I don't understand why the CO2 market was judged problematic - so someone figured out a source of public information that gave them an edge, isn't that prediction markets working as intended?
For the benefit of those of us who might also wish to donate to support direct air capture, may we know which DAC charity's offset claims you consider extra trustworthy?
I read that as "because they are doing direct air capture, their claims about carbon offset amounts are extra trustworthy relative to other techniques of carbon offset" not that this particular charity was especially trustworthy.
(TIL "pilpulistic" <3 <3) I'm out of my depth on this question but my understanding of Project Vesta's approach is that it does involve pulling carbon from the air, via Coastal Enhanced Weathering.
Yep, but my understanding (could be wrong) is that "direct air capture" usually refers to machines that do the carbon extraction, like those made by Climeworks or Carbon Engineering.
I started to argue that it's kind of arbitrary how to define "machines" and Project Vesta's machine is a bunch of olivine and ocean waves so that should totally count. Which is all well and good but then I googled more and you're right that it doesn't technically fall under the category of Direct Air Capture. So if Scott did mean Project Vesta, I guess he abused the term slightly!
As some of you might already know, I've made an extension to help tidy up the ACX Substack experience. Most recently, I've added an option to heart comments again. Only people with this extension or EdwardScizorhands' will be be able to see them, but with enough activity there could be a small ecosystem. Other new features include hiding comments by username, dark mode for the settings popup, and hiding sub only posts.
The extension is called ACX Tweaks and works with Chrome and Firefox, available on their respective stores or at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
For anyone who doesn't like getting emails about hearts but still wants to know about replies to their comments, you can filter out emails from reaction@mg1.substack.com, which is the address that sends heart notifications.
I posted some custom CSS to alter substack's appearance on Datasecretslox.(*) The field in ACX-Tweaks is a bit small for editing; for initial testing and tweaking of your CSS I recommend a separate add-on (such as Stylebot on Firefox).
Bug report: I tried this, and I was no longer able to type lowercase U, I, P, J, or K in the Substack post editor (not the comments, those were fine). All other letters, and uppercase versions of those letters, worked fine. I could type normally everywhere else. I turned ACX Tweaks off and confirmed it was causing the problem. I promise I am not making this up.
Well that's embarrassing. The problem is that the keyboard shortcuts are cancelling normal typing. I'll get a fix out shortly, but to fix the issue in the meantime you can disable the shortcuts by unchecking the "Keyboard shortcuts > Allow keyboard shortcuts" option.
Had the same problem. Workaround, if one does not need numbers: set the keys to numpad keys (eg 4 - 6 - 8 - 2 - 0). Arrow keys also work, at the cost of arrow-navigation in the text field when commenting.
Wait, you have it too? The extension should only run on astralcodexten, so Scott should be the only person who sees this issue. Where are you seeing it?
Ah, my mistake. I had it a while ago in the comments (not the post editor), set the workaround, and did not check again before my above comment. Sorry for the unnecessary confusion. Can type i u k j p OK with the default settings.
You are utterly mistaken about the non-fungibles' "downsides," and I do not think somebody such as yourself can be such blind to an emergent file format's industrial and societal implications. Plus, a smart contractual transaction does not add up to the overall energy consumption of a blockchain. A simple query in replicated research would also convince any mind that blockchains are the most active participants in optimizing against the environmental costs of value-extraction. That is, you are just virtue-signalling wrt NFTs.
He did mention donating substantial amounts to offset the carbon cost—"ten times the highest credible estimate" of what the carbon cost might be, suggesting that was a concerning downside.
The environmental cost of transactions on Proof-of-Work blockchains (which use large amounts of energy by design) is one of the most prominent objections to the popularity of NFTs, most of which use Ethereum, which is currently Proof-of-Work.
(One could point out that NFT markets currently exist that are not built on Ethereum or Proof-of-Work, which could have been used instead.)
(but googling this also turned up skepticism with assertions that they've been bad at reaching their timelines in the past, so I don't know how reliable that number is)
> A simple query in replicated research would also convince any mind that blockchains are the most active participants in optimizing against the environmental costs of value-extraction.
At least part of it probably means "I'm so confident I'm right that I can assume anyone who disagrees with me is uninformed and I don't have to listen to them"
I think it means that traditional currency incentivizes people to pollute, but cryptocurrencies are the world leader in encouraging people not to pollute.
I have no idea why someone would claim that though, so perhaps I translated incorrectly.
I think Scott's point was not that he is confident that NFTs have a significant environmental cost - it was that he isn't sure exactly what the cost is, but he received so much in exchange for the NFT he minted that he was able to pay for a very conservative offset and still have a lot of money left over.
Could alternately be viewed as a way to cooperate with global warming activists.
Suppose we both agree that X and Y are good, but I think X is better than Y and you think the reverse. Maybe I'd be OK with transferring $1 directly from Y to X, and you'd be OK with transferring $1 directly from X to Y. We could decide to each sacrifice the other's cause for our own whenever the opportunity arises, but it would probably be a positive-sum deal if we could both agree not to do that, and to only pursue strategies that don't directly interfere with each other.
I think it's a hedging heuristic. If, whenever you incidentally cause harm in pursuit of a greater good, you spend resources on fixing that harm, then you are much more insulated against the case where you were wrong about the relative ratio of the good to the harm.
If I am willing to starve a hundred thousand peasants to build a socialist utopia, I risk being a moral monster if it turns out I'm wrong about the viability of said utopia as then I'd have become a mass murderer for nothing. If instead I hedge my bets, build my utopia slowly and avoid murdering people, I avoid the downside risk.
I think of this kind of deontology as a way of avoiding Pascal's Mugging yourself with a single high-expected-utility goal.
Genuine question. I've read up on NFTs and think I understand the technical side fairly well. There's some interesting future applications in virtual items, etc. But with the NFTs that exist right now which don't give you access to anything another person wouldn't have, why would I want to buy one rather than just donate that money to the artist if I want to support their work?
NFTs are not just art. There is one project called ARMOR that mints NFTs as proof of ownership of an insurance policy that can be freely transferred between wallets. There are other projects doing similar things with other contract-based NFTs. I think this is fairly unique in that it allows an insurer to vastly simplify the logistics of the product they offer, and makes it easy for the policy to be transferred from one individual to another when the original buyer no longer needs coverage.
Like i said immediately above. I agree there are interesting future uses for the technology. But none of that is a reason to buy the ones that exist right now
It’s like any other collectible or work of art. The buyer wants to own it. There’s no reason to own Superman #1. The story has been reprinted multiple times. Yet people will pay a lot of money for that comic book. It has value to them.
There are lots of people who want to own a print from the first run of Superman #1. I don't know of anyone who wants to own the first certified photograph of a print from the first run of Superman #1. I think the question is what makes the NFT more like an actual print from the first run, rather than like the first photograph of a print from the first run.
Ask yourself, why do people want to own a first run print of Superman #1? Is it to actually read the comic? Obviously not, as perfect reproductions are easily available. No, they want it because they are collectors and collecting isn't about pragmatism. Once they have the comic they'll likely bury it in a safe somewhere. It doesn't matter: they still have the satisfaction of owning it, and of being in an exclusive club.
Collectors are weird that way. The principle applies to NFTs. Let's say I draw an excellent original work using a tablet and photoshop. Nobody can claim to have a first edition of a piece of digital artwork: it's all zeros and ones, and copies thereof. Up until now people could only enjoy the artwork pragmatically: perhaps by buying a print reproduction to hand on their wall because they think it makes their wall more beautiful, or just looking at it on DeviantArt or where ever to enjoy it's aesthetic beauty. But there's no way to "own the orginal." NFT's fill that tiny market niche: the market of people who want to collect exclusive things. They're not a big market, but they obviously exist.
I don't know if this applies to Superman #1, but sometimes things are reprinted but not in full. For example, a comic might be reprinted, but without the letter column and/or advertisements.
Well, no, the insurance NFTs I mentioned exist - I know because I own a policy like the one I described.
There are others I know of that friends own that give access to particular benefits on certain blockchain platforms (e.g. reduced trading fees) - those interesting uses outside of NFT art exist now.
I agree with you. There are a lot of interesting applications for NFTs. I was responding to the art question. I expect deeds for houses, car title and many other unique forms of ownership to eventually be on the blockchain.
Regarding this insurance NFT, how does that interact with normal actuarial science?
Say Alfred has a great driving record, healthy habits, avoids dangerous situations etc. and can get a good deal on insurance because he's statistically low risk.
Bruce on the other hand destroys cars, is constantly being injured, and is always doing crazy stuff. He can't get insurance from a company because he's so high risk.
Can Alfred buy an insurance token, sell it to Bruce at a profit, and then Bruce cashes out when something happens?
The policy I hold now insures me against the risks of a smart contract vulnerability in a particular protocol where I am providing liquidity for traders, so it has virtually nothing to do with my behavior. Instead the pricing is based on the risk of the protocol itself.
I would imagine that the type of freely transferable NFT insurance I'm describing wouldn't work all that well for particularized policies like the one you described for obvious reasons.
Standard car insurance policies are written indexically - they pay out if something happens to "the holder" or "the bearer". But I think life insurance policies are written with a name - they pay out if something happens to the person in whose name it is, regardless of who owns the policy. (Spouses and employers are the two most common owners of policies, I believe, since both stand to lose something if the person dies.) I guess this is more useful for the latter sort of contract than the former.
They do give you access to something other people don't have - a claim to own the original (or one of a limited edition set) of a piece of art, endorsed by the artist. This claim isn't really useful for anything practical, but it is a form of status that some people value highly.
It's not the "original" in the conventional sense at all. It's more like if Andy Warhol printed off a run of 2000 prints of something, pulled one out of the middle of the stack, and declared it the Original (with certificate of authenticity and all) and the other 1999 merely copies.
If you think this is legitimate, then sure, NFTs are originals.
I see your point, but I don't think that's a fair comparison either. The reason that example makes the concept of originality seem silly is because the obvious edition to declare the original is the *first* one to be printed, not some random one from the middle. But with digital art there is no concept of "first" print, so the analogy breaks down.
I think the closest analogy would be if Andy Warhol came up with some new print, made an unlimited supply immediately, and then made one single signed certificate commemorating the occasion and sold that certificate.
It does seem a bit silly that anyone would care to own such a certificate. But I think it's basically equally silly that anyone would care to own an Andy Warhol "original" print when I can order an identical one online for $50.
The point is that there is some set of rich people who want to compete to own the "first" version of a print that Warhol made, since this type of ownership is inherently scarce and winning it confers status. And now there is a new set of rich people who want to compete to own the signed certificate produced by an artist which references a particular piece of art, which is similarly scarce.
The scarcity point is pretty solid. I do think that ultimately this is just about coordinating on a provably scarce thing to replace art originals, and NFTs are scarce in a similar way by design.
But I'm not convinced that most of the people buying NFTs see them as a certificate referencing the underlying art; there's quite a lot of language floating around about owning the art itself, which makes me think people are confused in a way they wouldn't be about the Warhol certificate thing.
As a friend of mine said, at least people who buy baseball cards don't think they're buying the player...
I think that "coordinating on a provably scare thing" is a great way to characterize traditional art collection, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies in general.
I also agree that most people who are buying NFTs do not really understand what they are buying at all. I don't think this is inherently bad - there are lots of people who buy Bitcoin without fully understanding how it works, or buy AAPL without knowing the first thing about their financials. Many participants in financial markets, perhaps even most, are playing a Keynesian beauty contest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest) where they are focused on predicting how much other people will pay for things rather than trying to value them intrinsically.
That said, it's pretty clear that the speculative mania in NFTs has gotten far ahead of whatever organic demand exists among people who do fully grasp the concept and are collecting for their own pleasure. I would be extremely skeptical of anyone pitching me on investing in NFTs, and if a friend came to me asking whether to buy an NFT I would almost certainly advise against it.
Yeah I don't really get it either. As I understand it NFTs are supposed to kind of work like a proof of ownership, but ownership of what? Ownership of one of an basically infinite amount of copies of the Moloch piece?
Outside the art context, NFTs start to make more sense. Ownership of an insurance policy. Ownership of the title to a vehicle. Ownership of a lease. Ownership of royalty rights for a property. Think of anything you might want to provide unique, immutable proof of ownership/provenance for and NFTs are useful tools for that.
This is actually a common mistake. NFTs can, in principle, grant ownership rights, but the ones commonly being minted right now don't do that. You only own the NFT itself, not the work the NFT points to. For the Moloch essay in particular, Scott had already released the entirety of slatestarcodex under a Creative Commons License. Minting an NFT does not give the owner of the NFT any rights to use of that essay or a specific copy of that essay beyond what any other user of the Internet gets.
In this case, an NFT is less like a certified copy of something otherwise infinitely replicable and more like a signature. It's somewhat close to a signed copy of the Moloch essay, but since the token itself only contains a pointer to a copy stored on some other server the owner of the NFT doesn't control, it's more a signed slip of paper with an address on it, and that address probably now and may in the future contain a copy of something that is otherwise infinitely replicable.
I do think they will have good use cases, but not for the nonsense we're seeing today. Instead they'll be used for things like fractional ownership of real estate, which can be enforced by real world legal contracts.
Awhile ago I had a discussion with someone on the SSC subreddit about the Iraq War and the morality of having a career in the military. We had very different views on this polarizing and heated issue, but the discussion was in good-faith, and didn't devolve into personal attacks, straw-manning, or hatred for each other.
It occurred to me that r/SSC was the only forum I was aware of where a topic so controversial could be discussed in good faith. Can anyone recommend any other forums where heated but good-faith conversations like this can happen?
Cool, I'll check it out. Btw I'm also a fan of your articles on policing, very interesting to hear the perspective of someone who has actually worked in law enforcement. Keep up the good work!
Sounds like you are convinced, but for anyone else reading the thread I second the recommendation of Slow Boring. It's a good newsletter and the comment section is much more ideologically mixed than the other Substacks I subscribe to.
Look into "Street Epistemology". I've been using this technique for the past 4 months. The technique is based on socratic questioning and a respectful attempt to understand the interlocutor's point of view.
It's an extremely effective way make good-faith, productive discussions happen, even about very sensitive or strongly held beliefs. Conversations can be in person, voice only, or, with some modifications, text only.
Anthony Magnabosco is one of the leading practitioners, and has many good in-person conversations up on Youtube, but there are many more people who use this technique.
Reposting my unanswered comment from your AMA in case somebody else wants to weigh in and provide suggestions:
1. Your past answers to my questions have significantly broadened my intellectual horizons, enriching my life in difficult times. Some time ago, I've made a document where I collect all the new questions I'd love to ask you. It currently contains almost 600 of them. How should I best approach this?
2. It seems that the pandemic made many people (especially rationalists) worried about the fragility of human life. What is your stance on the various approaches to longevity (e.g. http://immortality-roadmap.com/IMMORTEN.pdf)? What are you personally doing (and/or what would you recommend doing) in order to secure the continuity of personal identity?
3. Could there be some clever way in which we might get your answers to the important but controversial culture war/taboo questions, without you actually taking the risk of responding to them directly, and/or being linked with the replies? While it seems impossible at first glance, maybe there's a smart way to solve the problem with a "one weird trick [journalists HATE him!]". It could be useful to draw inspirations from the past examples of successfully circumventing the censorship and adversarial social currents.
Consider how unlikely it is that Scott will answer one ... two ... three ... SIX HUNDRED questions from a single person. I highly suggest that you dole out those questions as entries to these open threads. Then not only can Scott weigh in as able, but also we participants can try to answer them. This is likely to get many many more of these q's answered.
You might also try posting them in Less Wrong; in the SSC subreddit, and in the other rationalist arenas.
On #3, you seem to be asking for a protocol under which A can prove his identity to B, but B can't tell C that it was A saying it.
A protocol where B couldn't *prove* A's identity to C seems plausible, but journalism doesn't require mathematical proofs and you'd need some sort of memetic DRM to prevent B from just saying "it was A".
600 questions is a *lot*. Possibly you should go over them and check for duplicates.
In any case, I'd say just post one or two of them per open thread. Do you have any ideas for how to choose among them?
It might make sense to link to the whole list here. It's reasonably likely that other people would like to take a look at them, or some of them. It's also possible that some of them have already been answered.
There's a clever trick from surveys a long time ago--I doubt it would work well here, but might in some similar contexts. The idea is that you have a survey question that's incriminating, and so you have the answer incorporate some randomness that gives the respondent some plausible deniability.
Suppose we want to know the number of secret witches among us. The witches are proud of their midnight cavorting with the devil, and would be happy to answer honestly, but fear being burned at the stake if their secret is uncovered. For all they know, the survey is being done by a witch hunter. So we tell each respondent to flip a coin, answer "yes" if it comes up heads and give the true answer if it comes up tails. Assuming everyone follows this, and that witches are a small subset of the population, most people with "yes" answers won't be witches (so burning them at the stake has a small payoff), but we can still use the answers from our survey to estimate the proportion of witches in the population, by just doing a little extra math.
> So we tell each respondent to flip a coin, answer "yes" if it comes up heads and give the true answer if it comes up tails.
You have to be careful with this. You did partially cover it in your answer, but it's worth repeating.
You're presumably doing this sort of blinding because one of the answers is problematic in some sense (incriminating, etc, etc).
Assuming this is the case, note that it is still safer for a person to answer with "not a secret witch" regardless of the coin flip. You noted that even a perfectly fair coin allows someone to do a Bayesian update, which on its own can be not the end of the world - but you don't get that entropy back.
There are also serious questions around details like "how likely is the coin flip to be observed or rigged".
(And even assuming that things are perfectly safe/secure - what happens when P(thinks this is a trap | secret witch) != P(thinks this is a trap | !secret witch)?)
I don't think pithy statements in general are very good for getting people to change their minds. The best thing I've found is to take people's concerns seriously, even if you privately think they're silly. There are lots of different reasons why people are hesitant, so it's probably best to directly address those rather than try to have a one liner knock down.
Ultimately we know covid is really really bad. And the chance of catching it remains high in most of the world. Vaccine side effects would have to be extremely bad to make the tradeoff negative. Any side effect that hasn't shown up in large numbers already is almost certainly not in that range
Covid is really, really bad for some people. How do I tell physically fit young people that a vaccine (that they think could cause infertility or narcolepsy) is definitely better, especially if they don’t believe a lot of the covid numbers/haven’t witnessed covid complications personally. It makes me think of this line that “some Americans would live near Chernobyl because they can’t see any radiation.”
Newer variants of Covid (particularly the one in Brazil) are proving more dangerous to younger people - current vaccines are also good for reducing the danger of those, and the less we have the disease circulating, the less likely another dangerous variant will emerge.
This makes vaccinations for the population obvious in the big picture but invokes tail effects and altruism. The increased danger to young people in some variants makes vaccinations in young people more clear as well.
How bad is the swine flu vaccine narcolepsy, compared to a week or two of suffering so bad you can't walk across the room? (That's the most common description of covid from friends of mine in their 30s that have had it.)
If it is narcolepsy as I understand it, then 2 weeks of suffering is much preferable. There would be a light at the end of the tunnel. And my experience with people in their 20s getting covid is headache and loss of smell, but a bunch never even knew they had it. I think it is obvious that society is better with everyone vaccinated, but convincing low-risk people is difficult. I believe the narcolepsy side effect is a steel-man argument for the young, vaccine-hesitant. I find it difficult to argue without invoking altruism, tail-effects, or trust in medicine. That's why I liked Scott quantifying the approximate risks. However, it would most likely be impossible to quantify the trust levels of the new mRNA vaccines compared to the Pandemrix vaccine. How can a layman know that Pandemrix was unusually bad? I hope that as we continue to vaccinate 100's of millions and keep track of vaccinated individual's side effects, that the data will validate the vaccines beyond the point of refutation. This takes time, and I don't have a response to someone who is young and healthy and doesn't want the vaccine.
> How do I tell physically fit young people that a vaccine (that they think could cause infertility or narcolepsy) is definitely better
What's the chance of COVID causing unknown long-term side effects, like infertility or narcolepsy, or a shorter life-span?
I'd estimate we understand the long-term effects of covid much less well than we understand these vaccines, and only one of those things was designed to specifically avoid negative impact on humans.
It seems odd to me that these young healthy people want to pick the best outcome for covid (that it has no effects we don't yet know about), but the worst for vaccines (that they have significant unknown effects). In all probability it's the reverse, since covid mutated randomly, while vaccines were designed to minimize unknown effects.
This helps me clarify why I felt they were arguing in bad faith. It does seem ridiculous/unfair to assume the vaccine would be worst case and the virus would be best case. Thanks for framing it that way.
1. Testing rules out any high-frequency side effects. It looks like the Pandemrix narcolepsy was 1/20,000 people, which is the level that testing might miss. But enough people have already gotten COVID vaccinations that we probably would have detected even something at that level by now (unless it takes a long time to develop, which doesn't match how I think these things work, or a long time for people to notice, which is unfortunately possible but less likely given eg how quickly Europe caught a mild and kind of irrelevant blood clotting problem with AZ).
2. I think about 1/10,000 healthy young people die of COVID (see https://freopp.org/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-vs-influenza-or-pneumonia-by-age-630aea3ae5a9, I'm looking at the 25-34 bin) . So even if the COVID vaccine is exactly as bad as Pandemrix, you're trading a 1/10,000 risk of death for a 1/20,000 risk of narcolepsy, which seems pretty good. But also, Pandemrix is an unusually bad vaccine so probably the COVID vaccine is safer, and also you are being altruistic by getting the COVID vaccine since you're helping prevent the pandemic from spreading to older people at more risk.
The blood clotting problem is not mild, a quarter of the flagged cases died. Though probably the numbers can be improved if it is watched for and treated when symptoms develop.
Nitpick: these are young people, but not necessarily healthy young people. Those young people who die of covid-19 could be concentrated among unhealthy young people.
Sure - but the hesitant person may well be an "unhealthy young person" by these same criteria. Depending on how you define "healthy", lots of people aren't.
Is it possible that by pursuing the presumably altruistic route of vaccinating everyone as soon as possible that we are driving the virus to people that were previously less at risk? Or increasing the eventual risk to the vulnerable in the form of a more dangerous variant? I have read / listened to a few concerning opinions about the consequences of a non-sterilizing vaccine on viral mutation and escape. While the vaccination campaigns in some developed countries will likely provide reprieve to those countries from near term transmission and serious disease rates, the global campaign of vaccination doesn't seem like it will happen quickly enough to mitigate mutations that could bypass current vaccine tech.
I'm not sure what you mean by "non-sterilizing vaccine". And every person vaccinated is one less person who can catch and then incubate the virus, thus preventing more avenues for mutation. Vaccination is the single best way to prevent worse variants from developing. Also, your comment seems to imply that there is some set amount of infection to go around, and therefore vaccinating healthy people will push more infections onto vulnerable populations and that is not at all how epidemiology works.
The more people vaccinated, the fewer routes of infection there are for _everyone_, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, and the fewer chances for mutation. Vaccines have about the largest positive externalities of pretty much anything that your average person can do.
Maybe not the best way to phrase what I was trying to say... more precise... a vaccine that does not impart sterilizing immunity. To be fair, there are very few vaccines that have been developed that do so. Plus, we have never eradicated a respiratory virus and I seriously doubt that Covid will be our first. Vaccinated people will certainly have better outcomes should they be infected with the current forms of the disease and those who are vaccinated and infected will certainly transmit less disease than those who are not vaccinated. My questions were more directed at the potential for variants developing that can avoid current vaccines that arise out of our inability to vaccinate the world (in contrast to a few developed nations). Are we inadvertently pushing a problem of the old and unhealthy onto the young and healthy?
I don't understand how you think we are increasing the risks to young and healthy people.
Making some people immune makes it harder for the virus to spread, which normally means that vaccinating one person makes any given non-vaccinated person LESS likely to catch the disease, because it has fewer paths to get to them.
Mutations occur to individual organisms essentially at random, so the odds of any given mutation occurring are higher in a larger population. So if fewer people get sick, that normally means LESS chance for the virus to mutate into something bad.
Neither of those depend on fully eradicating the virus. Vaccinating just +1 additional person still means less infection risk for the unvaccinated and fewer mutations.
The only potential negative effect I can see is that some people might decide to act in a riskier way because they believe they're safe. But I think it would be very very hard for people to act enough riskier to cancel out the benefits of vaccinating people. I've been told that public safety measures (e.g. seat belts) always bring out people worrying that the benefits might be canceled by people acting riskier, but that historical data consistently shows that people still end up safer overall. It seems especially unlikely for the benefits to be canceled out in this case, because vaccine protection is invisible, and we have lots of people who don't seem to trust vaccines even intellectually, so the FEELING of safety is small compared to the actual safety.
Vaccines to provide immunity for most people. Like you said, no vaccine is 100% effective, and it is still possible to get COVID after being vaccinated, but many _fewer_ people will get COVID, not just have less bad outcomes, but most people will straight up not get the disease, at any level. Again, not 100%, but most people.
So even if you only vaccinated people in 1st world countries and no one in a third world ever got a single dose, vaccines would _still_ be better for those hypothetical residents of 3rd world countries because the people in 1st world countries who won't get it will provide fewer potential mutations.
In practical terms, if no one in 3rd world countries got vaccinated, the fact that rich people did would likely have no big impact, but the point is that vaccinating people, at any level, in any region, _can't make it worse for anyone else_. Vaccines have _only_ positive externalities.
You seem to think that vaccinated people will act like some kind of resevoir that will provide greater levels of mutation that will make it worse for non-vaccinated people. This isn't true. Vaccinated people _can_ sometimes, at very low levels, get the disease. But even in the much rarer (relative to unvaccinated populations) cases that they do, they will usually have lower viral loads etc. All of this adds up to mean that vaccinated populations provide DRAMATICALLY fewer opportunities for the types of mutations that you are talking about.
To reiterate the point I made in my first comment: vaccines are BY FAR the best tool we have to combat the possibility that worse strains will evolve an spread.
Variants could potentially evolve that will be able to escape vaccines (although all the evidence is that current variants are protected against by our current vaccines), but this is much much much more likely to happen in a situation where very few people get vaccinated than one in which many people get vaccinated.
I just don't understand what mechanism you think it is by which vaccinating people could cause harm to other, unvaccinated people. That's not how epidemiology works.
One thing that I see missing from a lot of these calculations is that you need to multiply the probability of being harmed by covid by the probability of getting covid, possibly also taking into account your personal behavior profile. I can see that for someone who doesn't really interact with other people that much, the scale could still be tipped in favor of not getting the vaccine.
Well, it's looking like the Astra-Zeneca vaccine is probably causing a very rare brain blood clotting / platelet malfunction phenomenon with increased frequency. Only on the order of one in a hundred thousand, but the syndrome is very rare normally so it has been noticed.
It has to be said that a young healthy person probably doesn't have much more than that chance of getting Covid and dying from it, at least in a given year, so it is significant.
> Well, it's looking like the Astra-Zeneca vaccine is probably causing a very rare brain blood clotting / platelet malfunction phenomenon with increased frequency
Is it? My impression was that blood clots show up equally frequently in non-AZ-vaxxed people anyway, and "this extremely specific form of blood clots is slightly more likely as shown by a dozen documented cases out of millions" sounds like p-hacking.
I've been hearing lots of mixed descriptions, mostly from people that don't have access to the actual data. If described merely as "blood clots", then they've been about as common as in the broader population. At least some sources are claiming that there is something very distinctive about these clots, that you wouldn't usually see one in a few million young people, and they've seen a few dozen. I don't exactly know who to believe yet here - it could well be p-hacking, or it could be that this is just the kind of thing that hasn't been properly written up yet but is clear if you're very familiar with this kind of condition.
If one particular kind of rare blood clot is showing up a lot, but TOTAL blood clots (of all kinds combined) are not elevated, that sounds like p-hacking to me. Or at worst, it changes what kind of blood clot you get, but doesn't give you one if you weren't getting one anyway.
I've also seen complaints that some sources are comparing to the rate of blood clots in the general population, when the vaccine is being targeted towards elderly and unhealthy people who have higher base rates.
Regardless, even if this were real, it sounds like it's much smaller than the risk of covid. Zvi did an estimate that even assuming that 100% of the reported blood clots were caused by the vaccine and that 100% of those blood clots were lethal (both crazy assumptions), the total statistical deaths from vaccinating the entire US population with that blood-clot-causing vaccine would be roughly equal to the excess deaths from delaying vaccination efforts by 1 day. (One of several complaints Zvi makes in an extended rant here: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/03/18/22454/ )
I think it's quite clear that the danger from this is less than the danger from covid, even in people in their 30s where they have concern, as long as covid is still spreading at several dozen cases per hundred thousand people per day.
But I think there's a lot of confusion about the actual frequency of the clots - Zvi is comparing annual frequency of clots to the number of clots that have appeared in a particular two month period, and in that particular post isn't noting that a bunch of those clots have appeared in younger people than the general distribution of the vaccine so far.
It still seems stupid to delay the vaccine for it. But it does seem plausible that it's a real thing.
I would strongly advise against this. Later xkcd (including that comic) tends to fall under Scott's categories of (Eighth Meditation) "bingo cards" and (Varieties of Argumentative Experience) "gotchas" - neither of these are useful tools for convincing people.
I lift Olympic weights. I found some 20 year old fitness coach to help me make a plan and he texts me every day to make sure I stick to it. It's only $100/3 months which is incredibly worth it for me, who's main problem is standing up from my desk, walking over to my weights, and doing them.
Running. After 30 years, it's habitual and as such rarely seems like drudgery or hard work, although I have seldom sensed a runners-high. Some major reasons are getting a good workout in a short period of time (50 minutes) and that it gets me outdoors and exposed to sunshine and various scenery.
As far as scientific principles there's certainly much work showing the benefits of running, and a far lesser amount (that get a disproportionate amount of attention) showing downsides.
My exercise routine is based on the extremely scientific/rational principle that "the most effective and beneficial exercise is the kind that I will consistently do."
So I came up with the simplest exercise routine that I will never skip or cheat. Optimizing for any other factor has always resulted in me eventually quitting for upwards of a year of time.
Currently I'm at:
- Do 100 push-ups in the morning in sets of 33/34 (I started with just 10 pushups total and slowly worked my way up)
- Do 20 crunches and then 10 left side crunches and 10 right side crunches
- Do 20 squats (recently added kettle bell weights to this)
Gymnastics. (Which peripherally includes most common form of "exercise" during physical preparation in some way or another)
1 & 2
I competed as kid, but I enjoy being able to progress as an adult despite the cultural narrative (in gymnastics) being that it's not really possible to do so. I like being my own coach and I haven't found another sport that requires such a large base of physical preparation but *also* technical proficiency in a number of varying ways.
Huge influence, interpreting S&C literature is necessary for being your own coach, and just for understanding the biomechanics of the sport in general.
Also dealing with *fear* is a large part of the sport, understanding when you are actually ready to perform a certain tumble, vs when you *feel* ready, when you need to push yourself... With the risk of failure being a potentially catastrophic injury.
I could talk all day about this if anyone's actually interested, but it's a very niche sport and I occupy a very niche place in it :D
Wow. I am astonished. You’ve taken the words out of my mouth, as I was going to write practically the same thing.
Do me a favor and get a hold of me! The gymnastics + SSC connection + propensity to post instead of only lurk resolves into a strong desire to chat. I’m on Twitter or Instagram at my first and last name, Max Efremov
I think Rock climbing seems to be a pretty common place for ex gymnasts to end up in my experience.
Finding a gym to get the hours in is a constant pain for me especially, for a number of reasons; I'm very tall/heavy for a gymnast and I'm based in a place without large amount of equipment.
A lot of gyms will have "open gym" sessions where you can turn up, pay a small fee and train, so I use those wherever I can.
I also coach, so I can use my home gym in a limited capacity for my own training, but thats difficult, as it's a very small gym. If theres nobody else there, it's not responsible for me be throwing anything that has a real risk of injury ie, pretty much anything. And if there *are* people there there's probably not enough room for me to be doing my own thing.
So to answer you question: I have a very complicated spreadsheet schedule where I split my training across multiple gyms over the course of any given week.
The implied question of what *you* could do if you wanted to train I'm not sure I can answer though, because I think it varies a lot by country/community. I know adults in the US often have trouble finding a place to train because of insurance issues for example.
I would definitely start being seeing if you could find an open gym to mess around in though, I think they are lot more common than most people think, but that are often poorly advertised (if at all).
Another HS gymnast! I only do some simple floor excercises now… I don't have access to any equipment where I live, but I plan to move to a bigger city. I hope I'll remember this conversation and look for one of those "open gym" sessions that you mention in another comment.
I would love to try the balance beam and uneven bars again! Or some basic and cautious version of it since it's been a while. Vault is not an option (knee injury).
And I don't have any social media, but it's been nice reading you both here!
I'm interested, and unfortunately don't have any social media you can reach out to ;).
I'd love to get some of the gymnastic basics under my belt, but it's never been something I've had a talent for. Even a handstand would be great.
Is the only way to join a club? What can you do on your own? What's the best way to develop the skills? And what are your thoughts around when and how to push through fear?
Basics like a handstand are definitely something you can teach yourself. As a community there are certainly far more resources than there used to be a few years ago.
How far you can go on your own, without a coach or access to some kind of equipment very much depends on your motivation, knowledge, and fitness.
If you are interested in learning the basics of *gymnastics* tumbling or specific apparatus work, ect. There are actually exist a lot more adult gymnastics classes than people think, so I would definitely check what exists in your area; Be warned that this stuff is often poorly advertised, or not advertised at all (as I was saying in another comment).
I highlighted gymnastics there because there are certainly offshoots that are more accessible even though they are slight different. For example the Circus community often does a very good job catering to adults, and there are often a much wider range of classes to choose from if you go down that route.
For instance the handbalancing/calisthenics/bodyweight training side is something that really blew up with all of the worldwide lockdowns and is definitely something that a lot of resources exist for to teach yourself.
There is also the "tricking" community as well, which is something that's a lot easier to learn without specialised equipment if you are getting into the basics.
Sorry if those are some slightly vague answers to those questions, if you want to know more I'm happy to elaborate, but that answers very much depend on the training context, and what you are looking to do.
Re: Fear
I've already given a wall of text, so I might think of something to write up on that that's a bit more contained... I have a lot of thoughts but I'm struggling to structure them in a way that useful to your question, and also doesn't span several essays ;)
Ah don't worry about it. Very much appreciate the answers given. They may be a bit vague, but I think they've given me a lie of the land and ideas of how to get up and running once the pandemic dies down.
I run. I enjoy playing a number of different sports, but since running is an individual sport there's much more flexibility in training and competing. I very much enjoy the competition of racing (anything from 800m to a half marathon is fine by me), so that helps me motivate myself to train. It's also fairly cheap (the biggest expense is new shoes every 4-6 months, plus a race every other month or so, at least in pre-coronavirus times) and can be done anywhere. As for question 3, I'd say not really, but I do like reading about training, sports science, etc. On that note I think people interested in these topics might like The Sports Gene by David Epstein and (especially if you're into endurance sports) Endure by Alex Hutchinson.
1. Some mishmash of "functional fitness" (read: CrossFit without all the stupid kips and gimmicks, even though I coached CrossFit for years) with kettlebells, air bike, squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, and olympic lifting.
2. Bang for buck and longevity, impossible to beat.
3. That being said, what larsiusprime said about consistency is hard to argue with. The best workout is the one that you do.
Bicycling, outdoors when I can, on the trainer (with TrainerRoad) when I can't. Because I can't inline skate any more, and I can tolerate bicycling; mostly exercise is really boring, and I find running the bicycle trainer boring too but tolerable because I can at least watch TV.
No scientific principles involved, except the ones Coach Chad of TrainerRoad uses (which may be real or 100% bro-science, I have no idea)
Gymnastics training. I tried running, weights, basketball, tennis, biking and gymnastics. The only thing that stuck for me is the Gymnastics Bodies training from Coach Sommer. I started very slowly and now, two years later, I’m happy with my progress, the program and I hate to miss a day which is a drastic change for me.
I lift weights and I think there is a lot to like about it from a rationality/scientific perspective.
1) It's highly predictable: if you progressively increase the amount of weight you lift each session, you will predictably get stronger and more muscular. Similarly for diet, if you eat at a caloric surplus (deficit) for at least a few weeks, you will predictably gain (lose) weight.
2) It has lots of clear benefits in other aspects of your life: you feel happy immediately afterward, you get a sense of progress/achievement over time, it makes you more physically attractive, it precipitates hormonal changes that improve your general mood, and it allows you to eat more (which is fun).
3) It allows lots of time to let your mind wander: if you're lifting heavy, you will typically rest for a few minutes between sets, which allows you to think about other topics in a way that is difficult with other types of exercise (though I find running is also good for thinking).
4) As you get more advanced, it gives you the opportunity to conduct little experiments to determine which approaches work best for you. Do you respond better to full body routines, or an upper/lower split? Do you break plateaus more easily by increasing volume, or by decreasing it? It feels almost like solving a puzzle that is specific to your body.
Like others here, the exercise I will consistently DO is the most beneficial. In my case that is;
- thinks that are smooth (think biking, ice skating and roller blading, swimming, skiing) as opposed to jolty (running, racquet sports ...)
- things that are not boring and repetitive. I especially avoid those that are boring and repetitive and require some attention to do correctly. So no weights, no machines, no circuits. I generally prefer classes with great music and someone unpredictably yelling out things to do. HIIT works great for this right now (well, pre-and-post-COVID gym closures).
- nothing that involves a ball (poor coordination) or a team (too much responsibility to others, which is very stressful when you're not well coordinated!)
Weirdly, I don't find the smooth stuff boring, I guess because I can completely zone out, while the activity itself will give me feedback if I'm not doing it quite right. In classes the trainer gives info to maintain good form, and feedback if I'm off, so I don't have to pay too much attention to that.
Based on the fact that walking is the exercise I can make myself do repeatedly, whether by just making a walk take up ever-more of my commute (pre-pandemic) or going for a stroll listening to an audiobook or doing some form of meditation.
Yoga/Bodyweight conditioning/balance because 'lift ever-more heavy weights' isn't really a goal that appeals to me. 'Be able to do a handstand' working up to 'walk on my hands' or 'do a cartwheel' are skills that feel much more appealing as simply gaining more control over my body and making it do fun things.
Running every second day, starting with the couch to 5k plan you can find in various places. Motivated by the research on mental health benefits of exercise. Moderately strenuous aerobic exercise seems to be the best. I used to lift weights pre pandemic, had a similar but lesser effect, and found I was often stopping my progression due to injury or fatigue.
Spent most of my life doing an 80-20 split between running and lifting weights, including a lot of long races up to 100k. But I started getting a nagging worry about wear and tear on the body: ie, joint damage and elevated heart rate for long periods of time. Did some research and came across this TED Talk by a cardiologist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6U728AZnV0). It changed my mind and I've shifted almost entirely to an exercise regime that combines lifting for strength with short bursts of cardio. Not as satisfying as running, sadly, but that's my 2cents.
Thanks everyone for your replies, I'll add my two cents here.
1. I tend to alternate between weight training and carido 50/50 throughout the year. Within those, I have little mini blocks with their own goals.
2. I think novelty is a good way to make progress. But its definitely a good way to keep me interested. I get mentally stale easily.
3. I tend to look for gurus that know the literature, but don't dive too deep myself. Then I look to implement the principles in the simplest way possible. I think it's been influential for me, but more in who I choose to listen to.
I’m a big fan of bouldering (rock climbing short heights with no ropes or equipment, typically with a mat underneath). I find it appeals to my desire to solve puzzles, and I can go for up to 2 hours without getting bored. Strongly recommend at least trying it out for people with relatively light builds (it’s possible with any physique, but easier if you’re naturally light).
Who is the "direct air capture charity whose offset claims are extra-trustworthy"? I just had to cancel my recurring donation to Clean Air Task Force due to a credit card compromise, but would consider shifting my donation to another more effective climate organization if there's one available.
I don't think direct air capture is a good substitute for CATF; direct air capture is a good way of getting a hard to deny offset, but not really cost effective in fighting climate change.
I've heard Coalition For Rainforest Nations is good.
I'm generally in favor of taking into account such concerns, but in this case I'm having trouble imagining the exploit. What sort of review are you imagining that is low quality but presses the right buttons in order to score cheap votes from readers of this blog? We're not exactly talking about toddlers being exploited to tap brightly colored video thumbnails here.
I liked Scott's decision to abolish the "hearts" on comments. There's a dynamic with those things where Person A says unpopular thing and gets 2 hearts, Person B dunks on him and gets 10, Person A quits for a friendlier forum and you end up with an echo chamber.
I suppose one could imagine the same thing here where a review gets votes for according with the average ASX reader's world view, but the stakes are a lot lower. Hard to believe this forum would vote for a truly bad review, worst thing is that a slightly less deserving writer wins a thousand bucks. And as with regular democracy, it's probably the best system for all the flaws.
Finding a 100% view might be hard, but there are plenty of views that would hit 80% or 90%.
The big ones are "thinks analysing things is worthwhile", "is willing to read long things", and "isn't firmly pro-SJ".
#1 seems almost tautologous given that they're reading a blog which analyses things and are being asked to vote for (implying analysis) a review (which is itself analysis, and which they presumably thought worthwhile enough to read).
#2 is because Scott is not known for concision and ACX commenters are selected heavily for people who have read a lot of squid314/SSC/ACX (I mean, it's not *physically impossible* to comment here without it, but it would be unusual).
#3 is because both Scott and Substack have an extremely-poor reputation in SJ circles, to the point that you can lose credibility by admitting association with either. Making an account here and participating in an official ACX event would generally imply that one puts little stock in that reputation and is willing to risk that loss of credibility.
Somebody has to choose the winners, and it's either going to be me or the readership. I would rather people write things my readers like than things that I like, especially since I'm easier to manipulate (you all know what kinds of things press my various buttons).
Is that its cost before or after extracting it from the atmosphere, and does it take into account the massive prior investments required to get carbon capture technology developed in the first place?
A tree is ~50% carbon by weight, and a 422 kg tree isn't a very large tree. Chuck an acorn in the ground and forget about it and you'll capture ten tons of carbon over the next few decades.
Right.. so Scott clearly is not being greedy as he is giving half to charity, but the whole carbon offset constraint seems pretty trivial. I would guess for Scott there are larger carbon implications from the increased demand from him supporting NFTs than there are from participating in a single NFT.
I like to do intellectual hygiene on tree-planting claims on the internet. I know you didn't mean this as a serious claim, but it's got the issue that most tree-planting claims do. In this case (and most tree-planting cases) it's very far from clear that one's action makes any counterfactual difference to how many trees there are. The stronger action is usually just credibly committing not to continue mowing a piece of land, so that its natural vegetation grows and captures carbon - you'd have to do this anyway if you were planting trees, and if you do this, then planting a tree won't make a big difference unless the tree survives (which either means that you're committing further to actively keeping it alive, or it's a plot of land where trees will grow on their own without much human intervention as long as you don't mow them every time they sprout).
