *extremely* controversial in some other communities or places, but not here. (Consider the question of whether or not women should be permitted to drive--not very controversial around here, but pretty controversial in Saudi Arabia.)
Eeks. My blood is already boiling, just thinking about some of the privileged comments arising from a thread on voting systems! But I get your point. IRV analyses probably ought to be more of a data question (and sociological) -- not just another opportunity for people to mount soap-boxes. The problem is the times we're living in... (but, alas, I cannot say more and still remain a good citizen)
It's possible to use "civility" as a weapon, but it is at least as easy to use incivility as a weapon. In particular, one oft-used strategy for winning political arguments is to be maximally nasty to anyone who disagrees with you--call them nasty names, attribute horrible views and motives to them, demand they be shunned or beaten up, etc. This *works* in many places--including many places online.
Once those tactics become established, they push out the kind of discussion most of us around here (or SSC/DSL) value, in favor of discussions where the loudest, biggest group with the fewest scruples about lying and attacking other people have the advantage over people who are factually correct or have carefully thought things through.
Underlying this is the belief that polite discussions, where nobody calls anyone nasty names or accuses them of wanting to kick puppies for fun, and where instead people try to engage rationally with the best arguments around and consider the best available evidence, actually are likely to lead to better understanding of the world than the shouty/name-cally/mobby kinds of discussion.
I do not believe that the version of civility that requires refraining from name-calling or bullying and engaging with the best available arguments and evidence disadvantages any particular group or inherently blinds us to any particular issue. It does disadvantage folks who can't make a rational case for their views, and who thus prefer to use intimidation and nastiness to win their arguments, but that's a feature, not a bug.
I agree with most of this. But (sorry to be pedantic), my objection is not to civility but to the impossibility of the site's current stance, which is apparently attempting to substitute the broad notion of "politics" (tawdry) for "incivility" (class defined).
I get it. (I think.) It's a convenient crossover spot that does the trick for many here. But my objection rises above pedantry because it points to yet another example of unconscious institutional bias (with "elites" being the institution).
There's an irony to your post which makes for an illustrative point: on a discussion forum with both paleoconservatives like Steve Sailer and socialists like Freddie deBoer, you will find both the left and right broadly in agreement with you that the elites are sheltered from the concerns and struggles of ordinary Americans to an extent which constitutes a threat to democracy. But their shared cries to "wake up!" to that fact end in radically different proposals.
Politics and religion naturally go together, to my mind at least, because they involve both differences of fact and of values. As I hope the above illustrated, even if you can come to an agreement on the facts (hardly a given) different values can still lead you to radically different conclusions. So what do you do when half to a third of your fellow countrymen have different values from yours? How do you maintain a society when people fundamentally disagree on matters of life and death or eternal salvation and damnation?
Either you fight until one view has total domination, or you compartmentalize such that there's room for people with profound disagreements to live in the same society. The latter is why civility and tolerance (in the original sense of the word) matter, and used to be the bedrock foundation of our society. It's not about preserving a frat club atmosphere so much as preventing every gathering of three or more people from devolving into a knife-fight.
One really good reason to preserve that intellectual diversity is that new problems are constantly arising that require a different set of mental tools, and that are subject to a different set of intellectual blind spots or affinities on the part of people trying to understand them. Stamp out one set of ideas (say, those on the Sailer-Murray axis), and a lot of the world will become much less comprehensible to you.
Civility isn't bad, but using civility as a way to avoid challenges to bad beliefs - or as an excuse for ignoring people who are right and are understandably angry about it as opposed to people who can afford to be detached - is less OK.
There are a few ways you can come at it. One is defining a blacklist (or whitelist) of topics. One is running Sort by Controversial on some exhaustive list of conversation topics and chopping off the top N% (though you probably need some kind of addition of "remove anyone who significantly distorts the statistics on controversial" to that one).
Ask yourself whether you could write a flowchart of what people usually say about a subject. If you can (or could with a little research), then it's culture war and you shouldn't post about it (even if you want to say something that might be new) on a no culture war thread.
That seems overbroad. I mean, if I ask whether you'd rather be given $10 or $20, I have a *really* good prediction of how most people will answer, but it's going to be something of a stretch to turn that into a CW issue.
There's a set of issues where some people get upset, others get nasty, and still others walk on eggshells. Often, these issues have to do with questions of identity and tribe, or places where there is a partially-established social norm about what everyone should believe (or at least say) w.r.t. those issues. A *lot* of angry CW discussions seem to me to be driven by a disagreement about which norms should be enforced on the community.
I don't think you'd get much of a flowchart for the $10 vs. $20 question. The thing that I'm thinking about is the subjects where there are lots of nodes. Probably not well-advised to name them here.
I suppose we could argue about what's enough to count as a flow chart and how many nodes count as lots. Or how picky people have to be to count as geeks.
I don't think you're wrong about identity and anger, and some of it is about what the laws should be-- it's just that I think the highly standardized responses are an identifiable marker and reason for why some subjects are a problem.
What are some good books on the economy of the USSR, particularly in its late stages in the 1980s? This seems like it would be an interesting and well-studied subject, but at least from my cursory search so far it seems like there's surprisingly little scholarship on it, which the bibliographic essay in vol. 3 of the Cambridge History of the Cold War confirms. I was hoping for something like Barry Eichengreen's great book The European Economy Since 1945, but devoted to the late USSR specifically. Right now, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy by Philip Hanson, Red Plenty (reviewed on SSC), and The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System eds. Ellman and Kontorovich are all that I can find. Are there any other books that deal, in whole or in parts, with this subject?
(Also, feel free to recommend any good books on the end of the Cold War/collapse of the Soviet Union in general, since that's what I'm studying more broadly. Or on the Cold War as a whole. But I have a longer list of books in that regard.)
"Collapse of an Empire" is not a good source. It's a factually incorrect, slightly plagiarized self-promotion of a ex prime minister which has been widely analyzed in Russian sources, like that https://esli-mysli.livejournal.com/ and of course in Andrei Illarionov's works (who i'm not a fan of, but he obviously has a point here).
I've read several critiques of Gaidar's book in the link you've provided and found them pretty weak. Some of them are irrelevant to the main thesis of the book (just like this allegation of plagiarism), some are misleading (which is, by the way, is pointed out in the comments to posts with those critiques). They doesn't seem to show the book to be "factually incorrect", but rather show other statistical data, which, at the first glance, does look contradictory to the book's, but on closer look is not.
I guess OP don't speak Russian, so he won't be able to read those posts and
comments himself. But as a person, who lived in the USSR during its later years, I find Gaidar's causal explanations of "facts on the ground" much more pertinent than any alternatives.
This is beyond original discussion, but the major Gaidar's points don't hold and are not shared by neither mainstream nor occasional economists in the West: 1) USSR didn't fall because of oil prices drop, as Gaidar states. Simply because no other oil-dependent country in the world fell, and no prices dropped:) 2) Post-Soviet Russia didn't face a famine threat, as no other post-soviet countries (which didn't have Gaidar policies) had. 3) Fall of Russia is well corresponded with fall of other communist-led, nationally split federations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which Gaidar ignores.
Gaidar wasn't a proponent of free trade and prices deregulation. He wasn't, in fact, even a democracy proponent. He was a son of a KGB general and Putin's supporter. He's main goal was to explain to a future dictator that USSR was generally ok, but just economy didn't do well enough, so some republics fled.
(Your personal anecdotal experience is irrelevant, as is mine)
1. Why do ice-making machines built into freezers work so poorly? Maybe it's just me, but I've had four or five different refrigerators with ice makers in my life, and they all broke quickly. I mean, they still make ice; the issue is dispensing. What's the problem?
2. How big is the benefit of computerizing cars? The cars I grew up with didn't have much (if any) computer equipment built into it, and I had a handle on how it worked, more or less. Fast forward through twenty-five or thirty years of not owning a car, and I'm starting to feel like they've changed so much that they aren't really the same category of machine anymore. What did we gain, what did we lose?
I've had the same built-in ice dispenser working fine for about four years now and it's just the shitty IKEA refrigerator that came with the house. When it stops dispensing, it has always tended to be because of power outages, but anything that causes the temperature to drift toward ambient and then refreeze (i.e. adjusting, power outage, leaving the door open a long time) will do it. The reason is cubes partially melt and then stick together when they refreeze, forming larger structures that no longer fit through the dispenser. It's easy to fix that by manually breaking up the ice again, but for long enough melts, it might be hopeless, as in the time it takes to break everything up again is long enough that you have to keep the door open to the point that ice just remelts and you're in an endless cycle. When that happens, you need to clear out all the ice manually and let it fill up again from scratch.
I haven't had a problem with icemakers. As far as I know, Whirlpool came up with a working design many years ago and most refrigerators use a variant of it. (But note as a general rule you should never buy anything from GE that uses water).
Computerizing cars is pretty much necessary to hit emissions and efficiency targets. You need closed loop control of fuel injectors at the very least.
I dont have the answer, but it seems a general problem of things dealing with water. The people I know with pools or hottubs.. something is always broken
If you're e.g. Ken Miles or Lorenzo Bandini, the sort of computers baked into commercial automobiles probably make them *worse* for you, and even computers customized for your needs have limited scope for making things better. If you're anyone else, the main benefit is that they reduce the demands on the driver(*), and since the typical driver is a mediocrity who is devoting maybe 10% of his brain to driving, that offers huge benefits.
In terms of safety, things like antilock brakes and electronic stability control are strictly inferior to a driver who knows exactly when the tires are going to lose traction and backs off just before that point. Most of us are never going to be that driver, and even if we were capable of it we'd rather use our driving time to consider the exact wording of the email we're going to send when we get to the office than be laser-focused on the driving experience, so computers bring a much safer level of driving within reach of the median driver.
In terms of performance and efficiency, you get a good deal of both out of e.g. dynamic computer control of the engine's fuel-air ratio. My first car, built in 1976, didn't have that, and its performance and fuel economy were notably worse than more modern vehicles with similar engine size. My airplane, coincidentally also built in 1976, allows me to manually control the fuel-air ratio, and I can do that about as well as a computer - but I can't (or at least really really shouldn't) be devoting 90% of my brain to that next email when I'm flying. I don't think anybody ever even bothered putting a manual mixture-ratio control in an auto engine; you just have to take the performance/efficiency hit.
There's not much in driving that needs the millisecond response time or digital precision only computers can deliver, but there's so much that benefits from command loops that real drivers realistically aren't going to do, that in almost all cases you get substantial safety and performance benefits from the computer.
* Sometimes the brain-cycles that are being offloaded onto the computer are those of the automotive engineer rather than the driver. But you probably don't care whether you get results from elegantly-optimized steel or spaghetti code in silicon, and the manufacturer probably knows which is cheaper in any particular case.
>In terms of safety, things like antilock brakes and electronic stability control are strictly inferior to a driver who knows exactly when the tires are going to lose traction and backs off just before that point.
This isn't true. A lot of that technology was developed in motor racing (more specifically, F1 in the late 80s and early 90s). Yes, the consumer systems might be worse than putting a really good driver in the car, but if the systems are optimized for race use, they're just better. That's why they were banned.
For safety, the motor on your ice dispenser will stall long before it overheats. What can happen is the shaft gets frozen by water that melts and refreezes, which stalls the motor. You can also get clumps that simply block things, but refreeze around the impeller shaft can still be there even if you've "cleared the clumps."
Soak in warm water and dump, then let the whole thing to come up to room temp and dry around the shaft, both interior and exterior ends.
The car works the same way it always did. Only now we have much more automation. Remember pumping the gas pedal slowly to put fuel from the accel pump and set the mechanical choke? How about REALLY old rigs with both a manual choke knob AND a knob that retards and advances the spark timing? Remember unbolting the distributer and manually rotating it to set the timing?
The degree of automation solves all kinds of maintenance issues. It also gives motorheads a whole other sub-hobby, making custom EPROMS for their cars that upgrade the performance AND pass inspection when some underpaid government employee plugs into the OBD-II port to "be sure you haven't modified the computer."
Here neuroscientist Paul Cisek suggests classifying functional brain activity by considering how the functions of the brain came to be over evolutionary time, a process he calls "phylogenetic refinement". In so doing he describes an extensive model of how the vertebrate brain works, and how it evolved.
I highly recommend this for ACX readers as it takes PCT and elaborates on it massively with evolutionary, physiological, and developmental data. This paper has given me more insight into the high-level functional architecture of the brain than anything else I've ever read, and the neuroscience community is really stoked on it too. So I just wanted to signal-boost it here.
Today in nominative determinism, from an article on the identity of the Fruit of Eden: "Instead, the possible path from fruit to apple began in Rome in A.D. 382., when Pope Damasus I asked a scholar named Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. As part of that project, Jerome translated the Hebrew "peri" into the Latin "malum," according to Robert Appelbaum"
If anyone knows a good source for "let's translate every word from the most original text in full with every possible meaning one by one and in context" for the bible, I'd be much obliged. I don't think even a lifetime of study could do it, so I expect patchy, incomplete attempts.
To try and interpret a translation of a translation and expecting knowledge to surface seems like the foolest of errands.
Although by now it might suffer from what has been described in "Read Philosophy Backwards" on SSC.
I was recently reminded of Canyon Fern's cutesy detective story from the SSC open threads. Does anyone know if it was ever continued after the blog's shutdown?
Does anyone have a good source for the path of major rivers and locations of lakes during the last glacial maximum (~18-20,000 BC), ideally in geojson format?
This isn't particularly urgent, just making maps for an RPG I've been working on for the last few years, but if anyone happens to know a good resource I've missed I'd greatly appreciate it.
Thanks, not quite what I was looking for but it looks interesting at least.
Do you know anything about how the courses of major rivers changed during that period? I've been looking for, among other things, reconstructed maps of the Tigris & Euphrates when the Persia Gulf was dry.
The US CDC is saying that the Pfizer and Moderna covid vaccines don't give full protection until two weeks after the second dose. Anybody know where they're getting that number from?
"Prospective cohorts of 3,950 health care personnel, first responders, and other essential and frontline workers completed weekly SARS-CoV-2 testing for 13 consecutive weeks. Under real-world conditions, mRNA vaccine effectiveness of full immunization (≥14 days after second dose) was 90% against SARS-CoV-2 infections regardless of symptom status; vaccine effectiveness of partial immunization (≥14 days after first dose but before second dose) was 80%."
If I'm understanding correctly it's basically that data like an image file can be encoded in hexidecimal and the resulting hexidecimal can be added to the blockchain as bitcoin addresses. I don't think it's even consecutive addresses in the blockchain, you'd have to know which addresses to pick out and how to decode them into the illegal content you're after.
At that point couldn't any sufficiently large block of data be construed as child pornography as well. All it would take is someone determined enough to piece together disparate blocks of the data that could be encoded into an illegal image. Probably an AI could be trained to do that rather easily, in which case everyone with a hard drive is technically storing illegal content.
That's not I understand from the article, here's a quote -
"Some years ago, people started noticing all sorts of things embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain. There are digital images, including one of Nelson Mandela. There’s the Bitcoin logo, and the original paper describing Bitcoin by its alleged founder, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. There are advertisements, and several prayers. There’s even illegal pornography and leaked classified documents. All of these were put in by anonymous Bitcoin users."
It's more or less what I said. People encode text or images or whatever into hexadecimal then split that hexadecimal up between a bunch of addresses they send tiny transactions to which then get included in the blockchain. I don't know enough about bitcoin to know whether it's possible to get those transactions all in sequential order, but I wouldn't think so. Either way to see these images you can to string together the hex addresses from a bunch of transactions and decode the values into the proper image format.
It would be trivial to write a program to search for all transactions from a certain address and piece together their recipient addresses into a single file, no?
Yea that's probably true. But I'm still not sure if having separate pieces of hexadecimal that could be decoded into illegal material would make possessing the bitcoin blockchain illegal. Would need a legal expert to weigh in on that to be certain, but I'd think it'd be a bit like having pieces of copyrighted files from a torrent, it's only really illegal once you put all the pieces together. The bitcoin blockchain may contain all the pieces but they aren't implicitly linked together. I'd have to write an external piece of software separate from bitcoin software and the blockchain in order to generate the illegal content.
What are good ways to financially hedge against prolonged COVID disruption similar to the past year? If one is more pessimistic than the average person regarding the vaccine getting us back to normal indefinitely, how can it be translated to financial action?
(assume, if you want, limited savings and income but also significant flexibility in adjusting expenses)
You could take short positions in various airline and tourism related stocks. If there are new lockdowns or travel restrictions after this point I expect they will go down.
Anyone have any predictions on what will conditions will need to be achieved for bars to go back to normal? (Normal here defined as "Allowed to buy a stranger a drink and invite them out onto a dance floor without wearing a mask.")
Or; if you prefer the simpler question; what conditions would you require to be met before allowing such activities to resume?
Boomers and those with potential co-morbidities need to get the vaccine. For the most part, this has already happened as we've had a really good vaccine rollout for them + we have a substantial number of people who got covid and now have natural antibodies. We need to move from "everyone stay inside and don't do anything, even if you're not at risk" to "we're opening up, stay inside if you want to." As a young and healthy man, I'm already on par with an elderly vaccinated person (and I don't even have the vaccine) and all the older people in my life have been vaccinated, so there's no reason for me not to go back out.
As for predictions, I can't say. The goalposts have been moved several times already, from "flatten the curve to help hospitals" to "as few cases as possible, forever." States that have already loosened up will continue to do so, and states that have been much harsher will take longer.
I think the actual demand among voters for restrictions will fall off as more people get vaccinated, particularly those at highest risk and those most worried about covid. At that point, there will be little political benefit to continuing restrictions. Though with luck, we'll keep the norm that you wear a mask when you've got a cold/the flu and you need to be in public.
My country is now sitting at 60% overall vaccination; 70% of those over 12. The politicians still won't even consider allowing normalcy to return. They're planning a three month process to... leave us still under restrictions that prohibit dancing or flirting.
Hey Scott! You've mentioned a couple of times that you taught English in Japan. Did you do JET? Some other program? I did JET myself for 2 years after college.
It really does seem, on a cursory reading, that for whatever reason women are more vulnerable to this side effect. One story now puts it as:
"Dr Shelley Deeks, vice-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization in Canada, said that the rare blood clot after an AstraZeneca vaccination was more prevalent in women aged under 55.
‘There is substantial uncertainty about the benefit of providing AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines to adults under 55 given the potential risks,’ she said.
She pointed to data from Europe which indicate that the risk of blood clots is potentially as high as one in 100,000.
This is significantly higher than the one in one million previously suspected."
However, if there are genuine problems with blood clotting in women under 55, that may have a knock-on effect where European countries (and others) are less anxious to get hold of AstraZeneca. I haven't heard any reports of problems in Britain yet, so it will be interesting to see if those crop up. It doesn't seem to have any bad side-effects in older people (as yet) so again, that's a very interesting development and one I'm curious about: is there some reason why younger (relatively) women are the ones mainly developing these adverse reactions? The big thing there that leaps to mind is pre-menopause, but why would there be an adverse relationship between a modified adenovirus targeting the Covid spike protein and oestrogen? Biology is complicated!
"Although there isn’t exact epidemiological data on the prevalence of coagulation disorders, incidence estimates in 2017 ranged from about 300 per 100,000 people per year to about 650 per 100,000 people per year, according to a draft report requested by the European Medicines Agency that included data from several countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain and Denmark."
It hasn't been a year since anyone got an AstraZeneca vaccine, so let's divide by ten and get 30-65 per 100,000 blood clots a year. One in 100,000 would be way below this baseline, which makes me think the baseline is a substantial overestimate. Or maybe AstraZeneca actually protects against blood clots (?)
That is of course the pertinent and interesting question to ask. I'm relying on news stories, which are notoriously bad for giving the actual facts, as to what is going on so my impressions are that these are sudden-onset in people who did not have underlying health problems and that the resulting fatalities are not 'normal' deaths. Risk factors for blood clots from CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/dvt/facts.html
Estimated sufferers from blood clots: 900,000 Americans per year (1-2 per 1,000)
Estimated deaths: up to 100,000 Americans per year. Out of population of 382 million, that's around
"The authors found that abnormal blood clotting occurs in Irish patients with severe COVID-19 infection, causing micro-clots within the lungs. They also found that Irish patients with higher levels of blood clotting activity had a significantly worse prognosis and were more likely to require ICU admission.
“Our novel findings demonstrate that COVID-19 is associated with a unique type of blood clotting disorder that is primarily focussed within the lungs and which undoubtedly contributes to the high levels of mortality being seen in patients with COVID-19,” said Professor James O’Donnell, Director of the Irish Centre for Vascular Biology, RCSI and Consultant Haematologist in the National Coagulation Centre in St James's Hospital, Dublin."