$10 using normal offsets, but there's some skepticism about whether that works. I think it's about $300 by direct air capture (going off memory, I might be totally wrong), so I gave a $3000 offset.
I would love to know your take on NFTs. They seem silly to me. If seeing Michelangelo’s David on my computer was as good as having it in my house, I don’t think I’d bother to buy it and I doubt anyone would care if I did. But that’s not very sophisticated and I’d love to have my opinion challenged/supported.
I also think they're a bit odd, but you could probably make the case they're no more silly than autographs or first edition books. Neither of those change the actual content of the thing, but they're still collector's items. I'm not too big on autographs either, but I think they're kinda neat, and I have trouble drawing a clean line between them and NFTs.
Or it could just be like any other crypto, where rampant speculation abounds.
I agree with you that collecting first edition books is usually just collecting things *because* they're hard to collect.
A very common rationale for collecting first edition books is that the first edition is, besides proofs and manuscripts, the edition that is closest to the author's hand. This is silly in the case of books where the publishers (or author!) did things the author hated and wasn't able to fix until later editions - ie most famous books. But you still see people who want to own the first editions of 'American Gods' and 'Notre Dame de Paris' and 'The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent'.
Another common rationale is that they want to own a copy of the book that changed the world when it first came out. This makes sense for stuff like 'Origin of the Species', but c'mon, the first edition of the 'Rubiyat' changed literature practically zero, and it's still more sought after than Shakespeare's eyeteeth.
And then there's the rationale that if you're writing a paper on old books then you want to have the edition in question. That makes total sense. It also makes sense if you, for example, want to own a pre-2008 edition of 'The Two-Income Trap' where it says that securities backed by unwise mortgages are a bad idea: because the first edition was ahead of its time and cool to own for that reason. But that does not explain why people fight tooth and nail over first editions of Hemingway.
I assume that there are non-specious reasons to collect first editions besides just the thrill of the hunt. But I'm pretty sure that such reasons are the exceptions to the rule.
Book collector here. While I can't speak for every other collector, and some people who spend tons of money at auctions are just looking for a "cool" investment that they can brag about at parties (probably the same people who are investing in NFTs nowadays), for me the allure of antiquarian books is that they are like little time capsules. An early edition of an old book takes you back to the period when the book was just entering the world, before it was famous, and the first person who held it wasn't yet aware that one day its author will be a household name.
More generally, what makes any old book awesome is to be able to think about all the people, long-dead, who held it in their hands long before you, and all the journeys and travails it had to endure to finally make it into your hands right now. This is of course also why books that are signed, or that belonged to a famous person, or that have some interesting story behind them (e.g. a book that was read by inmates in a gulag) are more valuable.
Historical importance and rarity make a book valuable, but for copies of the same edition, the book's condition has a huge impact on price. This also makes sense, since if a book is like a time capsule, the most amazing time capsules are the ones that barely seem to have aged in a century or two. To go really romantic for a second (sorry about that), a book like that feels almost like a promise of immortality. I'm always super thrilled when I find a book from 1900, even if it's a forgotten title without much value, and it looks like it was printed yesterday.
Anyway, a charitable explanation of the high prices of rare books is that this way, you ensure the book will remain in good condition for years to come. If a first-edition Darwin cost $100, random people would buy it as a birthday present, the recipient would put in into a drawer somewhere, forget all about it, and perhaps trash it 30 years later during a move. If the book costs $10,000, it's fairly likely that the buyer will put it in a safe or a fireproof locker somewhere, that he/she will never forget about it, and that 100 years from now, the book will still exist.
I have a collection of books and manuscripts, even old civil war era Atlantic monthly magazines. I agree that holding the artifact in your hand is very important. I would not pay to own an old book if I would never be able to hold it...unless it was just for financial speculation, which is the only value in the NFT craze.
Yup, like the people who buy toys and never take them out of the packaging, so they can be re-sold at a premium later. Is it even really a 'toy' at that point?
I agree, these are two different factors that can make a book more interesting..usually it's one or the other, but they can also overlap, for example signed copies are often preserved in very good condition, or books that belonged to someone important - once they already have a story behind them, people will take better care of them.
Would it be accurate to say that you value antiquarian books as antiques that have the added value of containing words and thus information about the past as well as the emotions of those who lived then?
That's a very good way of phrasing it! I like handling antique objects in general, because they connect you with a past age, but while a knife or a hat speaks about the past indirectly (you need a lot more imagination to think about who produced it, what they were thinking...), a book or similar object will literally tell you this, to some extent.
Going back to the topic at hand, none of this is the case with NFTs, of course..
Speculative bubbles in silly assets seems like a perfect place to apply the Lindy effect. When something has been valuable for centuries (like first edition books) it's likely that they'll continue to be valuable for a while to come, but when something has only been valuable for months (like NFTs) it's reasonable to guess that it's unlikely to persist for many years.
I think the more general rule is that a thing created with the specific intent or expectation that it will be a valuable collector's item for future generations, is highly unlikely to be a valuable collector's item for future generations. Collectability is a function of "authenticity", and most people instinctively bounce off anything they recognize as an attempt to manufacture "authenticity" as a side effect of general anti-fraud heuristics.
A thing created without the specific intent or expectation that it will be a valuable collector's item for future generations, is also highly unlikely to be a valuable collector's item for future generations. But it won't have a collector's premium baked into its first-sale price, and you may be able to beat the market by properly assessing its aesthetics.
For what it's worth, Centipede Press books tend to appreciate, but they've only been doing major publishing since 2001. They seem to hit a sweet spot in terms of printing quality and smallish print runs.
I admit it-- I'm buying their complete short fiction of R. A. Lafferty series.
I think there are things produced as collectable which retain or gain value, but forget about it with *mass-produced* things which are presented as collectable.
I'm not sure authenticity explains your general rule.
Original Star Wars toys in good condition are rare and valuable. They're rare because the manufacturer underestimated the demand, and because almost all of them ended up actually being played with.
Prequel Star Wars toys are common and worthless. They're common because the manufacturer made enough of them for both children and speculators. (Speculators who didn't understand why the original toys had become valuable.)
I think the obvious response to your example is that anyone can buy a replica of Michelangelo's David that is indistinguishable from the original, but no one would expect the replica to be worth the same amount as the original. (I actually don't know if it's possible to buy a good replica of marble statues, but it's certainly possible for almost all famous paintings).
As Pycea said, there is some subset of art collectors who place a high value on ownership of "original" artwork. In the real world, it just so happens that original artworks are comprised of both 1) the collectible originality for the piece, and 2) the visual representation of it.
But there is no reason these two things need to go together in principle - we can produce 2 without 1, so why not 1 without 2? NFTs are basically doing just that: they represent a claim of ownership on the originality of a piece of art without also being a visual representation of that art, because the assumption is that the visual representation is a commodity.
One thing I don't get is - anyone can mint an NFT. As far as I know, an NFT doesn't actually store anything on the blockchain but a pointer to the artwork - there's no guarantee that the artwork is still hosted in the location being pointed to, nor is there a guarantee that there is only one pointer to that artwork. So an NFT is not unique nor original in any meaningful way once you look outside the blockchain.
An NFT basically is a piece of paper saying "I own this piece of art," and anyone with a printer can make a paper like that.
Yes, that's true. The thing that gives value to an NFT is the particular way that it was minted. Anyone can create an NFT which "points" to a piece of artwork. But in the context of art NFTs, the only tokens which have relevance are the ones which were minted by the artist themselves.
That Provenance article was interesting, I kind of wish the NPR article had simply noted that's what we're talking about here. It seems like NFTs have the ability to make something like provenance more reliable, particularly in terms of historical epochs, but don't really have much to say about the quality or importance of the artwork, which, to me, seems like the speculative aspect. Also, say we understand the provenance of a number of important existing artworks, it seems like adding these to the blockchain might be useful as a way of securing the records. However, in the long run, that just seems like the standard government 2.0 argument for blockchain (i.e. securing deeds and judgments, etc.) that I've been hearing of for maybe close to a decade. I wonder where the separation between signal and noise is with these contracts.
Yes, the quality and importance of the artwork are entirely up in the air. NFTs are basically just a framework for ownership of arbitrary digital assets. As you said, the speculative component of NFTs is guessing which ones have enough quality and importance to withstand the test of time. I own exactly one NFT which I think meets this threshold, and I think the fraction of NFTs currently in existence which meet it is significantly less than 1%.
I personally don't think there is a ton of value in porting non-blockchain-based information onto blockchains. The point of blockchains is to be decentralized and trustless, but if you port something over, then whoever is in charge of the porting represents a central authority that needs to be trusted. This is true whether we're talking about art provenance, deeds, or anything else.
I think blockchains work best in contexts which are self-contained, i.e. where the only information of relevance is information that exists natively on that blockchain.
Perhaps it's like getting a piece of paper that says "The bearer of this note owns Michaelangelo's David", signed by Tom Hanks, where Tom Hanks has sworn not to ever make a duplicate. The paper would not be honoured by the Galleria Dell'Accademia if you showed up there, but I like to think that the honour of ownership-per-Tom-Hanks of a famous piece of art is worth something at least, I'd pay fifty bucks for that piece of paper and hang it on my wall.
If you can get Tom Hanks to sign a few more documents granting ownership of other important things like the Eiffel Tower, the Moon, or the Number Twelve, I'm guessing you could start a bit of a speculative boom. And if someone else starts selling competing ownership of the same assets as conferred by Charlize Theron, then you can just say "phooey, who cares about Charlize Theron, the only Eiffel Tower ownership that counts is the one that Tom Hanks signed".
This is actually one of the best analogies I've heard!
Yes NFTs are dumb. But everything else collectible is also dumb. Maybe NFTs are a little dumber? And is there a reason to 'owning' a thing as an NFT rather than a HanksNote? Well not really, except that NFTs are the 'in thing' in the collectors market, so that market is making them more valuable. You don't 'own David' and have an NFT that proves you do. No, you 'own an NFT of David', and being an NFT is what gives it value. It sounds silly, but no more silly than whatever else the 'collectors market' has decided to assign outsized value to.
Imagine if Scott had given someone a paper certificate of ownership of one of his posts. Someone comes along wanting to buy an NFT of it. Scott says 'sorry, can't.. someone else already owns this certificate.... but go to talk to them, they might want to sell it'.
Do you think this buyer would care at all about acquiring the certificate? No... he doesn't want to own the blog post, he wants to own an NFT of the blog post.
I would disagree that everything collectible is dumb. People all over the world value antiquities, relics, beautiful old objects. A large part of art that is traded is old or unique. There is value in having the object, and we show our new art acquisitions to our friends and look for their approval. If I bought and NFT and showed my friends then I would be met with derision. Very few people are going to be impressed if you tell them you paid a lot of money for a line of code. Now that could perhaps change...
I think the right model for NFTs is not that people all over the world care about them (or will eventually care about them), but that a small subset of very wealthy people care about them.
A good analogy might be stamps. I think most people find rare stamps much less appealing than, say, the Mona Lisa. But there are enough people who do find stamps appealing that a market has formed around the more scarce ones.
NFTs are similar, in that the vast majority of people buying them are either crypto people, or non-crypto people hoping to sell to crypto people. The reason they're getting so much attention is that "crypto people" is a group that is now much, much wealthier than other similarly-sized subcultures. So even if there are only 10,000 people in the world who would consider buying a Beeple original, the winning bid among that subset is going to be an eye-popping number.
Ok, but what if you got one signed by the Galleria Dell'Accademia's leadership? They mint an NFT and declare that whoever owns the NFT has ownership of the Michaelangelo's David but granted them the rights to determine everything about where and when it's displayed. To sweeten the pot they informally agree to display whatever short message you want(you can change it once a month subject to review for obscenity) on a digital plaque nearby. Then they sell you the NFT for however much money.
sure, but that's harder to transfer and verify as not fake. If they do that on paper and I want to sell this ownership to a pal we need to get lawyers and notaries involved. With an NFT I just plop in their address and hit go. Ideally with some pretty fancy UX and security to make it hard to screw up.
> If seeing Michelangelo’s David on my computer was as good as having it in my house, I don’t think I’d bother to buy it and I doubt anyone would care if I did.
It seems basically a method of digital rights management. One could draw parallels with pirating music or a game vs buying it: you can "have" the media, easily, without "owning" it, and if ownership matters, this might be one implementation of it.
As hinted at elsewhere in thread you could also run something like a Substack or Patreon with NFTs, where subscribers get access to to what in meatspace would be a first edition. In such an instance it would be better visualized as an implementation of artist support.
Most art NFTs don't come with any form of digital rights. Owning a computer game means you have legal permission to play it; owning the actual IP for something gives you publishing rights; owning the NFT means you own the NFT, which lets you... Claim that you own the NFT?
If NFT's do come with digital rights, the applications are obvious. But even if they do not, that does not mean they do not have value.
Consider the case where an artist signs with a record label and the label now owns the rights to all of their music. If the artist releases a new album and both the artist and the label issue a NFT representing the "authoritative" copy of the album, which one do you think is worth more?
The example you give of a computer game is actually pretty apt. Ownership means many things. When you buy the game, you don't actually own it, you only bought a license to play it. An NFT is any particular product, it is a protocol for creating a provably unique entity. It might represent ownership, rights to entry, claims on other items, goodwill from the issuer, etc.
In this particular instance, the NFT buyer is buying goodwill from Scott, a symbol of SSC fandom, crypto shibboleth, and bragging rights.
NFTs don't confer digital rights - they are themselves a form of digital rights. This is true because if you own an NFT, no one else can own it. You actually summed it up very well with "owning the NFT means you own the NFT, which lets you... Claim that you own the NFT?"
This is obviously tautological, but so is the entire cryptocurrency sector. The only "right" conferred by my ownership of one Bitcoin is that I own one Bitcoin. That much is absolute, secured by an elaborate cryptographic system. No other guarantees are made - about how much that Bitcoin is worth, about whether anyone will accept it as payment, or anything else. It's a fully self-referential system, which only has value in the context of other systems because a large enough group of people behaves as if it does.
Interestingly, there are many other hugely valuable systems (corporate ownership, real estate titles, fiat currencies) which also have this self-referential property. It's just much more difficult to see it in those cases because the systems in question are so expansive.
That isn't true of corporate ownership and real estate titles. There may be some forms of ownership shares that legitimately grant nothing, but most grant some legal right to vote on business decisions plus a claim on profits. Your name on a deed filed with the local courthouse grants you the right to occupy a house and call the police whenever anyone else tries to occupy it. This is quite a bit more valuable than the owner of a house creating a token for you that you uniquely own with the address of the house embedded into it, but which grants no legal right to enter the property and do anything with the house.
Yes, but my point is that even those systems - legal ownership of corporations and real estate - are self-referential in that they only have value because a large enough group of people agrees to behave in a certain way.
A piece of paper that tells me I have claim to the profits of a business only has value to the extent that the operators of the business (or a court of law) recognize that claim. Similarly, a piece of paper that tells me no one else is allowed to occupy my house only has value to the extent that those who also want to occupy the house (or the police) recognize it.
This sounds reductive but I think it's a really important point. The vast majority of things that we own are not like this. Food, clothing, beds, cars, computers, televisions, etc - all of those goods are intrinsically valuable. My food/clothing/car would be useful to me even if no other humans existed. My share certificates and real estate deeds are not useful at all in the absence of other humans.
The point of making this comparison is not to suggest that NFTs are "on par" with corporate or real estate ownership. The point is just that humans have created tremendous value out of thin air in many domains by simply all agreeing to operate under the same rules. So the fact that NFTs grant the owner nothing except NFT ownership is not necessarily a knock against them. The important question is whether NFT ownership is something that enough people care about to imbue it with value.
Every claim of ownership or right is based on a collective agreement to act like it exists and to enforce it, if necessary. I own my house in the sense that I live there and have a key to lock the door, but much more importantly, if some stranger comes while I'm away on vacation and moves in, when I get home I can call the police and have him tossed out and charged with trespassing.
Without that collective agreement, my house would belong to anyone strong enough to take it from me. And that would remove my incentive to build or maintain or improve that home, unless I could find some way (joining a gang, hiring a private security company, supporting my local stationary bandit in exchange for his promise to protect my property rights) to prevent someone just taking it away when I was done. The agreement and mechanisms to protect property rights make it possible for us to get a lot richer and live a lot better in the real world, not just in the world of stocks or bank certificates.
I don't think "purely self-referential" and "only works if enough people go along with the system" are equivalent.
Real estate titles only work as long as most people go along with the system, but they make claims upon the real world. If someone tries to use your land, you can ask the government to intervene on your behalf, and the government will use your ownership of the title in its decision process about whether and how to intervene. The whole government only works as long as people buy into it, but the land is real; it's not an abstract self-referential construct.
Fiat money is mostly self-referential...except when the government demands that you pay your taxes in fiat money, and threatens to use force against you if you don't. Again, the whole government is dependent on most people playing along, but there's a real-world consequence (you can ultimately be jailed) that you care about. Even in a world with no governments and no fiat money, you'd care about being thrown into a jail; that part isn't self-referential.
There is no one plausibly threatening to imprison you unless you pay them in bitcoins or NFTs.
(I suppose there is ransomware that will lock you out of your computer unless you pay bitcoin. But I'm not aware of any ransomware makers that have issued their own new cryptocurrencies purely so that they can accept them in payment, nor do I think they could plausibly make that work. Fiat currencies originate with governments, not highwaymen.)
Note that in the art world, there are apparently forgeries that can only be detected by a team of experts working with advanced technical tools. Suppose I'm rich enough to buy some famous painting like the Mona Lisa and hang it on my wall. (It'll look great next to that hole in the drywall we keep meaning to repair.) Someone slips me a duplicate of very high quality, and keeps the original for himself. It's almost certain that I will never notice, never know, and that neither will any guest I have.
It's very odd that this has any extra value, even though it does and probably always will. I mean, I can say it has no value, and yet, I think if tomorrow some jackass slips past the security and burns the original of the Mona Lisa to a pile of ash, he's done something terrible and should probably rot in jail for many decades to come--even though it's clearly possible for a skilled artist to make a copy that's so good that nobody could tell the difference without taking it apart in a lab.
There's an extra ingredient there, which could maybe be called "physical historical value" or something. People care about physical objects that have had notable things happen to them. The Mona Lisa isn't just a painting with a certificate of authenticity of attached, it's the same canvas and ink that Leonardo touched.
There's nothing analogous to that for NFTs, although they do have other features in common like the artist having performed a speech act about them being "official" in some sense, and scarcity.
Yes, NFTs don't have a physical connection with the creator and humans evolved to care a lot about physical connections, but you could say they have an "attentional connection" with the creator. You know the creator did put time and effort into creating the NFT, and some people care about that. Maybe it doesn't feel as nice as a physical connection, but it's still something.
With the new Georgia election law, and a few other recent events, the blue tribe/"centrist" media/whatever you want to call them has spilled a lot of ink about how democracy is so important and republicans/conservatives/the red tribe/trump supporters is antidemocratic. Now there seems to be a pattern where the blue tribe strongly pushing something makes the red tribe start opposing it.
My question is, how big of a threat to democracy is this process emerging from media narratives? For the record, my two cents are that the Georgia election law is 1) silly and 2) probably not racist or antidemocratic, and that conservatives/red tribers/trump supporters actual-factual turning against democracy is the most probable way for democracy in the united states to collapse, so it's important not to pointlessly alienate them.
That seems like an overly simplistic definition of democratic/anti-democratic, right? We could have a voting system which is just a website where people can either click "Trump" or "Biden" and the winner is whoever gets the most clicks. That would make it maximally *easy* for people to vote, but it seems obvious that that system isn't more democratic than the current system (because it's so easy to vote that people can game the system without effort and the votes are meaningless).
I don't really know anything about the Georgia law, so I don't have a position on whether it's more or less democratic than what we have now. But I think the question of whether it's more or less democratic hinges on something more nuanced than whether it makes it more difficult for some people to vote in some cases. The real question is something like "is the increase in voting difficulty outweighed by some tangible increase in validity/accuracy of the final total?"
Exactly. The georgia election law is silly, but at the end of the day it's one of a long series of laws that have a well established record of disenfranchising exactly no one.
So, if these types of law are going to have zero effect why are the Republican legislatures so intent on passing them? To the extent of sacrificing serious political capital in other areas. At the very least they seem to be strongly convinced it will help their electoral outcomes
Again, Georgia's previous tightening of election laws didn't affect the margins, and it didn't affect black turnout. The most likely explanation is exactly what republicans say- that they genuinely believe that dead people voting is affecting margins in our elections and that these laws are necessary to combat that, or at least that passing laws to combat it is necessary to get reelected. Sort of like passing abortion restrictions that'll get struck down in the courts in a month, just like they did last time they were passed.
Does that explain all of the proposed changes? How does restricting voting hours or making it illegal to give food and water to those near a polling place actually help with the issue of dead people voting?
And to make voting more burdensome, shouldn’t the onus be on proving that there’s an actual issue? “I believe the election was fraudulent” is different from there being actual fraud.
Right. It's a minority party, and they have occasionally overtly admitted that they need to prevent people from voting to win elections. You could know nothing about the Georgia law, and just go on your priors based on what the party has done in the past.
The Republicans sincerely believe that election fraud is a major threat, because the Damn Dirty Democrats are trying to have all the illegal immigrants vote for them and maybe two or three times each. It doesn't matter whether this is true, or false, or used to be true in the era of Tammany and Daley but isn't true any more; they sincerely believe it so they are going to pass laws aimed at preventing election fraud.
The Democrats sincerely believe that election fraud is not a major threat but that vote suppression is, because the Damn Dirty Republicans are trying to stop all the People of Color from voting. It doesn't matter whether this is true, or false, or used to be true in the era of Jim Crow but isn't true any more, they sincerely believe it so they are going to pass laws aimed at expanding voting opportunities.
Pretty much any law that attempts to reduce voting fraud will incidentally make it harder to vote successfully; there will be finite effort involved, and some legitimate votes will be misidentified as fraudulent. Pretty much any law that attempts to expand voting opportunities will incidentally make it easier to vote fraudulently; the new voting opportunity is a new attack surface for the fraudster. So when the Republicans try to pass anti-fraud laws the Democrats will shout "vote suppression" and when the Democrats try to expand voting opportunities the Republicans will cry "fraud".
Since the Republicans sincerely believe voting fraud is a serious issue, they're willing to take that heat to address it. Likewise the Democrats on their end.
And of course the Democrats will shout "vote suppression" if there's actual vote suppression going on and the Republicans will shout "fraud" if there's actual fraud going on, but good luck figuring out the difference. So if you're interested in understanding what's actually going on, you're going to have to actually read the law yourself. Or hope that someone you trust will do an objective analysis of it for you, but you should be very careful who you trust in cases like this.
Thank you for that. I don't trust any news sources. (which is sad.)
I do wish we could have 'good faith' in politics. By which I mean that you accept the oppositions point of view and work from there. Rather than assuming ulterior motives.. other side bad.
I’m unaware of issues with invalid or inaccurate votes. If this problem exists then it should definitely be fixed. Where’s the proof of fraud?
We should do everything we can to ensure that everyone who is entitled to vote can vote. We should also make sure the system is secure against corruption. As I understand it, this bill makes it harder to vote and doesn’t solve any actual existing problems.
I'm not aware of any issues with invalid or inaccurate votes either, and like I said I don't know anything about the proposed law. I was just responding to your assertion that if a law makes it more difficult for some people to vote, then that law is necessarily anti-democratic.
This is from the docket of the Texas case against the bunch of contested states. This document is specifically about Georgia. Scroll down to section called "THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN GEORGIA WAS RIDDLED WITH ERRORS".
That's the trouble, how would you prove fraud in an election where there's no means of validating ballots? All we have is a giant pile of ballots, and we don't know where they came from.
Well, actually there's plenty of proof. It's just that the topic is hazmat, so proof doesn't reach high-status outlets. There are all kinds of statistical analysis, there is plain math that doesn't add up, there are all kinds of eyewitness accounts.
(A lot of this made it on the Supreme Court docket of Texas vs Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin; a lot did not.)
Clark County in Nevada automatically sent mail-in ballots to every "active" registered voter. What can possibly go wrong? After the election, more than one organization went and knocked at the doors of voters who allegedly cast suspicious-looking mail-in ballots and found that many of them never sent them in (and some of them had the blank ballots lying around still).
In Georgia, a surveillance video from the voting location that reported an outsized Biden vote spike in the early hours of the morning showed that the ballots in question were pulled out from under a table and counted with no observers in sight.
In more than one state, there were reports of voting machines being configured to not produce security logs (allegedly, with the default setting being to produce them). You would think somebody would want this explained, but no.
Hazmat is hazmat. Nobody wants this touched. This is what frustrates so many people, and this is why so many legislatures do what their voters want them to do - try to make sure that this doesn't happen again. This is probably the number 1 thing that voters want of their local legislatures now.
As for the Clark County thing, there are states that send mail-in ballots to everyone and have been doing so since well before the pandemic, so I'm not actually shocked and outraged.
The Georgia video was brought to the attention of the Georgia Sec of State (a Republican), who confirmed that observers were present, and the ballots in question were supposed to be there. Are the Republicans in on the conspiracy too?
As for the voting machines, there was a hand count done in Georgia (and other swing states), and it matched the electronic count.
Nobody is too scared to touch this stuff. Lots of people talked about, in court and in the media, for weeks and months after the election, and it all went nowhere. But I guess we're doomed to keep hearing the same arguments on repeat from now till 2024.
When the mail-in ballots first arrive, there's a signature and other information on the outer envelope, allowing you to check that this is an official ballot that you sent out and that it was filled out by a registered voter. This is done routinely as the ballots are being prepared for counting.
If you're worried about fraud in the counting machines, you can check the electronic count against a hand count. This was done in Georgia and other swing states.
The only thing that's not possible is identifying who cast a mail-in ballot *after* the ballots have been counted. If you could do that, it wouldn't be a secret ballot.
Where are the audits to verify elections were done properly? What portion of voter registrations are verified by the voting district? What portion of voter identities are cross checked? How frequently can votes be tracked from ballot printing to ballot counting?
I suggest that if one doesn't know the answers to these, one is taking the word of someone else that everything is above board.
I think the better concern is that something is "democratic" if it makes the result of the voting process a more reliable indicator of the actual preferences of the legal electorate, and "anti-democratic" if it makes the result of the voting process a less reliable indicator of the actual preferences of the legal electorate. If a change eliminates more votes from actual voters than it eliminates fraudulent votes, that seems prima facie like it's anti-democratic by this criterion.
A law that makes it more difficult for people *who are not eligible to vote in that election* to vote is *pro-democracy*. Examples of people commonly understood to not be eligible to vote in a given election are: persons who have already voted, persons who are not residing the area represented by the election (for example, people from outside the city don't get to vote for Mayor), persons who are legally barred from voting, (such as non-resident aliens, some felons, etc) and other minor categories. All of these categories have definitions. The goal of people who are not worried about illegal votes is to broaden the definition of 'legal voter' and decrease the verification requirements. The goal of people who are not worried about voter suppression is to narrow the definition and strengthen verification requirements. Whether or not one is worried about illegal votes or voter suppression is best predicted by party affiliation, rather than commitment to transparency, integrity, etc.
All the voter suppression laws are anti-democratic and a desperate attempt by Republicans to choose their voters rather than broadening their appeal. Every state has a process by which voters register and are validated. Statistically the existing systems work and very little illegal voting occurs. The Brennan Center "The Myth of Voter Fraud" { https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/myth-voter-fraud }
Voting for registered people needs to facilitate the population and be updated to modern technology with paper verification. In the last election, multiple hand recounts validated the original results.
See also
Network Contagion Research Institute
INVESTIGATING SOCIAL NETWORKS TO...
DIMINISH DECEPTION
MITIGATE MANIPULATION
HALT HATE
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) is a politically neutral, multi-disciplinary team of experienced neuroscientists, technology industry leaders, physicists, and machine learning experts from across academia and industry who have developed an integrated technology platform – Contextus { https://networkcontagion.us/technology/ } – to track and expose the epidemic of virtual deception, manipulation, and hate, as it spreads between social media communities and into the real world.
In pretty much every democracy throughout history there has been a dynamic of one side representing a non-majority, with lots of institutional power, vs a larger group with less power. Historically these situations tend to end with the small group expanding their coalition and becoming more moderate in the process, and the cycle continuing. The question is how much suffering has to happen to make that transition.
I am not an election law expert by any means, but I did not find any of the new laws to be egregiously onerous or partisan (especially after reading some comparisons to other state's laws like NY's). There seems to be some slack in giving authority to state officials to remove local election officials in "under-performing" districts, but the new laws also mandate Saturday early voting hours while making Sunday hours optional which seems like no net loss for voting opportunity and potentially a gain. The main drive of the new laws seems to be voting integrity and codifying voter ID requirements. I read that 62% of Americans think voter IDs should be required which I think is about as favorable a poll can be for a somewhat partisan issue in our current environment.
I don't understand all the implications of the law, but I'm a bit concerned about the state election board being re-cast as a dominated by the State Legislature and given the authority to oust county election boards and replace them. Seems like there's potentially a lot riding on what "underperforming" means.
This is, of course, in the context of the state legislature being Very Mad that certain state and local election officials didn't do the things they wanted while Trump was contesting the validity of the election. IDK if, under these laws, the state legislature could've screwed with that result more, but it seems like they're signaling to their voters that "Something went wrong in November/January, but we've fixed it now." I hope they're lying....
Antidemocratic? Depends on what provisions you're talking about.
The provisions that restrict early voting, dropboxes, etc, as well as the petty cruelties like prohibiting handing out water to people in line to vote, are unlikely to have much net effect on turnout, because the backlash-driven turnout increase will cancel out what turnout decrease they produce. But forcing voters to waste more effort on enduring difficulties in order to vote is arguably wrong in itself, and certainly inefficient, unless there is decisive evidence that doing so will substantially reduce fraud. And there is no such evidence AFAICT.
The most dangerously antidemocratic provisions, IMO, are those that hand more power to the state legislature to judge challenges to election results. It is hard to interpret this as anything but (a) spite against officials like Raffensperger who upheld Democratic victories in GA in the face of bad-faith, evidence-free challenges from Trump and his allies and (b) enabling a future Republican-controlled GA state legislature to overturn the will of GA voters in 2024 on similarly bogus grounds. As a general principle, anything that makes the process of adjudicating election challenges more partisan is really bad for democracy.
Whether you think the law is racist or not depends on your definition of racism. It is certainly motivated by a desire to make it harder for likely Democratic voters to vote and easier for Republican officials to throw out their votes. Given the racial distribution of the parties' voters, this disproportionately means weakening the voting power of Black voters and requiring more wasteful expenditure of effort from them. It's entirely plausible that many Republican GA legislators supported the law not out of any desire to disenfranchise Black people qua Black people, but out of a desire to maximize their own likelihood of staying in office and to engage in vice signalling. But the effect will nonetheless be to widen racial inequity for no good reason.
I don't know anything about the state of politics in Georgia, but a phrase like "petty cruelties such as prohibiting handing out water to people in line to vote" strikes the wrong note with me, especially since saprmarks in a comment above this explained *why* such a restriction is in place.
It hits me wrong because it sounds as if you have made your mind up already that the laws in question are wrong because the people proposing them have bad motives. What is this "souls to the polls" thing and why aren't people protesting about the separation of church and state? if it's black churches getting black voters out to vote for Democrats, isn't that interfering in an election - you see how easy it is to attribute bad motives? I've seen lots of proposals that churches should have their tax free status stripped away if the preacher preaches a sermon telling the congregants who to vote for, but the people demanding this don't seem to have a problem when it comes to preachers telling their congregants to get out and vote (for Democratic candidate):
""We gather in our churches on Sunday morning, you have morning worship and then after the service you get on the church buses, church vans, get in cars and people go to vote," says Bishop Reginald T. Jackson of the Sixth Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Jackson is the presiding prelate over more than 500 churches in Georgia."
The charitable explanation here is that churches, as large social entities in the district, are best placed to help people get out and vote who otherwise would lack a means of getting to the polls - just like the charitable explanation of not allowing water to be handed out is the one provided by saprmarks. If the church in question was driving congregants to the polls who all reliably voted Republican, I could assume we'd be hearing a lot of protest about church and state and interference in elections.
1. in fact I don't think a right wing church doing "souls to the polls" would provoke protest, and certainly it would not be seen as grounds for legal restrictions.
2. I am not aware of any evidence that people doing electioneering by offering water in polling lines is an actual problem.
3. After their actions in Nov-Jan, specifically their criticism of Raffensperger and their support of the "stop the steal" narrative, I do not think GA state legislators deserve charity in interpreting their motives. The notion that they are sincerely concerned with election integrity, rather than scheming to do everything they possibly can to make life harder for Democratic voters, is not believable based on their track record.
Just want to clarify that the new law does *not* prohibit Sunday voting or go after "souls to the polls" in any other way I know of. This has been widely misreported based on an earlier draft of the law.
About giving out water in polling lines: someone I know (context: I grew up in Georgia) commented the following, citing himself as an eye-witness.
"Politicians who weren’t on the election ballot gave out food and water in the county I used to work at. They never said “here is water, vote for X.” But they wore masks and clothing that made clear who they wanted you to vote for. Plus... they’re on the ballot just two years from now! People remember. It’s campaigning for the next election."
I've asked him if he has a link to reporting on this, but haven't gotten a response yet. I'll link it here if he does.
Fair enough and thanks for the details. I still think concern about that is unconvincing when it comes from people whose overall actions on voting procedures have the effect of making lines longer. Sincere concern for both voter welfare and preventing electioneering would couple restrictions on what can be given to those in line with substantial expansions of capacity that would make waits shorter and easier overall.
If I agreed with you than the overall effect of this law was to make lines longer, then I would agree with you that it is a bad law (I, like you, don't really think voter fraud is too big of a concern).
However, I think we disagree that the law, on net, will make voting harder. It seems to me that it will make voting easier (by codifying drop boxes, expanding early voting, and adding procedures for splitting up precincts where lines get too long). I also really like that it does away with signature matching, since that's probably a main cause of absentee ballots being tossed out.
The person I know has not gotten back to me, but I independently found some reporting on politicians handing out snacks to voters in line.
This [1] link is paywalled, but the National Review [3] summarizes it as:
"Georgia state Representative Roger Bruce and a local county commissioner were photographed handing out snacks to voters waiting in line at the courthouse of an Atlanta exurb. Bruce, a Democrat running unopposed for reelection, wore a “State Representative Roger Bruce” shirt, according to another newspaper."
In 2018, a candidate handed out pizza to voters in line, apparently with permission from the poll workers [2].
Prior to the January senate runoffs Secretary of State Raffensberger sent out a notice to election officials asking them to crack down on this practice [4]. I have a lot of positive affect towards Raffensberger after he stood up to lots of pressure from Trump to overturn the election, so this -- moreso even than the things I linked above -- convinces me that this has been an actual problem.
I think there's a lot of false information going around about the GA election law. Here's something I wrote on Facebook pushing back on this stuff (and towards the end I give my own opinion on the law as a whole):
A lot of what I'm seeing on social media about the new Georgia voting law seems false or badly misleading. This has given me a bad case of "people are wrong on the internet," so I'm writing this post to push back on some things that seem wrong to me.
No. An earlier version of the bill would have restricted early voting on Sundays, but the version of the bill that passed does not. Counties can have up to two Sundays of early voting.
No, it increases the number of drop boxes, and let me explain why there's so much confusion about this. Before 2020, Georgia had no ballot drop boxes. Then in 2020 there was this crazy global pandemic thing and Georgia allowed emergency use of drop boxes. Without the new law, things would go back to the pre-2020 status quo of no drop boxes. Instead, this law mandates drop boxes, though not as many as were used in 2020 (unless the pandemic emergency is still ongoing).
In other words, when people claim that the law decreases the number of drop boxes, that's true relative to 2020, but not true relative to what would happen if this law weren't passed.
Kind of, but this lacks important context. The law forbids giving "money or gifts" including "food and drink" to voters; the point is to stop people from campaigning at the polls by e.g. giving out bottles of orange juice labeled "GO ORANGE: VOTE FOR TRUMP" or whatever. Other states, like New York, have an identical law -- if you don't think those states are engaging in inhumane voter suppression, you probably shouldn't think Georgia is either.
The text of the bill makes it clear that this is an anti-voter intimidation measure. I'm not a lawyer, but I would be surprised if you would get in trouble for giving water to your grandma.
Also, the law makes an exception explicitly allowing "self-service water from an unattended receptacle."
No, and I'm really confused why people keep saying this. If you don't have a Georgia driver's liscence or ID, you can instead use the last four digits of your SSN. If for some reason you don't have that, you can instead use a utility bill, paycheck, or other official document that shows your name and address. This seems the same as (or more lenient than) absentee voter requirements in other states (e.g. it's the same for me in Massachusetts), and I'm not sure why I keep seeing claims otherwise. I think people might just be misreading the bill?
I don't think so. The previous law said that early voting would take place during "normal business hours," and the new bill replaces that with "9 a.m. through 5 p.m." as part of a push towards state-wide standardization. If that's not enough, local officials can extend it to 7am through 7pm. They can't extend it longer than that without a specific reason, but I guess I'd be surprised if any polling places used to keep longer hours for early voting anyway.
[I'm gonna stop refuting things and just do more FAQs now.]
Yes, it does, and this 𝘪𝘴 a potential cause for concern. The Secretary of State is removed as a voting member of the election board, a body mostly composed of members selected by the legislature (though there are restrictions, like that the members can't be political donors). I don't really know the reason for this, and I'm inclined to dislike it since I have a lot of positive affect for SoS Raffenburger after he stood up to Trump.
I disagree -- on the whole, I think that this law makes it much easier to vote in Georgia (relative to if the law hadn't been passed). Some things it does which make it easier to vote: mandate an extra Saturday of early voting, create absentee ballot drop boxes, and mandate the precincts whose lines are too long be divided into smaller precincts for the next election. Also, and this is pretty important, 𝗶𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴, which was a major cause of absentee ballots being thrown out.
There 𝘢𝘳𝘦 some changes which seem mildly restrictive, like shortening the window to request an absentee ballot, but I think these are outweighed by the good things it does.
Sure, this is fair. I guess I'm frustrated because I think Georgia passed a good law which made it easier to vote, and then everyone got whipped up into a frenzy, started baselessly claiming voter suppression, and called for boycotts of Georgian businesses. When someone does something you like but doesn't go far enough, it seems like you should go "this is a step in the right direction, but I'd like more," not lie and claim they're making things worse. Wouldn't it be sad if next time the GA legislature wants to expand voting access they don't go through with it because "well, last time we tried to expand voting access we were accused of racist voter suppression and a bunch of business fled the state, better not do 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 again"?
That is not quite a complete picture. The last four digits of the SSN are a verification method. You first need to obtain an absentee ballot in their name. Then there will likely be some sort of cross-check to see that someone has not voted twice. And if you are caught I do believe you are subject to criminal prosecution.
That's a pretty big if. All they'd know about me is a fake name, fake address and SSN of some other person (all is available on Darknet for pretty much every American that had ever gone online by now). If that's all that is required for me to vote in somebody's else name, that's zero security and "if they catch you, you'd be prosecuted" doesn't change it. It's like making a site where main admin login is literally "admin/password" and saying it's secure because if hackers get in FBI would prosecute them. It's plain insane to call a scheme like this secure, and people recognize it anywhere - except, for some reason, the elections.
But in order to make a difference you'd have to print 1000 fake ballots. And surely some of those would be flagged as double votes. Don't know what happens at that point, but it would certainly cause a scandal. Even if you don't get caught, at the very least everyone would know it happened. And if you're willing to risk a few years in prison there are probably all sorts of ways to mess with an election.
The real security hole is with electronic voting systems that have no paper trail. Without paper backup, if tampering is suspected there is nothing that can be done. It's just "well, computer says winner is..."
Printing 1000 of anything takes seconds (ok, minutes if you have a cheap printer). As far as I know, there's not even rudimentary security features on them, literally any printer can make them. Or you can get the official ones since apparently the barrier to getting one is pretty low. And avoiding double votes is easy - just vote for dead people, or for people that aren't going to vote - like sick, homeless, elderly, etc. Even if you trip up once or twice - there won't be any scandal, it will be written off as a glitch. I don't see where the risk is from - as far as I see now, everybody is pushing back hard against even an idea there's possible fraud. Imagine there would be a wide agreement in the industry that it's impossible to use somebody else's password online. If you did it, how would you be caught? Everybody would just assume that since it's impossible to use somebody else's password, it's either the person whose password it is, or maybe somebody made a typo, or there's a glitch or anything. Not that the risk of being caught ever stopped determined criminals with a lot to gain...
As for paper trail - Georgia SoS is arguing in the court right now that nobody should have ever access to the paper ballots, not even for for audit purposes. If you ask why have those ballots and keep them if nobody is ever allowed to see them for specific purpose of ensuring the correct count - then you'd have to take it with Georgia SoS, it makes sense for him apparently.
All available evidence suggests that voter fraud is extremely rare. The recent frenzied drive to prove that the 2020 election was rigged has turned up a shocking amount of nothing. American elections might seem insecure, but apparently they're secure enough.
FWIW, the best truly solid evidence that I know of for illegal voting in a US election comes from the Washington state gubernatorial election of 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_election). It was extremely close, with the Republican down by just over a hundred votes after recounts. So they took a fine-tooth comb to voting records, in hopes of disqualifying enough ballots to win.
Out of 2,810,053 votes cast, they found 1,678 illegal votes. There were at least a few from each of the obvious ways of voting illegally - I think felons were the biggest category, then non-citizens, with some double votes and a single-digit number of dead people voting. (Interestingly, this included one legal vote by a dead person - the guy voted in advance, and died before election day.)
There was no evidence of a systematic campaign to commit fraud. Most of the people approached about it seem to have just made honest errors - forgetting they'd submitted an advance vote, not realizing their record made them a disenfranchised felon, and so on. But it was still about 0.06% of the electorate - more than enough to swing the race(or something like Florida 2000) - and a few orders of magnitude higher than the usual election fraud numbers discussed in these debates.
The other reason it's relevant is that a judge certified that these numbers were accurate. And that judge still gave the election to the Democrat, despite agreeing with the Republican argument, because he couldn't find a legitimate way to undo the illegal votes(aside from calling in voters to give sworn statements about who their illegal vote had been for - the Democrats found a few illegal GOP voters who fessed up, and those were the only votes ultimately removed).
Given that there's forms of fraud that this kind of analysis can't detect, and that Washington has a lower proportion of adults who aren't legal voters(and thus, who could possibly make these errors) than many other states, I usually ballpark US election fraud at about 0.1% of ballots cast. It's not a truly solid number, but it seems like a fair estimate. This isn't enough for Trump to have won any new states in 2020, but for comparison it's substantially more than Bush's 0.009% margin of victory in Florida in 2000.
I'm not convinced the failed proposals are irrelevant. The backlash began before the law was finalized, so I think it makes sense for discussions about the backlash to include provisions that helped fuel the controversy but did not make it into the law. The confusion about what actually made it into law is troublesome, and that confusion has almost certainly fuelled more backlash, but how much backlash there would be with absolutely no confusion I am not certain. I think there would still be a notable amount.
I'm also not convinced by your argument about providing water. First, the impact depends on how long people must wait to vote. Second, you say it is aimed to prevent people from giving away campaign promotional food and drink. Is that actually a current problem in Georgia? Are there not currently laws that directly prohibit campaigning near polling places already? I would have guessed that there were. Even if there were not, enacting such laws would seem to both address the problem more directly and to cover the adjacent behaviors that we actually want to discourage (campaigning near polls, not giving away food and water)
Finally, what is your source? Some of your claims seem at odds with what is presented in various sources I have read. The closest to I've yet seen to what you're saying is a WaPo article (also the best article I've yet found), but that doesn't quite match everything.
I also used this NYT article about the law because it excerpted from the relevant sections, but I don't endorse the analysis in this article -- it seemed extremely bad-faith to me. For example, it didn't mention that the law ended signature matching, which seems like one of the most important thing the law does. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html
Retail value less than a dollar seems like it might allow water bottles - but maybe it should be updated for inflation to $2 to make it clear that you can give water bottles, and snacks to people whose blood sugar is getting low.
Thank you. The Athens Banner-herald is a nice source I hadn't come across before. I don't have a WSJ subscription anymore so I can't access most of the op-ed.
I really wish that there were better information on whether or not the changes in early voting hours require a change from what was actually happening. For instance, how often were polling places open after 7, were they open on more weekend days than they can be now, etc. Everything I've read so far seems to couch it in terms like "mostly" and "likely" without reference to what actual practices were.
The NYT article "analyzed the state’s new 98-page voting law and identified 16 key provisions that will limit ballot access, potentially confuse voters and give more power to Republican lawmakers."
This seems to be the most comprehensive argument against the law, but your comments don't seem to address all sixteen of the provisions the Times identified.
(For convenience, I'm making this comment separate from the one citing my sources.)
1) See my reply to Nicholas Weininger above about providing water -- someone I know claims that campaigning at the polls with food and water *is* a current problem. I'm also confused about why existing laws aren't enough to prohibit it, but at the very least it doesn't seem like an imaginary problem.
2) I agree it might be reasonable to have a very mild amount of skepticism about the lawmakers' intent based on previous drafts that did bad things. But we probably disagree about how much skepticism is appropriate. My model of how drafting a bill works is: you decide to write a bill; you start thinking about the changes you would like to make, and talk to other advocates/constituents about what they would like; you publish your draft, which necessarily does some things wrong, and then people get mad at you; you correct the things it did wrong, and repeat until you reach some sort of equilibrium.
In this case, I could imagine that the original drafters made the mistake of removing Sundays as early voting days innocently: constituents told them that they wanted more early voting and that Saturday was the most convenient day, and no one specifically told them that actually black churches in Atlanta have big "souls to the polls" events on Sundays. Once the mistake was found and they got in a lot of trouble, they fixed it, which is some evidence that this was process was being done in good-faith.
> Other states, like New York, have an identical law -- if you don't think those states are engaging in inhumane voter suppression, you probably shouldn't think Georgia is either
There's been a couple of other comparisons to NY here, and I'd just like to note that New York election laws are extremely corrupt, badly managed, and voter-suppressive (Famously with things like the NYC Mayoral race happening in odd years - which is a common trick to decrease turnout - but also a whole lot of other things. New York primary elections are low-turnout for a reason).
It's also worth noting that while New York is a blue state in presidential elections, the state legislature was not party until 2018. Prior to that Republicans had held the Senate for eight years.
And FWIW they made several changes to expand ballot access in 2019 and just added automatic registration in December.
"the point is to stop people from campaigning at the polls by e.g. giving out bottles of orange juice labeled "GO ORANGE: VOTE FOR TRUMP" or whatever. Other states, like New York, have an identical law -- if you don't think those states are engaging in inhumane voter suppression, you probably shouldn't think Georgia is either."
Do you have a citation on this supposedly identical law? My understanding is that most states prohibit any sort of "electioneering" (including wearing clothing with a political slogan, or putting up signs) within some radius of the polling place, but I haven't heard of any that prohibit giving food or water without any sort of campaign message. If you can show some though, I'd be interested to know.
Thanks for catching that the link to the NY law was broken. I'll update the link as a reply to my sources comment above.
See also my reply to Nicholas Weininger for a second-hand claim that campaigning at the polls with food and water is a current problem. I'm also confused why existing laws don't already prohibit this, but it at least doesn't seem to be an imaginary problem.
Your paragraph about drop boxes is incredibly misleading. It mandates one drop box in each voting district, but the bad part is that it limits it to one, and requires it to be *inside the polling place.* So it's really not a drop box at all. It's a way for you to go to your polling place and cast your ballot. The whole point of drop boxes is that they are available at places other than the polling place and are available 24/7. If you limit them to being in polling places, that makes it much harder to vote.
These are early ballots, and they all come with a postage paid envelope to return them in one of the thousands of publicly available U.S. Mail boxes. The only reason you would need a special ballot drop box is if you neglect to return your early ballot on time for the mail to handle it. Setting up and keeping secure remote boxes with 24/7 access would be a nontrivial expense and risk for trivial gain.
I’m in Arizona, which has always had fairly extensive mail in voting, and remote 24/7 boxes have never been a thing. But I frequently drop my absentee ballot off in person on the day of elections, and it is extremely easy - most people are not more than a couple of miles from a polling place, every polling place accepts mail ballots, and it takes literally seconds to drop them off.
For one, this is wrong. The law actually prevents the drop box from being used less than 4 days in advance. For two, why put this in the law? I understand why you wouldn't require more than this, but why specifically ban it, if not to make voting harder?
Which part of what I said was “wrong”? Your comment show some no factual disagreement. Going from “no non-mail ballot boxes except for a one time pandemic exception” to “permanent allowance for ballot boxes, with some restrictions” is an increase from the previous law.
As for why not more? Well, it’s an unnecessary expense and a security risk, and there’s a benefit to having similar policies across the state to avoid confusion (maybe some counties can’t afford the boxes).
At any rate, fundamentally I don’t agree that “any inconvenience in voting constitutes voter suppression” particularly when early voting and vote by mail already exist.
The part that was wrong was "the only reason you would need a special ballot drop box is if you neglect to return your early ballot on time for the mail to handle it." Georgia's law prevents that by closing drop boxes 4 days before the election. If it's too late to mail it in, it's too late to put it in the drop box. It's a ridiculous provision that just means fewer votes will be cast.
Obviously nobody is arguing that any inconvenience in voting is voter suppression. That's the kind of straw man that I'm led to believe is discouraged around here. It's voter suppression if it's an *unjustified* inconvenience, and the justifications for this law are weak.
They're weak because that's the point. Georgia Republican voters are furious that Biden won Georgia and Raffensberger certified the vote. This law is a direct reaction to that. The Georgia legislature is signaling that it's on the side of the MAGAs because that's who their voters are. Onerous restrictions to prevent phantom voter fraud is the point. Making it more difficult to vote by mail is the point. The entire point of the law is to suppress Democratic votes, and it's supposed to be obvious, just with a veneer of plausible deniability. It's all a signal to the MAGA base that Trump won the votes that mattered, and they won't let this happen again.
When the clear intent of the law is to prevent people from casting otherwise-legal votes, that's fairly characterized as voter suppression.
I voted by mail in the November 2020 election. I made a point of finding a dropbox instead of using US Mail because I did not trust the mail service to deliver my ballot in a timely way. There were numerous drop boxes to choose from in my southern California constituency, none more than two miles distant.
Disrupting the mail service seems to have been a deliberate Trump administration policy and Georgians living in the state's large urban centers, those most affected by the new voting law, are right to see the needless changes to the number of drop boxes where they live as preparation for highly effective voter suppression in the future.
Why did lack of ballot boxes only become voter suppression in 2021? Why isn’t it voter suppression in the many states that don’t offer them? This is an awfully isolated demand.
As for vote by mail, is there any evidence that, in the event, any significant number of ballots dropped off at USPS by the date and time indicated on the ballot were not counted, let alone due to deliberate action by Trump? Paranoia and insinuations do not constitute evidence for fraud by either side. Why is your paranoia about the USPS more justifiable than someone else’s paranoia about the security of remote ballot boxes?
You ask why the lack of drop boxes isn’t an issue in other states. Why do you think it isn’t?
My focus was on Georgia only because of the new law in that state that makes an existing problem worse – that’s distinct in a sinister way from those states in which the status quo continues. When you have the opportunity provided by new legislation to make things better but you choose to make them worse, you’re clearly not dealing from a straight deck.
On a more general note, your complaint is of a piece with the tactics used by Trump, his campaign, and his sycophants – it has a name: “Whataboutism”. Any criticism so valid that it has no real answer is deflected by “well, what about…..”.
As to your second query about evidence, this link takes you to a WP article that cites post office data about 150,000 ballots nationwide delivered after election day.
The new law in Georgia places an election day cutoff on mail-in ballots needlessly making timely delivery a critical issue. Do you think the Georgia legislators were unaware of the implications of doing that?
I’m not going to set out for you the deliberate attempts by Trump and his proxies to undermine the delivery of ballots – if they’d have had their way things would have been much worse. Either you didn’t follow the news last fall in which case you shouldn’t be commenting on the Georgia law now, or you did but choose to ignore it so you could claim I’m paranoid for fearing my ballot might be lost. Whichever, your accusation of paranoia is just a modified version of “whataboutism”; rather disappointingly, your second in a brief comment.
I put this essay this on Facebook today. I'm reposting it here because I recall that some of you are interested in these matters.
Here in southeast Michigan, the term "Arsenal of Democracy" brings to mind the bomber plant in Ypsilanti. But here's another amazing piece of World War II industrial production.
Liberty ships were cargo ships produced in U.S. shipyards in 1941-45. These ships were huge, each carrying 10,000 tons of cargo. They were 441 feet long -- that's about a third the length of the quarter-mile-long container ship that blocked the Suez canal recently.
And they built 2,710 of them!
As Wikipedia says: "The immensity of the effort, the number of ships built, the role of female workers in their construction, and the survival of some far longer than their original five-year design life combine to make them the subject of much continued interest."
The relevance of Liberty ships to my Political Graveyard project (biographical material on US political figures from Colonial times to the present, https://politicalgraveyard.com) is that most of them were named for famous Americans. Hundreds of these names were of political figures -- starting with each of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Using multiple sources, I'm working on documenting, for my web site, which politicians were honored in this particular way.
Ships were named for governors and senators, yes, but also for writers, poets, actors, musicians, journalists, inventors, theologians, generals, industrialists, doctors, humanitarians -- pretty much every category.
Some of the choices were perverse to modern eyes: there was a ship named SS Jefferson Davis, for the president of the Confederacy; SS Nathan B. Forrest, for the infamous founder of the KKK; and SS George A. Custer, for the general who died at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
But there were also SS Harriet Tubman, SS Frederick Douglass, SS Booker T. Washington, SS George Washington Carver, SS Geronimo, and SS William Lloyd Garrison.
(William Lloyd Garrison was the ferocious slavery-abolitionist who wrote, 30 years before the Civil War: "I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and _I_will_be_heard._" See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lloyd_Garrison )
Going through the list, I have come across many fascinating and mostly-forgotten folks. A few examples follow. The text is quoted or condensed from Wikipedia:
* Hans Christian Heg (1829-1863): A Norwegian American abolitionist, journalist, anti-slavery activist, politician and soldier. As Wisconsin prison commissioner, he spearheaded many reforms to the prison, believing that prisons should be used to "reclaim the wandering and save the lost." He led a Scandinavian volunteer regiment in the Civil War, and died of the wounds he received at the Battle of Chickamauga.
* Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908): The most distinguished female sculptor in America during the 19th century, and the first female professional sculptor. She also designed and constructed machinery, and devised new processes, especially in connection with sculpture, such as a method of converting the ordinary limestone of Italy into marble, and a process of modeling in which the rough shape of a statue is first made in plaster, on which a coating of wax is laid for working out the finer forms. While living in Rome, she associated with a colony of artists and writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bertel Thorvaldsen, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the two female Georges, Eliot and Sand. When in Florence, she was frequently the guest of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
* Harriet Monroe (1860-1836): editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts; publisher and editor of Poetry magazine. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.
* Harvey Cushing (1869-1939): A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of William Osler which won a Pulitzer Prize. He wrote numerous monographs on surgery of the brain and spinal column, and made important contributions to bacteriology. Under his influence neurosurgery became a new and autonomous surgical discipline. He considerably improved the survival of patients after difficult brain operations for intracranial tumors. But Cushing's greatest contribution came with his introduction to North America of blood pressure measurement.
* Haym Salomon (1740-1785): Poland-born Jewish businessman and financial broker who, like Robert Morris, went broke financing the American Revolution. In 1775, Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. In September 1776, he was arrested as a spy. The British pardoned him, but only after requiring him to spend 18 months on a British boat as an interpreter for Hessian soldiers – German troops employed by the British. Salomon used his position to help prisoners of war from the Continental Army escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert the war effort. In 1778 Salomon was arrested again and sentenced to death. Again, he managed to escape. From the period of 1781–1784, records show Salomon's fundraising and personal lending helped provide over $650,000 (more than $9.4 billion in current dollars) in financing to George Washington in his war effort. He died penniless.
* Helena Modjeska (1840-1909): A renowned Polish-American actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. Despite her accent and imperfect command of English, she achieved great success. In 1893 Modjeska was invited to speak to a women's conference at the Chicago World's Fair, and described the situation of Polish women in the Russian and Prussian-ruled parts of dismembered Poland. This led to a Tsarist ban on her traveling in Russian territory. Scholars have posited that Modjeska might have been Arthur Conan Doyle's model for the character Irene Adler, the only woman that Sherlock Holmes came close to loving. Susan Sontag's award-winning 1999 novel, "In America", though fiction, is based on Modjeska's life.
And that's just a few from the "H" section!
All of these, and a couple thousand others, were recognized in the names of Liberty ships.
Is there any evidence convoys were organized according to theme? Alternatively, were there some convoys that contained figures that would have been opposed to each other (Hamilton and Burr, Grant and Lee etc.)?
Very interesting, thanks. Do you know how they were named? Did congress get to put in names from their districts, or was there a desk of ship names somewhere in the navy?
I'm still mulling "Towards a Bayesian Theory of Willpower" and dug up an ancient Scott Alexander post called "Applied Picoeconomics" on LessWrong -- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NjzBrtvDS4jXi5Krp/applied-picoeconomics -- which proposed a nice application of Ainslie's ideas on hyperbolic discounting.
What are practical applications of the Bayesian theory?
Also mulling it over... Currently I don't understand how Scotts' (probably nascent) model maps to various parts of Bayes' theorem, and I don't understand what his model allows us to predict that we can't already (or how it predicts it better with fewer entities, etc.)
Was planning on posting a comment on the relevant post at some point, but since you mentioned it... do you have thoughts on this?
(For the Bayes part I think it suffices to say that you have prior probabilities that get updated via new evidence.)
As for my thoughts, they're *so* suspect. Under the hyperbolic discounting theory, my answer was "use commitment devices to bring long-term consequences near!". Under the Bayesian theory, my answer is "use commitment devices to drive up the weight on the intellectual evidence!"
So that's a little... convenient for me. (I'm a Beeminder cofounder.)
And yet I believe it. But also it's why I'm asking for what other practical lessons people are drawing from the Bayesian theory.
Question/pondering about a financial instrument that seems obvious and I'm surprised it either doesn't exist or doesn't exist prominently enough for me to know about it.
When I'm saving for retirement, i don't know exactly how long I'll live after retirement. If my life expectancy is 25 +- 15 years post-retirement, I could save 25 years of expenses and risk being destitute if I live too long, or I could save 40 years and risk having saved way too much money (these of course both need to be adjusted for market growth, but the savings needed to fund 40 years is still significantly higher than the savings needed to fund 25 years). My financial advisor friend tells me this is called "longevity risk".
It strikes me that this is a huge risk for people planning for retirement, and one that just begs to be insured. If you have 1000 people who need to fund 25 +- 15 years, they could all independently save 40 years of expenses, or they could each save (e.g.) 28 years of expenses, pay 3 of them to an insurance company, and that insurance company covers them however long they survive. In a way this is the opposite of life insurance.
So why can't I buy this insurance (as far as I know)? Social Security and pensions both implicitly accomplish this, but I can't really access a pension without totally changing my career plans, and I'd like to retire with more than social security offers (plus I don't totally trust it to still exist). The same financial advisor friend says that annuities work toward this goal, but it seems like an annuity tends to also lock you into a really conservative investment mix; I want to insure my longevity risk but have the same market risk exposure as a normal IRA. The closest I can think of is having an IRA until I retire and then all at once moving it into an annuity, but my longevity uncertainty will be smaller at retirement than now, so I'll still have to oversave in case my mean life expectancy is higher at retirement than it is now. I want to either 1) directly insure my longevity risk, or 2) buy into an IRA-like-vehicle that insures it by having an agreement "you invest/grow this however you want, and then at retirement, we pocket all of it, and we'll pay you 10% less than you'd be able to withdraw if you drew it down such that you'd hit 0 at exactly your mean life expectancy".
so my questions:
1) Does this exist?
2a) If not, why not? It seems obvious that it should, so there are probably good reasons it doesn't. My working theory is that it's hard to market, but that's not super satisfying
2b) If it does exist, why isn't it more prominent? I'm no expert, but I'm reasonably well informed about retirement for a nonexpert, so if I don't know about it, there's no way that many people do, and it might as well not exist for most people. It seems like it should be as popular as a normal IRA
3) Anyone want to partner with me to build a business selling this? (mostly sarcastic, but seriously, this seems like a huge opportunity that isn't being exploited)
I think you can buy annuities that have higher risk investments. If that isn’t what you want, it isn’t clear to me what it is. No matter how many years you save for, the market could turn against you. So what return could an annuity *promise* you that would satisfy you?
Yeah a properly structured annuity could be what I want. The two I was pointed at were "variable indexed annuities" and "fixed indexed annuities", both of which said they protect from market downturns. I want one with the exact same market exposure as an IRA, or at least exact market exposure as some particular index, which I couldn't find but I'd believe exists. Do you know of one?
Basically I specifically don't want a promised return, which most of them seem to have. I just want it to track the market and then pay me a fraction of what my market exposed investment has become.
Yeah, looking at the wiki page more closely they were definitely pretty different. But the concept contains that idea of distributing financial risk over the lifespans of multiple people.
Tontines served a function like this. A bunch of people would make payments into an annuity and after a certain point get payouts, and when someone died the slice of the payout going to the remaining folks expanded.
They featured prominently in a few mystery/adventure stories about people murdering each other.
That's pretty close, but I'd rather not need to personally find a set of people big enough to smooth out the risk, it seems like a big company would handle it better?
I think that's what The Financiers are hoping to do. Make them an insurance project where you're put in a fairly large pool with people who have similar life expectancies. So not widely available yet (as far as I know) but something that should be mainstream-available within the decade.
I’m sure this is an oversimplification, but give the conventional 4% “safe withdrawal rate” an investment that’s good for 25 years is also perpetual. I do not see it as saving $X for each year of requirement, but rather as saving in order to reach the point where investment income pays the bills.
Yeah that's basically my current retirement plan, but it definitely doesn't accomplish this. If you create enough savings to fund yourself in perpetuity means you're massively over saving. The ideal world will be to save enough to be drawn down to exactly zero on the day you die, which longevity risk prevents us from actually planning on.
To preempt "but many people want to die with money to give to their heirs": if you want to give money to your heirs, needing to save less for retirement means you can give it to them anyway, and you can do it way sooner when they need the money more.
The parent proposed that we could average out of the plus-15 and minus-15 arms. But there is no shortfall to cover in the plus-15 group, because the midpoint was 25. If you save enough for 25 years, you save enough for all values greater than 25 years.
If the retirement ages did not straddle (1 / safe withdrawal rate) this way then it could be a more important problem.
The idea of a "safe withdrawal rate" is inherently about handling longevity risk, and is the whole motivation for the question. If the safe withdrawal rate is 4% and I'm sure I'll live 25 years, then I probably want to use 7ish% of my money every year, not 4%, which let's you save like 40% less money (which you can give to your heirs earlier or spend on booze or whatever). The sage withdrawal rate is all about possibly living a long time, and the real withdrawal rate should be roughly (growth+1/years remaining) instead of just growth
You're right that the money growing means it probably isn't exactly symmetric around the mean, I'm simplifying that a lot, but handling longevity risk will definitely be cheaper for a collective than for me alone, and I'd like access to part of that savings.
I'm in much the same place, compounded by developing a serious illness in what was to be my last year before retirement, and wondering whether it was caused (or at least made more likely) by continuing in a stressful job just to be sure I had enough in the extreme longevity case. My odds are excellent that i'll recover this time, and good that this won't come back, but the practical need to entirely cover one's own risk, without well known/reliable/routine/affordable risk sharing mechanisms, is one of the things I hate most about the American system, as its developed in the past 40 years. (Before that, pensions were more widely available.)
Insurance companies do sell annuities, including cost-of-living adjusted annuities. They appear to be expensive, but possibly in this case the insurance companies are honest (i.e. they deliver what you believe you paid for). Sadly, my experience with health insurance in the US has taught me that insurance companies can and do get away with things that make me expect it would be unlikely I'd be able to extract contracted money from them, once I became sufficiently mentally or physically frail. (Yes, a person with spare time, all the latest tech, a significantly over-average IQ, and a couple of lawyers on retainer can usually get health insurance companies to do what they claimed they would back when you signed up... That's not much use to an old person with failing faculties, unless they have a dedicated financial caretaker who matches the same description.)
Yeah this is very fair and has come to mind, relying on a company to keep you funded requires *a lot* of trust that insurance companies probably don't deserve. I really hope that's not the reason this isn't common though...
Almost but not quite - the 4% safe withdrawal rate is considered obsolete for longer time periods. Basically, 4% is only safe over a few decades, and the safety assumes that you can spend from the principal. Basically, sound for 20-30 years, not sound for 40-60 years.
3,5% is probably a sounder number for very long periods, *and* it assumes a reasonable mix of stocks and bonds.
I think this is called a life annuity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_annuity). Apparently it's becoming more popular in the UK and the US, and has been popular for a while in Chile.
I started looking into these and it seemed like they generally had zero to low market exposure, which means they aren't really great plans. If I failed to find a fully market exposed one then that's perfect, but at least initially I didn't see it.
If you have not already, look up QLAC's. You pay $X amount up front and pick a starting age for your payments, like 85. This way you only have to save enough to reach that age and after that you get the income stream from the QLAC in a predetermined amount.
You're right; such instruments don't exist, although several financial economists that work in the retirement investment strategy area have argued for them, myself included. They are needed, but there are problems of risk allocation between issuer and owner that make them problematic and unlikely to be created (at least not on fair terms).
Alternatives? So-called variable annuities do allow equity investments, but at a high fee--and when you elect to turn them into an annuity the base rate becomes the insurance industry equivalent of the low risk-free rate. Index annuities have high fees and many limitations. Deferred annuities (including QLACS) for say age 80 or whatever are the same--they kick in when you are older, but their return from now until and including the payout period is low.
Take a look at "The Only Spending Rule Article You Will Ever Need," in the Financial Analyst Journal Jan/Feb 2015 (70th Anniversary Special Issue). It wasn't originally paywalled, but maybe it is now; perhaps it's worth paying for it. Or google it to see if it is online elsewhere. It proposes that retirees that want equity exposure self-annuitize, but because the investment results are volatile the annuity payment must be recalculated every month. An ARVA, or annually recalculated variable annuity. It give you what you are asking for, but the payout won't be level.
The payout volatility is a direct function of the supporting portfolio's investment volatility. Read "What Investment Risk Means to You, Illustrated: Strategic Asset Allocation, the Budget Constraint, and the Volatility of Spending During Retirement," in the Journal of Retirement , Fall of 2018. It ties back to the Spending Rule piece.
These are both simplifications, but with a very high capture of important outcomes while remaining accessible, of multi-period stochastic dynamic strategic asset allocation models, sometimes known as "lifestyle" models.
You can get "most" of what you're looking for, by doing it yourself.
For what it's worth, the so-called "4% rule" for safe withdrawals doesn't stand up to scrutiny whatsoever; the articles mentioned discuss this and explain why.
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It's kind of weird to see Erdogan pretty much doing a political campaign in a foreign country, with an anti-Kurd message, even though the country in question is supposedly an ally of the Kurds !
I also find this "Islamic campus" also questionable, with Erdogan, AKP and Millî Görüs being aligned behind a project of a political Islam, and to "keep the Turkish identity of the diaspora".
Especially when you remember the "Party of Equality and Justice", that wanted to gather all the Muslims in a single party :
- More diversity for the cultural grants [Wouldn't this be illegal?]
- The Central European Bank should be able to directly lend to states.
- More structural support in the ghettos [The kind of "structure" that often comes from Islamists these days ?]
- Integrate a multicultural vision of the French history in the school manuals
- Rethink secularism to allow a social and public religious practice
- A holiday for the Aïd
- Halal menus in schools
- Revocation of the law forbidding headscarves in school
- Stop [forbid ?] teaching gender studies in school
- Review [revocation ?] of the laws allowing gay marriage
- Palestine should be recognized as a country
- Turkey should be allowed in the EU (in the case it wants to join it again one of these days)
Now it seems that they have failed, getting like 1% (?) of the votes country-wide - I'd guess that for a country with about ~10% of Muslims, the Oumma is still quite divided, with the various "home" countries like Algeria and Morocco having a heavier weight than Turkey.
Still, political Islam should really be recognized as a danger, especially these days, and even in the countries where it hardly has any foothold, like the USA with those Gulen schools...
I'm not sure that Macron did the best thing in forbidding homeschooling and basically rolling back the separation of church and state (!) by deciding that the state should be responsible for the formation of imams :
But on the other hand the fact that it pissed off Erdogan might mean that it's going in the right direction ?
*Something* had to be done after the recent terror attacks, and more drastic decisions (closing down all the mosques ??) could have started a civil war...
Given all we've seen in the last 15 months, what is most likely to happen if a kilometre-size asteroid is in fact observed heading for the continental US?
I'm actually pretty confident in the government to get it together on that one. The solution is complicated, but the problem is unambiguously existential, easy to understand, and has a clear deadline.
There would certainly be conspiracy theorists claiming it's all fake, but there wouldn't be the usual grifters encouraging them. There's no profit in everybody dying.
Side note: 1 km is only one order of magnitude smaller than the dino-killer. I don't know whether it would actually matter which country it hit.
The dino-killer had significantly-higher extinction rates in North America than elsewhere. It would matter.
Also, even an actual dino-killer wouldn't kill off humanity. If you think you're well-prepared enough to survive and go warlord in the aftermath, it sounds plenty profitable (if still risky).
There's no profit in everybody dying, but if encouraging the idiots does not substantially interfere with NASA's efforts to nuke the space rock, why not run a little grift?
Entirely depends on how long it will be before impact. If it's 20 months away, you only need a tenth of the impulse to knock it off course as if it's 2 months away. If you catch it early enough, the momentum of a fairly standard interplanetary satellite bus smacking into its side should be sufficient to save us.
In last week's Open Thread, I posted a question regarding the predictive processing / trapped priors model of mental illnesses, particularly in the context of my own struggles with OCD. I was still very confused at the time, and my question was somewhat confusing as a result. Now, I have a much better understanding of the issues at hand, and would like to revisit it in a more clear-headed way.
Guys... it's time for some game theory.
In the review for Antifragile (which I had not yet read at the time of posting last week's comment), Scott says:
"For example, if some very smart scientists tell you that there's an 80% chance the coronavirus won't be a big deal, you thank them for their contribution and then prepare for the coronavirus anyway. In the world where they were right, you've lost some small amount of preparation money; in the world where they were wrong, you've saved hundreds of thousands of lives."
I will be using this example, along with two others: a phobic person who is afraid of dogs, and an OCD person who is afraid of accidentally leaving the stove on.
Let's define two statements, G and B (for "Good" and "Bad", respectively). G could be "The coronavirus won't be a big deal", or "This dog will not hurt me", or "I did not leave the stove on". B could be "The coronavirus WILL be a big deal", or "This dog WILL hurt me," or "I DID leave the stove on". Along with these two statements, let's define two actions: G' and B', corresponding to the rational action to take if G and B are true. For example, G' could be "don't bother preparing for the coronavirus", or "approach the dog", or "walk away and don't check the stove again". B' could be "prepare for the coronavirus", or "stay away from the dog", or "go back and check to make sure the stove isn't on".
Now we can make a matrix of outcomes for this decision:
G B
----- -----
G' | G'G G'B
B' | B'G B'B
There are two reasons someone might choose B' in this scenario.
First, they could have a high prior on B being true. For example, someone might think the coronavirus is likely to be a big deal, and thus decide to prepare for it. Or someone might have a high prior on dogs being a threat, and thus decide to stay away. Or someone might have a high prior on the stove being left on, and thus decide to go check. This is more or less the assumption of what's going on with the trapped priors framework as Scott describes it.
But there's another possibility: Someone might have a low prior on B being true, but decide that the costs of G'B (that is, acting as if G is true, while B is actually true) are so high that average payoff is always better choosing B'. For example, maybe someone only thinks there's a 20% chance of the coronavirus being a big deal, but the costs of not preparing (and then the virus being a big deal) are so high that it's better to prepare anyway. Or someone might think it's extremely unlikely for the dog to hurt them, but consider the possibility of getting hurt to be so awful that they avoid the dog anyway. Or someone might think it's extremely unlikely for the stove to be left on, but consider the possibility of it being left on to be so awful that they go check anyway. As far as I can tell, Scott's description of trapped priors with regard to mental illnesses doesn't take this into account.
So what I'm wondering is: How much of a phobia of dogs involves a high trapped prior in favor of dogs being dangerous, and how much of it involves assigning extremely large cost to the possibility of getting hurt? How much of OCD behavior involves a high trapped prior in favor of the stove being left on, and how much of it involves assigning extremely large cost to the possibility of it being left on?
I feel like it must be some combination of both, which complicates Scott's discussion of this topic. In that discussion, phobias are a combination of high priors in favor of the feared object being dangerous, combined with low bandwidth on the sensory channel preventing these priors from updating. But I feel like there must be some role for the idea of "the phobic person considers getting hurt by a dog to be such a horrible outcome that it may not even need to be a *likely* outcome in order for them to try to avoid it".
It's hard for me to tell the difference introspectively in my own OCD case, as a lot of this is happening "under the hood" so to speak. But I wonder if there's any empirical way of determining how much of a role each factor (priors on the one hand, and cost estimates on the other hand) is playing. I feel like if cost estimates were playing too big of a role, then exposure therapies wouldn't work, since exposure seems to be in the business of untrapping priors (e.g. convincing the phobic person that dogs are unlikely to harm them). But I'm not sure, and I'd like to hear what other people (especially Scott, if he sees this) think.
Looking this over again, it seems Substack butchered the "matrix" I tried to make by deleting all of the extra spaces. Here's what it's supposed to look like: http://puu.sh/Hvvlr/f88f5a69a9.png
(epistemic status: wildly speculative. I'm a mechanical engineer who reads papers on predictive processing in his free time; don't put too much trust on anything I write here)
I'll just sketch out a few interesting thoughts, let's see where we get.
If I understood you correctly, your reasoning is like this:
OCD might be the brain performing something very rational. The expected value of B would be (probability of occurence P) * (expected outcome of B occurs E), so either P or E must be unreasonably high for your brain to constantly freak out about something.
1) Can we measure if it's P or E (I think this is your core question, right?)? I'm skeptical, without knowing too much about the details. I was watching the discussion in this video on evidence of predictive processing here yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiQ7VQ_5y5c and part of the discussion was that while it's easy to control experienced stimuli in experiments (say whether you were primed or not), it's almost impossible to control for internal expectations (say what your brain is expecting in a situation).
Still, one could imagine a setting where you're exposed to various settings, but either only E or only P is modified. For the dog example:
- if you're exposed to a dog behind strong iron bars, the probability P of the dog reaching you is almost zero; but expected damage E depends on the dog (is it big and terrifying? is it kinda normal?)
- if you're with a normal, well-behaved dog, you could experiment with various levels of P - the dog is behind bars, the dog is held firmly by the owner, the dog is running around freely.
Still, I don't think this would work, but I'd interested to hear how it goes from someone with actual practical experience.
2) Why am I sceptical?
I don't think the model of the brain minimizing (P*E) I outlined above is correct, especially not in cases of mental illness. Please note that I'm not saying the brain is non-rational - my point is that the task our brains are performing are really hard.
An example: We are throwing insane amounts of money, time and work at teaching computers to drive. After decades of work, very high-quality sensors, high-precision maps with automatic updates and extreme computational powers, they are... well, the latest video I've seen of the Tesla outopilot looked roughly as good as a 17-year-old right after driving school (or a more experienced driver, but after 3 beer): Okay-ish, but way worse than what a skilled driver does while his conscious mind is obsessed with what to have for dinner.
At the same time, our own senses are not that great: From Scott's review of surfing uncertainty, on the brain's data handling: "Both streams are probabilistic in nature. The bottom-up sensory stream has to deal with fog, static, darkness, and neural noise; it knows that whatever forms it tries to extract from this signal might or might not be real. For its part, the top-down predictive stream knows that predicting the future is inherently difficult and its models are often flawed. So both streams contain not only data but estimates of the precision of that data."
So my argument would basically be that yes, somewhere in the process of estimating P and E, your brain is screwing up. But there's a wild variety of possible feedback loops and error mechanisms that allow it to spiral out of control, because...
- forming a coherent model of reality is really hard, so we usually get it wrong.
- questions like "how active should you be right now" are impossible to determine from an epistemic point of view, so mostly we have a set of pre-set gains for an internal model that responds to various inputs like how successfull your recent past actions have been and how much sunlight you get right now.
- integration of various sources of signal are really hard for the brain. A few years ago the gravity organ in my right ear stopped working; giving me not only really bad vertigo but also screwed up my brain for weeks as it was trying to rearrange itself with the large amount of error signals escalating internally.
I'll add a few links with discussion later, but right now my brain sent an escalating error signal of my 2-year-old having woken up and demanding for someone to say hi.
2) the Erdmann & Mathys paper "a generative framework for the study of delusions" provides a simple model for how delusional thoughts might maintain themselves and lead to more delusions. You can find the paper and my review here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing/comments/m0cx2y/a_generative_framework_for_the_study_of_delusions/ - I won't crosspost the review here, but I'd be rey interested to read what others think of it (also relevant to the topic of trapped priors)
I actually do remember reading that Chamber of Guf post, I had totally forgotten about it until now. It does seem very relevant to what I was saying, although I'm not totally sure that it answers my question of how much P is being overweighted vs E being overweighted. Like, are those thoughts being selected and entertained because the metaphorical angels think those thoughts are *more likely to be true*? Or is it because they're under orders to minimize costs, and they see upsetting thoughts (e.g. "I am gay") as having extremely high cost *if* they're true?
"I've been kind of imprecise here, lumping together depression and trauma and causes and effects and so on. The more rigorous version is that the tendency to underweight sensory evidence (and correspondingly overweight priors) is what VDBEA call a "better safe than sorry" processing strategy. In threat-detection, avoiding false negatives is more important than avoiding false positives - if you mistake a tree stump for a tiger it's mildly embarrassing, but if you mistake a tiger for a tree stump, you're dead. So in a threat-laden environment, you want to both adjust your prior to be that things are threats, and over-weight your prior relative to sensory evidence. Some people could have this processing strategy because they're genetically programmed to have it, and these people will be more vulnerable to depression, and more likely to get PTSD for any given level of trauma. Other people will get traumatized into it - something will happen that ups their estimate of how threat-laden the environment is and makes this cognitive strategy more attractive."
Let's look at the tiger example here. In the "better safe than sorry" processing strategy, are we sure that the brain is actually setting the priors on "that thing is a tiger" as very high and "that thing is a tree stump" as very low? Or is it still estimating "that thing is likely a tree stump, but the costs of it being a tiger are so high that I should act as if it's a tiger"? Is there any way to tell the difference?
I don't have much ability to read the thing about delusions at the moment - ironically, my current state of OCD gives me very serious reading issues, and reading the Chamber of Guf post has already exhausted my energy at the moment. I'll see if I can give it a look later on, depending on how long and technical it is.
People with anxiety disorders aren't usually actually trying to manage their fear of (insert object of fear), they're trying to avoid FEELING ANXIOUS.
And the hook is that the more you avoid ANYTHING you are anxious/fearful about, the more afraid of it you'll become.
My theory is that anxiety is our alarm system but it knows it's not well calibrated to every possible situation. So you feel anxious about something, think about how risky it is, and decide to avoid it. Then your brain goes 'oh, we avoided, it must actually be risky', and it increases the alarm next time. If you feel anxious, think about how risky it is, and don't avoid, your brain goes 'oh, the more rational parts of the system decided this isn't a big enough risk to avoid', and it downgrades the alarm the next time you encounter the same thing.
What people w/OCD are trying to avoid is the discomfort and anxiety created by DOUBT. Ironically, recent research shows that even for people without OCD, the more you ask yourself (or someone else asks you) if you're really really sure about something, the more unsure you become and the more doubt you experience! So since people with OCD are constantly asking themselves if they're sure ..... This is how OCD differentiates from phobias, and how it often gets extremely weird. I remember working with a guy who had to count every corner made by the walls/floor/ceiling of every room he went into, every time, in order to reduce his doubt/anxiety about whether NOT doing that would cause his family to die in horrible ways :-( He knew it made no sense, but the doubt was awful! He wasn't counting corners to protect his family, he was counting to reduce his doubt/anxiety.
When we work with people with any type of anxiety leading to avoidance, we often explicitly get them to rate the actual level of danger of the object of their fear (ie; 'if my plane crashes I WILL die' is high danger, while 'if I touch this door handle I might catch a cold' is low danger, but not zero'). THEN we get them to also rate how likely that outcome is (ie; chance of commercial plane crashing; extremely low. Chance of catching cold if I touch a door handle and don't wash my hands; it's gonna happen once or twice a year).
THEN we combine the two, AND ask about trade-offs; if danger is high but probability is very low, it's reasonable to choose not to avoid, IF the trade-off for not avoiding is a valued one (I get to travel to see the world, visit friends and family, advance at my job ...). If danger is lowish but probability is high, it's also reasonable not to avoid, if the trade-off is a good one (I get to not destroy the skin on my hands, I get to interact with the world in a more usual way, I get to go out in public easily ...).
Then we add the sweetener; if you start approaching what you now avoid, your anxiety/doubt/upset will GO DOWN. It takes practice, but people with OCD (and phobias) can definitely actually become COMFORTABLE doing/not doing what usually makes them anxious/creates doubt. (And if practice isn't enough, or this has been going on for years and is very hard to start to disassemble, fluoxetine works great to reduce the anxiety/doubt, so the person can work on approaching rather than avoiding.)
Systematic exposure works great, very very consistently, btw, because it just allows your alarm system to re calibrate. I often tell people they don't have to BELIEVE it will work, they just have to do it, as recommended, and voila!!! (If their fear is to high to try it at all; see 'fluoxetine' above.) The conscious part of you doesn't have to become convinced dogs are unlikely to harm you; your alarm system will do it automatically. And thank heavens it will!
Hm, just as I suspected - there is sort of a combination of likelihood of danger + level of danger going on here with these things. This seems somewhat obvious in hindsight, and I wonder why it is that Scott (or at least the paper Scott was reading from) didn't take this into account. It seems like the theory of trapped priors is only focusing on the brain inflating the *likelihood* of [bad thing happening] - e.g. making it feel *more likely* that touching a doorknob without washing your hands will give you a cold. But it seems like that's not the whole story - there's also a question of *how bad the person considers it to be* that they get a cold. Anxiety disorders in general seem to be a miscalibration of the overall risk assessment, which consists of both of these considerations.
Prompts: 1) What is the most counter intuive advice you've received that has helped you a lot? 2} What is the fairly obvious advice that you found actually surprisingly helpful? 3) What problem have you had that hasn't been amenable to the obvious solutions
Please also feel free to pot replies unrelated to the prompt in the general theme or asking for or offering life advice
I'll start with an answer for 2) I'd seen cutting caffeine and alcohol on every list of mental health advice throughout my life, in the general basket of nice wellness things yoga or taking hot baths. And dismissed it as banal. But experimenting with cutting my intake of both to near zero at the start of lockdown (for the first time in my adult life) I've noticed that significant improvement to my anxiety and general mental health baseline.
I still drink a lot of caffeine, but I'll second the alcohol recommendation. A beer absolutely hits the spot on special occasions, but for a lot of people, alcohol consumption (often significant consumption!) is part of their routine, and it's one of the easiest and most impactful changes that you can make.
1) Your manager helping you with a problem you're stuck on is often an optimal use of their time. This was counter-intuitive for me since my manager's time was (and is) way more valuable than mine. Buuuut, they can solve a problem in 15 minutes that might otherwise take me 3 days. And their time isn't 500 times as valuable as mine.
2) Block non-work time suck websites (ex. reddit, marginalrevolution, whatever your own poison is) on your work computer. Anecdotally, it increases the time I spend actually working by ~30% without substantially changing my enjoyment or time spent at desk.
3) Trochanteric bursitis. Did (and do) PT and the standard IT band stretches. Still can't run for more than a block without my hip swelling up.
If you're mentoring people (in my case, I was a grad student mentoring some undergraduate students in a research project), _resist_ the impulse to jump in and do something for your mentees, even if they're stuck on something that will take them 20+ hours and you could do it in <1. Partly, yes, your time really is that valuable. But more importantly, I was told that their experience struggling through it and doing it themselves would lead to them improving at that skill in a way they wouldn't if you jumped in to help.
In my case, I couldn't bring myself to completely leave them out to dry, remembering similar unpleasant experiences I went through, so I decided to split the difference and basically be "on call" -- they'd go ahead and start through it, but as soon as they spent 15 minutes thinking about something and getting nowhere, they could give me a call and I'd help them get unstuck. It seems to have worked well -- my mentees told me that they often got an "aha" moment 5-10 minutes into thinking about the problem, but hopefully this caps the time they waste going down rabbit holes.
(And obviously this only applies to things where they're actually supposed to be learning a skill -- if it's just a matter of learning how to access the database, or whatever, then there's no point making them struggle through that on their own.)