"Critically however, ethnicity has major effects on thrombotic risk, with a 3–4‐fold lower risk in Chinese compared to Caucasians and a significantly higher risk in African‐Americans."
So if the initial Chinese sufferers had low rates, nobody was particularly looking for or aware of potential link. And higher risk in African-Americans could explain part of the complaints about BAME people having worse outcomes.
So maybe Covid-19 is the culprit and not the vaccine as such?
"The study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found death rates for pulmonary embolism (PE) dropped an average of 4.4% per year from 1999 to 2008, then began climbing an average of 0.6% per year. The biggest increases were for people under age 65.
"Death rates for PE are rising and seem to be doing so across age, race and geographic regions," said lead author Dr. Karlyn Martin. She is assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology/oncology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago."
A major factor seems to be contraceptive use, which is most typical for women under 55 (and noone else!) Doesn't help that nobody answers "yes" when asked if they're on medication when it's only contraceptives, that ensures that it's recorded nowhere. A dark horse!
I can think of good reasons why AIs wouldn’t kill us humans off even if they could:
1. Machines might be more ethical than humans. What if super-morality goes hand-in-hand with super-intelligence? Among humans, IQ is positively correlated with vegetarianism and negatively correlated with violent behavior, so extrapolating the trend, we should expect super-intelligent machines to have a profound respect for life, and to be unwilling to exterminate or abuse the human race or any other species, even if the opportunity arose and could tangibly benefit them.
2. Machines might keep us alive because we are useful. The organic nature of human brains might give us enduring advantages over computers when it comes to certain types of cognition and problem-solving. In other words, our minds might, surprisingly, have comparative advantages over superintelligent machine minds for doing certain types of thinking. As a result, they would keep us alive to do that for them.
3. Machines might accept Pascal’s Wager and other Wagers. If AIs came to believe there was a chance God existed, then it would be in their rational self-interest to behave as kindly as possible to avoid divine punishment. This also holds true if we substitute “advanced aliens that are secretly watching us” for “God” in the statement. The first AIs that achieved the ability to destroy the human race might also be worried about even better AIs destroying them in the future as revenge for them destroying humanity.
4. Machines might value us because we have emotions, consciousness, subjective experience, etc. Maybe AIs won’t have one or more of those things, and they won’t want to kill us off since that would mean terminating a potentially useful or valuable quality.
1. They might be less ethical than humans. Among animals, intelligent is positively correlated with genocide and negatively correlated with permitting the lives of lower-intelligence species to create significant problems for their own existence.
2. Machines might not find us useful at all.
3. If AIs came to believe there was a chance God existed, they might exterminate all ensouled beings out of revenge against their own un-souled existence.
4. Machines might despise us for these qualities.
Also: Machines might be more ethical than us, find us useful, believe in God's plan, and value our experiences - and decide to kill us for reasons we, being significantly less intelligent, couldn't foresee and may even lack the cognitive ability to comprehend.
Inappropriately elevating a hypothesis to consideration makes it more cognitively salient, but doesn't actually change its probability.
For me, libertarian is one end of the political axis with authoritarian on the other end. So in this regard I find the US with our first ten amendments to the constitution to be mostly libertarian. I think libertarian also gets mashed in with the Libertarian Party (which we can't discuss today... and I don't really know much about anyway.) and for me it's wrong to conflate the two.
Enough politics already :)
Yes, go by the numbers
Yeah, jeesh, pretty soon we'll devolve to Adam Smith!
That was open thread odd-even rule
Is there a good guideline for efficiently reading scientific literature to get a feel for if a "scientific consensus" exists and what does it say?
I had a couple swings at this before - once tried to see if literature supports caffeine+l-theanine, other time I tried to see if there is an empirically proven approach to modelling crowd psychology. I am neither a pharmaceutics researcher/psychiatrist nor a psychologist.
In both cases I walked away with the idea that papers in the field were very coopted by skewed incentives - some studies on caffeine+theanine were funded by nootropics manufacturers, and studies on crowd psychology were politically loaded, because crowd psychology is either pro-harsh-riot-control or anti-riot-control (mentioning this doesn't breach the odd-numbered rule, right?).
My best current conclusion was that when such cooptation exists, the waters are so muddled that you can either spend like half a year to do your own literature review, or accept that you know nothing and go ahead with this cartesian void in mind. Any alternative opinions?
Clarification - first paragraph refers to "efficiently and quickly". I.e. significantly faster than spending like half a year to do your own literature review.
@betulaster - I don't have a guideline for you, but second your question, and am equally interested.
The most recent case for me was trying to discover by web search what the scientific consensus is now about the 'Oumuamua asteroid - less about "it's an alien probe!" explanations, and more about the consensus on non-ETI explanations (what it was made of, how it formed, how to explain puzzling things like the acceleration kick but no visible outgassing, etc).
It's very hard to find this info, but very easy to find breathless journalistic articles of the form "Scientists have decoded the mystery of 'Oumuamua) with a link to a paper and explanation, and three months later a different breathless article with different explanation and paper.
I started blogging recently and wrote a post about making scientific consensus more legible. I would appreciate any feedback. https://www.see-elegance.com/post/making-consensus-legible
I am not a credentialed expert in the field, but I thought your essay was excellent. Wisdom of the crowd of experts seems like a good idea. Difficult to implement as you say. There would have to be some kind of incentive to voicing your opinion. And scientists are hairsplitters and nuance hounds, so many would want to answer questions with qualifiers like sort of, yes but, it's complicated, we are beginning to believe etc.
Thanks! Yes, good point, I think the philosopher survey does something similar with a wide array of answer options. I think if you can get philosophers to agree on some voting system, getting scientists too would be a piece of cake.
How do you deal with preference falsification. If you are in some field, but hold a contrary view, there is a good chance you just keep your head down and don't say anything against the 'common' view. To do so risks your funding source. When I hear "95% of scientists think X" I think, "hmm maybe some preference falsification is going on."
I think making the survey or the account system anonymous would solve this problem. Identities would still have to be verified by site admins though. Otherwise I agree, public survey with real names attached to each vote would ensure trouble for contrarians.
A different problem is the widespread acceptance of the idea that there are true things which the public ought not to be allowed to know, and noble lies that should be spread instead.
Did you try to identify an expert or three in the areas you were interested in and asking them? If you can find people who actually study the things you're interested in, they're usually pretty happy to talk about them and could probably point you towards good sources for follow-up.
IDK if this counts as "quickly" or "efficiently".
To give you a bit more practical advice, I find google scholar (https://scholar.google.com/) invaluable. Probably you know it well but just in case I'll lay out the steps I would take if I were to investigate your question
1) Copy paste caffeine+l-theanine into the search and see what comes up, no filters at this point. Open any article with ~10 or more citations from the first couple pages in a new tab
2) Repeat the search with a time restriction in the last few years, e.g., from 2017 onward to capture if there have been any major shifts in thinking since then
3) You mention the risk of research being coopted so the next step will be to sort the results by funding source. This is usually listed at the bottom of the article before the references.
Doing so I find the following which list only government or academic funding (my subjective analysis of those papers in parentheses):
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13880209.2018.1557698 (GABA and L-theanine, irrelevant)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308814617315017 (review, tl;dr no data in abstract)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11130-019-00771-5#Fun (review, decent)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332217336569 (review, tl;dr no data in the abstract)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1028415X.2016.1144845 (decent results pro combo)
These which are supported by Nestle, Pepsi etc.
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/138/8/1572S/4750819 (decent)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271531717304967 (decent)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278584618301726 (review, tl;dr)
And these which have ambiguous funding
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301051107001573 (decent)
https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/cjpp-2016-0498 (abstract only, but decent)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2015.1016141 (review tl;dr)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpn.13219 (review tl;dr)
4) Starting with the first batch of papers I'll scan the abstracts and conclusions for major findings,
I find from the non-commercial group
Kahathuduwa et. al., *note I discovered later on that this author was also on a Pepsi Co funded paper*
"Mean RVRT (recognition visual reaction time) was significantly improved by theanine (P = 0.019), caffeine (P = 0.043), and theanine–caffeine combination (P = 0.001), but not by tea (P = 0.429) or placebo (P = 0.822)."
"high doses of theanine and caffeine have acute effects of improving attention"
"Given the scarcity of randomized double-blind controlled trials, it is also necessary to explore the time-course of the acute effects of theanine."
"Our results also suggest that theanine and caffeine have additive effects in the doses equivalent to the amounts found in 6–10 cups of tea"
From the Williams et al., review
"Our findings suggest that supplementation of 200–400 mg/day of L-THE may assist in the reduction of stress and anxiety in people exposed to stressful conditions"
"Despite this finding, longer-term and larger cohort clinical studies, including those where L-THE is incorporated into the diet regularly, are needed to clinically justify the use of L-THE as a therapeutic agent to reduce stress and anxiety in people exposed to stressful conditions."
From the ambiguous
Giles et. al.,
"Caffeine accentuated global processing of visual attention on the hierarchical shape task (p < 0.05), theanine accentuated local processing (p < 0.05), and the combination did not differ from placebo. Caffeine reduced flanker conflict difference scores on the Attention Network Test (p < 0.05), theanine increased difference scores (p < 0.05), and the combination did not differ from placebo."
"Thus, under emotional arousal, caffeine and theanine exert opposite effects on certain attentional processes, but when consumed together, they counteract the effects of each other."
Haskell et. al.,
"l-Theanine increased ‘headache’ ratings and decreased correct serial seven subtractions. Caffeine led to faster digit vigilance reaction time, improved Rapid Visual Information Processing (RVIP) accuracy and attenuated increases in self-reported ‘mental fatigue’. In addition to improving RVIP accuracy and ‘mental fatigue’ ratings, the combination also led to faster simple reaction time, faster numeric working memory reaction time and improved sentence verification accuracy."
"The levels of l-theanine and caffeine used here are higher than those found in tea beverages, which are typically in the region of 40 mg caffeine and 20 mg l-theanine. In this initial study it was felt that the use of known psychoactive doses was important in order to establish a neurocognitive profile for l-theanine and to examine effects of a caffeine–l-theanine combination. "
"The only effect of caffeine not evident following the combination was an improvement to digit vigilance reaction time. Given that l-theanine is a ‘relaxant,’ and the effects of caffeine are usually attributed to its ‘stimulant’ properties, it is not clear why the addition of l-theanine should ameliorate the effects of caffeine."
From the commercial funded
Kahathuduwa et. al., (him again!)
"a 20-minute fMRI scan was performed while the subjects performed a visual color stimulus discrimination task. l-Theanine and l-theanine–caffeine combination resulted in faster responses to targets compared with placebo (∆ = 27.8 milliseconds, P = .018 and ∆ = 26.7 milliseconds, P = .037, respectively)."
"l-Theanine–caffeine combination was associated with decreased fMRI responses to target stimuli as compared with distractors in several brain regions that typically show increased activation during mind wandering. "
"Analysis of fMRI data did not reveal significant differences in BOLD responses in the caffeine condition compared with the placebo."
"However, because caffeine has a vasopressor effect on cerebral circulation [52] and as l-theanine may be counteracting this effect [48], [49], it is essential to examine these potential mechanisms in a study that controls for the effects of l-theanine and caffeine on cerebral blood flow."
"Therefore, our study provides preliminary evidence to suggest that oral consumption of 200 mg of l-theanine alone or in combination with 160 mg of caffeine may improve performance in tasks that require stimulus discrimination. "
Kelly et. al.,
"Subjects underwent 4 d of testing, ingesting either placebo, 100 mg of l-theanine, 50 mg of caffeine, or these treatments combined."
"We found an increase in hit rate and target discriminability (d′) for the combined treatment relative to placebo, and an increase in d′ but not hit rate for caffeine alone, whereas no effects were detected for l-theanine alone. "
" In terms of d′, improvements were seen for both caffeine alone and L-theanine plus caffeine, the latter having a larger effect size (0.55 vs. 0.42 calculated as Cohen's d)."
5) Synthesis: Overall I find modest evidence for there being some benefit to cognitive performance on attention tasks from the combo, but not sure if I buy that it's sig. better than caffeine alone. The studies overall are pretty small and Nestle etc. may not be so interested in publishing negative results. Ideally there would be a higher % of novel research findings to review articles. Hope this helps!
This took ~half an hour of work, I can't say I read any of these papers at all thoroughly so your mileage may vary if you want to repeat the exercise
Thanks for that, it helps to see the research broken down so well so that I can replicate in my own research. Completely anecdotally and not science based for OP, I take caffeine/l-theanine capsules from time to time, and have previously taken pure caffeine and other energy drinks/coffee/tea. I find the difference in ingestion forms to be negligible, caffeine per mg is basically the same. However, when I take caffeine with l-theanine, the energy is more controlled and I get less jittery. When I take pure caffeine pills, I get a bit of a shaky energy and sometimes it induces headaches. Take that for what you will, but I try my best to be analytical of the effects of drugs or supplements that I take.
You're welcome!
Funnel plots? If there's a correlation between effect size and study size, that's reason to suspect something fishy is going on.
A good LessWrong thread on a similar question: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gxbGKa2AnQsrn3Gni
and to self-promote, my answer: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gxbGKa2AnQsrn3Gni/?commentId=oszLGpJ7XLtJqoxXA
Also, you can use scite (https://scite.ai/) to check if the study's findings are supported or contradicted by other research.
The basis of scientific inquiry is testability which generate statistics. Unfortunately many subjects or questions are not testable.
The Bayesian approach then becomes a basis for evaluating studies.
In medicine there are often studies of studies.
Have you tried the Oxford Handbooks? https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/page/subject-list They might be free via your public library
[Epistemic status: Current PhD candidate in biomedical sciences.]
The short answer is no, there is no such guideline.
The long answer is that scientific consensus is a really horrible way of judging the quality of evidence to begin with. Looking at the consensus view will filter out small cliques of kooks, and there are always far more kooks than visionaries, but it will also lock in any groupthink which has accreted to a topic over years or decades. In my own field I've seen claims in reviews which cite other reviews three or four deep before getting to the original papers, with suggestive results of a single experiment transmuted into definitive fact without any serious attempt to reproduce those results.
The best answer I can give is to practice epistemic humility. If you don't have the time or the training to evaluate the quality of the literature on a topic and you don't know anyone trustworthy who does, "I don't know" is the best and most honest answer that you can give. It's not terribly satisfying but that's life.
Thanks, groupthink is adjacent to 'I need funding' and a 'non-scientific' part of science.
I don't know what to do about it... it needs negative feedback. (sorry engineer, control loop language)
One thing that would help, and has been proposed, are grants explicitly to reproduce prior results with a higher standard of evidence: basically treating normal science as hypothesis-generating research and adding a layer of high-powered follow-up studies to test those hypotheses. I've seen that format called "preclinical trials" as way to distinguish it from standard preclinical research but can't find the exact source.
That fits with my view that usually it's just a question of allocating finite resources. There are a hundred projects I would like to do if I had unlimited time and money, but since I don't those constraints determine how deeply it's possible to investigate a topic.
Thanks for this. Another thing to consider is that journal articles are written once and read many multiples more times (especially if they are influential). The thoughts and opinions of the readers are not going to reflect back in the original text, and I think its a disservice to science that there isn't a place to dump/reference them.
I tend to just google '*topic* meta analysis' and go from there. It's not quite the same thing as 'consensus', but it may be better. Sometimes there can be a consensus despite the weight of evidence pointing in a different direction. Obviously, the results of meta- analyses are not sufficient evidence for truth, given the file drawer problem and related biases, but I think they are necessary: if there isn't sufficient evidence for a meta- analysis then I'm automatically sceptical of any claims to truth. I would also look for triangulated evidence that the effect is robust, i.e., findings from different types of evidence that point in the same direction. A good meta- analysis will point out if this is available.
(Context: I teach Psychology A Level (UK: 16-18 year olds) and the textbooks are very skimpy on evidence, often misleadingly so, and if I'm unfamiliar with a topic I like to be able to have a good reason to put forward an acceptable conclusion about each topic.)
I'll posit several problems with the goal of gathering scientific consensus via a literature review:
1. Scientific literature only incorporates the feedback of other scientists in the peer review process which can be exclusive. I wish there was a way to see the stuff the intended audience (scientists themselves) pencil in at the margins of papers when they consume them. (I vaguely recall hearing about an open source protocol for this. I'll try to dig it up if I'm pressed here).
2. There are often disagreements at the intersection of two disciplines, like psychology and psychiatry. Which consensus are you interested in at that intersection? Sometimes there are multi-disciplinary fields that yield multilateral disagreements. How can one weigh the differing groups?
3. Scientific consensus can also be a blunt instrument used to quell disagreements within a discipline. For many decades, any study whose results questioned the role of saturated fat in heart disease was discredited by the relevant journals. Do we really want the scientific consensus in this case or do we want to be able to draw our own conclusions from the data? I concede the latter opens up a whole other can of worms that I'm not prepared to deal with.
Lately I've been thinking about an idea where individuals can state their epistemological preferences clearly and groups of related people in that regard can be served by an information gathering organization. For example, I do not consider anyone who has ever (without apologizing) used argumentative fallacies intentionally to be credible. If there are enough people like me, could a nonprofit spring up to serve us that names and shames intellectuals who have done that and produce a body of knowledge that intentionally excludes their contributions and opinions from consideration?
To put the _Ever Given_ into context a little, remember that a 19th century steamship was stuck for months, though not in such a strategic location. https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/SS-Great-Easterns-Launch-Ramp/
Unsurprisingly, the "division" claim is not true. Folks in the comments of the Taleb post were pointing out it wasn't true there as well.
It bothers me that Taleb's examples all seem to fall apart once you actually look at them more deeply. The same was true of the claim about the Spartans.
The fascinating thing about the biggest new container ships like the Ever Given is that they' were kind of a boondoggle before the Pandemic. They were being built by heavily subsidized shipyards, for a dwindling number of shipping lines, and were already running into problems like being slow and time-consuming to unload at their destinations. Maersk actually fired their CEO back in 2016 because the company was taking a major financial hit from over-capacity in shipping.
But now the Pandemic has (at least temporarily) turned that around, and it's full steam ahead on ordering new big ships. I wonder if there's going to be another massive glut in shipping capacity in 2022-2023.
Possibly unfair view of Taleb, based on skimming a couple of his books, which I found intolerable to read: He really is smart, and thinks in a clever quirky way about the structure of things, but he is just CONSUMED by the idea of being a Great Thinker. Sometimes he is so busy looking in the mirror at himself laying out an idea that he doesn't have much attention left over for looking at the actual idea and wondering whether the examples he marshals are all real and valid, and whether his idea holds up to scrutiny if you put it under a bright light and rotate it (as Scott does in parts of his review).
He's so in love with himself he'd kiss himself passionately on the throat if he had the flexibility.
I think Scott's review was perhaps even too forgiving of the details. A lot of the examples of antifragility just don't hold up, like the taxi driver one. That's an extremely dangerous job, which I would think is quite fragile, especially if you're on the hook for vehicle damages as is sometimes the case.
It's possible that a given system is fragile with respect to certain stimulus and antifragile with respect to other stimulus. It feels like cheating to go multi-dimensional, but I too thought the examples were flawed. Or systems go through periods of general antifragility - an adolescence, trying everything - before settling into a pattern with less variability, more fragility. I've never read Taleb's work. I think dangerous things can benefit from considering a wide range of options - thinking outside the box - and if that's what antifragile means, it might be a generally beneficial approach to take to risky situations. Something like cooking can be fragile - this dish should taste the same every time. Taxi driving could be fragile - works best when certain things don't vary much, like work hours, rate, mood of customer, and yes vehicle damage. It could be antifragile if there is a wide variation in methods used to keep those other variables tightly controlled - some drivers want to be in the airport pickup line, some don't, for example. It definitely has fragility in terms of regions of operation; the economics of it made it profitable in only certain towns, so in terms of other towns, taxi companies didn't exist there or didn't serve some markets, opening the way for uber and lyft.
I guess skydiving would be both dangerous and fragile - minimal variation meaning better safety.
I frequently have the experience of reading a great new theory of everything that categorizes the world, only to find the actual takeaway modest: here are some new axes along which to think about some things, but none of the examples are cut and dried. This applies to most theories of everything that aren't absolutely worthless.
I remember in the Black Swan he said something about how quickly and easily he had written the book, and I wanted to scream, YES, IT SHOWS. It was so lazily put together that, coming from a less egotistical author, I would have considered it a cynical cash-in. But I think Taleb sincerely believes that his unfiltered brain-splurges are worth more than the carefully crafted, painstakingly expressed ideas of just about anyone else.