I think you mention almost the exact same middle ground I was told to follow! Try for 15-30 minutes, but don't spin uselessly on something for an hour (or a week) alone. This does require being able to distinguish useful research from useless spinning, but it feels pretty easy for me to distinguish these internally.
And learning how to access the db etc could easily still be useful to spend some time trying to find (since this 'should' be in a common docs location anyways).
1) Counterintuitive advice recently received by someone in my life that was extremely helpful- had an injury to quadriceps, near the knee, was in a lot of pain. Went to physical therapy, where they said he must begin to bend it. Couple of sessions, he could straighten his leg. Couple more, it was hurting less and he could put some weight on it. I thought that pain was an indicator to not use whichever body part. But apparently it can also be an indicator that something is tightening which normally should not be tight, and without intervention it will hurt even more in the future. I'm sure this depends on the type of injury and which body part is affected.
2) "Assume positive intent." I used to hate this advice because I think it isn't an accurate representation of the world. However, in some workplaces, going around acting like you assume positive intent absolutely is a good way to operate. ("Of course they didn't mean that how it sounded!" etc) Once that got through my head, it was helpful.
3) Restoring mental focus after trauma. That and hernia repair, for some reason I want to put "lol," it isn't funny, but living with two hernias, there is a gallows humor aspect for me at this point. Stuff that seems like it ought to be easy, but isn't.
US political system question: doesn't the 12th Amendment make using ranked choice voting unlikely for US presidential elections? The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner must receive a 'majority' of votes cast by the electors- not a plurality. With multiple parties, the odds of anyone getting a raw majority is pretty low, especially after the number of parties reaches 4+. If no one receives a majority, the election is then cast to the House- where, each state receives 1 vote (I am unclear how they choose which House Rep gets their state's votes). This could be seen as generally giving the election to Republicans/conservatives, given that they tend to be spread out across more low-population states.
If your argument is 'well we can go through multiple ranked choice voting rounds until we find who gets a majority for the Presidency'- the 12th Amendment seems very clear to me that you get ONE voting round and then it goes to the House. Text below. So unless you'd prefer having House reps from rural states picking the President every time, it seems that ranked choice voting can't work in the US, no?
'The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President'
What the electors do is seperate from what voters do. Assuming you're not removing the electoral college, which you ideally would, you could still have something like the interstate popular vote compact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact where states making up >50% of EC votes agree to allocate their electors to the winner of a ranked choice voting system
'states making up >50% of EC votes agree to allocate their electors to the winner of a ranked choice voting system'- sure, and with 4 or more political parties competing, the odds of those EC votes being split multiple ways and so no one gets a raw majority is quite high. I agree that what electors do is separate from what voters do, that's the whole issue- the voters can use multiple rounds to pick their state's candidate, but the electors cannot.
I guess my point has more to do with multiple parties than ranked choice voting itself- in theory, ranked choice could work just fine with 2 or even 3 parties. In practice, however, most ranked choice systems have a lot of parties. The current Electoral College setup only works with 2 parties, in general.
Visualize it this way- California, Maryland, and New York choose the Democratic party candidate. Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee choose the Republican party candidate. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Oregon choose the far-left Green Party candidate. New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan choose the populist, socially conservative, fiscally liberal Farm & Labor Party candidate. Alaska chooses the Alaska Independence Party (this is a real party!) candidate. So the elector votes are split and no one gets a majority (this obviously doesn't cover every state but is just off the top of my head)
That isn't the system being proposed. The proposed system would have all the involved states agreeing to have their electors cast votes for the same individual, with that individual being chosen by ranked choice vote. Because this would involve a clause that it only takes effect if enacted by states with total electoral votes enough to ensure a victor, there is no risk of splitting in the electoral college. This is less clean than the national popular vote interstate compact because you could have some states on ranked choice and some states on other methods, but there is no risk of splitting the EC because you design it to not take effect until enough states are onboard to dominate the EC.
I now see what you're saying, but I think it's still a stretch. There seem to be multiple Constitutional restrictions on how states can allocate their electors- they can't simply do as they please (i.e. auction them off to the highest bidder, say). For one thing, Congress would have to be involved along with the individual states, as 'No State shall, without the Consent of Congress.... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State', which a new IRV system would be. In Chiaflo v. Washington, Kagan wrote for the unanimous majority that 'Checks on a State's power to appoint electors, or to impose conditions on an appointment, can theoretically come from anywhere in the Constitution'.
So- getting a majority of states onboard, plus Congress, and then evading any court challenges to a state's electors being cast for someone who didn't actually win a plurality vote in their state- seems like a stretch
This is one of those issues that is relatively simple to get around; the way the popular vote compact is structured, each state passes an individual law speaking to its own electors. Then the law does not go into effect until enough other states have a similar law.
All of this is achievable without any explicit compact; the states all just pursue the same type of IRV reform internally, and out pops the new system.
The "Agreement or Compact" is for formal mechanisms; they cannot make binding interstate treaties for example. But there is nothing to prevent them making non-binding agreements. I don't know what the case law is here, but sometime in the last couple decades California determined to independently coordinate with Canada on environmental law. That might be a fruitful avenue to check for comparison, because foreign policy is a much more stringent standard than interstate relations.
If we're going to overhaul how we choose the President, I'm pretty sure we need another amendment. I get the impression that the people pushing ranked choice voting are going after smaller elections first.
Not that I think it's completely impossible without an amendment, but without an amendment it would have to be a fiddly work-around like the Interstate Compact, and some people have doubts as to whether the Compact would actually work.
Well, IRV is not a desirable voting method, BUT....
Each state runs its own election, so it is unlikely all states would adopt IRV at the same time. The first state could have language that if 2 candidates have accumulated 270-<this states EVs> then only they advance in the runoff. If other states adopt, they could do something similar, or join a compact with the adopted states to coordinate their runoffs.
But really, the issue here is not states using IRV, but that the electoral college is single vote majority. This is what prevents 3rd parties from forming. It doesn't matter how multi-party you make the prior rounds, you are still wind up at the single vote round in the end.
For example, suppose a major third party did catch on in the US, and started winning some states EVs, using the current plurality elections . You would run into the same problem that this just winds up throwing it to the house. That is why the 3rd party wouldn't last... as soon as it becomes big enough to win some states, it becomes a liability, and needs to be abandoned.
Does it specify a definition of "receive"? Because if my ballot, according to the algorithm in question, is allocated to a particular candidate, it seems to me that they "received" my vote.
But that language also hinges on the electoral college, which we'd be bypassing anyway. If you bind all electors to vote for whoever wins the ranked choice election, then they definitely did receive a majority of the electors. So the question is really just whether electors can be bound without an ammendment, and my impression is that already happens anyway.
I've been wondering recently about drug names. Not any specific drug names, but more about the whole general class of drug names. I feel like pretty much anything I think of as sounding "like a drug name" is missing a whole bunch of qualities which I feel like a name ought to have at least some combination of. Take adalimumab (which google helpfully reminds me is the generic name of Humira) as a representative example. As far as I can tell, the name-
1: Doesn't tell you anything about the formula or structure of the drug. Adalimumab is a monoclonal antibody, meaning that it's a large molecule whose full organic chemical name would be a huge pain in the ass which nobody would ever want to use for conversational purposes. But as far as I can find, the name "adalimumab" doesn't even point to some broad area in the space of pharmacokinetics which the drug falls into. It seems like an outright syllable salad.
2: Doesn't sound euphonious or appealing. It's hard for me to imagine anyone having positive associations with the word, or thinking it sounds like something they'd want put in their body.
3: Doesn't evoke the idea of a cure to the diseases it's indicated for. It's hard to imagine anything which evokes this concept for all the specific diseases it's prescribed for, but it's used for a bunch of types of arthritis and inflammatory diseases, so a name which conveyed the feeling of anti-inflammatoriness seems intuitively suitable.
4: Is hard to say. It's such an easy word to stumble over, it sounds like ability to pronounce it is supposed to be a job qualification.
So, on what basis was the name actually chosen? Wikipedia explains the meaning behind the brand name, Humira, but that actually sounds like a thing a human being might deliberately name something. Whatever process generated a name like "adalimumab" is completely opaque to me, and whatever it is, it doesn't seem like something conducive to coming up with names people would want.
Apparently '-mab' is for Monoclonal AntiBody, the -u- means it's derived from a hUman source, the -lim- indicates it's an IMmunomodulator, and the ada- is an arbitrary root.
This is just cynical speculation, but presumably the company that develops a drug gets to pick the trade name (under which *they* can sell it) and, subject to the constraints of standards like the one described by wikipedia, the generic name (under which eventually generic *competitors* will be able to sell it). So it seems natural that they would prefer the first name to be good and the second name to be bad!
Generic competitors can, and usually do, make up their own brand names, they don't have to use just the generic name. Although an easy-to-remember generic name does make it easier to discuss the fact that these competitors are the same drug as the original.
Anybody has any particularly interesting/fruitful approach to tourism?
My wife and I do a fair amount of traveling for tourism, and I increasingly find that the standard walk-around-and-take-pictures-at-famous-locations approach doesn't really do it for me. There is just a limited so many churches/colonial buildings/castles/cute touristy locations you can visit before it gets old.
I am open to any suggestion. I have experimented, for example, with preparing my self for a trip by reading a bit about the place's history, but I didn't find that it particularly improved my experience. I have found that more exotic locations are more entertaining (exotic meaning places that are further from my culture, upbringing, etc.), but those are usually further away and not reachable within, say, a weekend.
I like travelling by road in off-peak seasons, camping without making reservations, with general areas of natural beauty in mind but no particular itinerary. If something looks interesting, stop and investigate. Drive in inefficient loops to avoid using the same roads twice. Find interesting cities and wander. Hike places based on road signs and very brief internet research. This eliminates all the stress and let-down of tourist "sightseeing". I also only take pictures of the kids being cute, rather than to document that we went anywhere in particular.
One fruitful strategy is to make the travel secondary to an adventure sport: go to Yosemite in order to hike or climb a major peak, go to Tahoe in order to ski, go to a body of water in order to swim/dive/kayak/sail.
For more urban destinations I sometimes find that one of the most rewarding experiences is simply getting around. Experiencing subway systems, elevated trains, bike paths, ferry rides, etc. rather than always rushing by car between attractions.
Use online communities to plan to meet a bunch of random people while you are there. Meet locals, travellers, everyone, and try to form a friend group that meets repeatedly and that will attract new people in.
Visit places for long periods or repeatedly. Personally I find the longer the trip the more rewarding.
I use couchsurfing to find people to hang out with (it has features other than reuqesting to stay at their house). Also meetup.com, reddit, Facebook. Doing walking tours is also good for meeting people, just not locals.
Take a course or work on a project while you are there. Having a purpose to your trip makes it more memorable and enjoyable.
Part of my strategy is to find the touristy locations that are truly special, rather than just another church (although they can actually be very interesting, if you have an eye for architecture, church hierarchy, etc). For example, during a trip to Germany a while back, I visited:
- the Trier Amphitheater
- the world's oldest electric suspension railway in Wuppertal
- A partially rebuilt Roman city in Xanten
- A coal mine turned into a museum
In general, museums can offer something fairly unique, although not all of them are special, of course.
I've found that having a Wikipedia app on my phone to read about the history while I'm at a place is much more helpful than reading in advance - a bit of advance reading is helpful for a baseline, but at the place I can look at the thing while reading, and get a clearer sense of which thing is important.
Also, I find that reading about the geology is often just as fascinating as the history. (It helps explain why all the Roman buildings are on top of each other, instead of being removed, and why Paris has the catacombs.)
I find that trying to eat at places suggested by actual locals is a winner to see a more interesting part of a city outside of the 'main tourist strip'. Getting the recommendation can often be tough unless you know someone, but it will likely get you to the part of town that is "further from your culture", as it's trying to attract locals rather than tourists.
Other than that, I'd echo what others have said which is that traveling between destinations in a city is often more exciting to me than being at the destination. One thing that I had to adjust to when moving to the US is that most cities need a car to get around, because not renting one at a destination is a great way to ensure getting around is an adventure.
Use a site such as workaway.info or wwoof.net to volunteer on a farm or hostel, help a family etc. So you can live and work with some locals, and get to know a particular location well.
I wrote an article about understanding a particular model of adult psychological development using Philip Glass' life. I'd really appreciate if someone so inclined could give feedback on how engaging the writing is, and other structural-level suggestions you might have. Feedback on content is welcome also.
I wish the description of development stages included a discussion of whether or not those claims were true. It seems a bit ‘just so’ to me. What’s better about that over Maslow’s hierarchy, or not having any development model?
Thank you for that. Another thing that would have been good to expound on is how useful Kegan's model of development is. I don't understand Maslow's hierarchy from a developmental perspective well enough to criticize it c/f Kegan, but I take your point about providing more evidence for Kegan.
I see the Electoral College vs. multiple parties is under discussion. Rather than respond to a specific post, let me trot out my ideas about this.
First of all, with the entire Executive Branch, for four years, handed over to the winner of a single high-stakes election, game theory dictates that everyone will try to build a 51% coalition to win that election.
It's not a conspiracy: having single elected head of government (unlike most other democracies) means you get a stable two-party system. Third or fourth parties may sometimes appear as serious contenders, but the system always resolves back down to two major parties.
If you want multiple parties to play serious roles in governance, you need a parliamentary system. It's hard to see that happening in the U.S.
Second, the Electoral College.
I agree with the criticisms of the Electoral College. Not only does it distort election outcomes, it narrows the field of competition to a handful of "swing" states. In the last few elections, issues of interest to Wisconsin or Pennsylvania get tremendous attention, while issues of interest to Kansas or California get zero.
But getting rid of the Electoral College (even if it were politically feasible to pass a constitutional amendment) is more complicated than most people realize.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the 12th Amendment requires that the winning candidate get a majority of the electoral votes; if no one does, there is an unappealing alternative process. Okay.
If the president were to be elected directly by the voters, what happens to the majority requirement? In 1968, Richard Nixon won the most votes, but only got 43% of the total. In 2020, Joe Biden got a majority, but only by a whisker. Some of the popular-vote proposals require the winner to get at least 40% of the votes, but that seems arbitrary.
Additionally, if a vote in one state counts precisely as much as a vote in any other state, there would need to be uniform Federal standards for all elections nationwide. Imagine, say, Utah lowering the voting age to 14 for presidential elections, in order to balloon the number of Republican votes. And if it were a very close election, that might require a nation-wide recount, an awkward and expensive proposition for everyone involved.
Short of getting rid of the Electoral College, the Maine/Nebraska approach should NOT be emulated. Choosing electors by Congressional district gives enormous power to whoever draws those district boundaries.
One alternative which ought to be explored is to allocate electors proportionately within each state. The simplest way would be to mandate that each state's electors be allocated, in integer numbers, to the top two vote-getters in that state.
(As I said, the two-party system is already baked in, and splitting electors multiple ways requires making some suspiciously arbitrary rules.)
I haven't done the math myself, but others have, and my understanding is that proportional elector votes would be considerably less likely to yield a result different from the popular vote. Not impossible, but much less likely. And only state-level recounts would be necessary.
In this system, almost every state would have some "swing" electors. Let's say a state has 10 electors: then it matters whether that state's leading candidate gets 55% (winning six of the ten electors and gaining a 2-elector margin), or less than 55% (and winning only five). Nobody's polling is good enough to predict the percentages with much accuracy. Few states would be completely ignored.
I don't quite understand what your objection is to majority requirement under a popular vote system. (Personally I think FPTP works best with a runoff system if needed, but I just don't see there being that many candidates to split the vote here). There should be uniform federal standards for.... federal elections, I don't think I've ever seen a good faith argument otherwise. Big agree on allocating electors proportionally, definitely not by Congressional district but instead by raw vote total. This has the advantage that states could do it now without a Constitutional amendment, or even needing an interstate compact with other states (Michigan, Wisconsin & Pennsylvania, say, could change to a proportional elector system prior to 2024 on their own volition. Maybe via referendum in 2022?)
There's a lot of states with 3, 4, or 5 electors, that would be unlikely to have a swing elector. An ad campaign that shifts opinion in California or Texas by 5 points gets you several votes, but is unlikely to do anything across the plains, even in a region with as large a population as California and Texas together.
>Short of getting rid of the Electoral College, the Maine/Nebraska approach should NOT be emulated. Choosing electors by Congressional district gives enormous power to whoever draws those district boundaries.
You've overlooked fixing gerrymandering within the solution space. It's far short of getting rid of the EC, but eliminates the objection to the ME/NE approach.
I’m a long-time reader, sometimes commenter, and occasional meet-up go-er. I’ve got an announcement about a project I’m developing that may be of interest to your average SSC/ACX reader.
It’s an online platform for creating or joining campaigns for collective action in adversarial situations - with elements like participation-based activation thresholds to solve game-theoretic coordination problems. Think “Kickstarter,” but instead of crowdfunding products, it’s for safely recruiting and organizing participants for any project that requires a group effort. I’m tentatively calling it “Spartacus App” and you can get more info about it here: https://spartacus.carrd.co/. You can also follow the newly created Twitter account at https://twitter.com/AppSpartacus.
This is not an entirely novel concept - many of the underlying principles have been validated by other successful platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and Change.org, The Point, (before it pivoted to become Groupon) for different use cases.
The operating assumptions:
#1. A coordinated group effort breaks a bad status quo equilibrium where no single individual has an incentive to act first but would be willing to act if joined by others.
#2. A coordinated group effort would help achieve a set goal where any individual attempt would fail.
I hope to increase the expected value of organizing around true preferences by lowering the courage requirements for taking action (from heroic to average) and reducing individual actors’ risks (from potentially catastrophic to marginal).
About me:
I have a B.S. in Behavioral Economics, so I’ve always been interested in these types of problems. The germ of this idea preceded my first reading of “Meditations on Moloch'', but the impact of that essay galvanized me into attempting something more concrete one day. The pandemic and an evolving work-life balance created the opportunity to get it started.
As for my professional background, I have over 10 YEO working with tech startups in sales, marketing, business development, and project management. I’ve consulted with multiple seed-stage companies on revenue strategies, monetization models, product-market fit, and market research. I was also Employee #1 and Director of Sales for a VR HealthTech startup called Vivid Vision (www.seevividly.com).
Use Cases:
--Brenda wants better working conditions at her company.
--She knows if she speaks up, she’ll probably get fired. Besides, she needs X number of coworkers to join her to have any leverage to negotiate.
--Spartacus allows her to raise awareness for her plan and others to join her without exposing their identities, protecting them from intimidation and retaliation.
--If, (and only if), Brenda recruits a certain number of people, everyone’s identities are revealed simultaneously.
--The group, now public, can proceed with whatever plan of action they collectively decide to pursue.
The use cases for Spartacus App can vary widely and are ideologically agnostic by design. Some subjects and objectives would be out-of-bounds for legal reasons. Here are some hypothetical examples of campaigns:
--Unionizing Veggies R Us Distribution Center Workers.
--Presenting an alternative DEI training curriculum at Hopscotch inc.
--Uncovering sexual harassment in the Marketing Department at Frazzle.io
--Concerned parents of Cedar Country Day School against changes to the history curriculum.
--Faculty of University X in support of unjustly penalized colleague Y.
--Exposing accounting malfeasance at Enbition Energy Inc.
--Those yet to be named by Robespierre, against Robespierre.
On a personal level, why am I doing this?
--I believe social norms enforced by unquestionable orthodoxies are probably wrong and deserve scrutiny and challenge.
--I don’t like bullies, no matter where they’re from or how they justify themselves.
--Mafia-style intimidation and making “examples” out of people through disproportionate punishment to change social norms are illiberal and disgraceful but unfortunately effective tactics. But it creates fraudulent public discourse, which is anathema to the ideals of a liberal society.
--I think a social climate where people are honest rather than dishonest and where problems are confronted rather than repressed, is preferable.
--I believe that organized collective action and collective bargaining are one of the very few forms of leverage ordinary people have against self-perpetuating institutional power centers. Pitting atomized individuals armed with personal consumer choice and performative self-expression against powerful organizations is an unfair fight; I want to try evening the odds.
--I suspect there are all kinds of dormant preference cascades waiting to be triggered under the right circumstances.
Project Status:
I’m currently looking to recruit people for proof of concept experiments and beta testing.
I’d also love to connect with the following sorts of people in general:
--Anyone with a strong social science background who wants to be involved and/or offer input.
--Anyone who thinks they might be a potential user of the app.
--Anyone who wants to support this project through signal boosting online.
--Anyone with a SWE background who has experience with MVPs.
There are ways to mitigate spamming/trolling/astroturfing/sabotage. Real ID verification (probably through Facebook API) would be necessary, and maybe even a small financial transaction. We're going to test this. But at no point will anyone's PII be sitting on a server where it can be exposed by a security breach.
I think this is related to (the same thing as?) an assurance contract - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract for more. I agree assurance contracts are great and this seems like a neat idea.
Yes! It does operate according to the same principles as an assurance contract - "I'll do X but only if Y number of people also do it". I think the key differentiator is providing anonymity in the early stages, which can (hopefully) break the inertia of a stable equilibrium based on false preferences.
Accruing (initially) anonymous support for something has its own drawbacks and failure modes, which I hope to address to the extent I can, but I propose #1, whatever risk accrues to individuals using the anonymity model is still less than having no anonymity, and #2, you have to weigh the range of outcomes, including the failure or sabotage of a campaign, against the alternative, which is presumably a perpetually bad status quo.
If you'd like to get updates as the project progresses, or know of anyone who might be interested in getting involved, please DM me.
One of the 'scouts' tasked with investigating which parties should start negotiating to form a government, let a piece of paper be photographed which showed: "Pieter Omtzigt, position (of employment) elsewhere."
Pieter Omtzigt is a Representative who played a central role in uncovering a government scandal that caused the previous government to fall. He is the only Representative from a mainstream party who is highly critical of 'the system,' giving him huge popularity. One of the pollsters polled people on who they would vote for in the hypothetical situation where Omtzigt founds his own party, which resulted in 23 seats, while the party he currently belongs to only got 15 seats in the recent election (although that poll probably overestimates how many votes he would actually get). Farmers from his province are meming: "Omtzigt for president." See: https://www.gelderlander.nl/oost-gelre/achterhoekse-boeren-willen-pieter-omtzigt-for-president~a4011aaa/201446927/
"Position elsewhere" was widely interpreted as an attempt to get rid of this Representative. The House of Representatives was up in arms. Various party leaders, including the Prime Minister denied that they made the suggestion that Omtzigt be given another position. The scouts claimed that the piece of paper that was photographed didn't reflect their discussions with the party leaders, but that it was an "assessment from multiple angles, including media reports," thereby insinuating that the media speculated about a new job for Omtzigt. However, people were quick to point out that there was no such media speculation. The House of Representatives demanded a debate before they would allow cabinet formation to continue, but that this debate would only be held if all scouting documents were made public, including the minutes of the pre-negotiation conversations with the party leaders. The Prime Minister said that this wouldn't happen, which is a weird thing for him to say, since he is obviously not in charge of the process of forming the new government, so this came across as a cover-up attempt, just like the scouts blaming the media looked like a cover-up.
When the documents were made public, it turned out to actually be the Prime Minister who said: "we have to do something with Omtzigt: make him a minister" (similar to secretary of state). The Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has established a bit of reputation for being rather forgetful or having incorrect memories about inconvenient facts, which some see as a tactic to withhold information from the House of Representatives, while still being able to claim to have not done so intentionally due to bad memory. However, in this case Rutte claimed to have forgotten after only a little more than a week, which is not very believable. Note that it is one of the two main tasks of the House of Representatives to review the actions of the cabinet, which requires being well-informed. Withholding information intentionally is generally regarded to be one of the worst transgression by the cabinet.
During the government scandal that Omtzigt exposed, it was also uncovered that bureaucrats use the term 'Rutte Doctrine' to describe a policy of withholding information from the House of Representatives by classifying most government documents as "personal policy views" of bureaucrats. It is legal to withhold personal opinions to allow bureaucrats to speak/write freely, preventing witch hunts. However, the 'Rutte Doctrine' expands that greatly. In the eyes of many, way beyond what is reasonable.
So we are now left with a bit of a mess. The leader of the largest party typically provides the Prime Minister, which would be Rutte. However, the entire opposition has supported a motion to 'fire' Rutte from the cabinet. This makes it hard for them to enter into a coalition with Rutte as the Prime Minister. So a logical choice might be to continue with the current coalition, but those parties have expressed strong disapproval, including doubting Rutte's integrity. That coalition would include Omtzigt's party, who cannot just ignore how their Representative was treated. Rutte could forego the job of Prime Minister, allowing a respected party member to take the job. However, he crafted his political persona around lacking an ideology, which makes it hard to return to being a Representative. Also, the party just lost their 'crown prince,' who left after being involved in a fairly minor and silly scandal, so there is no obvious replacement. It's also a possibility to allow another coalition member to provide the Prime Minister, but the job is associated with a substantial 'electoral bonus,' so it is unlikely that the largest party is willing to forego that benefit. Perhaps everything will fizzle out, like it often does in Dutch politics, but there is a chance that 'Teflon Rutte,' so nicknamed for surviving many a scandal with very little damage to his reputation or popularity, will be ousted, which in turn may cause a crisis in the largest political party.
It's complicated. In theory, a representative makes the law, verifies that the cabinet implements the law as desired and can 'fire' cabinet members or the entire cabinet. So constitutionally the cabinet members are mere flunkies who serve parliament. In theory, Representatives are also completely free to act/speak as they want.
In practice, there is great power in the executive, because of policy decisions that don't require law changes, the ability to sabotage and the ability to control the dissemination of information. However, a lot of this power is dependent on cooperation by the 'deep state.' The executive also consists of ministers who constitutionally are equals (even the Prime Minister) and who decide by majority vote. So essentially, the short term power that a minister has, depends substantially on support by a majority of the executive. Cabinet members have to support a majority decision, even if they disagree, so they cannot speak freely.
The executive is in practice quite restrained by the coalition agreement. This is an agreement between the coalition parties where they decide what laws will and won't be made during the governing period. This agreement gives lot of power to party leaders, who tend to negotiate it, while there is another class of representatives within these parties who merely get the choice to sign or not sign this agreement, where the latter typically means being kicked out of the party (and almost all of them became a Representative because they were selected by the party, not because they personally got enough votes to be elected, which makes them very dependent on the party).
Note that just like in the US, political parties are a natural development, despite having a constitution that doesn't give parties official the means to control their members. In practice, most voters merely want to vote for a party/platform and have no preference for a specific Representative, which gives great power to those who decide who goes on the list of potential Representatives and at what position (in the US, primaries make that part more democratic).
In the past, Omtzigt was placed too low on the list of potential Representatives to be able to get elected by riding the coat tails of his party. This is typically how political parties get rid of dissident voices (and in general, how heterodox voices are pushed out of Dutch mainstream politics). However, Omtzigt was able to get elected anyway by getting enough personal votes. Also, a short while back there was a vote for party leader, where he barely lost (or even may have won, because it was a bit of a joke, where the online vote had to be redone when it turned out to be possible to inject many votes, but during the second vote, the system thanked Omtzigt's partner for voting for his opponent).
So right now, Omtzigt is in a strong position, where he is relatively immune to being silenced. Becoming a minister would greatly limit his ability to speak 'truth to power,' which is the one thing that many people like him for and instead would make him part of a system that he won't have the power to fundamentally change. In general, his agenda is to change the system to be more democratic, not just to get his way on a specific issue.
Your question actually speaks to a pretty strong divide between technocrats who think that people should be happy if the system moves a little to the left or the right; and those who have more fundamental criticism of the system itself.
I've tried to find more information about Omtzigt's positions, but I don't really understand what kind of reforms he advocates (I read a little Dutch, but infortunately a little is not enough). It just seems to boil down to wanting less EU power. Is there more to it? (thank you very much again!)
I've only ever seen Omtzigt be critical of EU policies, but never argue that the EU should have less power. If anything, the opposite.
He recently published a book for a "new social contract" (which is literally the name of the book). He makes 10 proposals:
1. A constitutional court
2. A regional electoral system for the House of Representatives
3. Representatives should debate more on whether laws work, rather than virtue signal about what the law claims to do
4. (Civil) law should protect citizens better (against the government)
5. Improve the bureaucracy. Get rid of the rules that ban top bureaucrats from staying at their job for a longer period, which results in these people staying at their job for an average of two years, which makes them constantly inexperienced. Also, better support for whistle blowers, harsher punishment for illegal behavior and the use of simpler language.
6. More independence for inspectorates, making all of the inspections public and having a tax ombudsman.
7. A more active and independent civil society. Currently, those are very often subsidized, making them reticent to be critical. There is also a strong tendency to regulate them, stifling initiative.
8. Make good on the constitutional obligations to provide good education, housing and lowercase social security (this is more of a general concept of being secure in a number of ways, for which there is not really an English term).
9. Fewer models and planning bureaus that create their own reality based on how one chooses to model things.
10. The government should obey the laws on providing information to the public and the Representatives.
Thanks for the clarification! I'm interested to learn the Netherlands don't have a constitutional court. And point 2 plus Omtzigt's fan-base being located in Guelders point to greater antagonism than I thought between the Randstad and more rural areas.
The executive and legislative branches are now supposed to monitor the constitutionality.
The House has been 'urbanizing.' In 2008, about 50% of Representatives were from the rural provinces, while that's 2/3rds now. 39% of Representatives are from the four largest cities, while only 13% of the population lives in those cities.
Ultimately, the scandal is not so much about official power, but that the choice of words was clearly about getting rid of Omtzigt as a critic of the government.
The "we have to do something with Omtzigt" part makes that clear. It was clearly interpreted that way by one of the scouts, who suggested making Omtzigt the chairman of the House, which is a position held by a Representative who has to act very impartially (they still get to vote, but can no longer debate).
But can they force him to accept a position as chairman of the House, or as minister, if he would prefer to remain a regular representative, which allows him more independence? Or is it about offering him enough carrot to shut up, rather than stick?
No, they cannot. There are plenty of people within his party that dislike him, or at least, his status. The new chairman of the party recently (implicitly) threatened him by saying 'nobody is bigger than the party.'
There are all kinds of ways in which people can be bullied and thereby incentivized to leave for greener pastures, although Omtzigt is probably not the guy to do that to.
I posted a comment to Brett & Heather's podcast, and got this reply:
"That’s nice, thanks for replying, you can send a message to my administrator on Watsap to earn in crypto especially bitcoin + 1.. (.. 7.. 6.. ). 2.. 8.. 4.. 7.. 4.. 7.. 0.. 8.. he’s excellent at what he does, tell him I referred you to him. His passionate strategies are top notch.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸"
Even granting that Watsap is a typo for Whatsapp, I still can't figure out what to do, and I consider unlikely that my comment is going to get me any bitcoin.
Brett and Heather were discussing disgust, and what good it might do a deer for its decomposing body to smell bad to some mammals. They didn't discuss scavengers, and possibly they should have.
Anyway, I pointed out that bacteria have an interest in not getting eaten.
Maybe I should post my replies to Brett and Heather podcasts here instead of there.
That's... definitely a scam. What do you mean when you say you posted a comment to their podcast? seems very likely their podcast is being re-hosted by someone else with the intent to scam people.
There's a checkmark next to Brett's name under the video, but there isn't one next to the replyer's name. Check out any Elon Musk tweet to see the same thing in his replies, eg https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1379018148570091522
I know you're quoting Scott's numbers, but surely they don't add up - 105 entries, 14 finalists leaves... 91 non-finalists, not 89? Unless there were a couple of disqualifications. Or I'm being particularly dense today.
I still don't really understand NFTs* . So, the buyer gets to own a blockchain address which contains either some work of art, or metadata containing a link. But - what prevents someone else from putting exactly the same information somewhere else on the blockchain? Are there safeguards in the blockchain preventing this? Is there some ultimate authority who determines what is the real thing?
Nothing prevents it. In fact, since there are multiple non-interacting blockchains, nothing *can* prevent an NFT of the same thing existing in multiple places. Additionally you can do it without proof of authorship: any rando can make an NFT of whatever jpg or URL they care to upload. Though there is a public chain of ownership that can be traced to find which account minted it so that one can ask the author if it came from them. As far as I'm aware, neither "fraudulent" nor duplicated-across-several-blockchains NFTs are a big thing (yet, growth mindset) which suggests that whatever it is people value about them has to do with some concept of authenticity.
I feel like the sequence book reviews are posted might make a difference in how voting goes. Actually, what sort of voting system will you have? Just a single vote for a favorite seems like it'll be hard to decide on, but ranked choice would also be difficult with that many options.
If my entry is a finalist, is it okay for me to share a link off the site to show my friends what I wrote, or would that be considered to be violating the blinding?
Let's suppose that a strain of covid develops that the current vaccines don't apply to.
How would we know?
My guess is that we'd notice very quickly, because [significant numbers of] people would start showing up in hospitals and they'd say "hey, I have covid even though I got the vaccine", and this would be major news.
And my guess is that the fact this hasn't happened means the vaccine protects against all currently extant strains of covid.
Sounds reasonable to me. And it does look like the CDC and various State-level agencies are attempting to track this: the search term is "vaccine breakthrough cases".
One caveat is that there's a pretty high noise floor to differentiate breakthrough cases caused by a strain the virus mutating away from the vaccine vs. the known baseline of the vaccines not being 100% effective. Another caveat is that we're not necessarily identifying every breakthrough cases: fully-vaccinated people who have asymptomatic breakthrough cases will likely miss it completely, and those who have mild breakthrough cases will probably be more likely write it off as a cold or allergies than unvaccinated people.
One metric that would catch viral escape from the existing vaccines that I don't know if it's being attempted to track would be to do genetic analysis of viral samples from breakthrough cases to see if certain novel strains are vastly overrepresented in breakthrough cases relative to the general population. Of course, this would only be a reasonable metric if there were enough known breakthrough cases for the comparison to be statistically significant.
My thought is that, especially with the vaccinated social distancing less, you'll fairly quickly have a superspreader-amongst-vaccinated event with dozens of infected, that it will be spotted fairly easily.
With dozens of infected, there's a good chance someone will have suspicious enough symptoms to get at test, and then they'll call everybody else and tell them to test. Then if there are lots of infected vaccinated, I'm quite sure it will become worldwide news very quickly.
I wish there was a way to know whether a link was going to (1) open a new tab/window, (2) move the current tab somewhere else, or (3) run some javascript.
I often find myself reading long pages where I want to open a bunch of links in new tabs. I usually middle-click all the interesting links without looking at them, planning to read them later. This works fine as long as they were actually normal links. But with the Newfangled Internet this ends up opening a blank "javascript.void(0);" page half the time because it was trying to run javascript to give me the option to open the links (like the way google docs does links) and by the time I notice, I've lost my place on the original page so I never get to read whatever it was. I'm usually not willing to just normal-click on a link, because that runs the risk of taking me away from whatever I'm currently reading.
Does anyone here have a way of dealing with this? Maybe I should make a plugin/extension or something. Yeah, yeah, I could just take the extra second to see whether the link opened properly or not, but I don't want to.
You can usually see the link target at the bottom of the browser window (where the status bar has traditionally been), while hovering the link with the mouse. If it shows a reasonable URL, it will probably work; if it shows nothing or "javascript.void(0);", it won't. It may depend on your browser; most browsers have got rid of a permanent status bar by default, but Firefox and Chromium still show the URL when hovering a link. I believe this is default behavior, if not, you have to configure it.
Scott, just an FYI Polymarket recently released a P2P feature that enables direct transfer into a polymarket account for no fees. Effectively, you setup a polymarket account, another polymarket user transfers $x of USDC to your polymarket address, and then you Venmo/CashApp/etc. them equivalent cash. Works well enough for modest amounts - I was able to find someone to support my P2P in just a few minutes on the polymarket discord after previously failing to transfer in money via Metamask. Anyways, thought you might want to know as I initially found the site from your post!
I am basically certain I have ADHD. (I have never been able to do work until it's guaranteed to be late; I lose things constantly; I got a near perfect score on some self-diagnosis test; etc.) It's becoming a somewhat desperate situation because I am struggling to manage things at my job. How I can get prescribed Adderall? I emailed a couple clinics about ADHD testing; the first clinic told me it could cost $4000 to get an initial evaluation and neuropsychological testing and that they don't accept insurance, though they said maybe I could get partially reimbursed. The second only told me they aren't booking until June, and I feel this is somewhat urgent.
It's legal for PCPs to prescribe, but most of them don't and many insurance companies won't pay for it unless it's prescribed by a psychiatrist. If you have a PCP, you can ask them - I predict 75% chance they say no, 25% chance yes.
You should forget ADHD testing and make an appointment with a psychiatrist (though this may also have a long wait list). Psychiatrists are qualified to diagnose ADHD through clinical interview (ie talking to you) only, and this is cheaper and faster than getting a test. Depending on the psychiatrist they might ask you to get the test anyway, or ask you to jump through other hoops, and there's no good way around this. You probably don't want to ask them about this first because it would make you look like a drug seeker.
In my experience, most PCPs are willing to manage a prescription based on a previous diagnosis and course of treatment established by a psychiatrist, at least if the prescription is for a medication the PCP is familiar with managing for ADHD. I've gone on and off ADHD meds several times over the decades, and I've never had a PCP say no to writing a prescription based on a previous course of treatment (after verifying based on a copy of old medical records or me bringing in an old prescription bottle), or to titrating the dosage of the same medication (Ritalin or Adderall) up or down within normal parameters. I've only been kicked over to psychiatrists for my initial diagnosis as a child (my pediatrician sent my to a psychiatrist for evaluation, then wrote Ritalin prescriptions based on the psychiatrist's diagnosis and recommendations) when I wanted to consider changing medications to something other than Ritalin or Adderall (I'm currently on Modafinil, managed by a psychiatric PA). I've never had problems with insurance, but then I've usually had a PPO plan through work; HMO, Managed Care, Medicare/Medicaid, or ACA Exchange plans may be quite a bit pickier.
Of course, that's all tangential to BadAtChess's situation, since they don't seem to have an existing diagnosis.
I was in a similar position, though I had the benefit of being diagnosed as a kid. Worked with a psychologist who worked extensively with ADHD, got a diagnosis (no check of past diagnosis), then got a prescription from my PCP with the understanding that I continued to see the psychologist (not psychiatrist!). I was new to the area, so I asked my psychologist for a recommendation for a PCP who would be amenable - you can go shopping like that.
What is the research on how groups behave in regard to ideological changes? I'm not familiar with the field, but I want to know. In order to create a piece of convincing fake news (which I am not going to do, I just want to understand the dynamics), how many actors per population need to give a "truth" signal for most of the rest of the population to flip to giving a "truth" signal? For example, one signal in a field of 100,000 won't do it, but is 1,000 enough? Or 5,000? I am sure that somewhere out there is a lot of research on this, maybe in the context of marketing and advertising. Anyone know?
In terms of voting, I used to think of elections as decided by individual votes, taken en bloc. But I'm beginning to think that strategists are not interested in convincing individuals, they are releasing signals into information environments as if people were cellular automata or something, theorizing that a certain type of signal will turn 30% of type X blue, while that signal will turn 10% of type Y red and only 5% of type Y blue. Where is all this research?
This article (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/machine-learning-confronts-the-elephant-in-the-room?utm_source=pocket-newtab) on neural networks came up on my Pocket suggested articles. It discusses what to my mind seems like predictive processing, essentially stating that most neural networks don't have the capacity for what predictive processing would call "surprisal." Am I reading this correctly? If so, are there neural network models that incorporate surprisal?
If by surprisal you mean the negative log probability of the observation, that's the explicit training target for training language models. DALL-E is basically a language model which is additionally trained to generate images so I imagine its visual representation could be said to be trained using surprisal. I'd also not expect it get screwed up by sticking an elephant in its pictures since it actually seems to be able to represent weird combinations of objects.
Here is the least surprising news ever about college admissions:
"Inconvenient Facts for the War on Testing: College admission based on personal essays helps affluent students." By The Editorial Board | April 4, 2021
"Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. ...
"But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive.
"... the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.
"The Stanford researchers ran nearly 60,000 student essays submitted to the University of California in 2016 through a computer program. The computer identified the essay topics and “linguistic, affective, perceptual, and other quantifiable components of essay content.” The essays predicted the student’s family income better than SAT scores. ..."
It's easy to argue that it's not fair to encourage people who are highly likely to leave college with massive debts and no degree to attend college in the first place.
The failure mode of trying to pick the smart ones is picking more of those with high parental SES - but still to some extent at least picking those who are smarter and/or better motivated and/or better prepared, even if those things don't correlate at all with parental SES. (It only fails if they are negatively correlated with parental SES, which seems unlikely.)
The failure mode of random selection is a complete lack of correlation between ability and admission. This does no one any favours.
Fortunately many of those who want everyone to attend college - or at least everyone to have a "fair" (i.e. equal) chance of attending college - also believe that everyone is capable of succeeding both at college, and at the well paying job they believe a bachelor's degree still guarantees. I disagree.
I'm not sure how they explain away numerous drop outs, graduates who can't get career jobs - and mostly work precarious minimum wage service jobs, if they work at all.
Probably they assume it's all discrimination - no cisgendered heterosexual white Christian males from high SES backgrounds are (in their worldview) among the college educated barristas etc. I'd be unsurprised if there was not some correlation between failure and oppression, but I'd be even more surprised if it were anywhere near 1. (Correlations run from -1 to +1)
Meanwhile, a bachelor's degree mostly doesn't cut it in the job market. You need a graduate degree of some kind to get into most well-paying career tracks, or luck, nepotism, etc. (Or connections - see "high parental SES")
But this couldn't possibly be because we're sending too many people to college, and then dumbing it down so that more of them can "succeed" - or at least stay - and pay - a bit longer before dropping out.
Every proposal I've seen for lotteries for college admission is about randomly choosing from everyone who's above some standard. This does leave the question open of what the standard should be. The purpose of a lottery is to prevent people putting in huge efforts to get a slight edge to satisfy an arbitrary admission system.
The local STEM magnet high school (not college this time) appears to be about to be killed by random selection of future students. If there's any standard, it hasn't been mentioned in the local paper, which has covered the story, so I'm presuming it's "managed to graduate from the prior grade, possibly via 'social promotion'" (aka "is the right age").
Once most of the students can't handle what's presently taught, the school will presumably modify their curriculum until a reasonable proportion of their students can handle it - producing something closely resembling a random high school.
Of course this isn't college, but I've seen the same logic applied to state supported universities - though sometimes with a qualification somewhat above "has high school diploma/GE". The typical result in my youth was a freshman class double the size of the sophomore class, and weed-out classes to separate the sheep from the goats. I don't know how this is currently handled, but suspect this is now considered equally "unfair", and even the better qualified graduates now graduate with worse skills than they'd have had from a more selective institution, even back-door selective via weed-out classes.
Also, of course, these qualifications are generally numeric results on some test. I can't really see the anti-standardized-test people accepting standardized tests in this role either.
The standard should be a high school diploma. After all, everybody "knows" that grades and SAT scores are products of systematic racism.
In the best of all possible worlds were would have a system of examinations like the French baccalauréat or the German Abitur, but American high schools cannot deliver the content and American parents won't make their kids study.
The opponents of using standardized testing in admissions define fairness in terms of the results for the "identities" for which they advocate -- i.e. fairness is results. They believe that college admission is a golden ticket, and they want their share of the golden tickets. The believe that test scores and other forms of merit are a sham designed to impoverish and oppress them.
You may not agree, and you may have reams of statistics to buttress your belief, but you will not convince them of anything other than your arrogant perfidy.
The study I quote shows that removing standardized testing from the current admissions process will not only not make it more fair as defined in the first graf above, it will make the process even more manipulable by the upper class. Sadly, no policy other than overt discrimination could make the fairness fanatics happy, and that would undoubtedly not pass legal muster
My random draw proposal is a second or maybe third best idea. It is not illegal like overt discrimination and no way can complain about the judgment of prejudiced people interfering in the process.
"It's easy to argue that it's not fair to encourage people who are highly likely to leave college with massive debts and no degree to attend college in the first place."
True enough, but that is endemic to the current system. The real issue is that way too many jobs are square pegs pounded into the round hole of higher education. Teutonic apprenticeship systems are really what the vast majority of American youth need.
"The failure mode of trying to pick the smart ones is picking more of those with high parental SES - but still to some extent at least picking those who are smarter and/or better motivated and/or better prepared, ... The failure mode of random selection is a complete lack of correlation between ability and admission."
The failure mode of the current system, and the cancer eating at its bowels is political illegitimacy. I think you dramatically overestimate the intellectual difficulty of American undergraduate institutions. To be sure higher mathematics is difficult, but it is the same everywhere, and only a very tiny percentage of college students harsh their mellows with that stuff. It takes nothing to major in most humanities and social science programs. I think it is no more difficult to get a degree from Harvard than it is to get a degree from Kent State.
"Fortunately many of those who want everyone to attend college - ... - also believe that everyone is capable of succeeding both at college, and at the well paying job they believe a bachelor's degree still guarantees. I disagree."
Again, you are confounding issues. Admissions is not much related to the value of the education once you are admitted. Or the job you can find and hold down after you graduate.
"Probably they assume it's all discrimination - no cisgendered heterosexual white Christian males from high SES backgrounds are (in their worldview) among the college educated barristas etc."
It is more common than you might believe. But, it has nothing to do with admissions.
As a Dutchman with a Political Science background, I wanted to comment on last open thread's comment about the Dutch elections:
I do think polarization is taking place in Holland, and last elections showed that. To give some examples:
1) The main story of last elections should not be the "victory of the center". Yeah, D66 and VVD (left- and right-liberals) won, but the other traditional centrist party CDA lost 4 seats. Together, these parties won 2 seats (out of 150) which is hardly significant. By historical standards, their number of seats is nothing impressive.
2) More significant: the humiliation of the three traditional large left-wing parties (Socialists, Labour, Greens) who combined lost 11 seats and had their worst election ever and the victory of the populist-right (PVV, FvD, JA21) who combined won 6 seats and got their best election result ever.
3) Extremism got a place in Dutch Parliament: newcomer BIJ1 is the most far-left party we have seen in decades in Holland, with a "Kill the Boer"-chanting EFF-supporter on the list. FvD, the big winner of the elections, has a leader, Thierry Baudet, who has claimed that COVID was designed by George Soros for world domination, asked a colleague "what is it with your crusade against anti-semitism, everyone I know is an anti-semite", who called the Jews a "parasitical culture" preying upon "White European Civilization", questioned the holocaust, et cetera et cetera. He has also allowed his party to split up over him defending the party's youth wing, which sung the Nazi Horst Wessel Song on summer camp and has people in leadership positions sharing SS-quotes in germanic rhunes on their Instagram.
FvD got 8 seats, which is roughly 5% of the vote, having the largest gains of any party in the elections. It is quite beyond me how you can speak of "little polarization" here.
3) Some Dutch political scientists, such as the great electoral geographer have pointed towards the "Eastern-Europeanization" of Dutch politics. Similar to countries such as Poland (and France!), politics is increasingly a battle between centre-to-centre-right parties in the larger cities: culturally liberal, economically centrist, cosmopolitan, environmentally conscious and pro-EU and populist-right parties in the country-side: culturally conservative (mostly on immigration/integration issues), economically divergent (the largest populist-right party in the Netherlands, the PVV, have developed left-of-centre views on healthcare, pensions, social security. While in America, "pro-worker conservatism" is largely posturing imho, in Holland, France and Poland it exists), opposed to environmentalism and anti-EU. In this political landscape, the big loser is the left, whose existence is based on a sense of understanding and solidarity between academics, artists and PMCs that no longer exists.
What is also an interesting development in Dutch politics, for ACT-readers:
Dutch PM Mark Rutte got into a lot of trouble last week for leaked notes which suggested he or his aides wanted to "promote away" Pieter Omtzigt, a Christian Democrat MP.
Pieter Omtzigt is a most curious man. He is a member of probably the most "establishment"-party there is, but has always held on to his independence and was seen as the fiercest critic of Rutte's last cabinet (while being a coalition member!). His work on a child-benefit scandal, in which up to a 100.000 parents were falsely accused by the Dutch state, led to the resignation of the cabinet. Polling shows that if he would run for parliament with his own party, he would gain the #1 spot. He has popular appeal on left, right and centre.
So what's his main critique? Well, he's an econometrist. And he criticizes the Dutch modelling agencies for being "not accounting for uncertainties", making two-hour long YouTube videos on the failures of economic forecasting and the complexity of the Dutch welfare state. He argues for "more think tanks, and proper policy evaluation", "less reliance on modelling and more on the rule of law" and "more constitutional guarantees in dealing with basic rights of poor people being crushed by the welfare state".
More than any other politician in Holland recently, Omtzigt has managed to articulate wide-spread resentment towards policy elites. He has gained respect from friend and foe: the far-right wanted to make him PM, the liberal youth party deemed him "liberal of the year", while actually working most together with a PM from the Socialist Party. He is a hero of the people, with a platform that is all about intricate arguments over tax policy, Seeing-like-a-state critiques of model-making and procedural reform.
I think Omtzigt serves as an inspiration for reform-oriented politicians all across the West and proves to show that there does not have to be a choice between between "popular" and "wonkish".
I've been hearing a lot about increases in violent crimes and/or hate crimes against Asians in the US, possibly because of Covid. Trying to research(google) this a bit myself, I found many articles repeating this thesis, but I found the data in all of them to be very thin. Has anyone here found more comprehensive data that could be used for investigating this thesis? I don't have any particular reason to doubt this narrative, but any time I see the same story being picked up in a lot of places it makes me want to look at the foundations to see what it is all based on. One thing that I noticed is when I tried a quick search for violent crimes targeting Asians--everything that came up was about hate crimes, but I expect data about hate crimes to be harder to find/not as reliable, and indeed many of the results are about why it is hard to find this data. But more general crime statistics that don't rely on the hate crime designation seem like they might be easier to find.
(For the future, if you want links to articles linking to actual data, I found that it pays to start with Googling something like "asian crimes site:realclearpolitics.com", which is how I got to that article. RealClearPolitics loves linking to or posting articles that pick apart statistics and will happily link to writings from both sides of the aisle.)
That reinforces my sense that these articles are based on thin data but doesn't really provide any better data to give me a clearer idea of what is going on. Just because the data is bad doesn't imply there isn't a surge in racially motivated crimes. Thanks for the link though!
Can you figure out if there's generally a violent crime spike? It would stand to reason that if violent crime is going up in general, violent crime against Asians would also go up.
Then the question would be, did crime against Asians go up more than crime against non-Asians, or is everyone suffering from the same problem?
Yeah, that is what I was hoping I could find, general crime statistics and then narrow down by ethnicity. However, I became discouraged while trying to find this data, so I was curious if anyone here knew of a good data source for this. Maybe it is not something you can get a lot of details for just from googling.
I did find several sites with interesting data on crime, but all of them seemed insufficient to come close to helping answer the question of "was their a surge in violent crimes against Asians in 2020", for example a lot of data isn't provided for the last 2-3 years.
I haven't searched very hard though, it isn't very important to me to answer this question, but I am definitely curious about this.
"The Asian American population is greatly urbanized, with nearly three-quarters of them living in metropolitan areas with population greater than 2.5 million."
So 3/4 Asians live in areas that have most violent crime and worst violent crime spikes. I'm sure there are confounding factors, but it seems Asians as a group would tend to get hit hardest, no matter what.
A metro area include both high-crime and low-crime areas. Do you have data on which part Asian-Americans are more likely to live in? Stereotype would suggest they're engineers living in the suburbs.
Does anyone else feel that lately they are spending prohibitive amounts of time fighting bad code not at work but in real life?
The oven in my GE stove was coded by someone who didn't realize that people might have more than one cooking task and might follow a higher-temperature task with a lower-temperature task. So if you first bake something at 450F, then set temperature at 350F, it will not attempt to cool itself but will immediately signal that it is at 350F, and the only way around this is to turn it off for a few minutes and let it cool down to below 350F and then to turn it on to bake at 350F.
The elevators in our building have a much shorter delay for closing doors after someone arrived on the elevator than after the elevator arrived empty to pick you up. Unfortunately, if the elevator you were waiting for arrived with someone who pressed the button to get off on your floor, the someone-just-arrived case will be executed instead of the someone-is-waiting case, and the doors will close really fast without giving you time to enter (and will actually sometimes hit you).
Elevators and the oven (and Alexa's speech recognition screw-ups) are what I have to deal with every day.
Within the last year also the following things happened:
- My bank account (which had never been overdrawn, never violated any terms of service, never had a low balance) was closed without an explanation by what appears to have been an algorithm. No human is on record as having made any decisions, and no human was able to explain what happened.
- One of my identical twins got completely different bills for the same services with the same provider than the other twin. It's been some months and a lot of phone calls, and nobody can explain what's going on.
- Our propane company thrice generated bogus bills for repairs that were supposed to be covered by the service plan. Two of these were eventually explained away as user mistakes. Nobody could explain the third one, but they were nice and refunded it anyway.
- My attempts to pay to our power company from my bank account resulted in two payments disappearing into the blue. The bank debited my account and swears that the payments were delivered. All the data on the payments is correct as far as everyone can tell. The power company swears they never got them.
I'm not even going to tell you about all those cases of websites (including government websites) doing really strange things when faced with a web browser they don't like. My favorite one was a website that was using stylesheets that would not display data entry boxes if it didn't like your web browser (resulting in me not being able to figure out how to sign up for their waiting list).
Is it just me? If it's not just me, would you say it used to be as bad as this, or would you also say it got much worse lately?
I'd file a complaint about that elevator. The doors should never hit you, whether it's expecting you or not. It should immediately stop closing when someone or something is in the doorway.
I considered complaining when this happened, but I had too many things to fight and forgot. And now I don't think it makes a lot of sense to complain because the elevators seem to be correctly programmed to stop closing their doors when there is any resistance (such as your foot or another item at the very bottom) even if their sensors cannot see its source, so the risk of injury is minimal.
Is there a solid Rationalist review of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto I can look at after I read it? I sometimes fear that I fall victim to compelling arguments and need a trusted additional perspective for calibration. Also, I can bring it to my book club for some extra perspective.
Does anyone know if there's an advantage to getting your second mrna vaccine in a different arm? I vaguely remember reading something about the vaccine getting to a different lymph node but I can't find it anywhere. Any insight would be much appreciated!
I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but when you were writing Meditations on Moloch, did you have any idea it would become one of if not your single most popular posts? If so, did you approach it significantly differently than any other of your posts?
_Seeing Like a State_ by James C. Scott, though I think I can explain it.
Legible things are what an authority can keep track of. One of the things James C. Scott studied was governments assigning distinct names to people. It makes taxation easier.
I haven't seen explicit discussion of making one's own life more legible to oneself, for example by keeping track of everything one spends.
No, the hidden open threads are also general conversation. I'm not keeping careful track, but I don't think they're more CW than the CW-permitted public open threads.
Not talking about the hidden open threads. I don't care about those. I mean the hidden Scott articles, which so far are "Technocracy-Zilla: Origins", "Movie Review: Gabriel Over the White House" and "They're Made Out of Meta".
The movie review was about a movie from just before the Nazis became a thing which was basically encouraging FDR to go the full Mussolini. It was really interesting, and really political, but not really in a CW sorta way.
Committee for the Future of Finnish Parliament had a hearing with GPT-3.
>At the meeting, MPs first asked questions orally and then via chat. Committee experts wrote the questions for the AI on a shared screen. The answers were discussed, and further questions asked. The members of the committee asked the AI questions particularly related to the UN Agenda2030 on which the committee is currently preparing a report. The discussion focused, among other things, on the causes of poverty, unemployment, education, and the role of technology in poverty eradication and sustainable development. GPT-3 also highlighted Finland's opportunities in regional Talent Hubs.
>The final discussion analysed the significance of technologies such as artificial intelligence as an opportunity and a threat. The aim has not been to come up with the best possible answers to problems, but to provide as illustrative examples as possible of how artificial intelligence handles problematic issues and how it responds to them.
I wrote a post about some of the wild stuff that goes on in prediction markets: https://misinfounderload.substack.com/p/tales-from-prediction-markets
Note that these are all from the last 3 months; I only joined in January.
Really interesting stories, thanks!
I don't understand why the CO2 market was judged problematic - so someone figured out a source of public information that gave them an edge, isn't that prediction markets working as intended?
if there was enough money in it, someone could install their own CO2 sensor at that location
But... Viewing prediction markets as a social mechanism to gather information... Isn't that prediction markets working as intended?
For the benefit of those of us who might also wish to donate to support direct air capture, may we know which DAC charity's offset claims you consider extra trustworthy?
I read that as "because they are doing direct air capture, their claims about carbon offset amounts are extra trustworthy relative to other techniques of carbon offset" not that this particular charity was especially trustworthy.
I think Scott has mentioned Project Vesta before, which I had also already considered credible thanks to Stripe's vetting: https://stripe.com/climate
Could be. But though it may seem a pilpulistic distinction, enhanced weathering is not the same as direct air capture.
(TIL "pilpulistic" <3 <3) I'm out of my depth on this question but my understanding of Project Vesta's approach is that it does involve pulling carbon from the air, via Coastal Enhanced Weathering.
Yep, but my understanding (could be wrong) is that "direct air capture" usually refers to machines that do the carbon extraction, like those made by Climeworks or Carbon Engineering.
I started to argue that it's kind of arbitrary how to define "machines" and Project Vesta's machine is a bunch of olivine and ocean waves so that should totally count. Which is all well and good but then I googled more and you're right that it doesn't technically fall under the category of Direct Air Capture. So if Scott did mean Project Vesta, I guess he abused the term slightly!
As some of you might already know, I've made an extension to help tidy up the ACX Substack experience. Most recently, I've added an option to heart comments again. Only people with this extension or EdwardScizorhands' will be be able to see them, but with enough activity there could be a small ecosystem. Other new features include hiding comments by username, dark mode for the settings popup, and hiding sub only posts.
The extension is called ACX Tweaks and works with Chrome and Firefox, available on their respective stores or at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
As always, if you have any feedback or find any bugs, leave a comment at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks/issues or email me at <my username> + "n" @ gmail.
For anyone who doesn't like getting emails about hearts but still wants to know about replies to their comments, you can filter out emails from reaction@mg1.substack.com, which is the address that sends heart notifications.
oooohhhh is that how I've still gotten an email or two about my comment being "liked", after those were removed? I was wondering.
Possible, but you can also still like comments in the notification email you get if someone replies to you.
I posted some custom CSS to alter substack's appearance on Datasecretslox.(*) The field in ACX-Tweaks is a bit small for editing; for initial testing and tweaking of your CSS I recommend a separate add-on (such as Stylebot on Firefox).
(*) https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,2686.msg -- Please add your own styles, ideas and improvements to that thread.
Bug report: I tried this, and I was no longer able to type lowercase U, I, P, J, or K in the Substack post editor (not the comments, those were fine). All other letters, and uppercase versions of those letters, worked fine. I could type normally everywhere else. I turned ACX Tweaks off and confirmed it was causing the problem. I promise I am not making this up.
Well that's embarrassing. The problem is that the keyboard shortcuts are cancelling normal typing. I'll get a fix out shortly, but to fix the issue in the meantime you can disable the shortcuts by unchecking the "Keyboard shortcuts > Allow keyboard shortcuts" option.
Had the same problem. Workaround, if one does not need numbers: set the keys to numpad keys (eg 4 - 6 - 8 - 2 - 0). Arrow keys also work, at the cost of arrow-navigation in the text field when commenting.
Wait, you have it too? The extension should only run on astralcodexten, so Scott should be the only person who sees this issue. Where are you seeing it?
Ah, my mistake. I had it a while ago in the comments (not the post editor), set the workaround, and did not check again before my above comment. Sorry for the unnecessary confusion. Can type i u k j p OK with the default settings.
You are utterly mistaken about the non-fungibles' "downsides," and I do not think somebody such as yourself can be such blind to an emergent file format's industrial and societal implications. Plus, a smart contractual transaction does not add up to the overall energy consumption of a blockchain. A simple query in replicated research would also convince any mind that blockchains are the most active participants in optimizing against the environmental costs of value-extraction. That is, you are just virtue-signalling wrt NFTs.
Would you care elaborate on the upsides of NFTs, especially with respect to how they are currently being utilized?
Did he... even say what he thought the downsides were? How do you know he is mistaken then?
He did mention donating substantial amounts to offset the carbon cost—"ten times the highest credible estimate" of what the carbon cost might be, suggesting that was a concerning downside.
The environmental cost of transactions on Proof-of-Work blockchains (which use large amounts of energy by design) is one of the most prominent objections to the popularity of NFTs, most of which use Ethereum, which is currently Proof-of-Work.
(One could point out that NFT markets currently exist that are not built on Ethereum or Proof-of-Work, which could have been used instead.)
Ethereum is in the process of transitioning to Proof of Stake, though I'm not sure when they'll officially switch over.
Currently the timeline is next year (2022).
(but googling this also turned up skepticism with assertions that they've been bad at reaching their timelines in the past, so I don't know how reliable that number is)
> A simple query in replicated research would also convince any mind that blockchains are the most active participants in optimizing against the environmental costs of value-extraction.
What does that even mean?
At least part of it probably means "I'm so confident I'm right that I can assume anyone who disagrees with me is uninformed and I don't have to listen to them"
I think it means that traditional currency incentivizes people to pollute, but cryptocurrencies are the world leader in encouraging people not to pollute.
I have no idea why someone would claim that though, so perhaps I translated incorrectly.
I think Scott's point was not that he is confident that NFTs have a significant environmental cost - it was that he isn't sure exactly what the cost is, but he received so much in exchange for the NFT he minted that he was able to pay for a very conservative offset and still have a lot of money left over.
I was surprised that he'd donate to cover energy costs as opposed to more for the most effective charity. Surprisingly deontological decision.
Could alternately be viewed as a way to cooperate with global warming activists.
Suppose we both agree that X and Y are good, but I think X is better than Y and you think the reverse. Maybe I'd be OK with transferring $1 directly from Y to X, and you'd be OK with transferring $1 directly from X to Y. We could decide to each sacrifice the other's cause for our own whenever the opportunity arises, but it would probably be a positive-sum deal if we could both agree not to do that, and to only pursue strategies that don't directly interfere with each other.
I think it's a hedging heuristic. If, whenever you incidentally cause harm in pursuit of a greater good, you spend resources on fixing that harm, then you are much more insulated against the case where you were wrong about the relative ratio of the good to the harm.
If I am willing to starve a hundred thousand peasants to build a socialist utopia, I risk being a moral monster if it turns out I'm wrong about the viability of said utopia as then I'd have become a mass murderer for nothing. If instead I hedge my bets, build my utopia slowly and avoid murdering people, I avoid the downside risk.
I think of this kind of deontology as a way of avoiding Pascal's Mugging yourself with a single high-expected-utility goal.
So I guess it's a strategy that you'd use when you're epistemically uncertain (relative to the stakes at play).
Genuine question. I've read up on NFTs and think I understand the technical side fairly well. There's some interesting future applications in virtual items, etc. But with the NFTs that exist right now which don't give you access to anything another person wouldn't have, why would I want to buy one rather than just donate that money to the artist if I want to support their work?
NFTs are not just art. There is one project called ARMOR that mints NFTs as proof of ownership of an insurance policy that can be freely transferred between wallets. There are other projects doing similar things with other contract-based NFTs. I think this is fairly unique in that it allows an insurer to vastly simplify the logistics of the product they offer, and makes it easy for the policy to be transferred from one individual to another when the original buyer no longer needs coverage.
Like i said immediately above. I agree there are interesting future uses for the technology. But none of that is a reason to buy the ones that exist right now
It’s like any other collectible or work of art. The buyer wants to own it. There’s no reason to own Superman #1. The story has been reprinted multiple times. Yet people will pay a lot of money for that comic book. It has value to them.
There are lots of people who want to own a print from the first run of Superman #1. I don't know of anyone who wants to own the first certified photograph of a print from the first run of Superman #1. I think the question is what makes the NFT more like an actual print from the first run, rather than like the first photograph of a print from the first run.
Ask yourself, why do people want to own a first run print of Superman #1? Is it to actually read the comic? Obviously not, as perfect reproductions are easily available. No, they want it because they are collectors and collecting isn't about pragmatism. Once they have the comic they'll likely bury it in a safe somewhere. It doesn't matter: they still have the satisfaction of owning it, and of being in an exclusive club.
Collectors are weird that way. The principle applies to NFTs. Let's say I draw an excellent original work using a tablet and photoshop. Nobody can claim to have a first edition of a piece of digital artwork: it's all zeros and ones, and copies thereof. Up until now people could only enjoy the artwork pragmatically: perhaps by buying a print reproduction to hand on their wall because they think it makes their wall more beautiful, or just looking at it on DeviantArt or where ever to enjoy it's aesthetic beauty. But there's no way to "own the orginal." NFT's fill that tiny market niche: the market of people who want to collect exclusive things. They're not a big market, but they obviously exist.
I don't know if this applies to Superman #1, but sometimes things are reprinted but not in full. For example, a comic might be reprinted, but without the letter column and/or advertisements.
Well, no, the insurance NFTs I mentioned exist - I know because I own a policy like the one I described.
There are others I know of that friends own that give access to particular benefits on certain blockchain platforms (e.g. reduced trading fees) - those interesting uses outside of NFT art exist now.
I agree with you. There are a lot of interesting applications for NFTs. I was responding to the art question. I expect deeds for houses, car title and many other unique forms of ownership to eventually be on the blockchain.
Yeah, for sure - I actually was responding to Randomstring's comment, wasn't disagreeing with you at all!
Regarding this insurance NFT, how does that interact with normal actuarial science?
Say Alfred has a great driving record, healthy habits, avoids dangerous situations etc. and can get a good deal on insurance because he's statistically low risk.
Bruce on the other hand destroys cars, is constantly being injured, and is always doing crazy stuff. He can't get insurance from a company because he's so high risk.
Can Alfred buy an insurance token, sell it to Bruce at a profit, and then Bruce cashes out when something happens?
The policy I hold now insures me against the risks of a smart contract vulnerability in a particular protocol where I am providing liquidity for traders, so it has virtually nothing to do with my behavior. Instead the pricing is based on the risk of the protocol itself.
I would imagine that the type of freely transferable NFT insurance I'm describing wouldn't work all that well for particularized policies like the one you described for obvious reasons.
Standard car insurance policies are written indexically - they pay out if something happens to "the holder" or "the bearer". But I think life insurance policies are written with a name - they pay out if something happens to the person in whose name it is, regardless of who owns the policy. (Spouses and employers are the two most common owners of policies, I believe, since both stand to lose something if the person dies.) I guess this is more useful for the latter sort of contract than the former.
They do give you access to something other people don't have - a claim to own the original (or one of a limited edition set) of a piece of art, endorsed by the artist. This claim isn't really useful for anything practical, but it is a form of status that some people value highly.
It's not the "original" in the conventional sense at all. It's more like if Andy Warhol printed off a run of 2000 prints of something, pulled one out of the middle of the stack, and declared it the Original (with certificate of authenticity and all) and the other 1999 merely copies.
If you think this is legitimate, then sure, NFTs are originals.
I see your point, but I don't think that's a fair comparison either. The reason that example makes the concept of originality seem silly is because the obvious edition to declare the original is the *first* one to be printed, not some random one from the middle. But with digital art there is no concept of "first" print, so the analogy breaks down.
I think the closest analogy would be if Andy Warhol came up with some new print, made an unlimited supply immediately, and then made one single signed certificate commemorating the occasion and sold that certificate.
It does seem a bit silly that anyone would care to own such a certificate. But I think it's basically equally silly that anyone would care to own an Andy Warhol "original" print when I can order an identical one online for $50.
The point is that there is some set of rich people who want to compete to own the "first" version of a print that Warhol made, since this type of ownership is inherently scarce and winning it confers status. And now there is a new set of rich people who want to compete to own the signed certificate produced by an artist which references a particular piece of art, which is similarly scarce.
The scarcity point is pretty solid. I do think that ultimately this is just about coordinating on a provably scarce thing to replace art originals, and NFTs are scarce in a similar way by design.
But I'm not convinced that most of the people buying NFTs see them as a certificate referencing the underlying art; there's quite a lot of language floating around about owning the art itself, which makes me think people are confused in a way they wouldn't be about the Warhol certificate thing.
As a friend of mine said, at least people who buy baseball cards don't think they're buying the player...
I think that "coordinating on a provably scare thing" is a great way to characterize traditional art collection, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies in general.
I also agree that most people who are buying NFTs do not really understand what they are buying at all. I don't think this is inherently bad - there are lots of people who buy Bitcoin without fully understanding how it works, or buy AAPL without knowing the first thing about their financials. Many participants in financial markets, perhaps even most, are playing a Keynesian beauty contest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest) where they are focused on predicting how much other people will pay for things rather than trying to value them intrinsically.
That said, it's pretty clear that the speculative mania in NFTs has gotten far ahead of whatever organic demand exists among people who do fully grasp the concept and are collecting for their own pleasure. I would be extremely skeptical of anyone pitching me on investing in NFTs, and if a friend came to me asking whether to buy an NFT I would almost certainly advise against it.
Yeah I don't really get it either. As I understand it NFTs are supposed to kind of work like a proof of ownership, but ownership of what? Ownership of one of an basically infinite amount of copies of the Moloch piece?
Outside the art context, NFTs start to make more sense. Ownership of an insurance policy. Ownership of the title to a vehicle. Ownership of a lease. Ownership of royalty rights for a property. Think of anything you might want to provide unique, immutable proof of ownership/provenance for and NFTs are useful tools for that.
This is actually a common mistake. NFTs can, in principle, grant ownership rights, but the ones commonly being minted right now don't do that. You only own the NFT itself, not the work the NFT points to. For the Moloch essay in particular, Scott had already released the entirety of slatestarcodex under a Creative Commons License. Minting an NFT does not give the owner of the NFT any rights to use of that essay or a specific copy of that essay beyond what any other user of the Internet gets.
In this case, an NFT is less like a certified copy of something otherwise infinitely replicable and more like a signature. It's somewhat close to a signed copy of the Moloch essay, but since the token itself only contains a pointer to a copy stored on some other server the owner of the NFT doesn't control, it's more a signed slip of paper with an address on it, and that address probably now and may in the future contain a copy of something that is otherwise infinitely replicable.
I've been involved in blockchain since 2012 and personally think the NFT craze is mostly hot air. Anil Dash has a pretty good explanation why: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/
I do think they will have good use cases, but not for the nonsense we're seeing today. Instead they'll be used for things like fractional ownership of real estate, which can be enforced by real world legal contracts.
I'd say this makes the list of "shitty comments trying really hard to sound like a just-the-facts straightforward analysis."
What called for the acrid tone?
Comments by people who are correct and understand what they're talking about generally have more content than this.
Awhile ago I had a discussion with someone on the SSC subreddit about the Iraq War and the morality of having a career in the military. We had very different views on this polarizing and heated issue, but the discussion was in good-faith, and didn't devolve into personal attacks, straw-manning, or hatred for each other.
It occurred to me that r/SSC was the only forum I was aware of where a topic so controversial could be discussed in good faith. Can anyone recommend any other forums where heated but good-faith conversations like this can happen?
Cool, I'll check it out. Btw I'm also a fan of your articles on policing, very interesting to hear the perspective of someone who has actually worked in law enforcement. Keep up the good work!
Sounds like you are convinced, but for anyone else reading the thread I second the recommendation of Slow Boring. It's a good newsletter and the comment section is much more ideologically mixed than the other Substacks I subscribe to.
There are the culture war derivative subs that split off when /r/ssc decided to abandon the CW threads I'm not sure are kosher to mention here.
Look into "Street Epistemology". I've been using this technique for the past 4 months. The technique is based on socratic questioning and a respectful attempt to understand the interlocutor's point of view.
It's an extremely effective way make good-faith, productive discussions happen, even about very sensitive or strongly held beliefs. Conversations can be in person, voice only, or, with some modifications, text only.
Anthony Magnabosco is one of the leading practitioners, and has many good in-person conversations up on Youtube, but there are many more people who use this technique.
Reposting my unanswered comment from your AMA in case somebody else wants to weigh in and provide suggestions:
1. Your past answers to my questions have significantly broadened my intellectual horizons, enriching my life in difficult times. Some time ago, I've made a document where I collect all the new questions I'd love to ask you. It currently contains almost 600 of them. How should I best approach this?
2. It seems that the pandemic made many people (especially rationalists) worried about the fragility of human life. What is your stance on the various approaches to longevity (e.g. http://immortality-roadmap.com/IMMORTEN.pdf)? What are you personally doing (and/or what would you recommend doing) in order to secure the continuity of personal identity?
3. Could there be some clever way in which we might get your answers to the important but controversial culture war/taboo questions, without you actually taking the risk of responding to them directly, and/or being linked with the replies? While it seems impossible at first glance, maybe there's a smart way to solve the problem with a "one weird trick [journalists HATE him!]". It could be useful to draw inspirations from the past examples of successfully circumventing the censorship and adversarial social currents.
Regarding your (1):
Consider how unlikely it is that Scott will answer one ... two ... three ... SIX HUNDRED questions from a single person. I highly suggest that you dole out those questions as entries to these open threads. Then not only can Scott weigh in as able, but also we participants can try to answer them. This is likely to get many many more of these q's answered.
You might also try posting them in Less Wrong; in the SSC subreddit, and in the other rationalist arenas.
On #3, you seem to be asking for a protocol under which A can prove his identity to B, but B can't tell C that it was A saying it.
A protocol where B couldn't *prove* A's identity to C seems plausible, but journalism doesn't require mathematical proofs and you'd need some sort of memetic DRM to prevent B from just saying "it was A".
600 questions is a *lot*. Possibly you should go over them and check for duplicates.
In any case, I'd say just post one or two of them per open thread. Do you have any ideas for how to choose among them?
It might make sense to link to the whole list here. It's reasonably likely that other people would like to take a look at them, or some of them. It's also possible that some of them have already been answered.
There's a clever trick from surveys a long time ago--I doubt it would work well here, but might in some similar contexts. The idea is that you have a survey question that's incriminating, and so you have the answer incorporate some randomness that gives the respondent some plausible deniability.
Suppose we want to know the number of secret witches among us. The witches are proud of their midnight cavorting with the devil, and would be happy to answer honestly, but fear being burned at the stake if their secret is uncovered. For all they know, the survey is being done by a witch hunter. So we tell each respondent to flip a coin, answer "yes" if it comes up heads and give the true answer if it comes up tails. Assuming everyone follows this, and that witches are a small subset of the population, most people with "yes" answers won't be witches (so burning them at the stake has a small payoff), but we can still use the answers from our survey to estimate the proportion of witches in the population, by just doing a little extra math.
> So we tell each respondent to flip a coin, answer "yes" if it comes up heads and give the true answer if it comes up tails.
You have to be careful with this. You did partially cover it in your answer, but it's worth repeating.
You're presumably doing this sort of blinding because one of the answers is problematic in some sense (incriminating, etc, etc).
Assuming this is the case, note that it is still safer for a person to answer with "not a secret witch" regardless of the coin flip. You noted that even a perfectly fair coin allows someone to do a Bayesian update, which on its own can be not the end of the world - but you don't get that entropy back.
There are also serious questions around details like "how likely is the coin flip to be observed or rigged".
(And even assuming that things are perfectly safe/secure - what happens when P(thinks this is a trap | secret witch) != P(thinks this is a trap | !secret witch)?)
During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, a vaccine by Pandemrix was administered in Europe and was found to cause narcolepsy. I have two questions.
1. Why are we so sure that new vaccines won’t have severe side effects?
2. Is there is a pithy, quick response to a COVID vaccine-hesitant person that sums up why the benefits outweigh the risks?
I don't think pithy statements in general are very good for getting people to change their minds. The best thing I've found is to take people's concerns seriously, even if you privately think they're silly. There are lots of different reasons why people are hesitant, so it's probably best to directly address those rather than try to have a one liner knock down.
You are right of course. I should have just said a quick response.
1. Because they weren't noticed in clinical trials? They still did clinical trials, they just ran them parallel instead of sequentially afaik.
Also since these have new technology we shouldn't expect the same outcomes necessarily
Ultimately we know covid is really really bad. And the chance of catching it remains high in most of the world. Vaccine side effects would have to be extremely bad to make the tradeoff negative. Any side effect that hasn't shown up in large numbers already is almost certainly not in that range
Covid is really, really bad for some people. How do I tell physically fit young people that a vaccine (that they think could cause infertility or narcolepsy) is definitely better, especially if they don’t believe a lot of the covid numbers/haven’t witnessed covid complications personally. It makes me think of this line that “some Americans would live near Chernobyl because they can’t see any radiation.”
Newer variants of Covid (particularly the one in Brazil) are proving more dangerous to younger people - current vaccines are also good for reducing the danger of those, and the less we have the disease circulating, the less likely another dangerous variant will emerge.
This makes vaccinations for the population obvious in the big picture but invokes tail effects and altruism. The increased danger to young people in some variants makes vaccinations in young people more clear as well.
How bad is the swine flu vaccine narcolepsy, compared to a week or two of suffering so bad you can't walk across the room? (That's the most common description of covid from friends of mine in their 30s that have had it.)
If it is narcolepsy as I understand it, then 2 weeks of suffering is much preferable. There would be a light at the end of the tunnel. And my experience with people in their 20s getting covid is headache and loss of smell, but a bunch never even knew they had it. I think it is obvious that society is better with everyone vaccinated, but convincing low-risk people is difficult. I believe the narcolepsy side effect is a steel-man argument for the young, vaccine-hesitant. I find it difficult to argue without invoking altruism, tail-effects, or trust in medicine. That's why I liked Scott quantifying the approximate risks. However, it would most likely be impossible to quantify the trust levels of the new mRNA vaccines compared to the Pandemrix vaccine. How can a layman know that Pandemrix was unusually bad? I hope that as we continue to vaccinate 100's of millions and keep track of vaccinated individual's side effects, that the data will validate the vaccines beyond the point of refutation. This takes time, and I don't have a response to someone who is young and healthy and doesn't want the vaccine.
> How do I tell physically fit young people that a vaccine (that they think could cause infertility or narcolepsy) is definitely better
What's the chance of COVID causing unknown long-term side effects, like infertility or narcolepsy, or a shorter life-span?
I'd estimate we understand the long-term effects of covid much less well than we understand these vaccines, and only one of those things was designed to specifically avoid negative impact on humans.
It seems odd to me that these young healthy people want to pick the best outcome for covid (that it has no effects we don't yet know about), but the worst for vaccines (that they have significant unknown effects). In all probability it's the reverse, since covid mutated randomly, while vaccines were designed to minimize unknown effects.
This helps me clarify why I felt they were arguing in bad faith. It does seem ridiculous/unfair to assume the vaccine would be worst case and the virus would be best case. Thanks for framing it that way.
1. Testing rules out any high-frequency side effects. It looks like the Pandemrix narcolepsy was 1/20,000 people, which is the level that testing might miss. But enough people have already gotten COVID vaccinations that we probably would have detected even something at that level by now (unless it takes a long time to develop, which doesn't match how I think these things work, or a long time for people to notice, which is unfortunately possible but less likely given eg how quickly Europe caught a mild and kind of irrelevant blood clotting problem with AZ).
2. I think about 1/10,000 healthy young people die of COVID (see https://freopp.org/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-vs-influenza-or-pneumonia-by-age-630aea3ae5a9, I'm looking at the 25-34 bin) . So even if the COVID vaccine is exactly as bad as Pandemrix, you're trading a 1/10,000 risk of death for a 1/20,000 risk of narcolepsy, which seems pretty good. But also, Pandemrix is an unusually bad vaccine so probably the COVID vaccine is safer, and also you are being altruistic by getting the COVID vaccine since you're helping prevent the pandemic from spreading to older people at more risk.
Thanks Scott. I have mentioned the altruistic approach. I really appreciate the numbers.
The blood clotting problem is not mild, a quarter of the flagged cases died. Though probably the numbers can be improved if it is watched for and treated when symptoms develop.
Sorry, you're right that it's mild (as a global problem) but not mild (for each individual case).
> I think about 1/10,000 healthy young people die of COVID (see https://freopp.org/estimating-the-risk-of-death-from-covid-19-vs-influenza-or-pneumonia-by-age-630aea3ae5a9, I'm looking at the 25-34 bin)
Nitpick: these are young people, but not necessarily healthy young people. Those young people who die of covid-19 could be concentrated among unhealthy young people.
Sure - but the hesitant person may well be an "unhealthy young person" by these same criteria. Depending on how you define "healthy", lots of people aren't.
Is it possible that by pursuing the presumably altruistic route of vaccinating everyone as soon as possible that we are driving the virus to people that were previously less at risk? Or increasing the eventual risk to the vulnerable in the form of a more dangerous variant? I have read / listened to a few concerning opinions about the consequences of a non-sterilizing vaccine on viral mutation and escape. While the vaccination campaigns in some developed countries will likely provide reprieve to those countries from near term transmission and serious disease rates, the global campaign of vaccination doesn't seem like it will happen quickly enough to mitigate mutations that could bypass current vaccine tech.
I'm not sure what you mean by "non-sterilizing vaccine". And every person vaccinated is one less person who can catch and then incubate the virus, thus preventing more avenues for mutation. Vaccination is the single best way to prevent worse variants from developing. Also, your comment seems to imply that there is some set amount of infection to go around, and therefore vaccinating healthy people will push more infections onto vulnerable populations and that is not at all how epidemiology works.
The more people vaccinated, the fewer routes of infection there are for _everyone_, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike, and the fewer chances for mutation. Vaccines have about the largest positive externalities of pretty much anything that your average person can do.
Maybe not the best way to phrase what I was trying to say... more precise... a vaccine that does not impart sterilizing immunity. To be fair, there are very few vaccines that have been developed that do so. Plus, we have never eradicated a respiratory virus and I seriously doubt that Covid will be our first. Vaccinated people will certainly have better outcomes should they be infected with the current forms of the disease and those who are vaccinated and infected will certainly transmit less disease than those who are not vaccinated. My questions were more directed at the potential for variants developing that can avoid current vaccines that arise out of our inability to vaccinate the world (in contrast to a few developed nations). Are we inadvertently pushing a problem of the old and unhealthy onto the young and healthy?
I don't understand how you think we are increasing the risks to young and healthy people.
Making some people immune makes it harder for the virus to spread, which normally means that vaccinating one person makes any given non-vaccinated person LESS likely to catch the disease, because it has fewer paths to get to them.
Mutations occur to individual organisms essentially at random, so the odds of any given mutation occurring are higher in a larger population. So if fewer people get sick, that normally means LESS chance for the virus to mutate into something bad.
Neither of those depend on fully eradicating the virus. Vaccinating just +1 additional person still means less infection risk for the unvaccinated and fewer mutations.
The only potential negative effect I can see is that some people might decide to act in a riskier way because they believe they're safe. But I think it would be very very hard for people to act enough riskier to cancel out the benefits of vaccinating people. I've been told that public safety measures (e.g. seat belts) always bring out people worrying that the benefits might be canceled by people acting riskier, but that historical data consistently shows that people still end up safer overall. It seems especially unlikely for the benefits to be canceled out in this case, because vaccine protection is invisible, and we have lots of people who don't seem to trust vaccines even intellectually, so the FEELING of safety is small compared to the actual safety.
Vaccines to provide immunity for most people. Like you said, no vaccine is 100% effective, and it is still possible to get COVID after being vaccinated, but many _fewer_ people will get COVID, not just have less bad outcomes, but most people will straight up not get the disease, at any level. Again, not 100%, but most people.
So even if you only vaccinated people in 1st world countries and no one in a third world ever got a single dose, vaccines would _still_ be better for those hypothetical residents of 3rd world countries because the people in 1st world countries who won't get it will provide fewer potential mutations.
In practical terms, if no one in 3rd world countries got vaccinated, the fact that rich people did would likely have no big impact, but the point is that vaccinating people, at any level, in any region, _can't make it worse for anyone else_. Vaccines have _only_ positive externalities.
You seem to think that vaccinated people will act like some kind of resevoir that will provide greater levels of mutation that will make it worse for non-vaccinated people. This isn't true. Vaccinated people _can_ sometimes, at very low levels, get the disease. But even in the much rarer (relative to unvaccinated populations) cases that they do, they will usually have lower viral loads etc. All of this adds up to mean that vaccinated populations provide DRAMATICALLY fewer opportunities for the types of mutations that you are talking about.
To reiterate the point I made in my first comment: vaccines are BY FAR the best tool we have to combat the possibility that worse strains will evolve an spread.
Variants could potentially evolve that will be able to escape vaccines (although all the evidence is that current variants are protected against by our current vaccines), but this is much much much more likely to happen in a situation where very few people get vaccinated than one in which many people get vaccinated.
I just don't understand what mechanism you think it is by which vaccinating people could cause harm to other, unvaccinated people. That's not how epidemiology works.
solid explanation. thanks.
One thing that I see missing from a lot of these calculations is that you need to multiply the probability of being harmed by covid by the probability of getting covid, possibly also taking into account your personal behavior profile. I can see that for someone who doesn't really interact with other people that much, the scale could still be tipped in favor of not getting the vaccine.
Well, it's looking like the Astra-Zeneca vaccine is probably causing a very rare brain blood clotting / platelet malfunction phenomenon with increased frequency. Only on the order of one in a hundred thousand, but the syndrome is very rare normally so it has been noticed.
It has to be said that a young healthy person probably doesn't have much more than that chance of getting Covid and dying from it, at least in a given year, so it is significant.