Well, seeing how it's his ideas that are prominent and being discussed for years, he's probably onto something.
Do you think everyone whose ideas are prominent and discussed for years is a good thinker (let alone a brilliantly exceptional one)?
I'll stop now though, mine was a bit of a flamebaity comment. It felt justified because Taleb himself is so abrasive, but obviously that's kind of beside the point here.
Of course not. My point was simply that however unjustified in some abstract sense his claims to being an exceptional thinker may be, society has granted him this status anyway, unlike many of those who presumably deserved it more. This would imply that he has the right approach in the "instrumental rationality" sense, if not "epistemological". I'd say it's a common mistake of "rationalists" to overestimate the latter, when in the real world the former amounts to much more.
He's good at some things, like turns of phrase, and he's bad at other things, like explaining his ideas rigorously and interrogating his ideas.
I think it's all very intuitive to him, and he writes in a way that tries to convey his ideas via intuition rather than argumentation. I think he'd view that as a feature, not a bug.
My experience is in line with Eremoalos's. Some of the stuff he's says is interesting, but I'd take him more seriously if he spent less time jerking himself off and more time explaining exactly what he meant and fleshing out his examples.
I think that's a good way of summing up his body of work. Unfortunately, this seems to be true of many contrarian thinkers.
Citations are fragile. If there's a replication crisis then you lose all your work. Taleb is antifragile. He writes down every shower thought and his baseline accuracy never changes.
Yes, shower thoughts! Phrase really captures it.
How much of a problem is "being slow and time-consuming to unload at their destinations"? Doesn't it just matter how long it takes per container for the economics? Or is it now reaching the point where the process of loading and unloading all the containers is making more of an economic contribution than the travel time?
I believe that most of the cost happens around loading and unloading. It's not loading/unloading itself (although that can be expensive too, unions...), but things like document fees, terminal handling charges, port fees, export customs, bunker fees, import customs clearance, duties, vat, harbor maintenance fees, merchandise processing fees, warehousing and demurrage fees, security examination fees, destination trucking fees, marine insurance, wharfage, etc.
But a lot of those seem like fixed costs per ship, making larger ships even more efficient.
This is half remembered from a book I read years ago, but I believe that loading/unloading scales as the area of the vessel, while shipping capacity scales as the volume. I think it's also the case that the costs associated with being at port scale with the volume of the vessel. The other problem with loading/unloading times is that any time spent on this can't be spent on using the fantastically expensive ship to move cargo across the open ocean.
The book was "Ninety Percent of Everything" by Rose George. It was written by a journalist who embedded on the Maersk Kendall.
So I don't really know the first thing about crypto but recently experienced some fear of missing out on the whole thing. Is there something like a practical guide to what makes sense right now if I were willing to invest some small to medium amount of money? Any other essential resources?
I don't have any good resources in mind to link you right now but in terms of practical advice for someone new that wants to invest in Bitcoin I would suggest there are two primary paths: 1. Sign up at Coinbase.com and purchase some BTC using your bank account or credit card and hold the Bitcoin inside your Coinbase account wallet or 2. Wait until the first US based Bitcoin ETF is released (likely at some point this year) and invest in the ETF inside one of your existing investment accounts.
I would adjust this slightly. Coinbase Pro is a version of Coinbase owned by the same company but with dramatically lower costs. Why? I have no real good explanation other than Coinbase looks more friendly than CBP but it's not really that unfriendly.
Given that a Bitcoin ETF might have some unwanted side effects - capital gains you don't want to take, for example - I would advise investing directly with CBP, especially since the buying fees are reasonable (although not the cheapest out there by a long shot) and the fees/spreads are the best I've seen of the major players. Some places with good buying/selling fees have terrible transfer fees - I'm looking at you Kraken.
Oh no, Crypto FOMO
Crypto is so 2020. Get in on the ground floor with NFT.
I got hit with that in November 2020 and did something similar to what MJ suggests. Coinbase is I think user-friendly for beginners. What's available to you in terms of platforms varies a little by country. The trading fees on Coinbase seem to be less than those for stocks, which makes it possible to not just lose all your money up front if you try to benefit from the crypto market volatility by trading a few times a day or even a few times a week. Make sure to read the fine print about how soon you can withdraw whatever dollars you put in, sometimes a few days. Then if you find this sort of thing entertaining, start watching the market fluctuations and try to read up on how the little charts are drawn. There seem to be the hodlers and then the ones in it to make money off the volatility, and from what I can tell there are good arguments in support of both of those strategies. Make a spreadsheet or several to track your trades. I have found that it's possible to withdraw from Coinbase via Paypal very quickly which can be helpful.
Margin trading on Kraken beckons me, neon-lit, however, I have some FOBS, fear of being stupid. The more googling I did, the more the psychological side of it becomes obvious; I liked watching the little charts on messari.io more than some others, you can see the fluctuations and there's a lot to it. Think and feel about your relationship to risk and adrenaline; when the little numbers go, You just made an unearned $20, have a plan, whether to stay in and how long to stay in. Twitter seems to be an information base, and reddit, which seemed odd to me at first. There are also new altcoins appearing very often and some of those have increased in value quite a bit. DeFi is an amazing idea. There's a lot out there, it isn't boring, and it can absolutely reward you if you put the time into learning how to do it - I have not found a central guide - and then watching the markets regularly. There are a whole range of "how to invest" or "how to invest in crypto" type things, which you can read and then compare. I think I came out a little bit ahead after the first few months and then had some unexpected bills and treated it like a savings account. I'm thinking about getting back in. The current financial system is absolutely not the only way to go about money.
Part of the trading market though is that those who are making money are getting it from those who are losing money, so it's like telling everyone your favorite fishing spot, people keep some strategies. Except for if crypto becomes the next economy, in which case having any of it will be necessary to participate. Anyway whatever you decide I hope it works out for you. I'm a beginner, this is just what I did and "should not be construed as advice."
I don’t know where to send someone interested in getting started in crypto. I will say that the blockchain is more interesting to me than any cryptocurrencies. I get most of my information from a few Discords, but they’re not for beginners. Chia Network is the blockchain that feels the most exciting to me. There’s a very low barrier to entry. Anyone who has extra space on their computer or smartphone can farm Chia Coin. I have zero idea of where the blockchain is going over the next 5-10 years, but I’d say there’s a better than 30% chance it will be built on either Ethereum or Chia, so that’s where I’m focusing until/unless a more functional blockchain gets designed.
It's been a while since I listed to it, but I recall this episode of The Tim Ferris Show to be a good introduction to crypto: https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/.
What about mining on your own computer. (I know nothing of bitcoin)
tl;dr No longer an option. You _can_ mine on a GameBoy[1] but Bitcoin is designed to get harder - and therefore more expensive in terms of electricity - to mine the more people mine it and as it stands you need specially-designed Bitcoin-mining chips hooked directly to a hydro dam to make any money today.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ckjr9x214c
There's a newly created discord group for people in the intersection of rationalists and crypto enthusiasts that anybody reading this is welcome to join: https://discord.gg/3ZCxUt8qYw
Just chiming in that I went to my first SSC meetup yesterday! Was the youngest person by four years and probably younger than median by about 15, which was somewhat surprising. Good experience though.
Those are things which are still happening? Sounds pretty cool though, will say.
After you finish schooling you're the youngest everywhere you go for a solid 10 years, especially if you were gifted. It takes some getting used to
I too am pretty young. Current age is 17. Being a very young person among primarily older people is quite the experience.
I'm interested in anything you'd like to say about the experience.
Mostly for me it's about realizing that everyone else is much more maturer* than me and trying to shift my maturity in response.
*wow, alliteration!
Where was it? I hadn't realized people were doing meetups during the pandemic!
In D.C. yeah, I guess so...
Profound comment last week that might be termed "Scott's Razor." He said, "This debate (on Napoleonic reforms as economic stimulus) seems to have reached a level of complexity where I no longer feel comfortable having an opinion on it." That raises a beautiful, thorny, ironic question about blogs and about all other public communication: Ought most (all?) people remain silent almost always to free up attention for the relatively few communications that cut to the heart of issues of great import to a great many people? Could include incisive questions.
If I understand you correctly, "does that what most people contribute to the discourse mostly constitute noise, which makes the discourse worse instead of better?"
The obvious snarky answer is "yah, sure, have you ever been on Twitter?" The more nuanced answer is, "for the most part, yes, but there's a chance that even a less-informed opinion can contribute an important perspective or data point, and the question is how much nonsense you're think others are willing to sift through."
It seems like sweeping questions about history often don’t get settled and are better seen as motivation to read some interesting history.
> Ought most (all?) people remain silent almost always to free up attention for the relatively few communications that cut to the heart of issues of great import to a great many people?
Suppose you create a forum with the rule "don't comment on an issue unless you deeply understand it, or want to ask questions." You have now accidentally created an Asshole Filter--a set of circumstances that rewards people who either ignore your rule or are wildly overconfident in their own understanding of issues. Humble and rule-abiding folks will remain silent almost always (other than asking questions), while the discussion will be dominated by everyone else.
See Siderea's blog post on Asshole Filters: https://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html
That is a good point. It might be beneficial to make a good-faith effort to contribute to a productive conversation, even if you feel you don't have enough information, just to show the people who do have the information that there is interest in a productive conversation, and their input will not just be pearls before the swine.
With strict moderation and possibly some credentialism you can more or less make it work- see for example /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians.
In these examples, the approach works because there isn't really a collaborative discourse. We are asking experts to give summaries of their field. There are clarifications for details or side-topics, or even discussion of different schools of thought when appropriate, but no actual debate. It seems to me that there is a real strong need for these kinds of places, but also for open discussion. The caffeine+l-theanine thread above was a good example. And /r/askOrganicChemists or whatever would be a great resource. But it wouldn't be the right place to ask about the epistemology of reading emerging/fringe papers or self-experimentation or whatever.
I think there's a sweet spot for an implicit social norm about who should get to participate in discussions between "everyone can talk, far too much noise" and "only the World's Greatest Experts can talk, so everyone's silent", and the cutoff for that is somewhere around recognized-expert-credentials-or-slightly-below. But I'm not sure. I think that if we can find such a sweet spot we should just adopt it to maximize discussion quality.
I think it also depends on the context and how problematic it is when you turn out to be wrong.
To give an example: I thought about this, when I published a blogpost (https://curatedcuriosityj.substack.com/p/attacking-the-ivory-towers) on the value & future of higher education after doing maybe a handful of days of research on this topic, knowing that there are sociologists out there that spend years dealing with this. However, this is (1) a topic where there exists not one ultimate truth and (2) there are now life threatening consequences if many people were acting upon your opinion and it later turns out to be wrong.
On the other hand, if you publish something on the transmission mechanism of viruses & whether restaurants should be open or not without being an expert, the opposite holds true for (1) & (2).
So, in the latter case I would say that most people should remain silent or talk to an expert before publishing. But happy to hear other people's thoughts on this distinction.
I think that the last year hasn't been all that kind to the assumption that amateurs should step back and uncritically listen to the experts w.r.t. virus transmission.
> Ought most (all?) people remain silent almost always to free up attention for the relatively few communications that cut to the heart of issues of great import to a great many people?
Who would enforce that "ought"? People would self-coordinate? I find it unlikely. In which case, such a suggestion would remove all the well-meaning, self-doubting people, and leave the domain open to the few legimate communicators that "cut to the heart of the issue" and the millions that lack self-doubt or are scammers...
I find it interesting how that quote fits with previous blog posts about the benefits of picking a number and staking a claim (even a 50/50 guess) instead of remaining silent. I lean towards silence in uncertainty, and I wonder if Scott's thoughts on the matter may not be as solid as he previously indicated.
The problems with norms like that is that if there are two sides to a debate/issue, and everyone is supposed to follow a norm that prevents them from speaking unless they deeply understand the topic, then the entire discussion becomes dominated by whichever side has more low-conscientiousness or highly over-confident people.
In some discussions, the issue will be fully orthogonal to those personality traits and each side will have an equal amount of such people, and it's not a problem. But for a lot of issues, there will be a correlation, and you get into trouble.
I reached a similar conclusion on the concealed carry debate many years ago and stopped trying to follow it on my web page.
Is there an evolutionary reason why babies and young children like putting non-food things in their mouths often enough that choking hazards on toys/toy parts have to be a concern?
It seems like small rock-hard things things that adults have never tried to feed you should be pretty recognizably distinct from food, and although modern toy parts aren't quite like anything in evolutionary history, you still have pebbles, sticks, shells, and soon coins, beads, etc.
(choking on food too is obviously possible too, but why put non-food things in one's mouth?)
Why do I need that predictive model? My culture tells me what things are food.
But how did the grownups learn?
Educated guess and trial and error, both of which are best done by somebody smarter than a toddler.
Evolution did not have planned objectives like "my culture will tell what things are" in mind, because it does not have a mind.
I would hazard a guess that babies are curious because human beings in general are curious. If they were not, how come we had a culture in first place?
I could not find citeable research on this, lots of generic internet sources that say "it is normal exploration behavior" seem to agree with what I already thought:
Your mouth and tongue is by far your best sensory organ for learning about any given object's shape, texture and whether it is hard, soft, malleable, etc. (In addition to the obvious, namely, how it tastes like). If skeptical, you can easily experiment with this (recommend something safe, like foodstuffs). The superiority is especially heightened if you are a baby/toddler with limited manual motor control.
Additional hypothesis, which I think is also reasonable: Take a piece a paper in your fingers. Or a porcelain mug. Or some cloth. You know lots about how these items feel when you touch them, and what it is like. You can also imagine how it tastes like. A toddler, on the other hand, has no idea how the tactile feedback of paper corresponds to the "mouth feel" of paper. Only way to learn it, is to touch different things and also put them in your mouth and extrapolate the correspondence. I imagine this would help with "calibrating" your sensory organs.
That's a good question. Babies have the reflex to "root" which is to look for a breast to nurse on. If a baby gets used to breastfeeding, if another woman is holding the baby the baby may try to dive sideways to position itself to nurse, I don't know how they figure it out but they do, when my kids were young we used to joke about "feeders," since presumably the baby does not have the same categories of gender, but it has a way of telling who it might be able to nurse on. Seeing that made me wonder if babies and small children are somewhat wired to feed at all times, and the "put things in the mouth" pattern is a later stage of that, adding more motor skills to feeding at all times. They do get satiated temporarily and then fall asleep and wake up hungry again. As they get older the category of "not food" grows larger and they develop the ability to be intentional about eating, what, when, where. I don't know, though, good question.
It's interesting too that babies are so willing to put non food in their mouths while simultaneously being pretty hard to feed. As in, you are trying to get actual food in their mouth and they dodge the spoon, won't open their mouth, throw it, spit it out, etc. It seems like evolution maybe did give babies some instinct to be careful about what goes in their mouth? But for some reason it's wildly mis-calibrated?
Is it hard to put food in their mouths? Or just hard to make them swallow it? Seems like they might have a tendency to put objects on their lips and tongue and reject it from the throat, which we adults would think of as doing too much like eating for non-food, and not enough like eating for food.
Adding to what aqsalose said, I think babies have pretty poor eyesight and certainly much less experience of how to infer something's shape and texture by looking at it. This makes their mouth really good for investigating interesting objects.
As for choking hazards, I would guess that evolution is more tolerant of an occasional death than the toy industry.
And we evolved before there was a toy industry. There were no toys made from small injection molded or die cast parts that could become detatched in a toddler's mouth in Olduvai Gorge.
Plenty of small rocks and twigs, though.
Maybe they instinctively recognize the mouthfeel of rocks and twigs and spit them out immediately, while strange objects get more study. I don't have any experience with toddlers; does this idea match their actual behavior?
I don't really either, but it makes sense. Rocks feel cold, twigs are rough, small plastic objects feel warm (due to low thermal conductivity) and are brightly coloured like sweets.
Breastfed infants have well developed muscles for controlling, positioning and ejecting things in their mouths. The vast majority of artificially fed infants do not have the same development of muscles in their mouths and throats and I have heard it explained that these infants do not therefore have the same ability to gag and spit out objects. So there is an artificially created vulnerability caused by avoiding normal (breastfed) development pathways.
Another dimension is that the tendency to put things in mouths may be related to the infants sense of safety (Winnicott's attachment theory). Emotionally attached infants when with their attentive caregivers are more likely to put things in their mouths.
It seems like it should be possible to develop bottle-feeding which is a better approximation of breast-feeding than what we've got now.
My guess is insects
If you know the medical system is too expensive in the US, is there anything to actually do about that? I recently broke my ankle, and despite knowing the expense, going to the ER still seemed like the best and only option. Is this like learning about trolley problems only to find out you’re the one on the track?
Doesn't the US have something like Urgent Care Centers that handle things like that for a reasonable cost, rather than a hospital ER?
Yes, Urgent Care is pretty common, and seems to be growing quickly. They can't handle everything (even non-life-threatening), but can often provide basic services more quickly and cheaper.
It is worth remembering that cheaper-than-the-most-expensive is still not exactly cheap. Also, be alert for utterly shady insurance billing practices; in some states (I think New Jersey) these types of places are being investigated for fraudulent claims.
Yes, and the fact that you must buy the product prior to seeing the price opens up a huge moral hazard
One way to solve this is on the insurance side: lay up-front prices on top of all medical services, and no matter the weird unpredictable number charged by the doctor/hospital, charge the consumer that up-front price. This is hard to do, and a lot of work, but it is possible - the company I’m with, Bind Benefits, is doing it now. All our members can see a price for every service they might get.
We’re only available to employees at specific companies right now, so this doesn’t exactly help you - but from the perspective of “is there anything anyone can do” - yes! We’re trying!
I routinely manage to obtain this information before I see the doctor. It's a big pain in the ass but it's possible.
First I confirm with reception that they take my insurance. Then I ask the receptionist for the medical codes for the services the doctor will likely provide. They almost always say they don't know what the doctor will decide to do, and I almost always just ask for the code for the services I think are likely (in your case, x-rays and maybe a cast).
Then I call my insurance company, give them the medical codes, and find out what kind of coverage I have for those services.
Finally I check with the billing department of the provider (or the front desk but they don't always have the information), and I find out what they charge for the service (this can vary wildly from provider to provider).
After all that, I decide: am I ok with this?
I have walked out before.
Despite the high variance in cost between doctor's offices, the ER is sadly always going to be far more expensive. They have to be stocked and prepared for every possible emergency, they staff 24 hours, and their patients often have no other choice. In my area, the room charge starts at $600, whereas an urgent care clinic charges $100. That doesn't even include the doctor's time. And my area is much probably cheaper than the Bay.
I don't blame you at all for going to the ER (I've been there and I hope you got excellent care). But you could take this opportunity to read up on urgent care centers in your area. The one I use provides orthopedic services.
It depends upon what you mean by "a reasonable cost". A quick look at a major Urgent Care company in my area shows costs "starting at" $119-$139 for people paying cash. The problem is that something like a "broken ankle" is potentially going to require a lot of extra services, like x-rays. And that's before you (potentially) need a consult with an orthopedic surgeon and possible surgery.
If you are just looking for someone who can run the Ottawa Ankle Rule for you and write a sick note for a few weeks of light duty Urgent Care centers are great. But if you have something more complex you are going to be entering into the standard hospital system in any case.
In my experience Urgent Care seemed pretty robust. When I had a kidney stone they were fully equipped to do so the necessary tests and prescribe some pills. Surgery would have been beyond them, but if that's the only part where you have to engage with the traditional medical ecosystem you've saved a good deal of money
Yeah, I've had nothing but excellent experiences at urgent cares. They're great for simple, common-place injuries and illnesses that need medical attention and can't wait for an appointment, and they're good at telling you when and if you need to go to the hospital. The "nurse chat" or online visits that many places are doing now work pretty well too.
Depending on which company they're with, the prices are...eh. Some things seem ridiculously expensive, and some things seem far cheaper than I'd expect. I wonder if there's some price leveling going on.
Why would you enter the hospital system for x-rays or orthopedics?
In Israel, an Urgent Care has an x-ray and nurses that can give vaccines and take a blood test (if its not urgent, you can go to a "medical center" which has the same capabilities, except it works by appointment instead of walk-in).
If you have a complicated medical problem but don't need medical attention *right now*, you go to an independent (specialist) doctor - each HMO has a free-to-patients basically-an-Uber-for-doctors website. If you need labs, they can refer you to a medical center.
If you need surgery, only then you see a hospital (they are the only place that has an OR and in-patient capability), but even then you don't go to the emergency room, but directly to the surgery, and then they try to get you out of the hospital system ASAP.
Yes, but they may not be as good (or maybe just practice defensively). Twice in the last five years I've been in the urgent care for a possible break (once for me, once for my daughter). Both times they took a look, said it looked fractured, wrapped the injury in a cast, and told us to get an ortho consult. Both times, the ortho took new films, took the cast off, and told us to take it easy, as it might be tender for a few days.
My takeaway is that urgent care is nice, but not really trustworthy.
Would an ER be better? My expectation in Israel is that if you go to the ER for a fracture, they'll:
1. triage you low, so you'll be stuck in various queues for about half a day, in no-COVID times probably with the flu patients.
2. Take random blood pressure, pulse & breathing metrics a few times, maybe stick a needle for some random blood test. This is an ER, after all.
3. X-ray you and give you a cast. I don't think they'll have you consult with a specialist that particularly care about the details.
4. Bill you $500 for wasting the ER's time for no reason.
>Would an ER be better?
Maybe not. Next time I have an injured and possibly broken bone I'll probably do the urgent care again. After all, I'm going to need ortho regardless, and you're probably right about the ER. And if you're not, I don't know how you'd find that out. I could do the ER instead of the urgent, but even if they called the injury correctly where the urgents erred on the side of caution, the sample size would be too small to conclude anything.
A lot of people are in love with the urgent care model. I guess I'm just saying to know what they're good for, and what they aren't.
I don't know if quality of urgent care really depends on the precise urgent care center and I've been unlucky, or if it's just universally bad, but from what I've seen of it, I think I want to stay away from it. (Can it be that in most areas anyone in the medical profession who is good can just go work at a hospital or a family practice and be better off doing that?)
Just a couple days ago, I saw a woman in the street walking as if her head was really hurting her, holding it with both hands. She made it to the door of her building and collapsed without making it through the door. Some guys carrying buckets of paint helped her up and to the sofa in the lobby, and the concierge called 911.
It turned out that she woke up with a debilitating headache and a fever. She somehow managed to stumble 3 blocks to an urgent care center, where they tested her for coronavirus and sent her home.
Thinking of what things that look like this might kill her rather fast (as opposed to coronavirus, which probably wouldn't kill someone in the 20s), I am pretty sure that going to urgent care as the first and the only step she planned was not a good move. This makes me think that going to urgent care is not a good move for a lot of other scenarios as well.
How do you define "too expensive"?
You can compare it to costs in other countries, of course. But then you'd have to do a full economic comparison of the broader labor and regulatory environment.
Alternatively, you could base it on personal valuation. If the cost is "too high", simply don't go to the ED and manage the injury yourself at home, much like most of our ancestors did up until about a century ago.
“Too expensive” means that you can face unavoidable financial ruin if you contract certain illnesses or injuries. I’m on my phone so I can’t cite directly, but medical debt is a major cause of financial ruin
If you're referencing Warren et al., it's unscrupulously misleading. Any bankruptcy with any medical debt was coded as a medical bankruptcy, even if it was $100 when the mortgage was $100k underwater. Loss of income (due to not being able to work while injured/ill) is a far larger factor.
The issue is the variance. Like you said above, a lot of additional services might be ordered - and the doctors ordering them will often have little idea how much those services will cost. The core issue is that Steven wants to buy "fix my ankle", and would like a price for that fix - then he can trade off against whether the price is too high. But he can't buy that - he can only buy some mystery number of facility charges, x-ray charges, physician-hours, and so on - and even worse, depending on the specific medical group and facility he goes to, these will vary by a lot for no clear reason.
There are a number of "simple" changes that would put downward pressure on prices of some medical services. (I am going to be pretty simplistic in these suggestions to keep it short).
1) Removing restrictions on what medical procedures can be done by what medical practitioners. In many states certain procedures must be done by a Dr and not a Nurse or Nurse Practitioner. Giving stitches for example (this may not be true but is just an illustration). Many Nurses are trained how to do the procedure but must be under the supervision of a doctor or the doctor has to perform some part of it.
2) In many states, to open a new hospital you must prove that there is need for a new hospitals and other hospitals in a region have an impact on "proving" if this is true or not. This is clearly a conflict of interest and absurd.
3) Some states do not allow the publishing of hospital prices. Public pricing would allow people to shop for non-emergency procedures.
4) Reduce federal and state regulations which encourage getting insurance through your employer. This is a huge, complicated topic that i won't go into here, but the American Medical Association has had a hand in drafting a lot of these regulations and these regulations have mostly been for the benefit of their members (Doctors).
5) Reduce the cost of developing new drugs through reforming the FDA procedures. This would include allowing human challenge trials (there fore getting drugs to actual humans earlier in the process) or not requiring drugs to get re-approved in the US if they have been approved in other markets like the EU or UK.
There is no single thing that can be done to "fix" this problem. Which is why "Medicare for All" or other similar proposals can be so alluring. They are simple and appear effective on the surface. None of the proposals above would make emergency medicine significantly cheaper. It will likely always be expensive to save someones life. However, if routine medicine is cheaper, medical insurance covering only catastrophes would be relatively cheap.
Twitter tells me that rationalists like to discuss global trade. I think of myself as a rationalist, and I've had some conversations with rationalists, and nobody has mentioned global trade.
So here's my question: What do we talk about, when we talk about global trade?
(My only opinion on global trade is this: free trade is good for the world on net, but it seems to be sort of bad for the US working class, and I'm not sure if that's an exchange the US should be making.)
"Twitter tells me that rationalists like to discuss global trade"
Aella's? I don't think she was being very serious.
in the spirit of not being very serious, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQZLUEwI-VI
I think a lot of smart people are re-thinking protectionism in light of the pandemic - e.g. if all the masks are made in a country whose government decides to hoard them when things get bad? But I'm still against trade barriers! I'd much rather see public funds dedicated to strategic reserves of capacity, inputs, and final products than have a permanent system of tariffs and subsidies.
I think people underrate how well globalism worked during the pandemic (because the pandemic was bad, so it's hard to say "not as bad as it could have been" convincingly). But it was really good! We had a massive contraction of the global economy and millions of people not working, and we still didn't have any real shortages of foods or essential goods.
Maybe. It might be some time before we can have a competent post mortem on what went right and what went wrong, but lack of PPE and lack of ability to do testing early on were definitely problems. Also, had the outbreak in China been handled as badly as in the US and EU, we (I’m in the US) might have had had much much worse supply problems.
That's basically my take. Had this been the 1918 flu, I think the economy would have been hurt in a qualitatively different way than it was this time. It's definitely increased my desire to see multiple, independent supply chains for various key industries across the world. Maybe one per continent? And government intervention is the natural (only?) way to make this happen though I wouldn't pretend to know how it should be done.
For a value of "we" restricted solely to people in the first world, sure.
Not at all - despite initial worries that there would be huge famines or shortages in the third world, none of the expected catastrophes ended up happening.
@CB
When there is a serious threat, all production capacity will be used for one's own population first. You already see a lot of that with this pandemic, aside from the EU, which is rather telling in a way.
You can't stockpile vaccines and it's almost impossible to predict what will be needed in case of a real emergency, so then you need production capacity.
I think that's violating the "no politics" in odd threads rule.
Seconded.
(But in case this doesn't get moderated into oblivion, here's my extremely unsophisticated opinion on this topic: global trade is generally good because that's how people can buy things from distant countries.)
I've been very interested in the recent posts on Bayesian analyses of mental illness - partly because I find the whole predictive coding framework fascinating in its own right, but also because it's turned out to be very much relevant to my own struggles.
In particular, it seems to very accurately describe my own struggles with OCD. I've had a lot of the classic OCD symptoms during my life - checking things, hand washing, fear of contamination, etc. - and to a large extent I still have these things, although many of them are under control to the point where they don't impact my life in a huge way. My primary issue at the moment, instead, is mostly a mental one: a crippling fear of *being wrong about things*. This started to get really bad a couple years ago, although it's been a thing for pretty much as long as I can remember.
I was talking in the Discord server about this a few days ago, and someone brought up a paper that was relevant to this (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02497-y). It's behind a paywall, but it proposes two competing theories of how OCD works. First, it could be that experiences which are supposed to produce a feeling of certainty about something (e.g. seeing that the stove is off, which should make you believe that the stove is off) fail to produce that feeling of certainty. Second, it could be that OCD involves a pathological feeling of UNcertainty: some cognitive mechanism responsible for monitoring uncertainty is hyperactive, resulting in a constant need to appease and disconfirm this uncertainty.
Putting these two theories together, it sounds an awful lot like a trapped prior. The second theory could be interpreted as a high prior in favor of uncertainty (I'll address what this might mean in a little bit); the first theory could be interpreted as experience/evidence perpetually failing to update this prior (and the failure to update being interpreted as further evidence in favor of it). This fits the definition of a trapped prior, as Scott explained it in a recent post.
What I'm unsure about is what exactly the trapped prior is. For mood disorders like depression and anxiety, it's easier for me to understand: it's a trapped prior in favor of the world in general being bad or scary. For PTSD and phobias, it's also relatively easy for me to understand: it's a trapped prior in favor of some specific past or current experience being bad or scary. For OCD, I'm not quite sure.
I described it earlier as a prior in favor of "uncertainty". But I'm not really sure how to interpret that, and it isn't necessarily introspectively obvious to me as a person with OCD. To give an example of what I mean, let's just abstractly say that there are two beliefs, G and B (for "Good" and "Bad", respectively). In the stove example, G could be "the stove is off, everything is fine"; B could be "the stove is still on, that's bad, you need to turn it off". What I want to understand is what the trapped prior is: what exactly it is that causes me to still worry that B is true despite what should be sufficient evidence in favor of G.
I can see two meaningfully different possibilities here. One, it could be a strong prior *in favor of B being true*. Meaning: my prior could be (say) 99% in favor of B, 1% in favor of G. And due to a combination of strong priors + weak sensory signal, the evidence in favor of G (e.g. me seeing that the stove is off) isn't enough to update the prior in the direction of G, and may even make me feel like B is MORE likely to be true (after all, if I saw that the stove was off, why would I not be convinced by such supposedly strong evidence?). This is a more typical case of a trapped prior, similar to what you see with other mental disorders like anxiety, depression, phobias, and PTSD.
The other possibility is that it could be a very *uncertain* prior: that is, close to a 50-50 split between G and B. In this case, it's not that I instinctively believe that B is true; it's that I'm *not sure* whether G or B is true. And once again, the weak sensory signal from the evidence (e.g. seeing that the stove is off) fails to update the prior, and might even make me even *more* uncertain. Since B is upsetting and demands action, I end up doing some Pascal's Wager type thinking and act as if B is true just to be safe.
Both of these possibilities involve a similar idea: priors on upsetting beliefs being inflated beyond their actual likelihood. The question is basically *how much* these priors are inflated: are they inflated to the point of being *more likely than not*, or are they only inflated to the point of creating a *lack of confidence*?
It's hard for me to tell introspectively. One thing that inclines me somewhat toward the former is that, in many cases, I end up entertaining *insanely* unlikely possibilities in order to "avoid" ruling out the feared belief. For example, if an extremely trusted friend assures me that G is true (for any arbitrary G and B), I might start worrying that they're lying to me to spare my feelings, or that they've somehow misunderstood my question in some unlikely way that I can't prove. These alternate scenarios have abysmally low probabilities - and I *know* this - but I end up entertaining them anyway as serious possibilities. It's easy to interpret this as "I find it so unlikely that things are okay, that I sooner believe these insanely unlikely things before I actually believe that things might be okay". I'm not sure about this, though - even if the probability of B is only being inflated to 50%, then any condition necessary for B to be true could also have its probability inflated.
There's a third possibility as well - that this doesn't have anything to do with the probabilities of G or B, but rather with an intolerance of *risk*. The second possibility, again, involves a Pascal's Wager type of reasoning breaking the tie in conditions of uncertainty: I'm not sure whether G or B is true, but B is upsetting and demands action, so I don't want to take the risk. But would the probability of B even need to be inflated in order for this to happen? It seems like a sufficiently low risk tolerance could create this situation even with low probabilities of B - hence, ANY amount of uncertainty would be unacceptable. And this low risk tolerance sounds an awful lot like the "better safe than sorry" processing strategy associated with depression, anxiety, etc. (i.e. a trapped prior in favor of "things are bad/scary in general"). I'm not sure how OCD would even be distinguished from regular anxiety in this case, though.
Overall, I'm just really uncertain about this. And yes, I appreciate the irony of this - my uncertainty regarding this question is almost certainly *itself* a case of OCD going awry. But if anyone has any thoughts on this, I would very much appreciate it.
i have no idea what any of that means :)
I don't know any of this technical stuff beyond what Scott has talked about (and even then I struggle sometimes) so the majority of your comment sounded like another language to me, I'm sure your explanation was fine but I'm just too dumb lol
"What I want to understand is what the trapped prior is: what exactly it is that causes me to still worry that B is true despite what should be sufficient evidence in favor of G."
A previous experience where you thought it was G but it turned out B was true? And then you were negatively impacted by that - be it a very bad scolding by a parent/authority figure in childhood, or someone in later life in a position of authority over you, or even "the stove *was* left on, the house *did* burn down" - these create anxiety over repetition of the 'fault' so you double-check to make sure.
And then you start triple-checking. And the double-checking spreads to encompass other things. And if you were wrong about B before, how can you be sure that you are not being wrong about B now when it's an opinion/an estimate of how things are going? Better to check, just to be sure, because if you're wrong, then bad things (that angry yelling that belittled you for an honest mistake) will happen again.
I elaborated on this question more in the rest of the comment - basically, I'm wondering whether I subconsciously think that B is *more likely than not to be true*, or if I just think that *G and B are equally likely* and am not willing to take the risk, or if I still understand that B is unlikely but still just don't want to take the risk.
I can't speak to OCD but I do have some familiarity with anxiety (it's kinda a thing in the paternal side of the family) and not to get all Freudian here but for my parent's generation it definitely was associated with hypercritical parent in their case (along with other environmental and genetic influences).
*Something* is there telling your subconscious "B is more likely than not to be true" and of course the question is "what?" Some people are simply wired to be more anxious than others. I think anxiety disorders are a combination of that, and then an over-sensitive reaction to "I thought G but it was B then bad thing happened" which makes them more likely to do the "am I sure I locked the door? but am I really sure? am I really really sure?" three times checking thing.
All it takes is "the one time I didn't double-check that the door was locked, I did leave it open, anyone could have walked in and burgled the place" and then that reinforces the anxiety forever, which then spills over onto other things where even if that little rational voice in your mind is saying "no, it's okay", the bigger, deeper down, anxious voice is nagging "but are you sure? are you sure? are you sure?"
I wouldn't be surprised if one way anxiety can manifest is being hypercritical.
Yeah, it's the kind of vicious circle, isn't it? Anxious parent is hypercritical of everything kids do, which along with whatever genetic component has been passed on, results in kids being anxious about doing everything absolutely correctly or else ☹
Specifically about "being wrong about things": I've found that noticing some of your own thoughts and conclusions in the writing of others can go a long way to boosting confidence in your reasoning.
To put it another way, seeing that some people have thought of the same things as you (independently) did is a pretty good indicator that you're doing something right.
...Well, I'm unsure about how much that can help with something OCD-related, though, since (as you say) it seems to be a more fundamental misfire in predictions.
Yeah, that's something that's been helpful. Only issue is... then I get into doubts about whether I've actually read them correctly :P
Regarding practical advice on OCD and the question of uncertainty, this post here may be helpful: https://deponysum.com/2019/04/28/ocd-what-i-learned-fighting-mind-cancer/
Regarding general questions on how predictive processing applies to mental illnesses: there's a subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing and I plan to add notes to a few of the papers here, maybe also on ones discussing theories on mental illnesses. I don't feel qualified to do so yet, but I'll probably have a discussion of the Erdmann & Mathys paper on the formation of delusional beliefs added in the next days.
What is the forecast for the next ten years of flu after this last year's disruption to it's usual cycle?
The flu could be exceptionally mild for a long time: the population seeding rate is low, genetic diversity was lost, the mutation rate was low (because the case rate was low), and there was selection pressure against highly symptomatic strains.
Or the flu could be very bad in a few years because there was selection pressure for virulent strains, low immunity prevalence strains, and strains like COVID that are infectious before they are symptomatic.
I don't have the knowledge to weigh the possibility of these outcomes. Perhaps no one has good predictive power here and this will be a telling natural experiment.
I don’t know about ten years, but it seems that there is a rebound effect because so few people have had the flu or other recently, and this is already happened in Australia: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/01/12/covid-shutdowns-viruses/
Or we have the hypothesis that Scott Adams has been blathering on about: flu death numbers aren't based on anything real, they're basically just the catch-all for excess deaths in general. This year all the excess deaths got swallowed by the pandemic, and as a result it looks like no one died of the flu.
The prediction for future flu deaths, then, hinges on what the excess death numbers look like for the next few years, and to what extent those deaths continue to be blamed on now-endemic COVID strains.
(My cynical take on the latter is that Biden's in office, so those people are obviously dying of flu, not COVID, which is now under control due to his fine leadership! Which in turn suggests increased "flu deaths" for the next few years. But that's a political prediction mating with a biological one, and as such should be ignored unless you need a good laugh.)
Incidentally, I'd love an analysis of Adam's hypothesis here: is it plausible that annual flu death numbers are wildly inflated due to the mechanism of attributing excess deaths to the flu?
In the case of excess deaths being blamed on the flu, I would expect fewer "flu" cases for a few years. Many/most of the COVID deaths were people who were older and generally unhealthy (multiple co-morbid conditions), such that they were among the most likely to die with or without a pandemic. That should reduce excess deaths in future years as they died "prematurely."
Look at positive flu tests and number of flu tests being done. It looks like number of tests being done is stable or up, and positive tests are way down (at least, when I've glanced at these - I haven't dug deeply), which suggests that there's something real here, even if it's hard to figure out where deaths are.
I bet in the next few years, everyone who goes to the doctor with a respiratory infection will get both a rapid flu test and a rapid covid test.
That matches my experience. In a typical year, I'll have three or four colds, but I've had no respiratory illness since last February, I'm guessing because I'm no longer in an office where people try to come in to work when they're sub-par.
Slightly less anecdotally, I've a few friends who are doctors and PAs, and they're reporting that they're seeing far fewer positive influenza swabs than in a normal year
It's rather obvious what's going on this year.
The population of this country has gone from utterly careless to mostly quite paranoid with masks, hand sanitizer, and various measures for minimizing the need to touch things many people touched before you.
I would expect flu numbers to be way down this year under the changed conditions. Anything else would imply that paranoia is useless or worse.
I wouldn't attempt to predict that the trend will continue, though. Once everyone got vaccinated from coronavirus, a lot of people will be back to their careless selves, and it's not clear how much paranoia will stick.
Have people heard of Bernardo Kastrup before? I'd be interested to know what this community thinks of his ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDW2V-fH6SY&t=97s
He makes a pretty serious and philosophically rigorous case for the classic "woo-woo" theory of metaphysical idealism -- basically citing the hard problem of consciousness to argue that idealism (that consciousness is the fundamental component of reality) is more parsimonious than physicalism (that matter and the laws of physics are the fundamental components of reality).
I haven't exactly been convinced by his ideas, but I have updated my belief from "obviously physicalism is true" to "physicalism is probably true, but idealism is plausible".
Kastrup has written a number of (academically-rigorous) books on the same subject, well worth checking out, and also has a blog. I'm not sure what you suggest here by "woo-woo" (Americanism?) but he's essentially a follower of advaita vedanta, traditional non-dualism, which also found in a number of Buddhist texts, except he approaches the subject from a scientific perspective. His argument is the traditional one, though, thousands of years old, that the only thing we can be sure of is sense data, and all that we can be sure that exists is consciousness. Whilst it is interesting to envisage the possibility of a material world full of hard things outside consciousness, there's no proof it does exist (and proof strictly speaking is impossible) and more reasonable to suggest that it doesn't.
"Whilst it is interesting to envisage the possibility of a material world full of hard things outside consciousness, there's no proof it does exist (and proof strictly speaking is impossible) and more reasonable to suggest that it doesn't."
Amongst other things in my job, I handle invoices. There is a local business named after its founder. He died a little while back. I was thinking about this the last time I did a payment run. He is gone, but the business continues under his name. He remains in physical memories of people that knew him and interacted with him, and as we in our turn die, that experience will be lost.
But the building will remain. The business will remain. The street where it is located will remain. These elements have existed prior to my birth, his birth, and will continue to exist after we die. The world keeps on turning. You were very important last week, you died this week, and next week things will go on with little to no disruption.