> Well, it's looking like the Astra-Zeneca vaccine is probably causing a very rare brain blood clotting / platelet malfunction phenomenon with increased frequency
Is it? My impression was that blood clots show up equally frequently in non-AZ-vaxxed people anyway, and "this extremely specific form of blood clots is slightly more likely as shown by a dozen documented cases out of millions" sounds like p-hacking.
I've been hearing lots of mixed descriptions, mostly from people that don't have access to the actual data. If described merely as "blood clots", then they've been about as common as in the broader population. At least some sources are claiming that there is something very distinctive about these clots, that you wouldn't usually see one in a few million young people, and they've seen a few dozen. I don't exactly know who to believe yet here - it could well be p-hacking, or it could be that this is just the kind of thing that hasn't been properly written up yet but is clear if you're very familiar with this kind of condition.
If one particular kind of rare blood clot is showing up a lot, but TOTAL blood clots (of all kinds combined) are not elevated, that sounds like p-hacking to me. Or at worst, it changes what kind of blood clot you get, but doesn't give you one if you weren't getting one anyway.
I've also seen complaints that some sources are comparing to the rate of blood clots in the general population, when the vaccine is being targeted towards elderly and unhealthy people who have higher base rates.
Regardless, even if this were real, it sounds like it's much smaller than the risk of covid. Zvi did an estimate that even assuming that 100% of the reported blood clots were caused by the vaccine and that 100% of those blood clots were lethal (both crazy assumptions), the total statistical deaths from vaccinating the entire US population with that blood-clot-causing vaccine would be roughly equal to the excess deaths from delaying vaccination efforts by 1 day. (One of several complaints Zvi makes in an extended rant here: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/03/18/22454/ )
I think it's quite clear that the danger from this is less than the danger from covid, even in people in their 30s where they have concern, as long as covid is still spreading at several dozen cases per hundred thousand people per day.
But I think there's a lot of confusion about the actual frequency of the clots - Zvi is comparing annual frequency of clots to the number of clots that have appeared in a particular two month period, and in that particular post isn't noting that a bunch of those clots have appeared in younger people than the general distribution of the vaccine so far.
It still seems stupid to delay the vaccine for it. But it does seem plausible that it's a real thing.
Perhaps XKCD 2397? https://m.xkcd.com/2397/
I would strongly advise against this. Later xkcd (including that comic) tends to fall under Scott's categories of (Eighth Meditation) "bingo cards" and (Varieties of Argumentative Experience) "gotchas" - neither of these are useful tools for convincing people.
Didn't swine flu cause narcolepsy as well? So the narcolepsy risk was the same for the flu and the vaccine?
Exercise junkies of ACX...
1. What's your primary form of exercise?
2. Why?
3. Have rationality/scientific principles had an influence? What is it?
I lift Olympic weights. I found some 20 year old fitness coach to help me make a plan and he texts me every day to make sure I stick to it. It's only $100/3 months which is incredibly worth it for me, who's main problem is standing up from my desk, walking over to my weights, and doing them.
Running. After 30 years, it's habitual and as such rarely seems like drudgery or hard work, although I have seldom sensed a runners-high. Some major reasons are getting a good workout in a short period of time (50 minutes) and that it gets me outdoors and exposed to sunshine and various scenery.
As far as scientific principles there's certainly much work showing the benefits of running, and a far lesser amount (that get a disproportionate amount of attention) showing downsides.
3. Sorta. Game theory.
My exercise routine is based on the extremely scientific/rational principle that "the most effective and beneficial exercise is the kind that I will consistently do."
So I came up with the simplest exercise routine that I will never skip or cheat. Optimizing for any other factor has always resulted in me eventually quitting for upwards of a year of time.
Currently I'm at:
- Do 100 push-ups in the morning in sets of 33/34 (I started with just 10 pushups total and slowly worked my way up)
- Do 20 crunches and then 10 left side crunches and 10 right side crunches
- Do 20 squats (recently added kettle bell weights to this)
Gymnastics. (Which peripherally includes most common form of "exercise" during physical preparation in some way or another)
1 & 2
I competed as kid, but I enjoy being able to progress as an adult despite the cultural narrative (in gymnastics) being that it's not really possible to do so. I like being my own coach and I haven't found another sport that requires such a large base of physical preparation but *also* technical proficiency in a number of varying ways.
Huge influence, interpreting S&C literature is necessary for being your own coach, and just for understanding the biomechanics of the sport in general.
Also dealing with *fear* is a large part of the sport, understanding when you are actually ready to perform a certain tumble, vs when you *feel* ready, when you need to push yourself... With the risk of failure being a potentially catastrophic injury.
I could talk all day about this if anyone's actually interested, but it's a very niche sport and I occupy a very niche place in it :D
Wow. I am astonished. You’ve taken the words out of my mouth, as I was going to write practically the same thing.
Do me a favor and get a hold of me! The gymnastics + SSC connection + propensity to post instead of only lurk resolves into a strong desire to chat. I’m on Twitter or Instagram at my first and last name, Max Efremov
I have to say I was not expecting to find a fellow gymnast here when I typed out this post, but I'm definitely pleased to be proved completely wrong!
I've sent you a message on instagram, definitely keen to catch up!
Guess the overlap was not as niche as I thought it was.
Also in case it's even less niche than I thought it was; If anyone else is lurking here, feel free to message me on instagram via @fabtheday
I was a gymnast in high school. I generally replaced gymnastic with rock climbing. Plus I got pretty beat up from doing gymnastics.
How do you find a gym for practice? It's not like tennis where there are public courts lying around everywhere.
I think Rock climbing seems to be a pretty common place for ex gymnasts to end up in my experience.
Finding a gym to get the hours in is a constant pain for me especially, for a number of reasons; I'm very tall/heavy for a gymnast and I'm based in a place without large amount of equipment.
A lot of gyms will have "open gym" sessions where you can turn up, pay a small fee and train, so I use those wherever I can.
I also coach, so I can use my home gym in a limited capacity for my own training, but thats difficult, as it's a very small gym. If theres nobody else there, it's not responsible for me be throwing anything that has a real risk of injury ie, pretty much anything. And if there *are* people there there's probably not enough room for me to be doing my own thing.
So to answer you question: I have a very complicated spreadsheet schedule where I split my training across multiple gyms over the course of any given week.
The implied question of what *you* could do if you wanted to train I'm not sure I can answer though, because I think it varies a lot by country/community. I know adults in the US often have trouble finding a place to train because of insurance issues for example.
I would definitely start being seeing if you could find an open gym to mess around in though, I think they are lot more common than most people think, but that are often poorly advertised (if at all).
Another HS gymnast! I only do some simple floor excercises now… I don't have access to any equipment where I live, but I plan to move to a bigger city. I hope I'll remember this conversation and look for one of those "open gym" sessions that you mention in another comment.
I would love to try the balance beam and uneven bars again! Or some basic and cautious version of it since it's been a while. Vault is not an option (knee injury).
And I don't have any social media, but it's been nice reading you both here!
I'm interested, and unfortunately don't have any social media you can reach out to ;).
I'd love to get some of the gymnastic basics under my belt, but it's never been something I've had a talent for. Even a handstand would be great.
Is the only way to join a club? What can you do on your own? What's the best way to develop the skills? And what are your thoughts around when and how to push through fear?
Basics like a handstand are definitely something you can teach yourself. As a community there are certainly far more resources than there used to be a few years ago.
How far you can go on your own, without a coach or access to some kind of equipment very much depends on your motivation, knowledge, and fitness.
If you are interested in learning the basics of *gymnastics* tumbling or specific apparatus work, ect. There are actually exist a lot more adult gymnastics classes than people think, so I would definitely check what exists in your area; Be warned that this stuff is often poorly advertised, or not advertised at all (as I was saying in another comment).
I highlighted gymnastics there because there are certainly offshoots that are more accessible even though they are slight different. For example the Circus community often does a very good job catering to adults, and there are often a much wider range of classes to choose from if you go down that route.
For instance the handbalancing/calisthenics/bodyweight training side is something that really blew up with all of the worldwide lockdowns and is definitely something that a lot of resources exist for to teach yourself.
There is also the "tricking" community as well, which is something that's a lot easier to learn without specialised equipment if you are getting into the basics.
Sorry if those are some slightly vague answers to those questions, if you want to know more I'm happy to elaborate, but that answers very much depend on the training context, and what you are looking to do.
Re: Fear
I've already given a wall of text, so I might think of something to write up on that that's a bit more contained... I have a lot of thoughts but I'm struggling to structure them in a way that useful to your question, and also doesn't span several essays ;)
Ah don't worry about it. Very much appreciate the answers given. They may be a bit vague, but I think they've given me a lie of the land and ideas of how to get up and running once the pandemic dies down.
I run. I enjoy playing a number of different sports, but since running is an individual sport there's much more flexibility in training and competing. I very much enjoy the competition of racing (anything from 800m to a half marathon is fine by me), so that helps me motivate myself to train. It's also fairly cheap (the biggest expense is new shoes every 4-6 months, plus a race every other month or so, at least in pre-coronavirus times) and can be done anywhere. As for question 3, I'd say not really, but I do like reading about training, sports science, etc. On that note I think people interested in these topics might like The Sports Gene by David Epstein and (especially if you're into endurance sports) Endure by Alex Hutchinson.
1. Some mishmash of "functional fitness" (read: CrossFit without all the stupid kips and gimmicks, even though I coached CrossFit for years) with kettlebells, air bike, squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, and olympic lifting.
2. Bang for buck and longevity, impossible to beat.
3. That being said, what larsiusprime said about consistency is hard to argue with. The best workout is the one that you do.
Bicycling, outdoors when I can, on the trainer (with TrainerRoad) when I can't. Because I can't inline skate any more, and I can tolerate bicycling; mostly exercise is really boring, and I find running the bicycle trainer boring too but tolerable because I can at least watch TV.
No scientific principles involved, except the ones Coach Chad of TrainerRoad uses (which may be real or 100% bro-science, I have no idea)
Shooting baskets from far enough out that I do a lot of ball chasing.
Gymnastics training. I tried running, weights, basketball, tennis, biking and gymnastics. The only thing that stuck for me is the Gymnastics Bodies training from Coach Sommer. I started very slowly and now, two years later, I’m happy with my progress, the program and I hate to miss a day which is a drastic change for me.
I lift weights and I think there is a lot to like about it from a rationality/scientific perspective.
1) It's highly predictable: if you progressively increase the amount of weight you lift each session, you will predictably get stronger and more muscular. Similarly for diet, if you eat at a caloric surplus (deficit) for at least a few weeks, you will predictably gain (lose) weight.
2) It has lots of clear benefits in other aspects of your life: you feel happy immediately afterward, you get a sense of progress/achievement over time, it makes you more physically attractive, it precipitates hormonal changes that improve your general mood, and it allows you to eat more (which is fun).
3) It allows lots of time to let your mind wander: if you're lifting heavy, you will typically rest for a few minutes between sets, which allows you to think about other topics in a way that is difficult with other types of exercise (though I find running is also good for thinking).
4) As you get more advanced, it gives you the opportunity to conduct little experiments to determine which approaches work best for you. Do you respond better to full body routines, or an upper/lower split? Do you break plateaus more easily by increasing volume, or by decreasing it? It feels almost like solving a puzzle that is specific to your body.
Like others here, the exercise I will consistently DO is the most beneficial. In my case that is;
- thinks that are smooth (think biking, ice skating and roller blading, swimming, skiing) as opposed to jolty (running, racquet sports ...)
- things that are not boring and repetitive. I especially avoid those that are boring and repetitive and require some attention to do correctly. So no weights, no machines, no circuits. I generally prefer classes with great music and someone unpredictably yelling out things to do. HIIT works great for this right now (well, pre-and-post-COVID gym closures).
- nothing that involves a ball (poor coordination) or a team (too much responsibility to others, which is very stressful when you're not well coordinated!)
Weirdly, I don't find the smooth stuff boring, I guess because I can completely zone out, while the activity itself will give me feedback if I'm not doing it quite right. In classes the trainer gives info to maintain good form, and feedback if I'm off, so I don't have to pay too much attention to that.
Walking.
Yoga/Body Weight conditioning/Balance/etc.
Based on the fact that walking is the exercise I can make myself do repeatedly, whether by just making a walk take up ever-more of my commute (pre-pandemic) or going for a stroll listening to an audiobook or doing some form of meditation.
Yoga/Bodyweight conditioning/balance because 'lift ever-more heavy weights' isn't really a goal that appeals to me. 'Be able to do a handstand' working up to 'walk on my hands' or 'do a cartwheel' are skills that feel much more appealing as simply gaining more control over my body and making it do fun things.
Running every second day, starting with the couch to 5k plan you can find in various places. Motivated by the research on mental health benefits of exercise. Moderately strenuous aerobic exercise seems to be the best. I used to lift weights pre pandemic, had a similar but lesser effect, and found I was often stopping my progression due to injury or fatigue.
Spent most of my life doing an 80-20 split between running and lifting weights, including a lot of long races up to 100k. But I started getting a nagging worry about wear and tear on the body: ie, joint damage and elevated heart rate for long periods of time. Did some research and came across this TED Talk by a cardiologist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6U728AZnV0). It changed my mind and I've shifted almost entirely to an exercise regime that combines lifting for strength with short bursts of cardio. Not as satisfying as running, sadly, but that's my 2cents.
Thanks everyone for your replies, I'll add my two cents here.
1. I tend to alternate between weight training and carido 50/50 throughout the year. Within those, I have little mini blocks with their own goals.
2. I think novelty is a good way to make progress. But its definitely a good way to keep me interested. I get mentally stale easily.
3. I tend to look for gurus that know the literature, but don't dive too deep myself. Then I look to implement the principles in the simplest way possible. I think it's been influential for me, but more in who I choose to listen to.
I’m a big fan of bouldering (rock climbing short heights with no ropes or equipment, typically with a mat underneath). I find it appeals to my desire to solve puzzles, and I can go for up to 2 hours without getting bored. Strongly recommend at least trying it out for people with relatively light builds (it’s possible with any physique, but easier if you’re naturally light).
Really enjoyed it whenever I did it. Also has a community of great people.
Who is the "direct air capture charity whose offset claims are extra-trustworthy"? I just had to cancel my recurring donation to Clean Air Task Force due to a credit card compromise, but would consider shifting my donation to another more effective climate organization if there's one available.
I don't think direct air capture is a good substitute for CATF; direct air capture is a good way of getting a hard to deny offset, but not really cost effective in fighting climate change.
I've heard Coalition For Rainforest Nations is good.
Won't voting on the winners just incentivize people to write reviews that people will vote for?
I'm generally in favor of taking into account such concerns, but in this case I'm having trouble imagining the exploit. What sort of review are you imagining that is low quality but presses the right buttons in order to score cheap votes from readers of this blog? We're not exactly talking about toddlers being exploited to tap brightly colored video thumbnails here.
I liked Scott's decision to abolish the "hearts" on comments. There's a dynamic with those things where Person A says unpopular thing and gets 2 hearts, Person B dunks on him and gets 10, Person A quits for a friendlier forum and you end up with an echo chamber.
I suppose one could imagine the same thing here where a review gets votes for according with the average ASX reader's world view, but the stakes are a lot lower. Hard to believe this forum would vote for a truly bad review, worst thing is that a slightly less deserving writer wins a thousand bucks. And as with regular democracy, it's probably the best system for all the flaws.
And it might be tough to find an 'average world view' here.
Finding a 100% view might be hard, but there are plenty of views that would hit 80% or 90%.
The big ones are "thinks analysing things is worthwhile", "is willing to read long things", and "isn't firmly pro-SJ".
#1 seems almost tautologous given that they're reading a blog which analyses things and are being asked to vote for (implying analysis) a review (which is itself analysis, and which they presumably thought worthwhile enough to read).
#2 is because Scott is not known for concision and ACX commenters are selected heavily for people who have read a lot of squid314/SSC/ACX (I mean, it's not *physically impossible* to comment here without it, but it would be unusual).
#3 is because both Scott and Substack have an extremely-poor reputation in SJ circles, to the point that you can lose credibility by admitting association with either. Making an account here and participating in an official ACX event would generally imply that one puts little stock in that reputation and is willing to risk that loss of credibility.
Somebody has to choose the winners, and it's either going to be me or the readership. I would rather people write things my readers like than things that I like, especially since I'm easier to manipulate (you all know what kinds of things press my various buttons).
"Can 'Civilization 2' Really Lead to the Abolition of Paywalls? An applied review of David Friedman's 'World's Largest Blinded Studies'."
Defintionally yes. Seems like a feature not a bug.
What was your carbon cost estimate of a single NFT?
I can't remember if https://memoakten.medium.com/the-unreasonable-ecological-cost-of-cryptoart-2221d3eb2053 was the exact site I used, but its estimate of 211 kg CO2 seems basically sane.
i don't know how carbon works, but what's that like $10 of carbon?
Is that its cost before or after extracting it from the atmosphere, and does it take into account the massive prior investments required to get carbon capture technology developed in the first place?
no idea.. what would the price range for 211kg be?
A tree is ~50% carbon by weight, and a 422 kg tree isn't a very large tree. Chuck an acorn in the ground and forget about it and you'll capture ten tons of carbon over the next few decades.
Right.. so Scott clearly is not being greedy as he is giving half to charity, but the whole carbon offset constraint seems pretty trivial. I would guess for Scott there are larger carbon implications from the increased demand from him supporting NFTs than there are from participating in a single NFT.
I like to do intellectual hygiene on tree-planting claims on the internet. I know you didn't mean this as a serious claim, but it's got the issue that most tree-planting claims do. In this case (and most tree-planting cases) it's very far from clear that one's action makes any counterfactual difference to how many trees there are. The stronger action is usually just credibly committing not to continue mowing a piece of land, so that its natural vegetation grows and captures carbon - you'd have to do this anyway if you were planting trees, and if you do this, then planting a tree won't make a big difference unless the tree survives (which either means that you're committing further to actively keeping it alive, or it's a plot of land where trees will grow on their own without much human intervention as long as you don't mow them every time they sprout).
$10 using normal offsets, but there's some skepticism about whether that works. I think it's about $300 by direct air capture (going off memory, I might be totally wrong), so I gave a $3000 offset.
Good to know.. I suppose that sets the minimum bid for any SSC NFTs
I would love to know your take on NFTs. They seem silly to me. If seeing Michelangelo’s David on my computer was as good as having it in my house, I don’t think I’d bother to buy it and I doubt anyone would care if I did. But that’s not very sophisticated and I’d love to have my opinion challenged/supported.
I also think they're a bit odd, but you could probably make the case they're no more silly than autographs or first edition books. Neither of those change the actual content of the thing, but they're still collector's items. I'm not too big on autographs either, but I think they're kinda neat, and I have trouble drawing a clean line between them and NFTs.
Or it could just be like any other crypto, where rampant speculation abounds.
I agree with you that collecting first edition books is usually just collecting things *because* they're hard to collect.
A very common rationale for collecting first edition books is that the first edition is, besides proofs and manuscripts, the edition that is closest to the author's hand. This is silly in the case of books where the publishers (or author!) did things the author hated and wasn't able to fix until later editions - ie most famous books. But you still see people who want to own the first editions of 'American Gods' and 'Notre Dame de Paris' and 'The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent'.
Another common rationale is that they want to own a copy of the book that changed the world when it first came out. This makes sense for stuff like 'Origin of the Species', but c'mon, the first edition of the 'Rubiyat' changed literature practically zero, and it's still more sought after than Shakespeare's eyeteeth.
And then there's the rationale that if you're writing a paper on old books then you want to have the edition in question. That makes total sense. It also makes sense if you, for example, want to own a pre-2008 edition of 'The Two-Income Trap' where it says that securities backed by unwise mortgages are a bad idea: because the first edition was ahead of its time and cool to own for that reason. But that does not explain why people fight tooth and nail over first editions of Hemingway.
I assume that there are non-specious reasons to collect first editions besides just the thrill of the hunt. But I'm pretty sure that such reasons are the exceptions to the rule.
Book collector here. While I can't speak for every other collector, and some people who spend tons of money at auctions are just looking for a "cool" investment that they can brag about at parties (probably the same people who are investing in NFTs nowadays), for me the allure of antiquarian books is that they are like little time capsules. An early edition of an old book takes you back to the period when the book was just entering the world, before it was famous, and the first person who held it wasn't yet aware that one day its author will be a household name.
More generally, what makes any old book awesome is to be able to think about all the people, long-dead, who held it in their hands long before you, and all the journeys and travails it had to endure to finally make it into your hands right now. This is of course also why books that are signed, or that belonged to a famous person, or that have some interesting story behind them (e.g. a book that was read by inmates in a gulag) are more valuable.
Historical importance and rarity make a book valuable, but for copies of the same edition, the book's condition has a huge impact on price. This also makes sense, since if a book is like a time capsule, the most amazing time capsules are the ones that barely seem to have aged in a century or two. To go really romantic for a second (sorry about that), a book like that feels almost like a promise of immortality. I'm always super thrilled when I find a book from 1900, even if it's a forgotten title without much value, and it looks like it was printed yesterday.
Anyway, a charitable explanation of the high prices of rare books is that this way, you ensure the book will remain in good condition for years to come. If a first-edition Darwin cost $100, random people would buy it as a birthday present, the recipient would put in into a drawer somewhere, forget all about it, and perhaps trash it 30 years later during a move. If the book costs $10,000, it's fairly likely that the buyer will put it in a safe or a fireproof locker somewhere, that he/she will never forget about it, and that 100 years from now, the book will still exist.
I have a collection of books and manuscripts, even old civil war era Atlantic monthly magazines. I agree that holding the artifact in your hand is very important. I would not pay to own an old book if I would never be able to hold it...unless it was just for financial speculation, which is the only value in the NFT craze.
It seems to me that wanting an old book for its history and wanting it in mint condition are somewhat pointing in opposite directions.
Yup, like the people who buy toys and never take them out of the packaging, so they can be re-sold at a premium later. Is it even really a 'toy' at that point?
I agree, these are two different factors that can make a book more interesting..usually it's one or the other, but they can also overlap, for example signed copies are often preserved in very good condition, or books that belonged to someone important - once they already have a story behind them, people will take better care of them.
Would it be accurate to say that you value antiquarian books as antiques that have the added value of containing words and thus information about the past as well as the emotions of those who lived then?
That's a very good way of phrasing it! I like handling antique objects in general, because they connect you with a past age, but while a knife or a hat speaks about the past indirectly (you need a lot more imagination to think about who produced it, what they were thinking...), a book or similar object will literally tell you this, to some extent.
Going back to the topic at hand, none of this is the case with NFTs, of course..
I can certainly understand that desire. And yes, I don't see how it could possibly apply to NFTs.
Speculative bubbles in silly assets seems like a perfect place to apply the Lindy effect. When something has been valuable for centuries (like first edition books) it's likely that they'll continue to be valuable for a while to come, but when something has only been valuable for months (like NFTs) it's reasonable to guess that it's unlikely to persist for many years.
There are first edition books and then there are first edition books.
As I understand it, first editions of books which became popular later can be valuable.
Books which are published to be collectable are less likely to retain any value, though that varies.
I think the more general rule is that a thing created with the specific intent or expectation that it will be a valuable collector's item for future generations, is highly unlikely to be a valuable collector's item for future generations. Collectability is a function of "authenticity", and most people instinctively bounce off anything they recognize as an attempt to manufacture "authenticity" as a side effect of general anti-fraud heuristics.
A thing created without the specific intent or expectation that it will be a valuable collector's item for future generations, is also highly unlikely to be a valuable collector's item for future generations. But it won't have a collector's premium baked into its first-sale price, and you may be able to beat the market by properly assessing its aesthetics.
For what it's worth, Centipede Press books tend to appreciate, but they've only been doing major publishing since 2001. They seem to hit a sweet spot in terms of printing quality and smallish print runs.
I admit it-- I'm buying their complete short fiction of R. A. Lafferty series.
I got sucked in because there are stories which are rare or not published elsewhere.
I think there are things produced as collectable which retain or gain value, but forget about it with *mass-produced* things which are presented as collectable.
I'm not sure authenticity explains your general rule.
Original Star Wars toys in good condition are rare and valuable. They're rare because the manufacturer underestimated the demand, and because almost all of them ended up actually being played with.
Prequel Star Wars toys are common and worthless. They're common because the manufacturer made enough of them for both children and speculators. (Speculators who didn't understand why the original toys had become valuable.)
I think the obvious response to your example is that anyone can buy a replica of Michelangelo's David that is indistinguishable from the original, but no one would expect the replica to be worth the same amount as the original. (I actually don't know if it's possible to buy a good replica of marble statues, but it's certainly possible for almost all famous paintings).
As Pycea said, there is some subset of art collectors who place a high value on ownership of "original" artwork. In the real world, it just so happens that original artworks are comprised of both 1) the collectible originality for the piece, and 2) the visual representation of it.
But there is no reason these two things need to go together in principle - we can produce 2 without 1, so why not 1 without 2? NFTs are basically doing just that: they represent a claim of ownership on the originality of a piece of art without also being a visual representation of that art, because the assumption is that the visual representation is a commodity.
One thing I don't get is - anyone can mint an NFT. As far as I know, an NFT doesn't actually store anything on the blockchain but a pointer to the artwork - there's no guarantee that the artwork is still hosted in the location being pointed to, nor is there a guarantee that there is only one pointer to that artwork. So an NFT is not unique nor original in any meaningful way once you look outside the blockchain.
An NFT basically is a piece of paper saying "I own this piece of art," and anyone with a printer can make a paper like that.
Yes, that's true. The thing that gives value to an NFT is the particular way that it was minted. Anyone can create an NFT which "points" to a piece of artwork. But in the context of art NFTs, the only tokens which have relevance are the ones which were minted by the artist themselves.
For example, it would be trivial for me to mint an NFT which represents the famous Beeple piece from this article: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million. But precisely because anyone can mint such an NFT, no one would care about the one I minted. The only NFT for this work that people care about is the one that Beeple himself minted and subsequently sold at Christie's. This NFT has a unique id (I believe it is 0xddf252ad1be2c89b69c2b068fc378daa952ba7f163c4a11628f55a4df523b3ef) and its ownership history can be publicly traced (see https://securityboulevard.com/2021/03/deconstructing-that-69million-nft/). This is an instance of what is known in the art world as "provenance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provenance#Works_of_art_and_antiques.
That Provenance article was interesting, I kind of wish the NPR article had simply noted that's what we're talking about here. It seems like NFTs have the ability to make something like provenance more reliable, particularly in terms of historical epochs, but don't really have much to say about the quality or importance of the artwork, which, to me, seems like the speculative aspect. Also, say we understand the provenance of a number of important existing artworks, it seems like adding these to the blockchain might be useful as a way of securing the records. However, in the long run, that just seems like the standard government 2.0 argument for blockchain (i.e. securing deeds and judgments, etc.) that I've been hearing of for maybe close to a decade. I wonder where the separation between signal and noise is with these contracts.
Yes, the quality and importance of the artwork are entirely up in the air. NFTs are basically just a framework for ownership of arbitrary digital assets. As you said, the speculative component of NFTs is guessing which ones have enough quality and importance to withstand the test of time. I own exactly one NFT which I think meets this threshold, and I think the fraction of NFTs currently in existence which meet it is significantly less than 1%.
I personally don't think there is a ton of value in porting non-blockchain-based information onto blockchains. The point of blockchains is to be decentralized and trustless, but if you port something over, then whoever is in charge of the porting represents a central authority that needs to be trusted. This is true whether we're talking about art provenance, deeds, or anything else.
I think blockchains work best in contexts which are self-contained, i.e. where the only information of relevance is information that exists natively on that blockchain.
Perhaps it's like getting a piece of paper that says "The bearer of this note owns Michaelangelo's David", signed by Tom Hanks, where Tom Hanks has sworn not to ever make a duplicate. The paper would not be honoured by the Galleria Dell'Accademia if you showed up there, but I like to think that the honour of ownership-per-Tom-Hanks of a famous piece of art is worth something at least, I'd pay fifty bucks for that piece of paper and hang it on my wall.
If you can get Tom Hanks to sign a few more documents granting ownership of other important things like the Eiffel Tower, the Moon, or the Number Twelve, I'm guessing you could start a bit of a speculative boom. And if someone else starts selling competing ownership of the same assets as conferred by Charlize Theron, then you can just say "phooey, who cares about Charlize Theron, the only Eiffel Tower ownership that counts is the one that Tom Hanks signed".
This is actually one of the best analogies I've heard!
Yes NFTs are dumb. But everything else collectible is also dumb. Maybe NFTs are a little dumber? And is there a reason to 'owning' a thing as an NFT rather than a HanksNote? Well not really, except that NFTs are the 'in thing' in the collectors market, so that market is making them more valuable. You don't 'own David' and have an NFT that proves you do. No, you 'own an NFT of David', and being an NFT is what gives it value. It sounds silly, but no more silly than whatever else the 'collectors market' has decided to assign outsized value to.
Imagine if Scott had given someone a paper certificate of ownership of one of his posts. Someone comes along wanting to buy an NFT of it. Scott says 'sorry, can't.. someone else already owns this certificate.... but go to talk to them, they might want to sell it'.
Do you think this buyer would care at all about acquiring the certificate? No... he doesn't want to own the blog post, he wants to own an NFT of the blog post.
I would disagree that everything collectible is dumb. People all over the world value antiquities, relics, beautiful old objects. A large part of art that is traded is old or unique. There is value in having the object, and we show our new art acquisitions to our friends and look for their approval. If I bought and NFT and showed my friends then I would be met with derision. Very few people are going to be impressed if you tell them you paid a lot of money for a line of code. Now that could perhaps change...
There's no intrinsic value to 'old' or 'unique'. Beautiful, yes, although we don't yet know why our brains like it so much.
1. would you show your friends a replica of the relic?
2. would you show your friends in game rare item from an mmorpg?
I think the right model for NFTs is not that people all over the world care about them (or will eventually care about them), but that a small subset of very wealthy people care about them.
A good analogy might be stamps. I think most people find rare stamps much less appealing than, say, the Mona Lisa. But there are enough people who do find stamps appealing that a market has formed around the more scarce ones.
NFTs are similar, in that the vast majority of people buying them are either crypto people, or non-crypto people hoping to sell to crypto people. The reason they're getting so much attention is that "crypto people" is a group that is now much, much wealthier than other similarly-sized subcultures. So even if there are only 10,000 people in the world who would consider buying a Beeple original, the winning bid among that subset is going to be an eye-popping number.
Somebody should ask Tom Hanks to start this up! The whole shebang would at least be hilarious!
Where's the dang up-vote button. lol
Ok, but what if you got one signed by the Galleria Dell'Accademia's leadership? They mint an NFT and declare that whoever owns the NFT has ownership of the Michaelangelo's David but granted them the rights to determine everything about where and when it's displayed. To sweeten the pot they informally agree to display whatever short message you want(you can change it once a month subject to review for obscenity) on a digital plaque nearby. Then they sell you the NFT for however much money.
can't they do that with an old fashioned paper contract?
sure, but that's harder to transfer and verify as not fake. If they do that on paper and I want to sell this ownership to a pal we need to get lawyers and notaries involved. With an NFT I just plop in their address and hit go. Ideally with some pretty fancy UX and security to make it hard to screw up.
> If seeing Michelangelo’s David on my computer was as good as having it in my house, I don’t think I’d bother to buy it and I doubt anyone would care if I did.
It seems basically a method of digital rights management. One could draw parallels with pirating music or a game vs buying it: you can "have" the media, easily, without "owning" it, and if ownership matters, this might be one implementation of it.
As hinted at elsewhere in thread you could also run something like a Substack or Patreon with NFTs, where subscribers get access to to what in meatspace would be a first edition. In such an instance it would be better visualized as an implementation of artist support.
Most art NFTs don't come with any form of digital rights. Owning a computer game means you have legal permission to play it; owning the actual IP for something gives you publishing rights; owning the NFT means you own the NFT, which lets you... Claim that you own the NFT?
If NFT's do come with digital rights, the applications are obvious. But even if they do not, that does not mean they do not have value.
Consider the case where an artist signs with a record label and the label now owns the rights to all of their music. If the artist releases a new album and both the artist and the label issue a NFT representing the "authoritative" copy of the album, which one do you think is worth more?
The example you give of a computer game is actually pretty apt. Ownership means many things. When you buy the game, you don't actually own it, you only bought a license to play it. An NFT is any particular product, it is a protocol for creating a provably unique entity. It might represent ownership, rights to entry, claims on other items, goodwill from the issuer, etc.
In this particular instance, the NFT buyer is buying goodwill from Scott, a symbol of SSC fandom, crypto shibboleth, and bragging rights.
NFTs don't confer digital rights - they are themselves a form of digital rights. This is true because if you own an NFT, no one else can own it. You actually summed it up very well with "owning the NFT means you own the NFT, which lets you... Claim that you own the NFT?"
This is obviously tautological, but so is the entire cryptocurrency sector. The only "right" conferred by my ownership of one Bitcoin is that I own one Bitcoin. That much is absolute, secured by an elaborate cryptographic system. No other guarantees are made - about how much that Bitcoin is worth, about whether anyone will accept it as payment, or anything else. It's a fully self-referential system, which only has value in the context of other systems because a large enough group of people behaves as if it does.
Interestingly, there are many other hugely valuable systems (corporate ownership, real estate titles, fiat currencies) which also have this self-referential property. It's just much more difficult to see it in those cases because the systems in question are so expansive.
That isn't true of corporate ownership and real estate titles. There may be some forms of ownership shares that legitimately grant nothing, but most grant some legal right to vote on business decisions plus a claim on profits. Your name on a deed filed with the local courthouse grants you the right to occupy a house and call the police whenever anyone else tries to occupy it. This is quite a bit more valuable than the owner of a house creating a token for you that you uniquely own with the address of the house embedded into it, but which grants no legal right to enter the property and do anything with the house.
Yes, but my point is that even those systems - legal ownership of corporations and real estate - are self-referential in that they only have value because a large enough group of people agrees to behave in a certain way.
A piece of paper that tells me I have claim to the profits of a business only has value to the extent that the operators of the business (or a court of law) recognize that claim. Similarly, a piece of paper that tells me no one else is allowed to occupy my house only has value to the extent that those who also want to occupy the house (or the police) recognize it.
This sounds reductive but I think it's a really important point. The vast majority of things that we own are not like this. Food, clothing, beds, cars, computers, televisions, etc - all of those goods are intrinsically valuable. My food/clothing/car would be useful to me even if no other humans existed. My share certificates and real estate deeds are not useful at all in the absence of other humans.
The point of making this comparison is not to suggest that NFTs are "on par" with corporate or real estate ownership. The point is just that humans have created tremendous value out of thin air in many domains by simply all agreeing to operate under the same rules. So the fact that NFTs grant the owner nothing except NFT ownership is not necessarily a knock against them. The important question is whether NFT ownership is something that enough people care about to imbue it with value.
Every claim of ownership or right is based on a collective agreement to act like it exists and to enforce it, if necessary. I own my house in the sense that I live there and have a key to lock the door, but much more importantly, if some stranger comes while I'm away on vacation and moves in, when I get home I can call the police and have him tossed out and charged with trespassing.
Without that collective agreement, my house would belong to anyone strong enough to take it from me. And that would remove my incentive to build or maintain or improve that home, unless I could find some way (joining a gang, hiring a private security company, supporting my local stationary bandit in exchange for his promise to protect my property rights) to prevent someone just taking it away when I was done. The agreement and mechanisms to protect property rights make it possible for us to get a lot richer and live a lot better in the real world, not just in the world of stocks or bank certificates.
I don't think "purely self-referential" and "only works if enough people go along with the system" are equivalent.
Real estate titles only work as long as most people go along with the system, but they make claims upon the real world. If someone tries to use your land, you can ask the government to intervene on your behalf, and the government will use your ownership of the title in its decision process about whether and how to intervene. The whole government only works as long as people buy into it, but the land is real; it's not an abstract self-referential construct.
Fiat money is mostly self-referential...except when the government demands that you pay your taxes in fiat money, and threatens to use force against you if you don't. Again, the whole government is dependent on most people playing along, but there's a real-world consequence (you can ultimately be jailed) that you care about. Even in a world with no governments and no fiat money, you'd care about being thrown into a jail; that part isn't self-referential.
There is no one plausibly threatening to imprison you unless you pay them in bitcoins or NFTs.
(I suppose there is ransomware that will lock you out of your computer unless you pay bitcoin. But I'm not aware of any ransomware makers that have issued their own new cryptocurrencies purely so that they can accept them in payment, nor do I think they could plausibly make that work. Fiat currencies originate with governments, not highwaymen.)
Note that in the art world, there are apparently forgeries that can only be detected by a team of experts working with advanced technical tools. Suppose I'm rich enough to buy some famous painting like the Mona Lisa and hang it on my wall. (It'll look great next to that hole in the drywall we keep meaning to repair.) Someone slips me a duplicate of very high quality, and keeps the original for himself. It's almost certain that I will never notice, never know, and that neither will any guest I have.
It's very odd that this has any extra value, even though it does and probably always will. I mean, I can say it has no value, and yet, I think if tomorrow some jackass slips past the security and burns the original of the Mona Lisa to a pile of ash, he's done something terrible and should probably rot in jail for many decades to come--even though it's clearly possible for a skilled artist to make a copy that's so good that nobody could tell the difference without taking it apart in a lab.
There's an extra ingredient there, which could maybe be called "physical historical value" or something. People care about physical objects that have had notable things happen to them. The Mona Lisa isn't just a painting with a certificate of authenticity of attached, it's the same canvas and ink that Leonardo touched.
There's nothing analogous to that for NFTs, although they do have other features in common like the artist having performed a speech act about them being "official" in some sense, and scarcity.
Yes, NFTs don't have a physical connection with the creator and humans evolved to care a lot about physical connections, but you could say they have an "attentional connection" with the creator. You know the creator did put time and effort into creating the NFT, and some people care about that. Maybe it doesn't feel as nice as a physical connection, but it's still something.
I guess I'll start the politics comments now.
With the new Georgia election law, and a few other recent events, the blue tribe/"centrist" media/whatever you want to call them has spilled a lot of ink about how democracy is so important and republicans/conservatives/the red tribe/trump supporters is antidemocratic. Now there seems to be a pattern where the blue tribe strongly pushing something makes the red tribe start opposing it.
My question is, how big of a threat to democracy is this process emerging from media narratives? For the record, my two cents are that the Georgia election law is 1) silly and 2) probably not racist or antidemocratic, and that conservatives/red tribers/trump supporters actual-factual turning against democracy is the most probable way for democracy in the united states to collapse, so it's important not to pointlessly alienate them.
2. My understanding of the new Georgia law is that it makes it more difficult for some people to vote. If true, I think that makes it anti-democratic.
That seems like an overly simplistic definition of democratic/anti-democratic, right? We could have a voting system which is just a website where people can either click "Trump" or "Biden" and the winner is whoever gets the most clicks. That would make it maximally *easy* for people to vote, but it seems obvious that that system isn't more democratic than the current system (because it's so easy to vote that people can game the system without effort and the votes are meaningless).
I don't really know anything about the Georgia law, so I don't have a position on whether it's more or less democratic than what we have now. But I think the question of whether it's more or less democratic hinges on something more nuanced than whether it makes it more difficult for some people to vote in some cases. The real question is something like "is the increase in voting difficulty outweighed by some tangible increase in validity/accuracy of the final total?"
Exactly. The georgia election law is silly, but at the end of the day it's one of a long series of laws that have a well established record of disenfranchising exactly no one.
So, if these types of law are going to have zero effect why are the Republican legislatures so intent on passing them? To the extent of sacrificing serious political capital in other areas. At the very least they seem to be strongly convinced it will help their electoral outcomes
Because they are signaling and/or wrong.
Again, Georgia's previous tightening of election laws didn't affect the margins, and it didn't affect black turnout. The most likely explanation is exactly what republicans say- that they genuinely believe that dead people voting is affecting margins in our elections and that these laws are necessary to combat that, or at least that passing laws to combat it is necessary to get reelected. Sort of like passing abortion restrictions that'll get struck down in the courts in a month, just like they did last time they were passed.
Does that explain all of the proposed changes? How does restricting voting hours or making it illegal to give food and water to those near a polling place actually help with the issue of dead people voting?
And to make voting more burdensome, shouldn’t the onus be on proving that there’s an actual issue? “I believe the election was fraudulent” is different from there being actual fraud.
Right. It's a minority party, and they have occasionally overtly admitted that they need to prevent people from voting to win elections. You could know nothing about the Georgia law, and just go on your priors based on what the party has done in the past.
The Republicans sincerely believe that election fraud is a major threat, because the Damn Dirty Democrats are trying to have all the illegal immigrants vote for them and maybe two or three times each. It doesn't matter whether this is true, or false, or used to be true in the era of Tammany and Daley but isn't true any more; they sincerely believe it so they are going to pass laws aimed at preventing election fraud.
The Democrats sincerely believe that election fraud is not a major threat but that vote suppression is, because the Damn Dirty Republicans are trying to stop all the People of Color from voting. It doesn't matter whether this is true, or false, or used to be true in the era of Jim Crow but isn't true any more, they sincerely believe it so they are going to pass laws aimed at expanding voting opportunities.
Pretty much any law that attempts to reduce voting fraud will incidentally make it harder to vote successfully; there will be finite effort involved, and some legitimate votes will be misidentified as fraudulent. Pretty much any law that attempts to expand voting opportunities will incidentally make it easier to vote fraudulently; the new voting opportunity is a new attack surface for the fraudster. So when the Republicans try to pass anti-fraud laws the Democrats will shout "vote suppression" and when the Democrats try to expand voting opportunities the Republicans will cry "fraud".
Since the Republicans sincerely believe voting fraud is a serious issue, they're willing to take that heat to address it. Likewise the Democrats on their end.
And of course the Democrats will shout "vote suppression" if there's actual vote suppression going on and the Republicans will shout "fraud" if there's actual fraud going on, but good luck figuring out the difference. So if you're interested in understanding what's actually going on, you're going to have to actually read the law yourself. Or hope that someone you trust will do an objective analysis of it for you, but you should be very careful who you trust in cases like this.
Thank you for that. I don't trust any news sources. (which is sad.)
I do wish we could have 'good faith' in politics. By which I mean that you accept the oppositions point of view and work from there. Rather than assuming ulterior motives.. other side bad.
I’m unaware of issues with invalid or inaccurate votes. If this problem exists then it should definitely be fixed. Where’s the proof of fraud?
We should do everything we can to ensure that everyone who is entitled to vote can vote. We should also make sure the system is secure against corruption. As I understand it, this bill makes it harder to vote and doesn’t solve any actual existing problems.
I'm not aware of any issues with invalid or inaccurate votes either, and like I said I don't know anything about the proposed law. I was just responding to your assertion that if a law makes it more difficult for some people to vote, then that law is necessarily anti-democratic.