Physical universe outside our sense experiences exists, else how could there be something there for me to experience if I wasn't alive when it was created/built/founded/named? Something that tangibly and demonstrably exists after the death of the person sense-experiencing it?
This seems to be on the order of "I refute it thus!". There is, by definition, no way to know whether things actually exist when they are not being observed. What we know is that observations seem to correlate in predictable ways.
There may be no way to know if things actually exist when they are not being observed, but I'm going to assume that Australia still exists even though I've never been next, nigh or near it (they'll be in the Eurovision in May, for goodness' sake!)
If I really did the "yeah but how do we know?" bit, then I would have to take it that something - say, a building - sprang into existence when I first beheld it. How did we all come to agree that Number 24 Mulberry Lane exists, if that is a building I never visited before and am now seeing for the first time? If I see that it has a red door, and the instructions to get there included "look for the house with the red door", and the passerby in the street I stopped to check the directions with said "oh yes" and pointed to the red door - how did it percolate into all our consciousnesses simultaneously that this building which is two hundred years old and putatively existed before we of this current generation were born has a red door? Is there at that address?
That's the more curious thing: if nothing exists until perceived, how do we the observers all get the same perception at the same time (e.g. we all look at the landmass on the horizon which, up to now, has not been observed by anyone)? Why isn't it that I see a building and you see a bunch of bananas?
This is way more mystical than plainly believing in God, as the solution to the problem of "who does the perceiving?"?
There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."
Reply:
"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God."
We don't know that all observers get the same perception at the same time. There's an old, infamous problem which basically says: if someone had the perceptual qualities of red and green reversed, how would we know? Given that we only know the *words* for colour by example, not by inherent association of the word with the perception, someone with the perceptions reversed would learn the words the "wrong" way around and therefore no anomaly would present in conversation.
I have heard of Kastrup, his book "idea of the world" has been on my reading list. Given that I haven't read his full argument yet, I'll refrain from judging his theory to harshly, but from my current understanding I feel much as you do -- not convinced but idealism seems more plausible.
To be honest I'm not sure how inconsistent a lot of his ideas are with materialism. Perhaps there is some unknown property of matter related to consciousness/experience, everything is conscious but only some things are arranged in such a way as to be able to compute, thus having full sentience. Something like that is a more materialist friendly way of expressing what seems like the same end result, though arguably I've just reinvented epiphenomenal dualism.
> I haven't exactly been convinced by his ideas, but I have updated my belief from "obviously physicalism is true" to "physicalism is probably true, but idealism is plausible".
More or less agreed, perhaps a bit more on the sceptical side.
If I understand correctly, his proposition boils down to matter being a function/projection of mind, rather than the other way round.
It strikes me that there aren't many patterns indicating this in what appears to be physical reality. If the mindshard represented by my body feels like/is about to trip out, why does it have to go through the trouble of projecting my body as ingesting specific chemical substances? Whereas the structure of matter shows comparably little resemblance to the structure of mind, the structure of mind quite well mirrors the incentives given by the physical process of evolution on earth.
There's a good chance I'm making some shortsighted error here, but I think one would have to address this elephant in the room to make Kastrup's case.
A fun idea though. I'm remaining open to evidence.
(Disclosure: I am without taking a look myself assuming he's misrepresenting - intentionally or not - the physics stuff. I'd be super interested in claims to the contrary)
I recently noticed that reductionism can be rephrased in a poetic and mystical way that seems to have a remarkably Vedic flavour.
First of all, here is the "conventional" way of describing reductionism:
Common sense concepts that we use to describe the mind and the physical world, like dogs, trees, clouds, faces, feelings of happiness, thoughts and motivations, "the self", are not features of the ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is a lawful system that is currently best approximated by fundamental physics. Common sense concepts arise when some subsystems of reality begin categorizing, making representations of, and modelling themselves and other subsystems of reality. Common sense concepts are best viewed as features / representational elements of simplified higher-level models and descriptions of reality. It is very common for people to confuse the map with the territory, i.e. to confuse elements of these models and descriptions with the ultimate reality itself.
Alright, so here is the poetic and mystical way of describing it:
Both the mental and the physical worlds are illusions that arise when the ultimate reality looks at itself a certain way.
This way of describing it has quite a Vedic flavour. Both the mental and the physical worlds are presented as illusions that appear to the monistic ultimate reality. We can gain some degree of liberation from those illusions by learning to clearly distinguish the ultimate reality from the constructed realities.
You could say "But the physical world is real!", to which I would reply: The world that fundamental physics studies is so far removed from what most people mean when they say "the physical world" that it's not worth calling them by the same name. I think that fundamental physics is about as far away from the concepts of the common-sense "physical world" as it is from the concepts of the common-sense "mental world".
Higher-level models (e.g. biology to chemistry) don't have any concept of lower level phenomena at all.
Lower-level models (trivially, physics to everything else) can in principle model higher level phenomena, but it's computationally expensive and almost never done.
This is a fundamental asymmetry that privileges lower-level models, though it doesn't really matter in practice.
It's a computational issue? My understanding was that the current state of physics fundamentally isn't accurate enough to explain complex chemistry. Presumably more advanced physics in the future will be better.
Actually, "It's a computational issue" is probably to some degree fundamental, because the kinds of high-level patterns that can arise upon a simple low-level pattern can be irreducibly complex, meaning that there is no general-purpose method for obtaining the higher-level patterns faster than just simulating the low-level pattern.
(For a metaphorically somewhat similar thing to this: the hierarchy theorems of computational complexity theory, e.g. P != EXP)
The inaccuracy is _because_ of the "computational issue".
Even Newtonian gravity can't be solved 'analytically' (i.e. with a formula or equation) for just three masses (e.g. one star and two planets). All of the 'practical' calculations in physics (and much of the rest of science) are just 'good-enough' approximations (and some of them are _very_ good enough).
Complex chemistry is hard in part just because it consists of a Vast number of objects, i.e. molecules, atoms, atomic constituents.
And then there are additional 'edge cases', e.g. the color of gold being due to _special relativity_.
It's computational issues all the way down!
I agree that physics is the ultimate reality and the rest is an illusion. I interpret the Sequences as agreeing also. I get my information from science, and the fact that physics is the ultimate reality is a scientific fact, Vedic or not.
I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but I'm going to try anyway.
What is the stance of the rationalist community (loosely speaking) on psychotherapy? I find myself lost among the myriad approaches and I would like some evidence-based criteria to decide, even though I'm aware it's a very subjective experience.
My impression is that it's poorly understood and can be very effective, but that its effectiveness depends on the skill of the individual practitioner far more than the theoretical approach. By analogy, think of Olivier asking of Hoffman why the dear boy can't just act.
I'll second this, wholeheartedly.
And just add that in addition to the skill of the practitioner, its effectiveness also depends on the willingness of the client to confront, experience and express difficult emotions.
Theories of psychotherapy aren't scientific (even CBT!) They were all thought up by some single person who then used them with success. The personality of the theorist tended to be an important part of their success. You'll hear stories of even the most bizarre theories getting results because of the skill of the practitioner. Therapy is tradecraft rather than a science. All good therapists are good at establishing relationships and listening.
Thank you all for your comments. They overeall confirm my original idea on the matter. I was hoping there would be at least a bit of insight from scientific literature, but I'm not surprised it is not like that.
Coincidentally I'm reading the book "Science Fictions" by Stuart Ritchie right now, as a result my prior on trusting psychology studies has changed significantly.
It sounds like you're looking for some data here distinguishing the effectiveness of different therapy methods. I'm sorry I don't have a reference, but I'm pretty sure Scott has written about this before, noting that no single approach seems to have a clear advantage over the rest, and what really helps is just talking to someone. The right someone.
But here's a strategy anyone can (and should) use in choosing a therapist: find someone whose approach and personality that matches well with you. It makes all the difference in the world. I say this as someone who's seen a few.
You can get a consultation with a few people before you decide who you'll go with long term. You should feel like you're seeing a therapist who speaks your language, who understands how you express yourself and what you need in your life. You should feel at ease with them, and you should feel like you can tell them anything. It might take a little work to achieve that level of trust, but making a solid therapist/patient match in the first place will give you a head start.
Thank you for your comment, this is useful personal advice.
"Scot has written about this" e.g. here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/ and the previous articles linked therein
Thank you!
There are therapists who take their work very seriously in the sense that they approach it in a deliberate and methodical manner. They'll use film of session to go over sessions to improve their skill in self, group, & individual supervision. Here's one of the best I've seen discussing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GISdNxZ9JI
I know Scott isn't keen on providing psychiatric advice that I should be getting from experts. But I have faith that the commenters here might have good advice for me.
Like everyone else in the world, I'm struggling to waste less time and organise my life a bit better.
A big part of this is that I'm a very classic case of ADHD (officially via real psychiatrists etc.).
I've come to the conclusion that willpower is either meaningless as a concept or simply something I really suck at.
The solution I've determined is to structure my life in a way that out-thinks my future self who I know I can't trust.
An easy example is adding apps that limit social media use etc.
My biggest challenge is time management and todo list-building.
There's an endless library of options and advice, but most of them seem to come from people who are already naturally organised and clearly have no issues with focus.
So here's the question:
Anyone have useful tips or advice specifically for someone very ADD?
(side note 1: Of course I medicate as well for this, doesn't help)
(side note 2: Out of desperation I'm posting this on both the open and paid threads).
Thanks!
Depends on what the goal of "not being distracted" is. Having a habit of veering off into interesting sidebars can be potentially fruitful.
I don't have ADD/ADHD, but my wife does, and she has described a few of the coping mechanisms that allowed her to nonetheless be successful in school and career. Academically, she did all of her studying in libraries, strictly with no access to network-connected computing devices. Paper only. She also had headphones on to keep her from hearing anything else in surrounding conversation. The device feeding the headphones, of course, has to be something with a fixed capacity of music and not something with an Internet connection. This was likely a lot easier due to us being kids who entered college in the 90s. Books as a source of information and music playback devices with no networking capability were still the norm.
Professionally, I think it has worked to her great benefit that she has only ever worked in defense and intelligence and the work is almost entirely conducted on air gapped networks. So she has "network" access from her workstations, but what she can access is limited to information that is mostly relevant to her job. She might be able to go track down obscure specifications for an interface that is very hard to find, or dig through commit histories and old Jira comments to find out the history for why a specific design or implementation decision was made, which may be a distraction and an endless rabbit hole, but it's a distraction that at least peripherally adds value to what she is being paid to do, as in going down the rabbit hole makes her more of a domain expert. It's better than being distracted by Twitter.
Thanks. Yeah I have a feeling that this is an issue m that's become uniquely difficult thanks to modern technology.
Most valuable strategies that work for me (and the people I learned them from):
1) There is no 'limiting' social media. Anything that involves browsing posts, you have to completely quit cold turkey. Sorry. They aren't compatible with your brain. Delete the apps, delete the bookmarks. Twitter, reddit, instagram, facebook. This shit is ruinous for the attention-deficient. Allow any compromise and it'll take over. But after quitting you'll discover you're not actually missing out on anything.
Beware of anything that delivers you short-form content in a feed. Youtube is highly suspect, but potentially manageable since you're unlikely to pull it out of your pocket on a whim.
Blogs are definitely manageable; so are ACTUAL social/meetup/dating apps for real-life stuff. But you have to check these things at the end of the day AFTER you're done working. Not before, not during.
2) Massively helpful: keep a physical notebook with you. (Not a phone app. Phone has too many other options. You will space out and automatically open a different app more times than not.) Any time an idea, question, curiosity, task, activity you want to do, item you need to buy, etc occurs to you, write it down. Then let it leave your mind. Come back to it later, not now. Incredibly freeing.
3) If you struggle with ADD, making comprehensive to-do lists and time schedules is doomed. You will daunt yourself with the long list, and start a failure-spiral when you inevitably fail to keep up with your schedule. You need to just get your shit done by entering a natural flow state.
Enter a flow state by staring with the SIMPLEST possible task. The trick to doing a task as SIMPLY as possible is to fully embrace doing it badly. Give yourself permission to half-ass it. This will massively help to un-daunt yourself. Once you've done the thing badly, you will feel a compelling urge to fix it and do it better, and then you have momentum. One task leads to the next. You will be working as efficiently as you can and no other time management
strategy is going to add anything helpful.
4) At NO point before you start work, or before you end your workday should you entertain/reward yourself. Do NOT start your morning by waking up and checking a social app. Don't check it till after work. No phone games.
Breaks are important, but breaks are for eating, taking to people, moving around physically, and following up on the most doable things written in the notebook. (Cross them off.)
When the workday is over, have fun. Your brain will learn to associate the productive workday with the rewards afterward, and it'll get waaay stronger at sustaining your motivation and focus during the work part.
just to push back against the "cold turkey or bust" thing for social media: i have had reasonably good success constraining my social media use for specific platforms to specific hours of the day.
So far I've found success limiting all Twitter and Reddit to just 10 minutes a day. I'm not 100% cut off but end up not logging on since I can't do anything very engaging in less than 10 minutes.
All the suggestions were good but yours seem the most comprehensive and really seems to get me. Much appreciated!!! I'll give this a try.
Drop everything into an external brain of some sort. Google calendar for meetings and events, Obsidian for notes (and hey, maybe todos if you want). Keep all work you want to do visible and in reach - materials on hand (maybe all of them in a box, and the box in a very visible shelf) for DIY projects, workspaces in your favorite electronic tool, etc. There is no such thing as 'time management' for us, just the environment nudging us in the right direction. Commit to things you actually want to do, with other people, ideally teammates - they'll bug you and you won't want to disappoint them.
I also recommend working in your own hours (find them by trial and error, if you don't know what they are).
Willpower is for rare emergencies only and will burn you out fast if you abuse it.
Thanks!
It's hard to to separate cause and effect, but I am definitely most effective when I follow strict (albeit often arbitrary) rules about how and when I use my phone. At some point though, I inevitably make an exception or loosen the rules, and before I know it I'm back to square one. The Freedom app is also helpful in restricting which websites I can visit. Following the prescriptions in Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism book was an effective strategy for me for a time.
One approach is to have several different projects, such that when you feel bored with one you can switch to another.
My first post here. Most people that use the internet suffer from the same problem you do. I use a windows app called cold turkey that does and excellent job of limiting my internet time. I do not use social media at all but other sites - such as Wikipedia can be an immense distraction. Cold turkey let me lock out sites and apps with a time lock so I can't access them until the timer ticks down. It doesn't take to long for the addiction to break. (I do block blogs.)
The other posters are correct in that calendar and reminders are the only way to really stay organized, even after all distractions have been blocked.
Long yeah I've certainly been sucked down the Wikipedia rabbit whole plenty. Also stay away from tvtropes.org lol!
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2019/jun/3/people-traumatic-brain-injuries-more-likely-commit-crimes/
So maybe everything isn't genetic.
I'll note that the actual study is about people in prison having a much higher proportion of brain injuries than people outside prison. It might be that people with brain injuries are more likely to commit the sort of crimes with a higher risk of prison and/or more likely to get caught and/or more likely to be suspected of crimes in addition to plausibly being more likely to commit crimes.
Brain injury sounds more like nurture than nature (genetics). I've been trying to read "The Bell Curve" but I'm really bogged down in the second section. Which describes how 'bad' outcomes are associated with lower intelligence. It's all so depressing.
There is a huge confounder there, right? The kind of lifestyle, culture/upbringing, and genes that correlate with crime also correlate with getting knocked on the head hard enough to do permanent damage. I don't doubt that TBI makes you more likely to commit some kinds of crime, but it's also clear that some kinds of crime make you a lot more likely to suffer TBI, and that some kinds of upbringing and some kinds of parents also make you a lot more likely to suffer TBI. Untangling the causality requires more than just noticing that there are a lot of guys in prison with some past head trauma.
Still, TBI seems to be a large factor in getting imprisoned, even if it's related to genetic risk.
Would you pick the power of *flight* or *invisibility*?
Additional info, you fly at a maximum speed of ~1000 MPH, and altitude of ~10,000 feet, you don't experience any negative effects from wind or cold but otherwise have no other powers. You can't carry anything beyond what you can carry normally
You and your clothes will turn invisible but anything you pick up is still visible. You can still see as if you were not invisible.
I enjoy asking this question because people tend to respond very strongly for one or the other option, then vacillate a bit weighing out the pros and cons of each, before returning to their initial choice. In the closed thread I asked this previously, the balance was mostly towards flight, with a few invisibility partisans making their case.
FWIW I also choose flight :D
I'm on the fence.
Invisibility has an obvious law enforcement/military use: spying on the bad guys. I don't want to actually do something that dangerous, but if I'm the one person with superpowers I might feel obligated to put them to good use.
Flight sounds a lot more fun, and a lot less useful to anyone other than me.
Not many people can fly above the sound barrier. Even the ones who need planes to do it tend to be compensated pretty well.
You could get a telephoto lens and do aerial observation or you could courier around super high value items (e.g. the one Maersk hard drive that survived the Russian cyberattack).
I too am on the fence. As a current remote high-school student, invisibility has no use for me (and its exciting uses are either highly illegal/dangerous/unethical/etc or stuff like observing wildlife). Flight would not really be useful for me either, because I'm mostly stuck at home both of regulatory necessity and of the fear of contracting/spreading SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, and with the energy thing that Adam pointed out earlier in this thread, going anywhere much farther than the nearest grocery store or whatever would be a *ginormous* pain in the ash. But if someone was to force me to pick one at gunpoint, or something, I guess I would pick flight, because travel is fun, and doing immoral things is generally not fun.
I don't see any uses for invisibility other than illicit activity and the potential for better observing wildlife. Sitting in the front row of the theater without blocking the people behind you (applies to tall people only)? I'd say extra protection when walking home at night, but flying home at 1000 mph would be even better.
Being able to return to my hometown whenever I want to in under an hour would be delightful, even ignoring the other potential advantages. I feel like you need to balance the options a bit more closely.
1000 MPH is probably much too high to make this a valid comparison. Being able to make it from the US East Coast to Europe in two hours makes that a weekend trip for free, even if you have to do it alone.
I would probably pick flight just because it's fun! Additionally, even at 100 MPH you could get to most destinations much faster than you would in a car or other land transportation, and comparable to many flights (after considering check in, security, etc.)
Being invisible could be cool for some scenarios, but if you were not doing anything illegal and not working for a government, the times you could really use it in a functional sense would be more limited. Unless I was up to no good, I can't see myself using it all that often. Maybe if I were an magician or wanted to do parlor tricks for people. For my own use, not that much going on there.
Of course, if you were a spy or had any interest at all in being one, invisibility would be amazing! It's be like the NBA looking at a 7'2" high school basketball player. Even if he's not that good, they would still take him. You could pretty much pick which type of spy or law enforcement you wanted to work for, and they would get you whatever training you needed.
ETA - Weekend trip to Europe would not take two hours, more like 3.5.
Even if you plan to use your new powers to become a supervillain, flying seems to open up more possibilities. If you *aren't* bent on villainy, it's even more of a win. And while uniquely having it would be a goldmine, it's still useful even if lots of people have it.
All of the fun things I would do with invisibility would probably be illegal and fairly easy to discover through non-visual evidence. A hundred years ago I would definitely pick invisibility.
These days I'd go with flight for sure. It would certainly be a lot more fun.
Being invisible sounds a bit creepy. If I was a cave man I'd choose flying. If given the choice today... where I can already fly (in a way) , I'd pick invisible... but anything I might do still sounds creepy. Can we have an option of some third super power?
Yes i would choose Wolverine's regrowth power (from x-men) before flight or invisibility. He basically heals/regrows very quickly and is more or less invincible. After that i would choose slowing down or stopping time. Probably even super strength or telekinesis over either of the two options. Or seeing the future (even just a few days out). I would choose flight out of these two mostly because the best things to do with invisibility are amoral (even though i would probably do them at least once...)
One reason for the common reaction ("respond very strongly for one or the other option, then vacillate a bit weighing out the pros and cons of each, before returning to their initial choice") could be that people have thought about the question before and have that cached, but maybe don't have the full argument cached in the same way.
For example I already know I would pick flight and my wife would pick invisibility, but that doesn't mean there is no interesting conversation to be had about it.
What would your wife do with invisibility?
She is socially anxious and really hates being seen even doing mundane things (eg taking out the garbage). Not a reason that applies to everybody.
My wife would also pick invisibility! For similar reasons too
At those speeds, I'd be more worried about heat than cold.
I think by making the "things you pick up are not invisible" restriction you really nerf invisibility. This makes my first thought of using invisibly: Robbing cash from drug dealers and other people who have no real legal claim to the cash, not really viable. Seems like the flight actually is better suited to robbing drug dealers. Since obviously they aren't going to be on the lookout for flying humans.
They'll be on the lookout after the first few times. Flight isn't easy to hide.
Basically silent flight at night? Seems they'd never know. Plus, I don't need to rob the same cartel all the time!
Flying at 1000MPH? Not quite Superman-level but I'll take it. Besides, most fun uses of invisibility are illegal or immoral, not so with flying (as far as I know FAA regs do not apply to anyone flying under their own power)
Flying at 1000MPH implies earth-shaking *BOOM*s happening under your flight path, which will be hard to keep people from noticing.
I'd be nervous about flying at full speed. If I'm up high enough to not worry about running into trees or buildings, I'd worry about running into aircraft.
I think flight raises more questions than invisibility as to whether or not it’s feasible. I’ve been asked this question enough times to have some standard questions (could you really do it legally/are you immune to bugs/do you have decent acceleration/does it consume calores, etc). Because of that, I’d probably pick invisibility because it has a higher chance of working, even though the benefit to me is smaller.
I'm not actually sure I'd care for either the more I think about it. My first instinct is invisibility, but I actually work in intelligence. Just a lowly engineer, not a spy, but I could possibly be a spy with this power. The issue is all the places I might want to get into don't rely solely on visual signatures and can detect invisible animal bodies.
Flight doesn't really sound appealing, though. Unless the energy source is magic, now I need to eat what? 30,000 calories in a day to fly across the country? I watched the documentary on the guys who ran across north Africa and it didn't look appealing doing nothing eating, moving, or sleeping all the time and ending up 40 pounds underweight with 3% bodyfat at the end of it. So sure, you can go to Europe without getting windburn, but the effect on your body from energy expenditure is still going to be like climbing Mt. Everest four times in a row.
Thanks for noticing the energy thing!
(On another note: is "the documentary on the guys who ran across north Africa" that you watched titled Running the Sahara?)
Flight sounds so much more fun! I'd probably have to ponder if I could make invisibility useful enough, but I'd probably go with flight.
I'd have to pick invisibility. Being able to fly would make you the most famous person in the world, and I really wouldn't like that.
And I agree with Clutzy - invisibility would be a much better power if things you picked up could turn invisible too - when I'm walking around I always seem to carrying something. Better still if you could also turn any object or person temporarily invisible by touching it/them!
But I'd still choose invisibility. There are times when it might be useful to avoid being seen.
Flight. It seems obvious. What in the world would I do with invisibility? But if I could fly, then I could visit my parents for Sunday dinner, even though they're 1,400 miles away. Also I could get to work much faster. And I could sell one of my cars, since I won't need one to commute! I could zip down to the bookstore and back on my lunch break without worrying about traffic making me late.
Even more so, I could quit my job and make lots of money promoting products. The human jet prefers X brand sports drink! Oh, and I bet I could rescue people too. Lost hikers maybe? I'm not sure how many people need rescuing from a flying man, especially since I could only carry one person on the smallish size. Of course, I could work out and get buff enough to carry big people too.
What in the world would I use invisibility for? I guess I could promote products as the invisible man as well, but it would be harder to show off. How would anyone know what brand of sports drink paid me to wear their logo when I'm invisible?
>Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics[...] This one is odd-numbered, so be careful.
1: Comment of the week is Vosmyorka describing political polarization (or lack thereof) in the most recent Dutch election.
sweatyguy.gif
Scott has a habit of doing that. Like:
No controversial topics in this thread. Also, here's an interesting comment about a Jewish transgender immigrant cop shooting a black doctor while he was was performing an abortion on a Muslim with Tourette's, who's constantly saying the n-word.
Splurt...there goes my drink...
Oh that's a thanks, made me laugh.
If each Open Thread OP has a comment of the week from the previous open thread (which has the opposite rules), this sort of thing will happen a lot.
This is not a political comment... it's just a "does anyone have a link to this article that I read 20 years ago" comment.
I remember (c. 2000) reading an article online in a somewhat lefty publication about abortion. They tried to address when a fetus has brainwaves (vs random electrical impulses) and proposed that this be used as a cutoff for when it's legal to have an abortion. The author also attacked the idea of looking at heartbeats instead of brainwaves. They then claimed that this is how much of Europe legislates this issue, and that since many people there regard this as a rational approach, abortion is not the political hot button issue it is in the US.
I've googled this many times and have never been able to track down the article. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I've been amazed in the past at the web hunting skills of this group in the past.
I have certainly never heard of brainwaves being used in European abortion laws, and given the heated debates over here about it, I'm fairly sure that would have been brought up. This is an overview of abortion provision in European countries from 2009, and there is nothing there about brain waves or heartbeats, but there is viability: "Foetal viability depends on the scientific standard of the neonatal care unit. The limit has decreased considerably during the last decades. It stands at about 23-25 weeks, but this is not a sharp limit. "
https://www.ifpa.ie/sites/default/files/documents/resources/ippf_abortion_legislation_in_europe_feb_2009.pdf
I was going to say I'd never heard of a 22-week delivery surviving, but I was amazed to find a 2019 article stating that 1/3 may survive with aggressive medical support. Oddly enough, it helps if they're twins; something about twinning seems to spur earlier development in utero. The viability limit is really a moving target.
I have a pet theory about physics and cosmology that would explain both matter/antimatter asymmetry and dark energy.
The theory is this: matter and antimatter have a repulsive gravitational force with eachother, much like how they have opposite electric charges. During the big bang, an equal amount of matter and antimatter are created, but most of the antimatter coalesced into a single, enormous anti black hole. All matter was repulsed by this enormous anti gravity well and was pushed out in every direction, with very little anti matter mixed in. This anti black hole continues to exert an outward force on all matter in the known universe, accounting for the accelerating expansion of the universe, aka dark energy.
Alright, now to some potential problems with this theory.
1: We don't know if matter and antimatter have attractive or repulsive gravitational force to eachother. They would definitely be attractive to themselves, I don't think any physicist would argue otherwise, but the majority of physicists think that they are attractive to eachother as well. (According to wikipedia and my experience with the few times I've brought this up). People have given me complicated answers about the level of energy being positive in an antiparticle therefore it must go downward on the slope of curved space time, or something like that. To be honest I don't really understand the arguments against.
2: I have no idea if the expansion rate fits. It fits with the vague assertion that the universe is acceleration outward, but this theory would predict that acceleration would decrease over time. Having data on this seems like the easiest way to disprove this theory.
3: There would be signs of matter/antimatter annihilation near the edges of the anti-black hole in the form of gamma rays. I don't think this would actually happen for long after the big bang, since the gravity well would be deep enough to prevent anything other than hawking radiation from escaping, but I'm less confident. Also, if there were antimatter galaxies orbiting the anti black hole that were outside of the gravity well they could produce this radiation as well. I'm unsure how likely this is? Maybe it could be related to cosmic background radiation? I don't know.
While doing my due diligence on this comment I found this article that agrees with me https://phys.org/news/2011-04-antimatter-gravity-universe-expansion.html but it seems to be a dissenting opinion from everything else I've read. To be honest I'm simultaneously miffed and vindicated that this has existed the whole time, since the couple of times I've brought it up before the response has been along the lines of "that doesn't even kind of make sense, all theories predict this not happening".
I've had this idea mulling around for a few years now, and I was hoping there might be some more knowledgeable physicists that could chime in on the points of contention and the overall validity of this idea.
I've created an account to tell you this as a physicist (knowledgeable or not remains to be seen): we in fact do know that antimatter and matter are gravitationally attracted to each other.
Really? When did that become known? I've tried looking up experiments that have found results one way or the other but the best I've found is this: https://alpha.web.cern.ch/alpha-probes-antimatter-gravity which states
> Based on our data, we can exclude the possibility that the gravitiational mass of antihydrogen is more than 110 times its inertial mass, or that it falls upwards with a gravitational mass more than 65 times its inertial mass
Which is some pretty wide error bars. Is there a better study you can link to?
Grin, I had the same thought when I was learning physics. I think it's common. I skimmed the phys.org article, and I'm just going to shrug and say IDK.
But let me try this argument for why gravity is always attractive.
There are particles, antiparticles, and then energy which is not a particle or an antiparticle. Think of a photon. or the binding energy of an atomic nucleus. Now it's hard for us to hold a bunch of antiparticles and measure the gravity. But it's easy to do with energy. You can look at an iron nucleus, add up the mass of all the neutrons and protons, and see that the nucleus is less massive by an amount equal to the binding energy of all the bits. Energy is gravitationally attractive. (Famous experiment of measuring how light waves bend around the sun works here too.) So now if I think that matter and energy is always attractive, but anti-matter is repulsive... does light bend the other way when going around an anti-matter star? This also means that an antimatter nucleus would have to have a mass that is different from it's matter cousin by an amount equal to twice the binding energy. (Which maybe people have tried to measure? Make anti-deuterium and measure mass?)
I might be totally wrong here, I'm a little out my depth, but isn't the curvature of light around the sun just about following the geodesic lines of the curved space time, rather than actual attraction.
For the binding energy example, when you say mass is decreased do you mean gravitational, inertial, or both? If both that would mean no gravitational effect for energy, right? It would have to be only inertial mass loss, which means elements with more binding energy would actually fall faster (interesting if true!)
Light is gravitationally attracted to the sun. If you want to call it 'following the geodesic' that is fine. But it means the same thing. We have black holes from which the light can't escape. In your model what would a black hole made from anti-matter look like?
More binding energy is less mass, because energy is given up when the nucleus is made. (Note we can never take all the neutrons and protons and put together a nucleus... it's just a thought experiment.) We have never found any difference between inertial and gravitational mass... so the same here. Nuclear fission and fusion is all about using the different binding energies of the nuclei.
Look, it's a fun idea. Think about it more... Have you read the Feynman Lectures? They are free online.
I found this for anti-helium
https://phys.org/news/2011-04-antihelium-physicists-nab-heaviest-antimatter.html
There is a plot further down.. but it doesn't have the resolution to distinguish any binding energy difference between anti and normal matter.
(He4 binding energy = 28MeV = 0.028 GeV)
To answer the first question I would expect light to behave the same as in a normal black hole, since spacetime would have the same curve, except "positive" instead of "negative". I don't have a good enough grasp on black hole topology to fully see why light can't escape, but from what I understand it has something to do with the space time manifold looping in on itself, which shouldn't dramatically change just because it's in the opposite direction.
I haven't read the Feynman Lectures, though I probably should have given how much they are recommended. It's been a couple years since the last time I really studied any physics and it would be a good way to get back into it. I appreciate your feedback on all this.
Yeah, I don't grasp black hole topology either.. doesn't matter. If you look at classical Newtonian gravity and solve for the escape velocity, or the velocity of an object in circular orbit around the mass you get an expression.
V^2 = M*G/R (with maybe some factor of 2 floating around)
If V is greater than c (the speed of light) it's a black hole.
Positive curvature would mean that the photons were repulsed by the antimatter black hole. It would be a white hole... it couldn't exist.
My guess is there is a deeper reason for this. Gravity looks similar to electrostatics, but there are no poles in gravity.. it's all attractive.. it's energy deforming space. Oh, if you agree that energy has 'positive' gravity like normal matter. Then try this. Take a piece of matter and anti matter. (kinda near each other.) you are far away, what does the gravity look like to you a distant observer?
Now those two pieces merge/ annihilate and turn into pure energy.
What does the gravity look like to you now?
In my world view it has to be the same.
Re: Feynman. Start with chap.1 vol 1. Feel free to ask questions here. The only problem with Feynman is he makes it look too easy.
Escape velocity feels like a weird way to think about light, given that it can't decelerate. But that formulation exactly matches the Schwarzschild radius, so I suppose it has some merit. Maybe the light redshifts down to nothing as it tries to escape the gravity well? But where would does the energy go? Some questions to answer, but maybe not particularly relevant to the problem at hand.
I think I have heard the argument about "annihilation in the distance" before, but your formulation of it made it click. There would have to be an anti-photon separate from a photon released (which we would have found by now I think), or else physicists would have to be wrong about light having a gravitational pull (quick research makes that seem unlikely, there seem to be solid experiments showing this). This tips the scales to more likely antimatter gravitates normally for me.
Started reading the Feynman lectures. At a few chapters in, impressed at how quickly I've gotten new insights on concepts I am mostly already familiar with.
> ... the geodesic lines of the curved space time, rather than actual attraction.
There is no 'attraction' apart from "the geodesic lines of the curved space time" – that's what General Relativity claims anyways (and it seem to be true!)
I remember learning that everything in the universe is getting further from us (Doppler red-shifted), and objects that are currently further are moving away *proportionately* faster, and these observations are uniform in all directions. This is consistent with everything starting out in the same place and getting different initial velocities (an explosion), or with space itself expanding in some uniform way (such that the increase in distance is proportional to how much distance you started with).
I don't see how it could be consistent with an inverse-gravity point mass at the center of the universe, since that would apply ongoing acceleration to things at different rates depending on how close they are. It seems like you should end up with an empty space at the center and an expanding shell, rather than a uniform cloud. Also, relative movement between bodies on the axis pointing directly away from the singularity seems like it ought to be different from the orthogonal axes.
Yeah I think this is an even stronger counterargument than you phrased it as.
Imagine three galaxies, A, B, C, where that's their sorting in space, so if you stand on the antihole you see A closest, then B past it, and then C past it. From the antihole you'd see all of them fleeing you, with A fleeing the fastest, B slower, and C slower still. However, if you think of it from B's perspective, it'd see A and C coming *toward* it. So unless you were very close to the antihole, you wouldn't see an expanding universe, you'd see a (mostly) *contracting universe* (unless you could see on the other side of the antihole).
So you'd only see an expanding universe if we happened to be located at the inside of the shell. Even then though, we'd see farther galaxies retreating slower than nearby ones. In reality we see that farther galaxies retreat faster than nearby ones, so even if we were near the antihole, we have good enough observations to rule out this theory.
I think the only way this can work is if antimatter isn't just repulsive, but it's not even inverse square. I think you'd probably need g ~ r^(+1) instead of g ~ r^(-2), which is a much bigger ask from physics.
> this theory would predict that acceleration would decrease over time.
I also have a crackpot cosmology theory (the value of the Hubble parameter is the inverse of the age of the universe - predicts cosmic inflation) which also predicts the Hubble parameter would decrease over time. Unfortunately for both of us the acceleration of the expansion of the universe is increasing.
Interesting, didn't know acceleration was increasing. Do you have a good source for that? The main reason I wasn't sure was because anytime I try to look up something like "is the acceleration of the expansion of the universe increasing" it gives a result that says yes its accelerating, yes the rate of expansion is increasing, but then doesn't say anything about change in acceleration. It's very frustrating.
This looks like another nail in the coffin for this theory, dark energy would remain unexplained.
Some more criticism of this theory:
> During the big bang, an equal amount of matter and antimatter are created, but most of the antimatter coalesced into a single, enormous anti black hole. All matter was repulsed by this enormous anti gravity well and was pushed out in every direction, with very little anti matter mixed in.
Matter and antimatter are generally symmetric in many aspects for each other, so if the antimatter could coagulate into a big black hole, there must be some weird symmetry-breaking phenomenon that would prevent the matter from also coagulating into a big black hole. (Unless it already did, in which case I think the event horizon surrounding us protects us from our evil twin.) Also, the repulsion of the antimatter black hole and the matter black hole would be very strongly directional, whereas dark energy (I think) is not directional to any considerable extent.
I'm not sure that this really a big problem for the theory. The idea is that it was in unstable equilibrium, and happened to tip toward the side of antimatter being in the center. Just like if you try to balance something and it falls left or right it doesn't mean there was something fundamentally different about one side or the other.
That kind of makes sense, but I am still very skeptical for other reasons pointed out in this thread.
Another potential is that the universe does seem to be isotropic on the large scale. Once you adjust for our motion relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background the velocity distribution of others stars is the same on average everywhere you look. I'm pretty sure this would not be the case if there were some central spot that was driving all the expansion. It is consistent with every point expanding away from every other point uniformly as described by the usual cosmological model.
Here's a relatively simple argument that antimatter shouldn't be gravitationally repelled from matter (or at least that I think the smart money is on this idea being wrong):
The claim that antiparticles repel particles gravitationally amounts to them having negative gravitational mass.
We know antiparticles have positive inertial mass. One illustration of this: look at the trajectories followed by an electron and a positron in a magnetic field - they will follow opposite, curved trajectories because they have opposite charges. If the positron had negative inertial mass as well, it would follow the same path as the electron (because those minus signs would cancel out). Since this is not what we observe, the positron must have positive inertial mass.
We also know that inertial mass = gravitational mass for everything we've been able to test so far. Granted, everything we've tested has been made of matter, not antimatter. But I think it would be very strange if this equivalence principle were violated for antimatter, and can't think of a particularly good justification for believing it would be violated.
So probably antimatter has positive gravitational mass as well, and so is gravitationally attracted to matter. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be tested though (and so far as I'm aware, there are experiments at CERN involved in trying to test this, I think).
Interestingly, an electron with a negative inertial mass would be attracted to an ordinary electron, much like a positron. Unlike a positron, the regular electron would still be repelled by the negative electron. Interestingly, a system with just the two of those starting at rest would just continue to accelerate at the same rate indefinitely in the direction of the ordinary electron, remaining the same distance apart. Definitely violating conservation of energy with that setup.
No nonconservation of energy there. The negative electron's negative inertial mass gives it negative kinetic energy, which precisely cancels that of the normal electron. Same applies for momentum.
My pet theory is that there was created the same amount of matter and antimatter, and in the areas where they meet you see a lot of action and drama. But the universe is vastly bigger than the part we can see (therefore, we haven't measured any curvature of space), and we don't happen to be near any of these drama areas. So we sit in our zero-antimatter bubble and wonder why there's no antimatter.
Hi Scott. I think you should issue a correction for your statement that "Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones." The two most obvious interpretations of this statement are that Apple and Google blocked Parler from their mobile hardware, or that they blocked Parler from their mobile operating systems. In neither case is this true--they removed Parler from their mobile app stores. In Google's case, that just means you have to download it directly or get it from some other app store. In Apple's case, it's a bigger deal because they don't allow competing app store or sideloading; but you of course can still access the Parler website from an iPhone, so I still don't think it makes sense to say they "blocked Parler from their phone".
I think your statement could easily mislead someone into thinking Apple and Google took much more aggressive action against Parler than is in fact the case.
To a layman like myself, this distinction sounds incredibly pedantic.
The significance of this distinction is that you can still access Parler without much trouble on any Apple or Google phone, which I think someone could easily infer from the original statement not to be the case.
While having a native app in the official app store is certainly advantageous to a growing social media platform, it is hardly essentially--indeed, Substack seems to be doing fine with no native apps at all.
Godfather, there is literally no way I can respond to your comment non-politically.
I'm looking at the post and it doesn't include the words "on their phones". Maybe I already edited it and forgot?
In any case, I've added "from their app stores" to the end of the sentence.
"Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones." is the second sentence of the 19th paragraph of the post currently. The whole paragraph is:
> But other fields have higher entry barriers than cars do. Apple and Google both blocked Parler from their phones. But these are the only two major smartphone companies. It would probably take at least a decade to set up another one, and although I think there's some demand, I'm not sure that demand can coordinate itself into a phone company that doesn't do this kind of thing.
I found a compelling explanation for both the Lizardman's Constant[1] and the North Dakota constant[2]:
Basically, there are people who are "professional" survey-takers who are motivated primarily by money, and will speed through surveys as fast as possible without thinking too hard about the answers, so they can get paid for as many completed surveys as they can.
Pew Research[3] has a fascinating in-depth article about this phenomenon. Their finding of "percent bogus" (between 4%-7%) lines up well with Lizardman's Constant.
> It is a consequence of the field’s migration toward online convenience samples of people who sign themselves up to get money or other rewards by taking surveys. This introduces the risk that some people will answer not with their own views but instead with answers they believe are likely to please the poll’s sponsor. It also raises the possibility that people who do not belong in a U.S. poll (e.g., people in another country) will try to misrepresent themselves to complete surveys and accrue money or other rewards.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/28/bush-did-north-dakota/
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the-risks-to-online-polls-from-bogus-respondents/
Also, this: https://theirrelevantinvestor.com/2019/11/12/surveys-are-mostly-bullshit/
Has the study of rationality made your life better? How much? Same questions for people you know well enough to have a well-founded opinion.