This is from the docket of the Texas case against the bunch of contested states. This document is specifically about Georgia. Scroll down to section called "THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN GEORGIA WAS RIDDLED WITH ERRORS".
http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163469/20201210202722129_22O155%20Amici%20Brief%20GA%20State%20Sem%20%20Willian%20Ligon%20et%20al.pdf
It's probably not exhaustive, but it should give you some idea as to what people are upset at and what the lawmakers are trying to fix.
"it should give you some idea as to what people are upset at and what the lawmakers are trying to fix."
It does, but not in the way I think you intended
> Where’s the proof of fraud?
That's the trouble, how would you prove fraud in an election where there's no means of validating ballots? All we have is a giant pile of ballots, and we don't know where they came from.
Well, actually there's plenty of proof. It's just that the topic is hazmat, so proof doesn't reach high-status outlets. There are all kinds of statistical analysis, there is plain math that doesn't add up, there are all kinds of eyewitness accounts.
(A lot of this made it on the Supreme Court docket of Texas vs Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin; a lot did not.)
Clark County in Nevada automatically sent mail-in ballots to every "active" registered voter. What can possibly go wrong? After the election, more than one organization went and knocked at the doors of voters who allegedly cast suspicious-looking mail-in ballots and found that many of them never sent them in (and some of them had the blank ballots lying around still).
In Georgia, a surveillance video from the voting location that reported an outsized Biden vote spike in the early hours of the morning showed that the ballots in question were pulled out from under a table and counted with no observers in sight.
In more than one state, there were reports of voting machines being configured to not produce security logs (allegedly, with the default setting being to produce them). You would think somebody would want this explained, but no.
Hazmat is hazmat. Nobody wants this touched. This is what frustrates so many people, and this is why so many legislatures do what their voters want them to do - try to make sure that this doesn't happen again. This is probably the number 1 thing that voters want of their local legislatures now.
Have you seen 60 minutes re: georgia?
Do you have sources for any of that?
As for the Clark County thing, there are states that send mail-in ballots to everyone and have been doing so since well before the pandemic, so I'm not actually shocked and outraged.
The Georgia video was brought to the attention of the Georgia Sec of State (a Republican), who confirmed that observers were present, and the ballots in question were supposed to be there. Are the Republicans in on the conspiracy too?
As for the voting machines, there was a hand count done in Georgia (and other swing states), and it matched the electronic count.
Nobody is too scared to touch this stuff. Lots of people talked about, in court and in the media, for weeks and months after the election, and it all went nowhere. But I guess we're doomed to keep hearing the same arguments on repeat from now till 2024.
When the mail-in ballots first arrive, there's a signature and other information on the outer envelope, allowing you to check that this is an official ballot that you sent out and that it was filled out by a registered voter. This is done routinely as the ballots are being prepared for counting.
If you're worried about fraud in the counting machines, you can check the electronic count against a hand count. This was done in Georgia and other swing states.
The only thing that's not possible is identifying who cast a mail-in ballot *after* the ballots have been counted. If you could do that, it wouldn't be a secret ballot.
>>>where is the proof of fraud?
Where are the audits to verify elections were done properly? What portion of voter registrations are verified by the voting district? What portion of voter identities are cross checked? How frequently can votes be tracked from ballot printing to ballot counting?
I suggest that if one doesn't know the answers to these, one is taking the word of someone else that everything is above board.
What if:
a) It makes it more difficult for some people to vote, but also eliminates a large number of fraudulent ballots?
b) It makes it more difficult for some people to vote, but also eliminates a significant amount of voter intimidation or suppression?
I think the better concern is that something is "democratic" if it makes the result of the voting process a more reliable indicator of the actual preferences of the legal electorate, and "anti-democratic" if it makes the result of the voting process a less reliable indicator of the actual preferences of the legal electorate. If a change eliminates more votes from actual voters than it eliminates fraudulent votes, that seems prima facie like it's anti-democratic by this criterion.
A law that makes it more difficult for people *who are not eligible to vote in that election* to vote is *pro-democracy*. Examples of people commonly understood to not be eligible to vote in a given election are: persons who have already voted, persons who are not residing the area represented by the election (for example, people from outside the city don't get to vote for Mayor), persons who are legally barred from voting, (such as non-resident aliens, some felons, etc) and other minor categories. All of these categories have definitions. The goal of people who are not worried about illegal votes is to broaden the definition of 'legal voter' and decrease the verification requirements. The goal of people who are not worried about voter suppression is to narrow the definition and strengthen verification requirements. Whether or not one is worried about illegal votes or voter suppression is best predicted by party affiliation, rather than commitment to transparency, integrity, etc.
Someone else compared it to NY's election laws and found them similar. I'm not knowledgeable to vet that comparison. I'm curious if anyone else has.
All the voter suppression laws are anti-democratic and a desperate attempt by Republicans to choose their voters rather than broadening their appeal. Every state has a process by which voters register and are validated. Statistically the existing systems work and very little illegal voting occurs. The Brennan Center "The Myth of Voter Fraud" { https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/myth-voter-fraud }
Voting for registered people needs to facilitate the population and be updated to modern technology with paper verification. In the last election, multiple hand recounts validated the original results.
See also
Network Contagion Research Institute
INVESTIGATING SOCIAL NETWORKS TO...
DIMINISH DECEPTION
MITIGATE MANIPULATION
HALT HATE
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) is a politically neutral, multi-disciplinary team of experienced neuroscientists, technology industry leaders, physicists, and machine learning experts from across academia and industry who have developed an integrated technology platform – Contextus { https://networkcontagion.us/technology/ } – to track and expose the epidemic of virtual deception, manipulation, and hate, as it spreads between social media communities and into the real world.
https://networkcontagion.us/
In pretty much every democracy throughout history there has been a dynamic of one side representing a non-majority, with lots of institutional power, vs a larger group with less power. Historically these situations tend to end with the small group expanding their coalition and becoming more moderate in the process, and the cycle continuing. The question is how much suffering has to happen to make that transition.
Which side is which?
The side that gets fewer votes is usually the non-majority (or minority)
in this particular case there is an extreme amount of institutional advantages that may make the cycle slower and more painful.
I found this article recommended by WaPo to be a good summary of the changes to the voting laws in Georgia. https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/03/27/what-does-georgias-new-voting-law-sb-202-do
I am not an election law expert by any means, but I did not find any of the new laws to be egregiously onerous or partisan (especially after reading some comparisons to other state's laws like NY's). There seems to be some slack in giving authority to state officials to remove local election officials in "under-performing" districts, but the new laws also mandate Saturday early voting hours while making Sunday hours optional which seems like no net loss for voting opportunity and potentially a gain. The main drive of the new laws seems to be voting integrity and codifying voter ID requirements. I read that 62% of Americans think voter IDs should be required which I think is about as favorable a poll can be for a somewhat partisan issue in our current environment.
I don't understand all the implications of the law, but I'm a bit concerned about the state election board being re-cast as a dominated by the State Legislature and given the authority to oust county election boards and replace them. Seems like there's potentially a lot riding on what "underperforming" means.
This is, of course, in the context of the state legislature being Very Mad that certain state and local election officials didn't do the things they wanted while Trump was contesting the validity of the election. IDK if, under these laws, the state legislature could've screwed with that result more, but it seems like they're signaling to their voters that "Something went wrong in November/January, but we've fixed it now." I hope they're lying....
Antidemocratic? Depends on what provisions you're talking about.
The provisions that restrict early voting, dropboxes, etc, as well as the petty cruelties like prohibiting handing out water to people in line to vote, are unlikely to have much net effect on turnout, because the backlash-driven turnout increase will cancel out what turnout decrease they produce. But forcing voters to waste more effort on enduring difficulties in order to vote is arguably wrong in itself, and certainly inefficient, unless there is decisive evidence that doing so will substantially reduce fraud. And there is no such evidence AFAICT.
The most dangerously antidemocratic provisions, IMO, are those that hand more power to the state legislature to judge challenges to election results. It is hard to interpret this as anything but (a) spite against officials like Raffensperger who upheld Democratic victories in GA in the face of bad-faith, evidence-free challenges from Trump and his allies and (b) enabling a future Republican-controlled GA state legislature to overturn the will of GA voters in 2024 on similarly bogus grounds. As a general principle, anything that makes the process of adjudicating election challenges more partisan is really bad for democracy.
Whether you think the law is racist or not depends on your definition of racism. It is certainly motivated by a desire to make it harder for likely Democratic voters to vote and easier for Republican officials to throw out their votes. Given the racial distribution of the parties' voters, this disproportionately means weakening the voting power of Black voters and requiring more wasteful expenditure of effort from them. It's entirely plausible that many Republican GA legislators supported the law not out of any desire to disenfranchise Black people qua Black people, but out of a desire to maximize their own likelihood of staying in office and to engage in vice signalling. But the effect will nonetheless be to widen racial inequity for no good reason.
I don't know anything about the state of politics in Georgia, but a phrase like "petty cruelties such as prohibiting handing out water to people in line to vote" strikes the wrong note with me, especially since saprmarks in a comment above this explained *why* such a restriction is in place.
It hits me wrong because it sounds as if you have made your mind up already that the laws in question are wrong because the people proposing them have bad motives. What is this "souls to the polls" thing and why aren't people protesting about the separation of church and state? if it's black churches getting black voters out to vote for Democrats, isn't that interfering in an election - you see how easy it is to attribute bad motives? I've seen lots of proposals that churches should have their tax free status stripped away if the preacher preaches a sermon telling the congregants who to vote for, but the people demanding this don't seem to have a problem when it comes to preachers telling their congregants to get out and vote (for Democratic candidate):
""We gather in our churches on Sunday morning, you have morning worship and then after the service you get on the church buses, church vans, get in cars and people go to vote," says Bishop Reginald T. Jackson of the Sixth Episcopal District of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Jackson is the presiding prelate over more than 500 churches in Georgia."
The charitable explanation here is that churches, as large social entities in the district, are best placed to help people get out and vote who otherwise would lack a means of getting to the polls - just like the charitable explanation of not allowing water to be handed out is the one provided by saprmarks. If the church in question was driving congregants to the polls who all reliably voted Republican, I could assume we'd be hearing a lot of protest about church and state and interference in elections.
I don't think the analogy works because:
1. in fact I don't think a right wing church doing "souls to the polls" would provoke protest, and certainly it would not be seen as grounds for legal restrictions.
2. I am not aware of any evidence that people doing electioneering by offering water in polling lines is an actual problem.
3. After their actions in Nov-Jan, specifically their criticism of Raffensperger and their support of the "stop the steal" narrative, I do not think GA state legislators deserve charity in interpreting their motives. The notion that they are sincerely concerned with election integrity, rather than scheming to do everything they possibly can to make life harder for Democratic voters, is not believable based on their track record.
Just want to clarify that the new law does *not* prohibit Sunday voting or go after "souls to the polls" in any other way I know of. This has been widely misreported based on an earlier draft of the law.
About giving out water in polling lines: someone I know (context: I grew up in Georgia) commented the following, citing himself as an eye-witness.
"Politicians who weren’t on the election ballot gave out food and water in the county I used to work at. They never said “here is water, vote for X.” But they wore masks and clothing that made clear who they wanted you to vote for. Plus... they’re on the ballot just two years from now! People remember. It’s campaigning for the next election."
I've asked him if he has a link to reporting on this, but haven't gotten a response yet. I'll link it here if he does.
Fair enough and thanks for the details. I still think concern about that is unconvincing when it comes from people whose overall actions on voting procedures have the effect of making lines longer. Sincere concern for both voter welfare and preventing electioneering would couple restrictions on what can be given to those in line with substantial expansions of capacity that would make waits shorter and easier overall.
If I agreed with you than the overall effect of this law was to make lines longer, then I would agree with you that it is a bad law (I, like you, don't really think voter fraud is too big of a concern).
However, I think we disagree that the law, on net, will make voting harder. It seems to me that it will make voting easier (by codifying drop boxes, expanding early voting, and adding procedures for splitting up precincts where lines get too long). I also really like that it does away with signature matching, since that's probably a main cause of absentee ballots being tossed out.
The person I know has not gotten back to me, but I independently found some reporting on politicians handing out snacks to voters in line.
This [1] link is paywalled, but the National Review [3] summarizes it as:
"Georgia state Representative Roger Bruce and a local county commissioner were photographed handing out snacks to voters waiting in line at the courthouse of an Atlanta exurb. Bruce, a Democrat running unopposed for reelection, wore a “State Representative Roger Bruce” shirt, according to another newspaper."
In 2018, a candidate handed out pizza to voters in line, apparently with permission from the poll workers [2].
Prior to the January senate runoffs Secretary of State Raffensberger sent out a notice to election officials asking them to crack down on this practice [4]. I have a lot of positive affect towards Raffensberger after he stood up to lots of pressure from Trump to overturn the election, so this -- moreso even than the things I linked above -- convinces me that this has been an actual problem.
[1] https://www.douglascountysentinel.com/news/local/rep-bruce-under-investigation-for-handing-out-snacks-to-voters-in-lines/article_5c69c150-2b15-5ed1-8eb1-465f9acd0fe9.html
[2] https://www.douglascountysentinel.com/news/local/rep-bruce-under-investigation-for-handing-out-snacks-to-voters-in-lines/article_5c69c150-2b15-5ed1-8eb1-465f9acd0fe9.html
[3] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dem-abuses-prompted-georgia-voting-laws-food-and-drink-rule/
[4] https://sos.ga.gov/index.php/elections/secretary_raffensperger_cracks_down_on_line_warming_loophole
I think there's a lot of false information going around about the GA election law. Here's something I wrote on Facebook pushing back on this stuff (and towards the end I give my own opinion on the law as a whole):
A lot of what I'm seeing on social media about the new Georgia voting law seems false or badly misleading. This has given me a bad case of "people are wrong on the internet," so I'm writing this post to push back on some things that seem wrong to me.
Just for fun, let's do this in FAQ form.
* 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴, 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗯𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗔𝘁𝗹𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗮 𝗰𝗵𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗱𝗼 "𝗦𝗼𝘂𝗹𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗼𝗹𝗹𝘀" 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀?
No. An earlier version of the bill would have restricted early voting on Sundays, but the version of the bill that passed does not. Counties can have up to two Sundays of early voting.
* 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗯𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘁 𝗱𝗿𝗼𝗽 𝗯𝗼𝘅𝗲𝘀?
No, it increases the number of drop boxes, and let me explain why there's so much confusion about this. Before 2020, Georgia had no ballot drop boxes. Then in 2020 there was this crazy global pandemic thing and Georgia allowed emergency use of drop boxes. Without the new law, things would go back to the pre-2020 status quo of no drop boxes. Instead, this law mandates drop boxes, though not as many as were used in 2020 (unless the pandemic emergency is still ongoing).
In other words, when people claim that the law decreases the number of drop boxes, that's true relative to 2020, but not true relative to what would happen if this law weren't passed.
* 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗼 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲?
Kind of, but this lacks important context. The law forbids giving "money or gifts" including "food and drink" to voters; the point is to stop people from campaigning at the polls by e.g. giving out bottles of orange juice labeled "GO ORANGE: VOTE FOR TRUMP" or whatever. Other states, like New York, have an identical law -- if you don't think those states are engaging in inhumane voter suppression, you probably shouldn't think Georgia is either.
The text of the bill makes it clear that this is an anti-voter intimidation measure. I'm not a lawyer, but I would be surprised if you would get in trouble for giving water to your grandma.
Also, the law makes an exception explicitly allowing "self-service water from an unattended receptacle."
* 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗮𝗻 𝗜𝗗?
No, and I'm really confused why people keep saying this. If you don't have a Georgia driver's liscence or ID, you can instead use the last four digits of your SSN. If for some reason you don't have that, you can instead use a utility bill, paycheck, or other official document that shows your name and address. This seems the same as (or more lenient than) absentee voter requirements in other states (e.g. it's the same for me in Massachusetts), and I'm not sure why I keep seeing claims otherwise. I think people might just be misreading the bill?
* 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗸𝗲𝗲𝗽 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀?
I don't think so. The previous law said that early voting would take place during "normal business hours," and the new bill replaces that with "9 a.m. through 5 p.m." as part of a push towards state-wide standardization. If that's not enough, local officials can extend it to 7am through 7pm. They can't extend it longer than that without a specific reason, but I guess I'd be surprised if any polling places used to keep longer hours for early voting anyway.
[I'm gonna stop refuting things and just do more FAQs now.]
* 𝗗𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲?
Yes, it does, and this 𝘪𝘴 a potential cause for concern. The Secretary of State is removed as a voting member of the election board, a body mostly composed of members selected by the legislature (though there are restrictions, like that the members can't be political donors). I don't really know the reason for this, and I'm inclined to dislike it since I have a lot of positive affect for SoS Raffenburger after he stood up to Trump.
* 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹, 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗹, 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗶𝗮?
I disagree -- on the whole, I think that this law makes it much easier to vote in Georgia (relative to if the law hadn't been passed). Some things it does which make it easier to vote: mandate an extra Saturday of early voting, create absentee ballot drop boxes, and mandate the precincts whose lines are too long be divided into smaller precincts for the next election. Also, and this is pretty important, 𝗶𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴, which was a major cause of absentee ballots being thrown out.
There 𝘢𝘳𝘦 some changes which seem mildly restrictive, like shortening the window to request an absentee ballot, but I think these are outweighed by the good things it does.
* 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗶𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝘄 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲, 𝗶𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝗯𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗴𝗼 𝗳𝘂𝗿𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗶𝘁 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻 𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗲𝗿-𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲 (𝗯𝘆 𝗲.𝗴. 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗲 𝗯𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗶𝗮𝗻)?
Sure, this is fair. I guess I'm frustrated because I think Georgia passed a good law which made it easier to vote, and then everyone got whipped up into a frenzy, started baselessly claiming voter suppression, and called for boycotts of Georgian businesses. When someone does something you like but doesn't go far enough, it seems like you should go "this is a step in the right direction, but I'd like more," not lie and claim they're making things worse. Wouldn't it be sad if next time the GA legislature wants to expand voting access they don't go through with it because "well, last time we tried to expand voting access we were accused of racist voter suppression and a bunch of business fled the state, better not do 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 again"?
So let me get this straight, I can cast a fake ballot in anyone's name provided I know the last four digits of their social security number?
US elections seem insanely insecure to me.
That is not quite a complete picture. The last four digits of the SSN are a verification method. You first need to obtain an absentee ballot in their name. Then there will likely be some sort of cross-check to see that someone has not voted twice. And if you are caught I do believe you are subject to criminal prosecution.
That's a pretty big if. All they'd know about me is a fake name, fake address and SSN of some other person (all is available on Darknet for pretty much every American that had ever gone online by now). If that's all that is required for me to vote in somebody's else name, that's zero security and "if they catch you, you'd be prosecuted" doesn't change it. It's like making a site where main admin login is literally "admin/password" and saying it's secure because if hackers get in FBI would prosecute them. It's plain insane to call a scheme like this secure, and people recognize it anywhere - except, for some reason, the elections.
But in order to make a difference you'd have to print 1000 fake ballots. And surely some of those would be flagged as double votes. Don't know what happens at that point, but it would certainly cause a scandal. Even if you don't get caught, at the very least everyone would know it happened. And if you're willing to risk a few years in prison there are probably all sorts of ways to mess with an election.
The real security hole is with electronic voting systems that have no paper trail. Without paper backup, if tampering is suspected there is nothing that can be done. It's just "well, computer says winner is..."
Printing 1000 of anything takes seconds (ok, minutes if you have a cheap printer). As far as I know, there's not even rudimentary security features on them, literally any printer can make them. Or you can get the official ones since apparently the barrier to getting one is pretty low. And avoiding double votes is easy - just vote for dead people, or for people that aren't going to vote - like sick, homeless, elderly, etc. Even if you trip up once or twice - there won't be any scandal, it will be written off as a glitch. I don't see where the risk is from - as far as I see now, everybody is pushing back hard against even an idea there's possible fraud. Imagine there would be a wide agreement in the industry that it's impossible to use somebody else's password online. If you did it, how would you be caught? Everybody would just assume that since it's impossible to use somebody else's password, it's either the person whose password it is, or maybe somebody made a typo, or there's a glitch or anything. Not that the risk of being caught ever stopped determined criminals with a lot to gain...
As for paper trail - Georgia SoS is arguing in the court right now that nobody should have ever access to the paper ballots, not even for for audit purposes. If you ask why have those ballots and keep them if nobody is ever allowed to see them for specific purpose of ensuring the correct count - then you'd have to take it with Georgia SoS, it makes sense for him apparently.
In parts of California (L.A. County, e.g.), you can "cast a fake ballot in anyone's name" without providing any identifying info *at all*.
So you're absolutely correct about the insanely insecure elections.
All available evidence suggests that voter fraud is extremely rare. The recent frenzied drive to prove that the 2020 election was rigged has turned up a shocking amount of nothing. American elections might seem insecure, but apparently they're secure enough.
FWIW, the best truly solid evidence that I know of for illegal voting in a US election comes from the Washington state gubernatorial election of 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_election). It was extremely close, with the Republican down by just over a hundred votes after recounts. So they took a fine-tooth comb to voting records, in hopes of disqualifying enough ballots to win.
Out of 2,810,053 votes cast, they found 1,678 illegal votes. There were at least a few from each of the obvious ways of voting illegally - I think felons were the biggest category, then non-citizens, with some double votes and a single-digit number of dead people voting. (Interestingly, this included one legal vote by a dead person - the guy voted in advance, and died before election day.)
There was no evidence of a systematic campaign to commit fraud. Most of the people approached about it seem to have just made honest errors - forgetting they'd submitted an advance vote, not realizing their record made them a disenfranchised felon, and so on. But it was still about 0.06% of the electorate - more than enough to swing the race(or something like Florida 2000) - and a few orders of magnitude higher than the usual election fraud numbers discussed in these debates.
The other reason it's relevant is that a judge certified that these numbers were accurate. And that judge still gave the election to the Democrat, despite agreeing with the Republican argument, because he couldn't find a legitimate way to undo the illegal votes(aside from calling in voters to give sworn statements about who their illegal vote had been for - the Democrats found a few illegal GOP voters who fessed up, and those were the only votes ultimately removed).
Given that there's forms of fraud that this kind of analysis can't detect, and that Washington has a lower proportion of adults who aren't legal voters(and thus, who could possibly make these errors) than many other states, I usually ballpark US election fraud at about 0.1% of ballots cast. It's not a truly solid number, but it seems like a fair estimate. This isn't enough for Trump to have won any new states in 2020, but for comparison it's substantially more than Bush's 0.009% margin of victory in Florida in 2000.
I'm not convinced the failed proposals are irrelevant. The backlash began before the law was finalized, so I think it makes sense for discussions about the backlash to include provisions that helped fuel the controversy but did not make it into the law. The confusion about what actually made it into law is troublesome, and that confusion has almost certainly fuelled more backlash, but how much backlash there would be with absolutely no confusion I am not certain. I think there would still be a notable amount.
I'm also not convinced by your argument about providing water. First, the impact depends on how long people must wait to vote. Second, you say it is aimed to prevent people from giving away campaign promotional food and drink. Is that actually a current problem in Georgia? Are there not currently laws that directly prohibit campaigning near polling places already? I would have guessed that there were. Even if there were not, enacting such laws would seem to both address the problem more directly and to cover the adjacent behaviors that we actually want to discourage (campaigning near polls, not giving away food and water)
Finally, what is your source? Some of your claims seem at odds with what is presented in various sources I have read. The closest to I've yet seen to what you're saying is a WaPo article (also the best article I've yet found), but that doesn't quite match everything.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/04/03/georgia-voting-law-explained/
Ah! I forgot to copy over my sources -- sorry!
My main source was the law itself: https://www.legis.ga.gov/.../leg.../document/20212022/201121
Similar law in NY prohibiting gifting food and drink at the polls: https://codes.findlaw.com/.../electi.../eln-sect-17-140.html
I also used this NYT article about the law because it excerpted from the relevant sections, but I don't endorse the analysis in this article -- it seemed extremely bad-faith to me. For example, it didn't mention that the law ended signature matching, which seems like one of the most important thing the law does. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html
A WSJ op-ed with some info: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jim-eagle-and-georgias-voting-law-11616799451
A ridiculously comprehensive guide to the law, including details like "what type of paper are ballots now required to be printed on?": https://www.onlineathens.com/story/news/state/2021/03/28/new-georgia-voting-law-what-does-sb-202-change-elections/7038406002/
I get a 404 when I click on the link for the NY law prohibiting food and drink gifts.
Thanks, this should be the correct link: https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/election-law/eln-sect-17-140.html
Retail value less than a dollar seems like it might allow water bottles - but maybe it should be updated for inflation to $2 to make it clear that you can give water bottles, and snacks to people whose blood sugar is getting low.
Crap, the link to the GA law was also broken -- that's my bad. Here's the correct one: https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20212022/201121
Thank you. The Athens Banner-herald is a nice source I hadn't come across before. I don't have a WSJ subscription anymore so I can't access most of the op-ed.
I really wish that there were better information on whether or not the changes in early voting hours require a change from what was actually happening. For instance, how often were polling places open after 7, were they open on more weekend days than they can be now, etc. Everything I've read so far seems to couch it in terms like "mostly" and "likely" without reference to what actual practices were.
The NYT article "analyzed the state’s new 98-page voting law and identified 16 key provisions that will limit ballot access, potentially confuse voters and give more power to Republican lawmakers."
This seems to be the most comprehensive argument against the law, but your comments don't seem to address all sixteen of the provisions the Times identified.
(For convenience, I'm making this comment separate from the one citing my sources.)
1) See my reply to Nicholas Weininger above about providing water -- someone I know claims that campaigning at the polls with food and water *is* a current problem. I'm also confused about why existing laws aren't enough to prohibit it, but at the very least it doesn't seem like an imaginary problem.
2) I agree it might be reasonable to have a very mild amount of skepticism about the lawmakers' intent based on previous drafts that did bad things. But we probably disagree about how much skepticism is appropriate. My model of how drafting a bill works is: you decide to write a bill; you start thinking about the changes you would like to make, and talk to other advocates/constituents about what they would like; you publish your draft, which necessarily does some things wrong, and then people get mad at you; you correct the things it did wrong, and repeat until you reach some sort of equilibrium.
In this case, I could imagine that the original drafters made the mistake of removing Sundays as early voting days innocently: constituents told them that they wanted more early voting and that Saturday was the most convenient day, and no one specifically told them that actually black churches in Atlanta have big "souls to the polls" events on Sundays. Once the mistake was found and they got in a lot of trouble, they fixed it, which is some evidence that this was process was being done in good-faith.
> Other states, like New York, have an identical law -- if you don't think those states are engaging in inhumane voter suppression, you probably shouldn't think Georgia is either
There's been a couple of other comparisons to NY here, and I'd just like to note that New York election laws are extremely corrupt, badly managed, and voter-suppressive (Famously with things like the NYC Mayoral race happening in odd years - which is a common trick to decrease turnout - but also a whole lot of other things. New York primary elections are low-turnout for a reason).
It's also worth noting that while New York is a blue state in presidential elections, the state legislature was not party until 2018. Prior to that Republicans had held the Senate for eight years.
And FWIW they made several changes to expand ballot access in 2019 and just added automatic registration in December.
"the point is to stop people from campaigning at the polls by e.g. giving out bottles of orange juice labeled "GO ORANGE: VOTE FOR TRUMP" or whatever. Other states, like New York, have an identical law -- if you don't think those states are engaging in inhumane voter suppression, you probably shouldn't think Georgia is either."
Do you have a citation on this supposedly identical law? My understanding is that most states prohibit any sort of "electioneering" (including wearing clothing with a political slogan, or putting up signs) within some radius of the polling place, but I haven't heard of any that prohibit giving food or water without any sort of campaign message. If you can show some though, I'd be interested to know.
Thanks for catching that the link to the NY law was broken. I'll update the link as a reply to my sources comment above.
See also my reply to Nicholas Weininger for a second-hand claim that campaigning at the polls with food and water is a current problem. I'm also confused why existing laws don't already prohibit this, but it at least doesn't seem to be an imaginary problem.
See this comment for some updates on things I've learned since writing this post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-167#comment-1710044
Someone, please forward this analysis to MLB’s commissioner.
Your paragraph about drop boxes is incredibly misleading. It mandates one drop box in each voting district, but the bad part is that it limits it to one, and requires it to be *inside the polling place.* So it's really not a drop box at all. It's a way for you to go to your polling place and cast your ballot. The whole point of drop boxes is that they are available at places other than the polling place and are available 24/7. If you limit them to being in polling places, that makes it much harder to vote.
These are early ballots, and they all come with a postage paid envelope to return them in one of the thousands of publicly available U.S. Mail boxes. The only reason you would need a special ballot drop box is if you neglect to return your early ballot on time for the mail to handle it. Setting up and keeping secure remote boxes with 24/7 access would be a nontrivial expense and risk for trivial gain.
I’m in Arizona, which has always had fairly extensive mail in voting, and remote 24/7 boxes have never been a thing. But I frequently drop my absentee ballot off in person on the day of elections, and it is extremely easy - most people are not more than a couple of miles from a polling place, every polling place accepts mail ballots, and it takes literally seconds to drop them off.
For one, this is wrong. The law actually prevents the drop box from being used less than 4 days in advance. For two, why put this in the law? I understand why you wouldn't require more than this, but why specifically ban it, if not to make voting harder?
Which part of what I said was “wrong”? Your comment show some no factual disagreement. Going from “no non-mail ballot boxes except for a one time pandemic exception” to “permanent allowance for ballot boxes, with some restrictions” is an increase from the previous law.
As for why not more? Well, it’s an unnecessary expense and a security risk, and there’s a benefit to having similar policies across the state to avoid confusion (maybe some counties can’t afford the boxes).
At any rate, fundamentally I don’t agree that “any inconvenience in voting constitutes voter suppression” particularly when early voting and vote by mail already exist.
The part that was wrong was "the only reason you would need a special ballot drop box is if you neglect to return your early ballot on time for the mail to handle it." Georgia's law prevents that by closing drop boxes 4 days before the election. If it's too late to mail it in, it's too late to put it in the drop box. It's a ridiculous provision that just means fewer votes will be cast.
Obviously nobody is arguing that any inconvenience in voting is voter suppression. That's the kind of straw man that I'm led to believe is discouraged around here. It's voter suppression if it's an *unjustified* inconvenience, and the justifications for this law are weak.
They're weak because that's the point. Georgia Republican voters are furious that Biden won Georgia and Raffensberger certified the vote. This law is a direct reaction to that. The Georgia legislature is signaling that it's on the side of the MAGAs because that's who their voters are. Onerous restrictions to prevent phantom voter fraud is the point. Making it more difficult to vote by mail is the point. The entire point of the law is to suppress Democratic votes, and it's supposed to be obvious, just with a veneer of plausible deniability. It's all a signal to the MAGA base that Trump won the votes that mattered, and they won't let this happen again.
When the clear intent of the law is to prevent people from casting otherwise-legal votes, that's fairly characterized as voter suppression.
I voted by mail in the November 2020 election. I made a point of finding a dropbox instead of using US Mail because I did not trust the mail service to deliver my ballot in a timely way. There were numerous drop boxes to choose from in my southern California constituency, none more than two miles distant.
Disrupting the mail service seems to have been a deliberate Trump administration policy and Georgians living in the state's large urban centers, those most affected by the new voting law, are right to see the needless changes to the number of drop boxes where they live as preparation for highly effective voter suppression in the future.
Why did lack of ballot boxes only become voter suppression in 2021? Why isn’t it voter suppression in the many states that don’t offer them? This is an awfully isolated demand.
As for vote by mail, is there any evidence that, in the event, any significant number of ballots dropped off at USPS by the date and time indicated on the ballot were not counted, let alone due to deliberate action by Trump? Paranoia and insinuations do not constitute evidence for fraud by either side. Why is your paranoia about the USPS more justifiable than someone else’s paranoia about the security of remote ballot boxes?
You ask why the lack of drop boxes isn’t an issue in other states. Why do you think it isn’t?
My focus was on Georgia only because of the new law in that state that makes an existing problem worse – that’s distinct in a sinister way from those states in which the status quo continues. When you have the opportunity provided by new legislation to make things better but you choose to make them worse, you’re clearly not dealing from a straight deck.
On a more general note, your complaint is of a piece with the tactics used by Trump, his campaign, and his sycophants – it has a name: “Whataboutism”. Any criticism so valid that it has no real answer is deflected by “well, what about…..”.
As to your second query about evidence, this link takes you to a WP article that cites post office data about 150,000 ballots nationwide delivered after election day.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/05/usps-late-ballots-election/
The new law in Georgia places an election day cutoff on mail-in ballots needlessly making timely delivery a critical issue. Do you think the Georgia legislators were unaware of the implications of doing that?
I’m not going to set out for you the deliberate attempts by Trump and his proxies to undermine the delivery of ballots – if they’d have had their way things would have been much worse. Either you didn’t follow the news last fall in which case you shouldn’t be commenting on the Georgia law now, or you did but choose to ignore it so you could claim I’m paranoid for fearing my ballot might be lost. Whichever, your accusation of paranoia is just a modified version of “whataboutism”; rather disappointingly, your second in a brief comment.
"Now there seems to be a pattern where the blue tribe strongly pushing something makes the red tribe start opposing it."
This pattern is at least in its adolescence, and probably closer to middle aged.
I put this essay this on Facebook today. I'm reposting it here because I recall that some of you are interested in these matters.
Here in southeast Michigan, the term "Arsenal of Democracy" brings to mind the bomber plant in Ypsilanti. But here's another amazing piece of World War II industrial production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship
Liberty ships were cargo ships produced in U.S. shipyards in 1941-45. These ships were huge, each carrying 10,000 tons of cargo. They were 441 feet long -- that's about a third the length of the quarter-mile-long container ship that blocked the Suez canal recently.
And they built 2,710 of them!
As Wikipedia says: "The immensity of the effort, the number of ships built, the role of female workers in their construction, and the survival of some far longer than their original five-year design life combine to make them the subject of much continued interest."
The relevance of Liberty ships to my Political Graveyard project (biographical material on US political figures from Colonial times to the present, https://politicalgraveyard.com) is that most of them were named for famous Americans. Hundreds of these names were of political figures -- starting with each of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Using multiple sources, I'm working on documenting, for my web site, which politicians were honored in this particular way.
Ships were named for governors and senators, yes, but also for writers, poets, actors, musicians, journalists, inventors, theologians, generals, industrialists, doctors, humanitarians -- pretty much every category.
Some of the choices were perverse to modern eyes: there was a ship named SS Jefferson Davis, for the president of the Confederacy; SS Nathan B. Forrest, for the infamous founder of the KKK; and SS George A. Custer, for the general who died at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
But there were also SS Harriet Tubman, SS Frederick Douglass, SS Booker T. Washington, SS George Washington Carver, SS Geronimo, and SS William Lloyd Garrison.
(William Lloyd Garrison was the ferocious slavery-abolitionist who wrote, 30 years before the Civil War: "I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and _I_will_be_heard._" See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lloyd_Garrison )
Going through the list, I have come across many fascinating and mostly-forgotten folks. A few examples follow. The text is quoted or condensed from Wikipedia:
* Hans Christian Heg (1829-1863): A Norwegian American abolitionist, journalist, anti-slavery activist, politician and soldier. As Wisconsin prison commissioner, he spearheaded many reforms to the prison, believing that prisons should be used to "reclaim the wandering and save the lost." He led a Scandinavian volunteer regiment in the Civil War, and died of the wounds he received at the Battle of Chickamauga.
* Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908): The most distinguished female sculptor in America during the 19th century, and the first female professional sculptor. She also designed and constructed machinery, and devised new processes, especially in connection with sculpture, such as a method of converting the ordinary limestone of Italy into marble, and a process of modeling in which the rough shape of a statue is first made in plaster, on which a coating of wax is laid for working out the finer forms. While living in Rome, she associated with a colony of artists and writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bertel Thorvaldsen, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the two female Georges, Eliot and Sand. When in Florence, she was frequently the guest of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
* Harriet Monroe (1860-1836): editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts; publisher and editor of Poetry magazine. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.
* Harvey Cushing (1869-1939): A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of William Osler which won a Pulitzer Prize. He wrote numerous monographs on surgery of the brain and spinal column, and made important contributions to bacteriology. Under his influence neurosurgery became a new and autonomous surgical discipline. He considerably improved the survival of patients after difficult brain operations for intracranial tumors. But Cushing's greatest contribution came with his introduction to North America of blood pressure measurement.
* Haym Salomon (1740-1785): Poland-born Jewish businessman and financial broker who, like Robert Morris, went broke financing the American Revolution. In 1775, Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. In September 1776, he was arrested as a spy. The British pardoned him, but only after requiring him to spend 18 months on a British boat as an interpreter for Hessian soldiers – German troops employed by the British. Salomon used his position to help prisoners of war from the Continental Army escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert the war effort. In 1778 Salomon was arrested again and sentenced to death. Again, he managed to escape. From the period of 1781–1784, records show Salomon's fundraising and personal lending helped provide over $650,000 (more than $9.4 billion in current dollars) in financing to George Washington in his war effort. He died penniless.
* Helena Modjeska (1840-1909): A renowned Polish-American actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. Despite her accent and imperfect command of English, she achieved great success. In 1893 Modjeska was invited to speak to a women's conference at the Chicago World's Fair, and described the situation of Polish women in the Russian and Prussian-ruled parts of dismembered Poland. This led to a Tsarist ban on her traveling in Russian territory. Scholars have posited that Modjeska might have been Arthur Conan Doyle's model for the character Irene Adler, the only woman that Sherlock Holmes came close to loving. Susan Sontag's award-winning 1999 novel, "In America", though fiction, is based on Modjeska's life.
And that's just a few from the "H" section!
All of these, and a couple thousand others, were recognized in the names of Liberty ships.
Is there any evidence convoys were organized according to theme? Alternatively, were there some convoys that contained figures that would have been opposed to each other (Hamilton and Burr, Grant and Lee etc.)?
My sense is that no one in the military paid much attention to the names, except as neutral signifiers for each specific ship.
Very interesting, thanks. Do you know how they were named? Did congress get to put in names from their districts, or was there a desk of ship names somewhere in the navy?
I'm still mulling "Towards a Bayesian Theory of Willpower" and dug up an ancient Scott Alexander post called "Applied Picoeconomics" on LessWrong -- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NjzBrtvDS4jXi5Krp/applied-picoeconomics -- which proposed a nice application of Ainslie's ideas on hyperbolic discounting.
What are practical applications of the Bayesian theory?
Also mulling it over... Currently I don't understand how Scotts' (probably nascent) model maps to various parts of Bayes' theorem, and I don't understand what his model allows us to predict that we can't already (or how it predicts it better with fewer entities, etc.)
Was planning on posting a comment on the relevant post at some point, but since you mentioned it... do you have thoughts on this?
(For the Bayes part I think it suffices to say that you have prior probabilities that get updated via new evidence.)
As for my thoughts, they're *so* suspect. Under the hyperbolic discounting theory, my answer was "use commitment devices to bring long-term consequences near!". Under the Bayesian theory, my answer is "use commitment devices to drive up the weight on the intellectual evidence!"
So that's a little... convenient for me. (I'm a Beeminder cofounder.)
And yet I believe it. But also it's why I'm asking for what other practical lessons people are drawing from the Bayesian theory.
Question/pondering about a financial instrument that seems obvious and I'm surprised it either doesn't exist or doesn't exist prominently enough for me to know about it.
When I'm saving for retirement, i don't know exactly how long I'll live after retirement. If my life expectancy is 25 +- 15 years post-retirement, I could save 25 years of expenses and risk being destitute if I live too long, or I could save 40 years and risk having saved way too much money (these of course both need to be adjusted for market growth, but the savings needed to fund 40 years is still significantly higher than the savings needed to fund 25 years). My financial advisor friend tells me this is called "longevity risk".
It strikes me that this is a huge risk for people planning for retirement, and one that just begs to be insured. If you have 1000 people who need to fund 25 +- 15 years, they could all independently save 40 years of expenses, or they could each save (e.g.) 28 years of expenses, pay 3 of them to an insurance company, and that insurance company covers them however long they survive. In a way this is the opposite of life insurance.
So why can't I buy this insurance (as far as I know)? Social Security and pensions both implicitly accomplish this, but I can't really access a pension without totally changing my career plans, and I'd like to retire with more than social security offers (plus I don't totally trust it to still exist). The same financial advisor friend says that annuities work toward this goal, but it seems like an annuity tends to also lock you into a really conservative investment mix; I want to insure my longevity risk but have the same market risk exposure as a normal IRA. The closest I can think of is having an IRA until I retire and then all at once moving it into an annuity, but my longevity uncertainty will be smaller at retirement than now, so I'll still have to oversave in case my mean life expectancy is higher at retirement than it is now. I want to either 1) directly insure my longevity risk, or 2) buy into an IRA-like-vehicle that insures it by having an agreement "you invest/grow this however you want, and then at retirement, we pocket all of it, and we'll pay you 10% less than you'd be able to withdraw if you drew it down such that you'd hit 0 at exactly your mean life expectancy".
so my questions:
1) Does this exist?
2a) If not, why not? It seems obvious that it should, so there are probably good reasons it doesn't. My working theory is that it's hard to market, but that's not super satisfying
2b) If it does exist, why isn't it more prominent? I'm no expert, but I'm reasonably well informed about retirement for a nonexpert, so if I don't know about it, there's no way that many people do, and it might as well not exist for most people. It seems like it should be as popular as a normal IRA
3) Anyone want to partner with me to build a business selling this? (mostly sarcastic, but seriously, this seems like a huge opportunity that isn't being exploited)
I think you can buy annuities that have higher risk investments. If that isn’t what you want, it isn’t clear to me what it is. No matter how many years you save for, the market could turn against you. So what return could an annuity *promise* you that would satisfy you?
Yeah a properly structured annuity could be what I want. The two I was pointed at were "variable indexed annuities" and "fixed indexed annuities", both of which said they protect from market downturns. I want one with the exact same market exposure as an IRA, or at least exact market exposure as some particular index, which I couldn't find but I'd believe exists. Do you know of one?
Basically I specifically don't want a promised return, which most of them seem to have. I just want it to track the market and then pay me a fraction of what my market exposed investment has become.
(deleted and reposted because no edit button)
Isn't this a tontine?
Haha I mean it's a similar sentiment, but don't those only pay out to the last person alive?
Yeah, looking at the wiki page more closely they were definitely pretty different. But the concept contains that idea of distributing financial risk over the lifespans of multiple people.
Tontines served a function like this. A bunch of people would make payments into an annuity and after a certain point get payouts, and when someone died the slice of the payout going to the remaining folks expanded.
They featured prominently in a few mystery/adventure stories about people murdering each other.