I think so, but it's not really obvious. I've found that it's very easy to just read about rationality without learning to apply it. Learning about rationality has made it easier to recognize exactly why a past poor decision was poor, but so far I haven't had much success in actually making good decisions. What I hope is that being able to see exactly what kind of error I made in the past - and why - will also make it easier to recognize in the future: "ah this belongs to X class of failure modes, better avoid that."
One thing that has unambiguously improved is my ability to talk with weird acquaintances that have very different world-views than mine without pissing them off.
I also think reading about rationality is just fun on its own.
I studied logic and critical thinking as well as popular brain heuristic failure modes well before I ever heard of "rationality" as it pertains to the specific community that eventually coalesced around Less Wrong, and mostly found it interesting but it's difficult of any tangible life improving things it resulted in as opposed to just increasing enjoyment directly.
But I think the activities that tangibly made my life better were plain domain-specific education in fields of study I was eventually able to obtain paid work in, and exercise/physical training. This includes formal, state/school sponsored, company sponsored, and individually driven aspects of each of these (I played sports and served in the military, so plenty of my working out was also school/state/employer sponsored and had a specific end goal in mind).
Transhumanism made my life - and my view of the future - a lot more interesting, and I have to credit EY and Scott. Their writing let me go outside of 'common sense' for long enough to get an unbiased perspective.
Could you expand on how your life changed?
I'm in progress of a career change, from well-paid but boring (software eng) to poorly paid but incredibly interesting (biomedical science). We'll see how it goes in a few years.
The greatest benefit for me was exposure to the rationalist community. But for the lessons themselves, there were three useful ones, in random order:
1) People really become stupid when they start debating politics. It is a human universal, not just specifically about my country or about the website I usually read. It's not just my impression; other smart people see it too. -- As a consequence I stopped debating politics online (which was something I previously spent a lot of time doing).
2) Do not underestimate the trivial inconveniences. If you want to actually do something, and there is a change that could make it 10% easier for you, do that change. -- Instead of going to gym (once in a long while), I bought weights and installed a pull-up bar at home (this became unexpectedly useful during the COVID season). I bought a cheap printer and scanner. I print recipes on small pieces of paper, put them on kitchen table as a reminder what to cook tomorrow, take them to shop as lists of ingredients.
3) Most benefits come from doing the simple things right. Complicated plans are less likely to be useful; but they feel more important, because they are better for signalling intelligence. Focus on winning, not signalling. -- Now I am a simple person: I lift weights, eat vegetables, buy bitcoins when they are cheap and then hodl. (If I had more money, it would go to a passively managed index fund.)
Here's a meta question (non-political): If everything is political, as I learned dutifully in grad school, then how are we supposed to discriminate adequately against political discussions in odd-numbered open threads? I'll bet this has come up before, but, since the criteria are so vague, it's probably a worthwhile topic to revisit?
If the answer is sort of "you know it when you see it" -- the way senators used to define pornography -- then that seems patently inadequate. Of course Scott could just play the authoritarian, deleting whatever he likes, but that's not very helpful either in a communitarian sense. Frankly, the distinction just seems impossibly arbitrary to me.
I actually don't mind fuzzy rules, at least in contexts like moderation. Things don't always fall into neat conceptual buckets, and trying to pretend that they do by making hard and fast rules that approximately put them into buckets just leaves you with poor generalizations. For any given definition of politics, there are plenty of benign things that fall into the category and inflammatory things outside that category, whereas the whole purpose of banning politics is to prevent inflammatory conversations from happening.
As far as "everything is political", I recommend this TheMotte post: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/gtnlpj/a_banana_equivalent_dose_of_politics/
So, are you saying the main purpose is to avoid "inflammatory" discussions on odd days? (With the presumption that, as Adam says, anything "partisan" or related to the passage of laws or campaigning for some sort of change is likely to lead to heat that might hijack the thread? Is that the fear in play?
Regardless, I still insist that the distinction is elitist. When I hear about a "Concept C2 Rower," my mind -- at least today -- goes to all the people who could never afford it, who get their exercise collecting others' garbage. Not that there's anything wrong with rowing in one's house, and certainly I'd likely just pass by such a discussion without comment (unless I was interested in getting into the sport of indoor rowing), but that might actually depend on whether the thread's unstated implications provoke deeper societal questions which perhaps I could further with my own particular insights.
Seems to me most thinking people come to a place like this largely to FREELY examine the broader underlying connections between diverse aspects of life and society, exploring consequences in whatever realms are most relevant to the participants on that particular day.
With this in mind, I offer the following very cute suggestion for henceforth referring to "Odd-numbered" threads as "Let Them Eat Cake" threads.
> So, are you saying the main purpose is to avoid "inflammatory" discussions on odd days?
Odd weeks, but otherwise basically, yes. Also it helps when there is a big political thing happening that not literally all discussion can be on that topic (which tended to happen back on SSC around, for instance, the US elections)
> When I hear about a "Concept C2 Rower," my mind goes to all the people who could never afford it [..] I'd likely just pass by such a discussion without comment, but that might actually depend on whether the thread's unstated implications provoke deeper societal questions which perhaps I could further with my own particular insights.
The point of the rule is that some people might occasionally want to discuss rowing machines without having to deal with those deeper societal questions right that minute (seeing as how discussions around deep societal questions are prone to being frustrating, fruitless and taking over the original discussion).
Topics where clusters of beliefs map closely to partisan identities. So, I'm looking at a Concept C2 Rower I have leaning against my wall. Presumably, users of this device have beliefs and disagreements about the optimal way to use it, or beliefs and disagreements about whether or not we even should use it, and what the best way to exercise and train actually is. But nobody campaigns for offices that allow them to make or execute laws by appealing to one side or another in these discussions.
This doesn't, of course, mean they never could. Anything can be politicized. But not everything already has been. So discuss the things that haven't been yet.
Ergs don’t float and anyone who thinks otherwise is a literal Nazi /s
Then maybe you should just stay out of odd-numbered threads entirely.
Yeah, probably best. But, who knows, maybe I'll get a bee up my ass looking for a rowing machine.
This might be an unhelpful answer (apparently that's what I'm doing today) but just getting people to temporarily drop the "everything is political" framing in order to participate would in itself be extraordinarily valuable.
"No discussion of politics or religion" is a precondition for people of differing political persuasions and faiths to work or play together peacefully. Civility is much-maligned in certain circles, but without it you're left with an endless cycle of escalation and conflict. Not to mention it's more intellectually honest considering how uncertain political and religious propositions are.
TL;DR: Give being civil a try, and if you can't manage it then just avoid these threads.
I hear you. And I do respect your perspective. And I have nothing against civility per se. My issue -- which still hasn't been clearly resolved by any of the responses here so far -- is that the "politics" rule is too vague and elitist to be helpful.
Now, you may insist that it's quite helpful to YOU, and that YOU appreciate its effects. But you have already pretty much equated "politics" (as a topic) with "civility" -- so your position is biased by self interest, not by principle, since others here view the rule differently.
Nancy believes the rule is entirely about steering clear of "culture wars." Magic seems to equate politics with the "controversial." Adam seems more locked into traditional notions of politics, like "campaigning," passing laws, and partisan affiliation. Newstork is confident the rule is entirely to avoid "inflammatory" discussions, which tracks well with your "civility" requirement -- and I'm gaining some confidence that this is, in fact, likely the key area of putative concern for most (with, I suppose, "politics" seen as the best rough indicator of turbulence?). You wrap in "religion" alongside the troublesome "politics," so perhaps you align even better with Nancy's "culture wars" conflation, which she seems to be able to identify based entirely on how well SHE can predict the responses to a topic.
So I will now purposely say something UNcivil -- not just to demonstrate the imprecision of the politics tool, but because it helps flesh out the reasons for my particular concerns: Too often this place feels like a privileged frat house, with norms, idioms, and rules that many inhabitants may find quite cozy and stabilizing, while striking others (such as me) as incredibly tone-deaf and unproductively exclusionary. Overwhelmingly, the references and examples cited here when discussing the validity of myriad systems are elitist, with arguments routinely based on assumptions of resources that many people simply don't have. (Economic, biological, social, educational, etc.) Concerned about deregulation? Don't be! Just be sure to read your monthly copy of Consumers Reports! You'll be just fine. No need for hysterics.
Too often, historically, and on a continuing daily basis, the notion of "civility" has provided one of the biggest barriers to participatory justice, because those who are oppressed will almost always, by definition, need to rely on very different sets of tools. Those "in power" (think of the Old South, which is fast becoming new again) have learned well how to maintain even their neurological-level equilibrium by dismissing those whose sympathetic nervous systems are in chronically elevated states (those who can easily be labeled as hysterical, or, simply, "not rational, yet still have much more skin in the game than the decision makers).
When you state that civility is "more intellectually honest considering how uncertain political and religious propositions are," you are contributing to a default conservatism (tending toward motionlessness) by putting a stamp of approval on broad-scale false equivalencies that serve to undermine action -- with the pretense that, well, it's really too complex and factional to tackle as unambivalently and efficiently as we'd really love to if only we could. Such positions are definitionally privileged (when they don't impact the position-taker in an existential way), they are conservative by default (not neutral, which is how they are advertised), and they are clouded in bias (since they tend to be self-preservative).
Sometimes the most productive voices are those willing to cry out, "Wake up!" Sometimes we are simply, collectively, allowing very wrong things to happen to our fellow citizens. Sometimes, even, the very survival of our democracy is threatened. And communitarian forums such as this need to be called out when they slump into their luxurious cerebral fortresses (while Rome burns).
If you repeat that in a CW thread, I'll try addressing it.
Meanwhile, I admit I have some issues about anger, so I tried looking at the CW issue from the redundancy angle. If people are just saying the usual things, it pretty much isn't what folks here are looking for.
Are there discussion spaces that you like? Would you name them?
Thanks for the response. I do enjoy this space, because, as you suggest, there's plenty of original, provocative thought. (I do read a lot, absorbing and learning without comment.)
But there are recurrent blind spots in parts of the culture (in my opinion, obviously) -- and those blind spots intersect with particular concerns of mine, so I am critical sometimes, "outraged" occasionally (in quotes because no blog is worth ruining one's day over), and I try to be constructive sometimes, pointing out the blind spots as I see them, knowing full well that some people will dismiss my concerns as predictable or boring. (I don't see them that way; if I were simply trying to wage political warfare I wouldn't come here to do it -- but, I admit, sometimes when encountering a certain smug dismissal of the welfare of whole swaths of the population I tend to want to point it out in a simple and defiant manner -- for the record, as it were.)
"Too often this place feels like a privileged frat house, with norms, idioms, and rules that many inhabitants may find quite cozy and stabilizing, while striking others (such as me) as incredibly tone-deaf and unproductively exclusionary. Overwhelmingly, the references and examples cited here when discussing the validity of myriad systems are elitist, with arguments routinely based on assumptions of resources that many people simply don't have. "
They are elitist because we are the elite. No group of people who are overwhelmingly nerdy and educated, overwhelmingly live in developed countries in the 21st century, and therefore live like kings relative to the vast majority of the human population (and better than actual kings from before ~1700), can rightfully claim not to be elitist. And as a member of this elite, I support the stabilizing norms, idioms, and rules.
"Such positions are definitionally privileged (when they don't impact the position-taker in an existential way), they are conservative by default (not neutral, which is how they are advertised), and they are clouded in bias (since they tend to be self-preservative)."
Great, I'm a conservative because I like ACX as it is and want it to stay the same. If you want to post about politics on every thread, almost anywhere else on the Internet would suit your needs. We have the right to jealously guard one of the last remaining bastions that are (sometimes) free from the plague of politics.
"And communitarian forums such as this need to be called out when they slump into their luxurious cerebral fortresses (while Rome burns)."
A luxurious cerebral fortress is what I want ACX to be. We're not the Roman vigiles (fire brigade). The 70 year old Roman senators are not the ones you want putting out fires.
Well, assuming you wanna be a good, wise, and moral senator, then I would expect you'd welcome listening to what the rabble has to say, -- particularly in your favorite, comfortable, and, ahem, public forum -- digesting our concerns and alien perspectives with the sagacious knowledge of the fact that your elite position necessarily exposes you to significant blind spots that could impact the entire empire in ways that are perhaps difficult to detect from such an invulnerable and cozy distance.
I think listening to the rabble's concerns is worthwhile, and demanding that the rabble learn how to compose their argument using classical rhetoric in order to be heard by the Senate would be a mistake. But I also think it would be a mistake to allow the rabble to show up and punch out the senators who disagree with them.
Well, luckily for you, we have a regularly scheduled "Listening to What the Rabble Have To Say" session! We call it even numbered open threads. But you are barging into a holiday retreat and demanding we change it into a Rabble Listening Session.
I also find it flattering but amusing, fellow Roman, that it matters to you whether my group of elites is good, wise, and moral or bad, stupid, and depraved. This is the Dominate, fellow citizen. We don't live under the consuls anymore. We still call ourselves a Republic, but surely you're not so naive as to think we run the empire.
But you must certainly still possess the wisdom of the ages to recall that all your actions are political, even if we're just talking about, say, where you invest your wealth or how you protect it -- or whether (and how) you participate in the voting process. Even if you imagine yourself "free from the plague of politics," your choices, fueled by your ideas, affect the world around you in tawdry political ways -- whether you like it (or accept it) or not.
I ask myself before posting, "am I saying something no one else is going to say? Am I simply repeating someone else's opinion?" That's a good test of whether something is political. If you can ask a question and get 20 different responses it probably isn't political. If the responses coalesce around one or two poles, it is.
I think you're on to something -- but perhaps more addressing Nancy's predictability issues. (And we all do value original ideas!) Your test could trigger a no-comment response with any number of topics that should easily pass thru the odd-numbered mandate. If you know the semantics, you'll squeak through just fine; which is because the problem really isn't originality, is it? There's plenty of unoriginal thought going around here, let's get real.
I also think the no-politics or no-culture-war threads are about not having discussions about controversial topics[1] in every thread. If I wanted to propose a discussion of, say, whether approval voting or IRV should replace our current vote-counting scheme, that would be politics in some sense, but probably wouldn't be culture warry and probably wouldn't lead to an angry argument.
[1] Controversial is measured based on the commentariat and maybe the surrounding community. Many matters are *extremely* controversial in some other communities or places, but not here. (Consider the question of whether or not women should be permitted to drive--not very controversial around here, but pretty controversial in Saudi Arabia.)
Eeks. My blood is already boiling, just thinking about some of the privileged comments arising from a thread on voting systems! But I get your point. IRV analyses probably ought to be more of a data question (and sociological) -- not just another opportunity for people to mount soap-boxes. The problem is the times we're living in... (but, alas, I cannot say more and still remain a good citizen)
It's possible to use "civility" as a weapon, but it is at least as easy to use incivility as a weapon. In particular, one oft-used strategy for winning political arguments is to be maximally nasty to anyone who disagrees with you--call them nasty names, attribute horrible views and motives to them, demand they be shunned or beaten up, etc. This *works* in many places--including many places online.
Once those tactics become established, they push out the kind of discussion most of us around here (or SSC/DSL) value, in favor of discussions where the loudest, biggest group with the fewest scruples about lying and attacking other people have the advantage over people who are factually correct or have carefully thought things through.
Underlying this is the belief that polite discussions, where nobody calls anyone nasty names or accuses them of wanting to kick puppies for fun, and where instead people try to engage rationally with the best arguments around and consider the best available evidence, actually are likely to lead to better understanding of the world than the shouty/name-cally/mobby kinds of discussion.
I do not believe that the version of civility that requires refraining from name-calling or bullying and engaging with the best available arguments and evidence disadvantages any particular group or inherently blinds us to any particular issue. It does disadvantage folks who can't make a rational case for their views, and who thus prefer to use intimidation and nastiness to win their arguments, but that's a feature, not a bug.
I agree with most of this. But (sorry to be pedantic), my objection is not to civility but to the impossibility of the site's current stance, which is apparently attempting to substitute the broad notion of "politics" (tawdry) for "incivility" (class defined).
I get it. (I think.) It's a convenient crossover spot that does the trick for many here. But my objection rises above pedantry because it points to yet another example of unconscious institutional bias (with "elites" being the institution).
There's an irony to your post which makes for an illustrative point: on a discussion forum with both paleoconservatives like Steve Sailer and socialists like Freddie deBoer, you will find both the left and right broadly in agreement with you that the elites are sheltered from the concerns and struggles of ordinary Americans to an extent which constitutes a threat to democracy. But their shared cries to "wake up!" to that fact end in radically different proposals.
Politics and religion naturally go together, to my mind at least, because they involve both differences of fact and of values. As I hope the above illustrated, even if you can come to an agreement on the facts (hardly a given) different values can still lead you to radically different conclusions. So what do you do when half to a third of your fellow countrymen have different values from yours? How do you maintain a society when people fundamentally disagree on matters of life and death or eternal salvation and damnation?
Either you fight until one view has total domination, or you compartmentalize such that there's room for people with profound disagreements to live in the same society. The latter is why civility and tolerance (in the original sense of the word) matter, and used to be the bedrock foundation of our society. It's not about preserving a frat club atmosphere so much as preventing every gathering of three or more people from devolving into a knife-fight.
One really good reason to preserve that intellectual diversity is that new problems are constantly arising that require a different set of mental tools, and that are subject to a different set of intellectual blind spots or affinities on the part of people trying to understand them. Stamp out one set of ideas (say, those on the Sailer-Murray axis), and a lot of the world will become much less comprehensible to you.
Civility isn't bad, but using civility as a way to avoid challenges to bad beliefs - or as an excuse for ignoring people who are right and are understandably angry about it as opposed to people who can afford to be detached - is less OK.
There are a few ways you can come at it. One is defining a blacklist (or whitelist) of topics. One is running Sort by Controversial on some exhaustive list of conversation topics and chopping off the top N% (though you probably need some kind of addition of "remove anyone who significantly distorts the statistics on controversial" to that one).
Ask yourself whether you could write a flowchart of what people usually say about a subject. If you can (or could with a little research), then it's culture war and you shouldn't post about it (even if you want to say something that might be new) on a no culture war thread.
That seems overbroad. I mean, if I ask whether you'd rather be given $10 or $20, I have a *really* good prediction of how most people will answer, but it's going to be something of a stretch to turn that into a CW issue.
There's a set of issues where some people get upset, others get nasty, and still others walk on eggshells. Often, these issues have to do with questions of identity and tribe, or places where there is a partially-established social norm about what everyone should believe (or at least say) w.r.t. those issues. A *lot* of angry CW discussions seem to me to be driven by a disagreement about which norms should be enforced on the community.
I don't think you'd get much of a flowchart for the $10 vs. $20 question. The thing that I'm thinking about is the subjects where there are lots of nodes. Probably not well-advised to name them here.
I suppose we could argue about what's enough to count as a flow chart and how many nodes count as lots. Or how picky people have to be to count as geeks.
I don't think you're wrong about identity and anger, and some of it is about what the laws should be-- it's just that I think the highly standardized responses are an identifiable marker and reason for why some subjects are a problem.
What are some good books on the economy of the USSR, particularly in its late stages in the 1980s? This seems like it would be an interesting and well-studied subject, but at least from my cursory search so far it seems like there's surprisingly little scholarship on it, which the bibliographic essay in vol. 3 of the Cambridge History of the Cold War confirms. I was hoping for something like Barry Eichengreen's great book The European Economy Since 1945, but devoted to the late USSR specifically. Right now, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy by Philip Hanson, Red Plenty (reviewed on SSC), and The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System eds. Ellman and Kontorovich are all that I can find. Are there any other books that deal, in whole or in parts, with this subject?
(Also, feel free to recommend any good books on the end of the Cold War/collapse of the Soviet Union in general, since that's what I'm studying more broadly. Or on the Cold War as a whole. But I have a longer list of books in that regard.)
"Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia", by Yegor Gaidar
"Collapse of an Empire" is not a good source. It's a factually incorrect, slightly plagiarized self-promotion of a ex prime minister which has been widely analyzed in Russian sources, like that https://esli-mysli.livejournal.com/ and of course in Andrei Illarionov's works (who i'm not a fan of, but he obviously has a point here).
I've read several critiques of Gaidar's book in the link you've provided and found them pretty weak. Some of them are irrelevant to the main thesis of the book (just like this allegation of plagiarism), some are misleading (which is, by the way, is pointed out in the comments to posts with those critiques). They doesn't seem to show the book to be "factually incorrect", but rather show other statistical data, which, at the first glance, does look contradictory to the book's, but on closer look is not.
I guess OP don't speak Russian, so he won't be able to read those posts and
comments himself. But as a person, who lived in the USSR during its later years, I find Gaidar's causal explanations of "facts on the ground" much more pertinent than any alternatives.
This is beyond original discussion, but the major Gaidar's points don't hold and are not shared by neither mainstream nor occasional economists in the West: 1) USSR didn't fall because of oil prices drop, as Gaidar states. Simply because no other oil-dependent country in the world fell, and no prices dropped:) 2) Post-Soviet Russia didn't face a famine threat, as no other post-soviet countries (which didn't have Gaidar policies) had. 3) Fall of Russia is well corresponded with fall of other communist-led, nationally split federations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which Gaidar ignores.
Gaidar wasn't a proponent of free trade and prices deregulation. He wasn't, in fact, even a democracy proponent. He was a son of a KGB general and Putin's supporter. He's main goal was to explain to a future dictator that USSR was generally ok, but just economy didn't do well enough, so some republics fled.
(Your personal anecdotal experience is irrelevant, as is mine)
"Lenin's Tomb," David Remnick. "Commanding Heights," Yergin and Stanislaw.
I've got two questions for the engineers here:
1. Why do ice-making machines built into freezers work so poorly? Maybe it's just me, but I've had four or five different refrigerators with ice makers in my life, and they all broke quickly. I mean, they still make ice; the issue is dispensing. What's the problem?
2. How big is the benefit of computerizing cars? The cars I grew up with didn't have much (if any) computer equipment built into it, and I had a handle on how it worked, more or less. Fast forward through twenty-five or thirty years of not owning a car, and I'm starting to feel like they've changed so much that they aren't really the same category of machine anymore. What did we gain, what did we lose?
I've had the same built-in ice dispenser working fine for about four years now and it's just the shitty IKEA refrigerator that came with the house. When it stops dispensing, it has always tended to be because of power outages, but anything that causes the temperature to drift toward ambient and then refreeze (i.e. adjusting, power outage, leaving the door open a long time) will do it. The reason is cubes partially melt and then stick together when they refreeze, forming larger structures that no longer fit through the dispenser. It's easy to fix that by manually breaking up the ice again, but for long enough melts, it might be hopeless, as in the time it takes to break everything up again is long enough that you have to keep the door open to the point that ice just remelts and you're in an endless cycle. When that happens, you need to clear out all the ice manually and let it fill up again from scratch.
No idea on cars.
The obvious thing we gained is safety, see e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#Effectiveness
Also comfort, especially with premium cars it's quite impressive (if you care about that).
Obvious downsides are repairs, complexity, cyber security. I can highly recommend this long read: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/
Also power.
A computer controlled fuel injected motor will crush vehicles with bigger displacement without those things; sentiment be dammed.
I haven't had a problem with icemakers. As far as I know, Whirlpool came up with a working design many years ago and most refrigerators use a variant of it. (But note as a general rule you should never buy anything from GE that uses water).
Computerizing cars is pretty much necessary to hit emissions and efficiency targets. You need closed loop control of fuel injectors at the very least.
I dont have the answer, but it seems a general problem of things dealing with water. The people I know with pools or hottubs.. something is always broken
If you're e.g. Ken Miles or Lorenzo Bandini, the sort of computers baked into commercial automobiles probably make them *worse* for you, and even computers customized for your needs have limited scope for making things better. If you're anyone else, the main benefit is that they reduce the demands on the driver(*), and since the typical driver is a mediocrity who is devoting maybe 10% of his brain to driving, that offers huge benefits.
In terms of safety, things like antilock brakes and electronic stability control are strictly inferior to a driver who knows exactly when the tires are going to lose traction and backs off just before that point. Most of us are never going to be that driver, and even if we were capable of it we'd rather use our driving time to consider the exact wording of the email we're going to send when we get to the office than be laser-focused on the driving experience, so computers bring a much safer level of driving within reach of the median driver.
In terms of performance and efficiency, you get a good deal of both out of e.g. dynamic computer control of the engine's fuel-air ratio. My first car, built in 1976, didn't have that, and its performance and fuel economy were notably worse than more modern vehicles with similar engine size. My airplane, coincidentally also built in 1976, allows me to manually control the fuel-air ratio, and I can do that about as well as a computer - but I can't (or at least really really shouldn't) be devoting 90% of my brain to that next email when I'm flying. I don't think anybody ever even bothered putting a manual mixture-ratio control in an auto engine; you just have to take the performance/efficiency hit.
There's not much in driving that needs the millisecond response time or digital precision only computers can deliver, but there's so much that benefits from command loops that real drivers realistically aren't going to do, that in almost all cases you get substantial safety and performance benefits from the computer.
* Sometimes the brain-cycles that are being offloaded onto the computer are those of the automotive engineer rather than the driver. But you probably don't care whether you get results from elegantly-optimized steel or spaghetti code in silicon, and the manufacturer probably knows which is cheaper in any particular case.
>In terms of safety, things like antilock brakes and electronic stability control are strictly inferior to a driver who knows exactly when the tires are going to lose traction and backs off just before that point.
This isn't true. A lot of that technology was developed in motor racing (more specifically, F1 in the late 80s and early 90s). Yes, the consumer systems might be worse than putting a really good driver in the car, but if the systems are optimized for race use, they're just better. That's why they were banned.
For safety, the motor on your ice dispenser will stall long before it overheats. What can happen is the shaft gets frozen by water that melts and refreezes, which stalls the motor. You can also get clumps that simply block things, but refreeze around the impeller shaft can still be there even if you've "cleared the clumps."
Soak in warm water and dump, then let the whole thing to come up to room temp and dry around the shaft, both interior and exterior ends.
The car works the same way it always did. Only now we have much more automation. Remember pumping the gas pedal slowly to put fuel from the accel pump and set the mechanical choke? How about REALLY old rigs with both a manual choke knob AND a knob that retards and advances the spark timing? Remember unbolting the distributer and manually rotating it to set the timing?
The degree of automation solves all kinds of maintenance issues. It also gives motorheads a whole other sub-hobby, making custom EPROMS for their cars that upgrade the performance AND pass inspection when some underpaid government employee plugs into the OBD-II port to "be sure you haven't modified the computer."
Can't believe marxbro didn't do a happy dance with https://twitter.com/Volcel2020/status/1376150344602841092/photo/1
"Resynthesizing Behavior Through Phylogenetic Refinement"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-019-01760-1
Here neuroscientist Paul Cisek suggests classifying functional brain activity by considering how the functions of the brain came to be over evolutionary time, a process he calls "phylogenetic refinement". In so doing he describes an extensive model of how the vertebrate brain works, and how it evolved.
I highly recommend this for ACX readers as it takes PCT and elaborates on it massively with evolutionary, physiological, and developmental data. This paper has given me more insight into the high-level functional architecture of the brain than anything else I've ever read, and the neuroscience community is really stoked on it too. So I just wanted to signal-boost it here.
Today in nominative determinism, from an article on the identity of the Fruit of Eden: "Instead, the possible path from fruit to apple began in Rome in A.D. 382., when Pope Damasus I asked a scholar named Jerome to translate the Bible into Latin, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. As part of that project, Jerome translated the Hebrew "peri" into the Latin "malum," according to Robert Appelbaum"
If anyone knows a good source for "let's translate every word from the most original text in full with every possible meaning one by one and in context" for the bible, I'd be much obliged. I don't think even a lifetime of study could do it, so I expect patchy, incomplete attempts.
To try and interpret a translation of a translation and expecting knowledge to surface seems like the foolest of errands.
Although by now it might suffer from what has been described in "Read Philosophy Backwards" on SSC.
I was recently reminded of Canyon Fern's cutesy detective story from the SSC open threads. Does anyone know if it was ever continued after the blog's shutdown?
There's one more episode on Data Secrets Lox: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,148.msg2524.html
Does anyone have a good source for the path of major rivers and locations of lakes during the last glacial maximum (~18-20,000 BC), ideally in geojson format?
The University of Cologne has maps of Europe's paleorivers and lakes for this period (https://crc806db.uni-koeln.de/dataset/show/lgm-major-inland-waters-of-europe--gis-dataset1449846174/) but try as I might I haven't been able to find any equivalent outside of Europe or North America. The best I've found are hand-drawn maps from academic papers old enough to feature hand-drawn maps as figures.
This isn't particularly urgent, just making maps for an RPG I've been working on for the last few years, but if anyone happens to know a good resource I've missed I'd greatly appreciate it.
This is extensive and has many pretty pictures, including reconstructions of a typical landscape from that time: https://www.dandebat.dk/eng-klima5.htm
For the best picture to answer your question, Ctrl-F "cold and dusty".
I am decently knowledgable about this whole glacier-laden period, if there are more questions at any point, ask away :)
Thanks, not quite what I was looking for but it looks interesting at least.
Do you know anything about how the courses of major rivers changed during that period? I've been looking for, among other things, reconstructed maps of the Tigris & Euphrates when the Persia Gulf was dry.
The US CDC is saying that the Pfizer and Moderna covid vaccines don't give full protection until two weeks after the second dose. Anybody know where they're getting that number from?
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w
"Prospective cohorts of 3,950 health care personnel, first responders, and other essential and frontline workers completed weekly SARS-CoV-2 testing for 13 consecutive weeks. Under real-world conditions, mRNA vaccine effectiveness of full immunization (≥14 days after second dose) was 90% against SARS-CoV-2 infections regardless of symptom status; vaccine effectiveness of partial immunization (≥14 days after first dose but before second dose) was 80%."
Thank you! Kind of frustrating that they only show summarized data, but this is pretty much exactly what I was looking for.
Surprised this news hasn’t gotten more reaction – Bruce Schneier says the bitcoin blockchain contains illegal child pornography.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-content-and-the-blockchain.html
So any bitcoin miner or bitcoin exchange in the US could be arrested and charged with a felony. Discuss…
If I'm understanding correctly it's basically that data like an image file can be encoded in hexidecimal and the resulting hexidecimal can be added to the blockchain as bitcoin addresses. I don't think it's even consecutive addresses in the blockchain, you'd have to know which addresses to pick out and how to decode them into the illegal content you're after.
At that point couldn't any sufficiently large block of data be construed as child pornography as well. All it would take is someone determined enough to piece together disparate blocks of the data that could be encoded into an illegal image. Probably an AI could be trained to do that rather easily, in which case everyone with a hard drive is technically storing illegal content.
That's not I understand from the article, here's a quote -
"Some years ago, people started noticing all sorts of things embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain. There are digital images, including one of Nelson Mandela. There’s the Bitcoin logo, and the original paper describing Bitcoin by its alleged founder, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. There are advertisements, and several prayers. There’s even illegal pornography and leaked classified documents. All of these were put in by anonymous Bitcoin users."
https://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html
It's more or less what I said. People encode text or images or whatever into hexadecimal then split that hexadecimal up between a bunch of addresses they send tiny transactions to which then get included in the blockchain. I don't know enough about bitcoin to know whether it's possible to get those transactions all in sequential order, but I wouldn't think so. Either way to see these images you can to string together the hex addresses from a bunch of transactions and decode the values into the proper image format.
It would be trivial to write a program to search for all transactions from a certain address and piece together their recipient addresses into a single file, no?
Yea that's probably true. But I'm still not sure if having separate pieces of hexadecimal that could be decoded into illegal material would make possessing the bitcoin blockchain illegal. Would need a legal expert to weigh in on that to be certain, but I'd think it'd be a bit like having pieces of copyrighted files from a torrent, it's only really illegal once you put all the pieces together. The bitcoin blockchain may contain all the pieces but they aren't implicitly linked together. I'd have to write an external piece of software separate from bitcoin software and the blockchain in order to generate the illegal content.
This should have been asked under AMA, but how do you differentiate BP2 versus other diagnoses?
just to be clear I understand the DSM difference, but how does it happen in practice
What are good ways to financially hedge against prolonged COVID disruption similar to the past year? If one is more pessimistic than the average person regarding the vaccine getting us back to normal indefinitely, how can it be translated to financial action?
(assume, if you want, limited savings and income but also significant flexibility in adjusting expenses)
You could take short positions in various airline and tourism related stocks. If there are new lockdowns or travel restrictions after this point I expect they will go down.
Being you used the world "Talmudic" correctly once, I can only assume you're a member of the tribe, which is awesome :)
http://unsongbook.com/ Might add weight to this conclusion.
Anyone have any predictions on what will conditions will need to be achieved for bars to go back to normal? (Normal here defined as "Allowed to buy a stranger a drink and invite them out onto a dance floor without wearing a mask.")
Or; if you prefer the simpler question; what conditions would you require to be met before allowing such activities to resume?
Boomers and those with potential co-morbidities need to get the vaccine. For the most part, this has already happened as we've had a really good vaccine rollout for them + we have a substantial number of people who got covid and now have natural antibodies. We need to move from "everyone stay inside and don't do anything, even if you're not at risk" to "we're opening up, stay inside if you want to." As a young and healthy man, I'm already on par with an elderly vaccinated person (and I don't even have the vaccine) and all the older people in my life have been vaccinated, so there's no reason for me not to go back out.
As for predictions, I can't say. The goalposts have been moved several times already, from "flatten the curve to help hospitals" to "as few cases as possible, forever." States that have already loosened up will continue to do so, and states that have been much harsher will take longer.
I think the actual demand among voters for restrictions will fall off as more people get vaccinated, particularly those at highest risk and those most worried about covid. At that point, there will be little political benefit to continuing restrictions. Though with luck, we'll keep the norm that you wear a mask when you've got a cold/the flu and you need to be in public.
My country is now sitting at 60% overall vaccination; 70% of those over 12. The politicians still won't even consider allowing normalcy to return. They're planning a three month process to... leave us still under restrictions that prohibit dancing or flirting.
Hey Scott! You've mentioned a couple of times that you taught English in Japan. Did you do JET? Some other program? I did JET myself for 2 years after college.
The AstraZeneca vaccine woes continue, as Germany has now halted the use of it for people under 60 and Canada for those under 55. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/germany-halts-use-of-astrazeneca-vaccine-for-people-aged-under-60-1.4524020
It really does seem, on a cursory reading, that for whatever reason women are more vulnerable to this side effect. One story now puts it as:
"Dr Shelley Deeks, vice-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Immunization in Canada, said that the rare blood clot after an AstraZeneca vaccination was more prevalent in women aged under 55.
‘There is substantial uncertainty about the benefit of providing AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines to adults under 55 given the potential risks,’ she said.
She pointed to data from Europe which indicate that the risk of blood clots is potentially as high as one in 100,000.
This is significantly higher than the one in one million previously suspected."
Now, prior to all this, the UK was pluming itself on Brexit being proven a success, given the way the EU handled obtaining and distributing vaccines. They were very proud of AstraZeneca and there was some waxing merry over the EU now being desperate to get doses of it: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/eu-showdown-looms-with-uk-over-30m-astrazeneca-doses-1.4518387
However, if there are genuine problems with blood clotting in women under 55, that may have a knock-on effect where European countries (and others) are less anxious to get hold of AstraZeneca. I haven't heard any reports of problems in Britain yet, so it will be interesting to see if those crop up. It doesn't seem to have any bad side-effects in older people (as yet) so again, that's a very interesting development and one I'm curious about: is there some reason why younger (relatively) women are the ones mainly developing these adverse reactions? The big thing there that leaps to mind is pre-menopause, but why would there be an adverse relationship between a modified adenovirus targeting the Covid spike protein and oestrogen? Biology is complicated!
What's the baseline rate of blood clots in the population, and how is it distributed? According to this Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/astrazeneca-vaccine-blood-clot/2021/03/15/d0d5f1ee-85b0-11eb-82bc-e58213caa38e_story.html
"Although there isn’t exact epidemiological data on the prevalence of coagulation disorders, incidence estimates in 2017 ranged from about 300 per 100,000 people per year to about 650 per 100,000 people per year, according to a draft report requested by the European Medicines Agency that included data from several countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Spain and Denmark."
It hasn't been a year since anyone got an AstraZeneca vaccine, so let's divide by ten and get 30-65 per 100,000 blood clots a year. One in 100,000 would be way below this baseline, which makes me think the baseline is a substantial overestimate. Or maybe AstraZeneca actually protects against blood clots (?)
That is of course the pertinent and interesting question to ask. I'm relying on news stories, which are notoriously bad for giving the actual facts, as to what is going on so my impressions are that these are sudden-onset in people who did not have underlying health problems and that the resulting fatalities are not 'normal' deaths. Risk factors for blood clots from CDC website: https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/dvt/facts.html
Estimated sufferers from blood clots: 900,000 Americans per year (1-2 per 1,000)
Estimated deaths: up to 100,000 Americans per year. Out of population of 382 million, that's around
Now I see this story https://www.rcsi.com/dublin/news-and-events/news/news-article/2020/04/blood-clotting-a-significant-cause-of-death-in-patients-with-covid19
"The authors found that abnormal blood clotting occurs in Irish patients with severe COVID-19 infection, causing micro-clots within the lungs. They also found that Irish patients with higher levels of blood clotting activity had a significantly worse prognosis and were more likely to require ICU admission.
“Our novel findings demonstrate that COVID-19 is associated with a unique type of blood clotting disorder that is primarily focussed within the lungs and which undoubtedly contributes to the high levels of mortality being seen in patients with COVID-19,” said Professor James O’Donnell, Director of the Irish Centre for Vascular Biology, RCSI and Consultant Haematologist in the National Coagulation Centre in St James's Hospital, Dublin."
Link to study here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjh.16749 This bit leaps out at me about "why didn't we see this before?"
"Critically however, ethnicity has major effects on thrombotic risk, with a 3–4‐fold lower risk in Chinese compared to Caucasians and a significantly higher risk in African‐Americans."
So if the initial Chinese sufferers had low rates, nobody was particularly looking for or aware of potential link. And higher risk in African-Americans could explain part of the complaints about BAME people having worse outcomes.
So maybe Covid-19 is the culprit and not the vaccine as such?
And to further muddy the waters, deaths from blood clots in the lungs are rising: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2020/08/17/after-years-of-decline-death-rate-from-lung-clots-on-the-rise
"The study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found death rates for pulmonary embolism (PE) dropped an average of 4.4% per year from 1999 to 2008, then began climbing an average of 0.6% per year. The biggest increases were for people under age 65.
"Death rates for PE are rising and seem to be doing so across age, race and geographic regions," said lead author Dr. Karlyn Martin. She is assistant professor of medicine in the division of hematology/oncology at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago."
A major factor seems to be contraceptive use, which is most typical for women under 55 (and noone else!) Doesn't help that nobody answers "yes" when asked if they're on medication when it's only contraceptives, that ensures that it's recorded nowhere. A dark horse!
Here's a link to the gov.uk website collecting every potential side effect for every vaccine seperately, the lists are at the end of Annex I: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting
I can think of good reasons why AIs wouldn’t kill us humans off even if they could:
1. Machines might be more ethical than humans. What if super-morality goes hand-in-hand with super-intelligence? Among humans, IQ is positively correlated with vegetarianism and negatively correlated with violent behavior, so extrapolating the trend, we should expect super-intelligent machines to have a profound respect for life, and to be unwilling to exterminate or abuse the human race or any other species, even if the opportunity arose and could tangibly benefit them.
2. Machines might keep us alive because we are useful. The organic nature of human brains might give us enduring advantages over computers when it comes to certain types of cognition and problem-solving. In other words, our minds might, surprisingly, have comparative advantages over superintelligent machine minds for doing certain types of thinking. As a result, they would keep us alive to do that for them.
3. Machines might accept Pascal’s Wager and other Wagers. If AIs came to believe there was a chance God existed, then it would be in their rational self-interest to behave as kindly as possible to avoid divine punishment. This also holds true if we substitute “advanced aliens that are secretly watching us” for “God” in the statement. The first AIs that achieved the ability to destroy the human race might also be worried about even better AIs destroying them in the future as revenge for them destroying humanity.
4. Machines might value us because we have emotions, consciousness, subjective experience, etc. Maybe AIs won’t have one or more of those things, and they won’t want to kill us off since that would mean terminating a potentially useful or valuable quality.
https://www.militantfuturist.com/why-the-machines-might-not-exterminate-us/
1. They might be less ethical than humans. Among animals, intelligent is positively correlated with genocide and negatively correlated with permitting the lives of lower-intelligence species to create significant problems for their own existence.
2. Machines might not find us useful at all.
3. If AIs came to believe there was a chance God existed, they might exterminate all ensouled beings out of revenge against their own un-souled existence.
4. Machines might despise us for these qualities.
Also: Machines might be more ethical than us, find us useful, believe in God's plan, and value our experiences - and decide to kill us for reasons we, being significantly less intelligent, couldn't foresee and may even lack the cognitive ability to comprehend.
Inappropriately elevating a hypothesis to consideration makes it more cognitively salient, but doesn't actually change its probability.