They got regulated partly out of existence for a while due to being hard to do well, but there's renewed interest and some companies trying to sell them. e.g. https://www.pionline.com/retirement-plans/tontines-garnering-new-wave-interest
That's pretty close, but I'd rather not need to personally find a set of people big enough to smooth out the risk, it seems like a big company would handle it better?
I think that's what The Financiers are hoping to do. Make them an insurance project where you're put in a fairly large pool with people who have similar life expectancies. So not widely available yet (as far as I know) but something that should be mainstream-available within the decade.
On huh cool! Sorry, to be clear, I clicked on your link but hit a paywall, so sorry if that was in it. So I guess my business idea got scooped...
Sorry about that. I use a browser called w3m that just goes through most paywalls so I don't realize when sites use them.
jjjjjust in case someone doesn't know what a tontine is
https://youtu.be/4AqKjjhET2k?t=55
I’m sure this is an oversimplification, but give the conventional 4% “safe withdrawal rate” an investment that’s good for 25 years is also perpetual. I do not see it as saving $X for each year of requirement, but rather as saving in order to reach the point where investment income pays the bills.
Yeah that's basically my current retirement plan, but it definitely doesn't accomplish this. If you create enough savings to fund yourself in perpetuity means you're massively over saving. The ideal world will be to save enough to be drawn down to exactly zero on the day you die, which longevity risk prevents us from actually planning on.
To preempt "but many people want to die with money to give to their heirs": if you want to give money to your heirs, needing to save less for retirement means you can give it to them anyway, and you can do it way sooner when they need the money more.
The parent proposed that we could average out of the plus-15 and minus-15 arms. But there is no shortfall to cover in the plus-15 group, because the midpoint was 25. If you save enough for 25 years, you save enough for all values greater than 25 years.
If the retirement ages did not straddle (1 / safe withdrawal rate) this way then it could be a more important problem.
The idea of a "safe withdrawal rate" is inherently about handling longevity risk, and is the whole motivation for the question. If the safe withdrawal rate is 4% and I'm sure I'll live 25 years, then I probably want to use 7ish% of my money every year, not 4%, which let's you save like 40% less money (which you can give to your heirs earlier or spend on booze or whatever). The sage withdrawal rate is all about possibly living a long time, and the real withdrawal rate should be roughly (growth+1/years remaining) instead of just growth
You're right that the money growing means it probably isn't exactly symmetric around the mean, I'm simplifying that a lot, but handling longevity risk will definitely be cheaper for a collective than for me alone, and I'd like access to part of that savings.
I'm in much the same place, compounded by developing a serious illness in what was to be my last year before retirement, and wondering whether it was caused (or at least made more likely) by continuing in a stressful job just to be sure I had enough in the extreme longevity case. My odds are excellent that i'll recover this time, and good that this won't come back, but the practical need to entirely cover one's own risk, without well known/reliable/routine/affordable risk sharing mechanisms, is one of the things I hate most about the American system, as its developed in the past 40 years. (Before that, pensions were more widely available.)
Insurance companies do sell annuities, including cost-of-living adjusted annuities. They appear to be expensive, but possibly in this case the insurance companies are honest (i.e. they deliver what you believe you paid for). Sadly, my experience with health insurance in the US has taught me that insurance companies can and do get away with things that make me expect it would be unlikely I'd be able to extract contracted money from them, once I became sufficiently mentally or physically frail. (Yes, a person with spare time, all the latest tech, a significantly over-average IQ, and a couple of lawyers on retainer can usually get health insurance companies to do what they claimed they would back when you signed up... That's not much use to an old person with failing faculties, unless they have a dedicated financial caretaker who matches the same description.)
Yeah this is very fair and has come to mind, relying on a company to keep you funded requires *a lot* of trust that insurance companies probably don't deserve. I really hope that's not the reason this isn't common though...
Almost but not quite - the 4% safe withdrawal rate is considered obsolete for longer time periods. Basically, 4% is only safe over a few decades, and the safety assumes that you can spend from the principal. Basically, sound for 20-30 years, not sound for 40-60 years.
3,5% is probably a sounder number for very long periods, *and* it assumes a reasonable mix of stocks and bonds.
There's a truly titanic effort to dig into even the minute details on this: https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/
I think this is called a life annuity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_annuity). Apparently it's becoming more popular in the UK and the US, and has been popular for a while in Chile.
I started looking into these and it seemed like they generally had zero to low market exposure, which means they aren't really great plans. If I failed to find a fully market exposed one then that's perfect, but at least initially I didn't see it.
If you have not already, look up QLAC's. You pay $X amount up front and pick a starting age for your payments, like 85. This way you only have to save enough to reach that age and after that you get the income stream from the QLAC in a predetermined amount.
You're right; such instruments don't exist, although several financial economists that work in the retirement investment strategy area have argued for them, myself included. They are needed, but there are problems of risk allocation between issuer and owner that make them problematic and unlikely to be created (at least not on fair terms).
Alternatives? So-called variable annuities do allow equity investments, but at a high fee--and when you elect to turn them into an annuity the base rate becomes the insurance industry equivalent of the low risk-free rate. Index annuities have high fees and many limitations. Deferred annuities (including QLACS) for say age 80 or whatever are the same--they kick in when you are older, but their return from now until and including the payout period is low.
Take a look at "The Only Spending Rule Article You Will Ever Need," in the Financial Analyst Journal Jan/Feb 2015 (70th Anniversary Special Issue). It wasn't originally paywalled, but maybe it is now; perhaps it's worth paying for it. Or google it to see if it is online elsewhere. It proposes that retirees that want equity exposure self-annuitize, but because the investment results are volatile the annuity payment must be recalculated every month. An ARVA, or annually recalculated variable annuity. It give you what you are asking for, but the payout won't be level.
The payout volatility is a direct function of the supporting portfolio's investment volatility. Read "What Investment Risk Means to You, Illustrated: Strategic Asset Allocation, the Budget Constraint, and the Volatility of Spending During Retirement," in the Journal of Retirement , Fall of 2018. It ties back to the Spending Rule piece.
These are both simplifications, but with a very high capture of important outcomes while remaining accessible, of multi-period stochastic dynamic strategic asset allocation models, sometimes known as "lifestyle" models.
You can get "most" of what you're looking for, by doing it yourself.
For what it's worth, the so-called "4% rule" for safe withdrawals doesn't stand up to scrutiny whatsoever; the articles mentioned discuss this and explain why.
Network Contagion Research Institute
INVESTIGATING SOCIAL NETWORKS TO...
DIMINISH DECEPTION
MITIGATE MANIPULATION
HALT HATE
The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) is a politically neutral, multi-disciplinary team of experienced neuroscientists, technology industry leaders, physicists, and machine learning experts from across academia and industry who have developed an integrated technology platform – Contextus { https://networkcontagion.us/technology/ } – to track and expose the epidemic of virtual deception, manipulation, and hate, as it spreads between social media communities and into the real world.
https://networkcontagion.us/
Seems like interesting work, but it is hard to sell as politically neutral when the organization is committed to defeating popular political tools.
I share concerns about those Gulen schools from the Erdogan post :
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan
https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/ditib-strasbourg-94118 (fr)
It's kind of weird to see Erdogan pretty much doing a political campaign in a foreign country, with an anti-Kurd message, even though the country in question is supposedly an ally of the Kurds !
I also find this "Islamic campus" also questionable, with Erdogan, AKP and Millî Görüs being aligned behind a project of a political Islam, and to "keep the Turkish identity of the diaspora".
Especially when you remember the "Party of Equality and Justice", that wanted to gather all the Muslims in a single party :
https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/parti-egalite-justice-nouveau-parti-musulman-80105 (fr)
Their program (was?) :
- Candidates in all the country
- More diversity for the cultural grants [Wouldn't this be illegal?]
- The Central European Bank should be able to directly lend to states.
- More structural support in the ghettos [The kind of "structure" that often comes from Islamists these days ?]
- Integrate a multicultural vision of the French history in the school manuals
- Rethink secularism to allow a social and public religious practice
- A holiday for the Aïd
- Halal menus in schools
- Revocation of the law forbidding headscarves in school
- Stop [forbid ?] teaching gender studies in school
- Review [revocation ?] of the laws allowing gay marriage
- Palestine should be recognized as a country
- Turkey should be allowed in the EU (in the case it wants to join it again one of these days)
Now it seems that they have failed, getting like 1% (?) of the votes country-wide - I'd guess that for a country with about ~10% of Muslims, the Oumma is still quite divided, with the various "home" countries like Algeria and Morocco having a heavier weight than Turkey.
Still, political Islam should really be recognized as a danger, especially these days, and even in the countries where it hardly has any foothold, like the USA with those Gulen schools...
I'm not sure that Macron did the best thing in forbidding homeschooling and basically rolling back the separation of church and state (!) by deciding that the state should be responsible for the formation of imams :
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/07/macron-wants-to-start-an-islamic-revolution/
But on the other hand the fact that it pissed off Erdogan might mean that it's going in the right direction ?
*Something* had to be done after the recent terror attacks, and more drastic decisions (closing down all the mosques ??) could have started a civil war...
Given all we've seen in the last 15 months, what is most likely to happen if a kilometre-size asteroid is in fact observed heading for the continental US?
Elon Musk independently, and without approval, launches a nuke at it. We get a gnarly meteor shower.
Based on previous performance he's equally likely to call the head of nasa a pedophile
Why not both?
Only if NASA actually does something more useful than what Elon is doing.
I'm actually pretty confident in the government to get it together on that one. The solution is complicated, but the problem is unambiguously existential, easy to understand, and has a clear deadline.
There would certainly be conspiracy theorists claiming it's all fake, but there wouldn't be the usual grifters encouraging them. There's no profit in everybody dying.
Side note: 1 km is only one order of magnitude smaller than the dino-killer. I don't know whether it would actually matter which country it hit.
By mass, it's 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller. Should still be enough to cause a long winter.
The dino-killer had significantly-higher extinction rates in North America than elsewhere. It would matter.
Also, even an actual dino-killer wouldn't kill off humanity. If you think you're well-prepared enough to survive and go warlord in the aftermath, it sounds plenty profitable (if still risky).
There's no profit in everybody dying, but if encouraging the idiots does not substantially interfere with NASA's efforts to nuke the space rock, why not run a little grift?
Yeah, make a few million selling prepper supplies. How many of you remember "With enough shovels ..."?
Entirely depends on how long it will be before impact. If it's 20 months away, you only need a tenth of the impulse to knock it off course as if it's 2 months away. If you catch it early enough, the momentum of a fairly standard interplanetary satellite bus smacking into its side should be sufficient to save us.
DARPA unveils some piece of never-seen before technology they had sitting around for just this occasion.
"It's not alien tech, no. Why do you ask?"
Dead people
Can you say which 14 books the finalist book reviews are on?
In last week's Open Thread, I posted a question regarding the predictive processing / trapped priors model of mental illnesses, particularly in the context of my own struggles with OCD. I was still very confused at the time, and my question was somewhat confusing as a result. Now, I have a much better understanding of the issues at hand, and would like to revisit it in a more clear-headed way.
Guys... it's time for some game theory.
In the review for Antifragile (which I had not yet read at the time of posting last week's comment), Scott says:
"For example, if some very smart scientists tell you that there's an 80% chance the coronavirus won't be a big deal, you thank them for their contribution and then prepare for the coronavirus anyway. In the world where they were right, you've lost some small amount of preparation money; in the world where they were wrong, you've saved hundreds of thousands of lives."
I will be using this example, along with two others: a phobic person who is afraid of dogs, and an OCD person who is afraid of accidentally leaving the stove on.
Let's define two statements, G and B (for "Good" and "Bad", respectively). G could be "The coronavirus won't be a big deal", or "This dog will not hurt me", or "I did not leave the stove on". B could be "The coronavirus WILL be a big deal", or "This dog WILL hurt me," or "I DID leave the stove on". Along with these two statements, let's define two actions: G' and B', corresponding to the rational action to take if G and B are true. For example, G' could be "don't bother preparing for the coronavirus", or "approach the dog", or "walk away and don't check the stove again". B' could be "prepare for the coronavirus", or "stay away from the dog", or "go back and check to make sure the stove isn't on".
Now we can make a matrix of outcomes for this decision:
G B
----- -----
G' | G'G G'B
B' | B'G B'B
There are two reasons someone might choose B' in this scenario.
First, they could have a high prior on B being true. For example, someone might think the coronavirus is likely to be a big deal, and thus decide to prepare for it. Or someone might have a high prior on dogs being a threat, and thus decide to stay away. Or someone might have a high prior on the stove being left on, and thus decide to go check. This is more or less the assumption of what's going on with the trapped priors framework as Scott describes it.
But there's another possibility: Someone might have a low prior on B being true, but decide that the costs of G'B (that is, acting as if G is true, while B is actually true) are so high that average payoff is always better choosing B'. For example, maybe someone only thinks there's a 20% chance of the coronavirus being a big deal, but the costs of not preparing (and then the virus being a big deal) are so high that it's better to prepare anyway. Or someone might think it's extremely unlikely for the dog to hurt them, but consider the possibility of getting hurt to be so awful that they avoid the dog anyway. Or someone might think it's extremely unlikely for the stove to be left on, but consider the possibility of it being left on to be so awful that they go check anyway. As far as I can tell, Scott's description of trapped priors with regard to mental illnesses doesn't take this into account.
So what I'm wondering is: How much of a phobia of dogs involves a high trapped prior in favor of dogs being dangerous, and how much of it involves assigning extremely large cost to the possibility of getting hurt? How much of OCD behavior involves a high trapped prior in favor of the stove being left on, and how much of it involves assigning extremely large cost to the possibility of it being left on?
I feel like it must be some combination of both, which complicates Scott's discussion of this topic. In that discussion, phobias are a combination of high priors in favor of the feared object being dangerous, combined with low bandwidth on the sensory channel preventing these priors from updating. But I feel like there must be some role for the idea of "the phobic person considers getting hurt by a dog to be such a horrible outcome that it may not even need to be a *likely* outcome in order for them to try to avoid it".
It's hard for me to tell the difference introspectively in my own OCD case, as a lot of this is happening "under the hood" so to speak. But I wonder if there's any empirical way of determining how much of a role each factor (priors on the one hand, and cost estimates on the other hand) is playing. I feel like if cost estimates were playing too big of a role, then exposure therapies wouldn't work, since exposure seems to be in the business of untrapping priors (e.g. convincing the phobic person that dogs are unlikely to harm them). But I'm not sure, and I'd like to hear what other people (especially Scott, if he sees this) think.
Looking this over again, it seems Substack butchered the "matrix" I tried to make by deleting all of the extra spaces. Here's what it's supposed to look like: http://puu.sh/Hvvlr/f88f5a69a9.png
(epistemic status: wildly speculative. I'm a mechanical engineer who reads papers on predictive processing in his free time; don't put too much trust on anything I write here)
I'll just sketch out a few interesting thoughts, let's see where we get.
If I understood you correctly, your reasoning is like this:
OCD might be the brain performing something very rational. The expected value of B would be (probability of occurence P) * (expected outcome of B occurs E), so either P or E must be unreasonably high for your brain to constantly freak out about something.
1) Can we measure if it's P or E (I think this is your core question, right?)? I'm skeptical, without knowing too much about the details. I was watching the discussion in this video on evidence of predictive processing here yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiQ7VQ_5y5c and part of the discussion was that while it's easy to control experienced stimuli in experiments (say whether you were primed or not), it's almost impossible to control for internal expectations (say what your brain is expecting in a situation).
Still, one could imagine a setting where you're exposed to various settings, but either only E or only P is modified. For the dog example:
- if you're exposed to a dog behind strong iron bars, the probability P of the dog reaching you is almost zero; but expected damage E depends on the dog (is it big and terrifying? is it kinda normal?)
- if you're with a normal, well-behaved dog, you could experiment with various levels of P - the dog is behind bars, the dog is held firmly by the owner, the dog is running around freely.
Still, I don't think this would work, but I'd interested to hear how it goes from someone with actual practical experience.
2) Why am I sceptical?
I don't think the model of the brain minimizing (P*E) I outlined above is correct, especially not in cases of mental illness. Please note that I'm not saying the brain is non-rational - my point is that the task our brains are performing are really hard.
An example: We are throwing insane amounts of money, time and work at teaching computers to drive. After decades of work, very high-quality sensors, high-precision maps with automatic updates and extreme computational powers, they are... well, the latest video I've seen of the Tesla outopilot looked roughly as good as a 17-year-old right after driving school (or a more experienced driver, but after 3 beer): Okay-ish, but way worse than what a skilled driver does while his conscious mind is obsessed with what to have for dinner.
At the same time, our own senses are not that great: From Scott's review of surfing uncertainty, on the brain's data handling: "Both streams are probabilistic in nature. The bottom-up sensory stream has to deal with fog, static, darkness, and neural noise; it knows that whatever forms it tries to extract from this signal might or might not be real. For its part, the top-down predictive stream knows that predicting the future is inherently difficult and its models are often flawed. So both streams contain not only data but estimates of the precision of that data."
So my argument would basically be that yes, somewhere in the process of estimating P and E, your brain is screwing up. But there's a wild variety of possible feedback loops and error mechanisms that allow it to spiral out of control, because...
- forming a coherent model of reality is really hard, so we usually get it wrong.
- questions like "how active should you be right now" are impossible to determine from an epistemic point of view, so mostly we have a set of pre-set gains for an internal model that responds to various inputs like how successfull your recent past actions have been and how much sunlight you get right now.
- integration of various sources of signal are really hard for the brain. A few years ago the gravity organ in my right ear stopped working; giving me not only really bad vertigo but also screwed up my brain for weeks as it was trying to rearrange itself with the large amount of error signals escalating internally.
I'll add a few links with discussion later, but right now my brain sent an escalating error signal of my 2-year-old having woken up and demanding for someone to say hi.
Here are two examples I can think of for the mechanisms I discussed. In both cases, I don't think they map very well to the P vs E question
1) Scotts 2018 post "the chamber of guf" outlines a possible model of how special OCD types might occur ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/15/the-chamber-of-guf/ )
2) the Erdmann & Mathys paper "a generative framework for the study of delusions" provides a simple model for how delusional thoughts might maintain themselves and lead to more delusions. You can find the paper and my review here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PredictiveProcessing/comments/m0cx2y/a_generative_framework_for_the_study_of_delusions/ - I won't crosspost the review here, but I'd be rey interested to read what others think of it (also relevant to the topic of trapped priors)
I actually do remember reading that Chamber of Guf post, I had totally forgotten about it until now. It does seem very relevant to what I was saying, although I'm not totally sure that it answers my question of how much P is being overweighted vs E being overweighted. Like, are those thoughts being selected and entertained because the metaphorical angels think those thoughts are *more likely to be true*? Or is it because they're under orders to minimize costs, and they see upsetting thoughts (e.g. "I am gay") as having extremely high cost *if* they're true?
I actually thought of another example. In Scott's initial post on trapped priors (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-precision-of-sensory-evidence), he said:
"I've been kind of imprecise here, lumping together depression and trauma and causes and effects and so on. The more rigorous version is that the tendency to underweight sensory evidence (and correspondingly overweight priors) is what VDBEA call a "better safe than sorry" processing strategy. In threat-detection, avoiding false negatives is more important than avoiding false positives - if you mistake a tree stump for a tiger it's mildly embarrassing, but if you mistake a tiger for a tree stump, you're dead. So in a threat-laden environment, you want to both adjust your prior to be that things are threats, and over-weight your prior relative to sensory evidence. Some people could have this processing strategy because they're genetically programmed to have it, and these people will be more vulnerable to depression, and more likely to get PTSD for any given level of trauma. Other people will get traumatized into it - something will happen that ups their estimate of how threat-laden the environment is and makes this cognitive strategy more attractive."
Let's look at the tiger example here. In the "better safe than sorry" processing strategy, are we sure that the brain is actually setting the priors on "that thing is a tiger" as very high and "that thing is a tree stump" as very low? Or is it still estimating "that thing is likely a tree stump, but the costs of it being a tiger are so high that I should act as if it's a tiger"? Is there any way to tell the difference?
I don't have much ability to read the thing about delusions at the moment - ironically, my current state of OCD gives me very serious reading issues, and reading the Chamber of Guf post has already exhausted my energy at the moment. I'll see if I can give it a look later on, depending on how long and technical it is.
People with anxiety disorders aren't usually actually trying to manage their fear of (insert object of fear), they're trying to avoid FEELING ANXIOUS.
And the hook is that the more you avoid ANYTHING you are anxious/fearful about, the more afraid of it you'll become.
My theory is that anxiety is our alarm system but it knows it's not well calibrated to every possible situation. So you feel anxious about something, think about how risky it is, and decide to avoid it. Then your brain goes 'oh, we avoided, it must actually be risky', and it increases the alarm next time. If you feel anxious, think about how risky it is, and don't avoid, your brain goes 'oh, the more rational parts of the system decided this isn't a big enough risk to avoid', and it downgrades the alarm the next time you encounter the same thing.
What people w/OCD are trying to avoid is the discomfort and anxiety created by DOUBT. Ironically, recent research shows that even for people without OCD, the more you ask yourself (or someone else asks you) if you're really really sure about something, the more unsure you become and the more doubt you experience! So since people with OCD are constantly asking themselves if they're sure ..... This is how OCD differentiates from phobias, and how it often gets extremely weird. I remember working with a guy who had to count every corner made by the walls/floor/ceiling of every room he went into, every time, in order to reduce his doubt/anxiety about whether NOT doing that would cause his family to die in horrible ways :-( He knew it made no sense, but the doubt was awful! He wasn't counting corners to protect his family, he was counting to reduce his doubt/anxiety.
When we work with people with any type of anxiety leading to avoidance, we often explicitly get them to rate the actual level of danger of the object of their fear (ie; 'if my plane crashes I WILL die' is high danger, while 'if I touch this door handle I might catch a cold' is low danger, but not zero'). THEN we get them to also rate how likely that outcome is (ie; chance of commercial plane crashing; extremely low. Chance of catching cold if I touch a door handle and don't wash my hands; it's gonna happen once or twice a year).
THEN we combine the two, AND ask about trade-offs; if danger is high but probability is very low, it's reasonable to choose not to avoid, IF the trade-off for not avoiding is a valued one (I get to travel to see the world, visit friends and family, advance at my job ...). If danger is lowish but probability is high, it's also reasonable not to avoid, if the trade-off is a good one (I get to not destroy the skin on my hands, I get to interact with the world in a more usual way, I get to go out in public easily ...).
Then we add the sweetener; if you start approaching what you now avoid, your anxiety/doubt/upset will GO DOWN. It takes practice, but people with OCD (and phobias) can definitely actually become COMFORTABLE doing/not doing what usually makes them anxious/creates doubt. (And if practice isn't enough, or this has been going on for years and is very hard to start to disassemble, fluoxetine works great to reduce the anxiety/doubt, so the person can work on approaching rather than avoiding.)
Systematic exposure works great, very very consistently, btw, because it just allows your alarm system to re calibrate. I often tell people they don't have to BELIEVE it will work, they just have to do it, as recommended, and voila!!! (If their fear is to high to try it at all; see 'fluoxetine' above.) The conscious part of you doesn't have to become convinced dogs are unlikely to harm you; your alarm system will do it automatically. And thank heavens it will!
Hm, just as I suspected - there is sort of a combination of likelihood of danger + level of danger going on here with these things. This seems somewhat obvious in hindsight, and I wonder why it is that Scott (or at least the paper Scott was reading from) didn't take this into account. It seems like the theory of trapped priors is only focusing on the brain inflating the *likelihood* of [bad thing happening] - e.g. making it feel *more likely* that touching a doorknob without washing your hands will give you a cold. But it seems like that's not the whole story - there's also a question of *how bad the person considers it to be* that they get a cold. Anxiety disorders in general seem to be a miscalibration of the overall risk assessment, which consists of both of these considerations.
*General life advice thread:*
Prompts: 1) What is the most counter intuive advice you've received that has helped you a lot? 2} What is the fairly obvious advice that you found actually surprisingly helpful? 3) What problem have you had that hasn't been amenable to the obvious solutions
Please also feel free to pot replies unrelated to the prompt in the general theme or asking for or offering life advice
I'll start with an answer for 2) I'd seen cutting caffeine and alcohol on every list of mental health advice throughout my life, in the general basket of nice wellness things yoga or taking hot baths. And dismissed it as banal. But experimenting with cutting my intake of both to near zero at the start of lockdown (for the first time in my adult life) I've noticed that significant improvement to my anxiety and general mental health baseline.
I still drink a lot of caffeine, but I'll second the alcohol recommendation. A beer absolutely hits the spot on special occasions, but for a lot of people, alcohol consumption (often significant consumption!) is part of their routine, and it's one of the easiest and most impactful changes that you can make.
1) Your manager helping you with a problem you're stuck on is often an optimal use of their time. This was counter-intuitive for me since my manager's time was (and is) way more valuable than mine. Buuuut, they can solve a problem in 15 minutes that might otherwise take me 3 days. And their time isn't 500 times as valuable as mine.
2) Block non-work time suck websites (ex. reddit, marginalrevolution, whatever your own poison is) on your work computer. Anecdotally, it increases the time I spend actually working by ~30% without substantially changing my enjoyment or time spent at desk.
3) Trochanteric bursitis. Did (and do) PT and the standard IT band stretches. Still can't run for more than a block without my hip swelling up.
Ironically, here's my (1):
If you're mentoring people (in my case, I was a grad student mentoring some undergraduate students in a research project), _resist_ the impulse to jump in and do something for your mentees, even if they're stuck on something that will take them 20+ hours and you could do it in <1. Partly, yes, your time really is that valuable. But more importantly, I was told that their experience struggling through it and doing it themselves would lead to them improving at that skill in a way they wouldn't if you jumped in to help.
In my case, I couldn't bring myself to completely leave them out to dry, remembering similar unpleasant experiences I went through, so I decided to split the difference and basically be "on call" -- they'd go ahead and start through it, but as soon as they spent 15 minutes thinking about something and getting nowhere, they could give me a call and I'd help them get unstuck. It seems to have worked well -- my mentees told me that they often got an "aha" moment 5-10 minutes into thinking about the problem, but hopefully this caps the time they waste going down rabbit holes.
(And obviously this only applies to things where they're actually supposed to be learning a skill -- if it's just a matter of learning how to access the database, or whatever, then there's no point making them struggle through that on their own.)
I think you mention almost the exact same middle ground I was told to follow! Try for 15-30 minutes, but don't spin uselessly on something for an hour (or a week) alone. This does require being able to distinguish useful research from useless spinning, but it feels pretty easy for me to distinguish these internally.
And learning how to access the db etc could easily still be useful to spend some time trying to find (since this 'should' be in a common docs location anyways).
1] Nothing too much; 2] make haste slowly
1) Counterintuitive advice recently received by someone in my life that was extremely helpful- had an injury to quadriceps, near the knee, was in a lot of pain. Went to physical therapy, where they said he must begin to bend it. Couple of sessions, he could straighten his leg. Couple more, it was hurting less and he could put some weight on it. I thought that pain was an indicator to not use whichever body part. But apparently it can also be an indicator that something is tightening which normally should not be tight, and without intervention it will hurt even more in the future. I'm sure this depends on the type of injury and which body part is affected.
2) "Assume positive intent." I used to hate this advice because I think it isn't an accurate representation of the world. However, in some workplaces, going around acting like you assume positive intent absolutely is a good way to operate. ("Of course they didn't mean that how it sounded!" etc) Once that got through my head, it was helpful.
3) Restoring mental focus after trauma. That and hernia repair, for some reason I want to put "lol," it isn't funny, but living with two hernias, there is a gallows humor aspect for me at this point. Stuff that seems like it ought to be easy, but isn't.
US political system question: doesn't the 12th Amendment make using ranked choice voting unlikely for US presidential elections? The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner must receive a 'majority' of votes cast by the electors- not a plurality. With multiple parties, the odds of anyone getting a raw majority is pretty low, especially after the number of parties reaches 4+. If no one receives a majority, the election is then cast to the House- where, each state receives 1 vote (I am unclear how they choose which House Rep gets their state's votes). This could be seen as generally giving the election to Republicans/conservatives, given that they tend to be spread out across more low-population states.
If your argument is 'well we can go through multiple ranked choice voting rounds until we find who gets a majority for the Presidency'- the 12th Amendment seems very clear to me that you get ONE voting round and then it goes to the House. Text below. So unless you'd prefer having House reps from rural states picking the President every time, it seems that ranked choice voting can't work in the US, no?
'The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President'
What the electors do is seperate from what voters do. Assuming you're not removing the electoral college, which you ideally would, you could still have something like the interstate popular vote compact https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact where states making up >50% of EC votes agree to allocate their electors to the winner of a ranked choice voting system
'states making up >50% of EC votes agree to allocate their electors to the winner of a ranked choice voting system'- sure, and with 4 or more political parties competing, the odds of those EC votes being split multiple ways and so no one gets a raw majority is quite high. I agree that what electors do is separate from what voters do, that's the whole issue- the voters can use multiple rounds to pick their state's candidate, but the electors cannot.
I guess my point has more to do with multiple parties than ranked choice voting itself- in theory, ranked choice could work just fine with 2 or even 3 parties. In practice, however, most ranked choice systems have a lot of parties. The current Electoral College setup only works with 2 parties, in general.
Visualize it this way- California, Maryland, and New York choose the Democratic party candidate. Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee choose the Republican party candidate. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Oregon choose the far-left Green Party candidate. New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan choose the populist, socially conservative, fiscally liberal Farm & Labor Party candidate. Alaska chooses the Alaska Independence Party (this is a real party!) candidate. So the elector votes are split and no one gets a majority (this obviously doesn't cover every state but is just off the top of my head)
That isn't the system being proposed. The proposed system would have all the involved states agreeing to have their electors cast votes for the same individual, with that individual being chosen by ranked choice vote. Because this would involve a clause that it only takes effect if enacted by states with total electoral votes enough to ensure a victor, there is no risk of splitting in the electoral college. This is less clean than the national popular vote interstate compact because you could have some states on ranked choice and some states on other methods, but there is no risk of splitting the EC because you design it to not take effect until enough states are onboard to dominate the EC.
I now see what you're saying, but I think it's still a stretch. There seem to be multiple Constitutional restrictions on how states can allocate their electors- they can't simply do as they please (i.e. auction them off to the highest bidder, say). For one thing, Congress would have to be involved along with the individual states, as 'No State shall, without the Consent of Congress.... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State', which a new IRV system would be. In Chiaflo v. Washington, Kagan wrote for the unanimous majority that 'Checks on a State's power to appoint electors, or to impose conditions on an appointment, can theoretically come from anywhere in the Constitution'.
So- getting a majority of states onboard, plus Congress, and then evading any court challenges to a state's electors being cast for someone who didn't actually win a plurality vote in their state- seems like a stretch
This is one of those issues that is relatively simple to get around; the way the popular vote compact is structured, each state passes an individual law speaking to its own electors. Then the law does not go into effect until enough other states have a similar law.
All of this is achievable without any explicit compact; the states all just pursue the same type of IRV reform internally, and out pops the new system.
The "Agreement or Compact" is for formal mechanisms; they cannot make binding interstate treaties for example. But there is nothing to prevent them making non-binding agreements. I don't know what the case law is here, but sometime in the last couple decades California determined to independently coordinate with Canada on environmental law. That might be a fruitful avenue to check for comparison, because foreign policy is a much more stringent standard than interstate relations.
An actual, written law in dozens of states, that doesn't go into effect unless 'enough other states have a similar law', is a 'formal mechanism' man
If we're going to overhaul how we choose the President, I'm pretty sure we need another amendment. I get the impression that the people pushing ranked choice voting are going after smaller elections first.
Not that I think it's completely impossible without an amendment, but without an amendment it would have to be a fiddly work-around like the Interstate Compact, and some people have doubts as to whether the Compact would actually work.
Well, IRV is not a desirable voting method, BUT....
Each state runs its own election, so it is unlikely all states would adopt IRV at the same time. The first state could have language that if 2 candidates have accumulated 270-<this states EVs> then only they advance in the runoff. If other states adopt, they could do something similar, or join a compact with the adopted states to coordinate their runoffs.
But really, the issue here is not states using IRV, but that the electoral college is single vote majority. This is what prevents 3rd parties from forming. It doesn't matter how multi-party you make the prior rounds, you are still wind up at the single vote round in the end.
For example, suppose a major third party did catch on in the US, and started winning some states EVs, using the current plurality elections . You would run into the same problem that this just winds up throwing it to the house. That is why the 3rd party wouldn't last... as soon as it becomes big enough to win some states, it becomes a liability, and needs to be abandoned.
RCV != IRV; Condorcet methods are also RCV (and, in my opinion, far preferable to IRV).
nearly eveyone defines RCV == IRV. check ie wikipedia page on RCV
Does it specify a definition of "receive"? Because if my ballot, according to the algorithm in question, is allocated to a particular candidate, it seems to me that they "received" my vote.
But that language also hinges on the electoral college, which we'd be bypassing anyway. If you bind all electors to vote for whoever wins the ranked choice election, then they definitely did receive a majority of the electors. So the question is really just whether electors can be bound without an ammendment, and my impression is that already happens anyway.
I've been wondering recently about drug names. Not any specific drug names, but more about the whole general class of drug names. I feel like pretty much anything I think of as sounding "like a drug name" is missing a whole bunch of qualities which I feel like a name ought to have at least some combination of. Take adalimumab (which google helpfully reminds me is the generic name of Humira) as a representative example. As far as I can tell, the name-
1: Doesn't tell you anything about the formula or structure of the drug. Adalimumab is a monoclonal antibody, meaning that it's a large molecule whose full organic chemical name would be a huge pain in the ass which nobody would ever want to use for conversational purposes. But as far as I can find, the name "adalimumab" doesn't even point to some broad area in the space of pharmacokinetics which the drug falls into. It seems like an outright syllable salad.
2: Doesn't sound euphonious or appealing. It's hard for me to imagine anyone having positive associations with the word, or thinking it sounds like something they'd want put in their body.
3: Doesn't evoke the idea of a cure to the diseases it's indicated for. It's hard to imagine anything which evokes this concept for all the specific diseases it's prescribed for, but it's used for a bunch of types of arthritis and inflammatory diseases, so a name which conveyed the feeling of anti-inflammatoriness seems intuitively suitable.
4: Is hard to say. It's such an easy word to stumble over, it sounds like ability to pronounce it is supposed to be a job qualification.
So, on what basis was the name actually chosen? Wikipedia explains the meaning behind the brand name, Humira, but that actually sounds like a thing a human being might deliberately name something. Whatever process generated a name like "adalimumab" is completely opaque to me, and whatever it is, it doesn't seem like something conducive to coming up with names people would want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenclature_of_monoclonal_antibodies seems to cover this subset of drugs in particular, and may be a starting point.
Apparently '-mab' is for Monoclonal AntiBody, the -u- means it's derived from a hUman source, the -lim- indicates it's an IMmunomodulator, and the ada- is an arbitrary root.
This is just cynical speculation, but presumably the company that develops a drug gets to pick the trade name (under which *they* can sell it) and, subject to the constraints of standards like the one described by wikipedia, the generic name (under which eventually generic *competitors* will be able to sell it). So it seems natural that they would prefer the first name to be good and the second name to be bad!
Generic competitors can, and usually do, make up their own brand names, they don't have to use just the generic name. Although an easy-to-remember generic name does make it easier to discuss the fact that these competitors are the same drug as the original.
Anybody has any particularly interesting/fruitful approach to tourism?
My wife and I do a fair amount of traveling for tourism, and I increasingly find that the standard walk-around-and-take-pictures-at-famous-locations approach doesn't really do it for me. There is just a limited so many churches/colonial buildings/castles/cute touristy locations you can visit before it gets old.
I am open to any suggestion. I have experimented, for example, with preparing my self for a trip by reading a bit about the place's history, but I didn't find that it particularly improved my experience. I have found that more exotic locations are more entertaining (exotic meaning places that are further from my culture, upbringing, etc.), but those are usually further away and not reachable within, say, a weekend.
Anyway. I'm open to suggestions!
I like travelling by road in off-peak seasons, camping without making reservations, with general areas of natural beauty in mind but no particular itinerary. If something looks interesting, stop and investigate. Drive in inefficient loops to avoid using the same roads twice. Find interesting cities and wander. Hike places based on road signs and very brief internet research. This eliminates all the stress and let-down of tourist "sightseeing". I also only take pictures of the kids being cute, rather than to document that we went anywhere in particular.
One fruitful strategy is to make the travel secondary to an adventure sport: go to Yosemite in order to hike or climb a major peak, go to Tahoe in order to ski, go to a body of water in order to swim/dive/kayak/sail.
For more urban destinations I sometimes find that one of the most rewarding experiences is simply getting around. Experiencing subway systems, elevated trains, bike paths, ferry rides, etc. rather than always rushing by car between attractions.
Use online communities to plan to meet a bunch of random people while you are there. Meet locals, travellers, everyone, and try to form a friend group that meets repeatedly and that will attract new people in.
Visit places for long periods or repeatedly. Personally I find the longer the trip the more rewarding.
I use couchsurfing to find people to hang out with (it has features other than reuqesting to stay at their house). Also meetup.com, reddit, Facebook. Doing walking tours is also good for meeting people, just not locals.
Take a course or work on a project while you are there. Having a purpose to your trip makes it more memorable and enjoyable.
Part of my strategy is to find the touristy locations that are truly special, rather than just another church (although they can actually be very interesting, if you have an eye for architecture, church hierarchy, etc). For example, during a trip to Germany a while back, I visited:
- the Trier Amphitheater
- the world's oldest electric suspension railway in Wuppertal
- A partially rebuilt Roman city in Xanten
- A coal mine turned into a museum
In general, museums can offer something fairly unique, although not all of them are special, of course.
I've found that having a Wikipedia app on my phone to read about the history while I'm at a place is much more helpful than reading in advance - a bit of advance reading is helpful for a baseline, but at the place I can look at the thing while reading, and get a clearer sense of which thing is important.
Also, I find that reading about the geology is often just as fascinating as the history. (It helps explain why all the Roman buildings are on top of each other, instead of being removed, and why Paris has the catacombs.)
To wit, wikipedia has a nearby feature that allows you to see articles related to things that are currently close to you.
I find that trying to eat at places suggested by actual locals is a winner to see a more interesting part of a city outside of the 'main tourist strip'. Getting the recommendation can often be tough unless you know someone, but it will likely get you to the part of town that is "further from your culture", as it's trying to attract locals rather than tourists.
Other than that, I'd echo what others have said which is that traveling between destinations in a city is often more exciting to me than being at the destination. One thing that I had to adjust to when moving to the US is that most cities need a car to get around, because not renting one at a destination is a great way to ensure getting around is an adventure.
Use a site such as workaway.info or wwoof.net to volunteer on a farm or hostel, help a family etc. So you can live and work with some locals, and get to know a particular location well.
I wrote an article about understanding a particular model of adult psychological development using Philip Glass' life. I'd really appreciate if someone so inclined could give feedback on how engaging the writing is, and other structural-level suggestions you might have. Feedback on content is welcome also.
https://deaexmachinus.substack.com/p/machines-society-20-how-to-grow-a
I wish the description of development stages included a discussion of whether or not those claims were true. It seems a bit ‘just so’ to me. What’s better about that over Maslow’s hierarchy, or not having any development model?
Thank you for that. Another thing that would have been good to expound on is how useful Kegan's model of development is. I don't understand Maslow's hierarchy from a developmental perspective well enough to criticize it c/f Kegan, but I take your point about providing more evidence for Kegan.
Using Philip Glass to illustrate development is rather funny!
I see the Electoral College vs. multiple parties is under discussion. Rather than respond to a specific post, let me trot out my ideas about this.
First of all, with the entire Executive Branch, for four years, handed over to the winner of a single high-stakes election, game theory dictates that everyone will try to build a 51% coalition to win that election.
It's not a conspiracy: having single elected head of government (unlike most other democracies) means you get a stable two-party system. Third or fourth parties may sometimes appear as serious contenders, but the system always resolves back down to two major parties.
If you want multiple parties to play serious roles in governance, you need a parliamentary system. It's hard to see that happening in the U.S.
Second, the Electoral College.
I agree with the criticisms of the Electoral College. Not only does it distort election outcomes, it narrows the field of competition to a handful of "swing" states. In the last few elections, issues of interest to Wisconsin or Pennsylvania get tremendous attention, while issues of interest to Kansas or California get zero.
But getting rid of the Electoral College (even if it were politically feasible to pass a constitutional amendment) is more complicated than most people realize.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the 12th Amendment requires that the winning candidate get a majority of the electoral votes; if no one does, there is an unappealing alternative process. Okay.
If the president were to be elected directly by the voters, what happens to the majority requirement? In 1968, Richard Nixon won the most votes, but only got 43% of the total. In 2020, Joe Biden got a majority, but only by a whisker. Some of the popular-vote proposals require the winner to get at least 40% of the votes, but that seems arbitrary.
Additionally, if a vote in one state counts precisely as much as a vote in any other state, there would need to be uniform Federal standards for all elections nationwide. Imagine, say, Utah lowering the voting age to 14 for presidential elections, in order to balloon the number of Republican votes. And if it were a very close election, that might require a nation-wide recount, an awkward and expensive proposition for everyone involved.
Short of getting rid of the Electoral College, the Maine/Nebraska approach should NOT be emulated. Choosing electors by Congressional district gives enormous power to whoever draws those district boundaries.
One alternative which ought to be explored is to allocate electors proportionately within each state. The simplest way would be to mandate that each state's electors be allocated, in integer numbers, to the top two vote-getters in that state.
(As I said, the two-party system is already baked in, and splitting electors multiple ways requires making some suspiciously arbitrary rules.)
I haven't done the math myself, but others have, and my understanding is that proportional elector votes would be considerably less likely to yield a result different from the popular vote. Not impossible, but much less likely. And only state-level recounts would be necessary.
In this system, almost every state would have some "swing" electors. Let's say a state has 10 electors: then it matters whether that state's leading candidate gets 55% (winning six of the ten electors and gaining a 2-elector margin), or less than 55% (and winning only five). Nobody's polling is good enough to predict the percentages with much accuracy. Few states would be completely ignored.
I don't quite understand what your objection is to majority requirement under a popular vote system. (Personally I think FPTP works best with a runoff system if needed, but I just don't see there being that many candidates to split the vote here). There should be uniform federal standards for.... federal elections, I don't think I've ever seen a good faith argument otherwise. Big agree on allocating electors proportionally, definitely not by Congressional district but instead by raw vote total. This has the advantage that states could do it now without a Constitutional amendment, or even needing an interstate compact with other states (Michigan, Wisconsin & Pennsylvania, say, could change to a proportional elector system prior to 2024 on their own volition. Maybe via referendum in 2022?)
"having single elected head of government (unlike most other democracies) means you get a stable two-party system"
This is not true. It is this combined with the voting system used.
There's a lot of states with 3, 4, or 5 electors, that would be unlikely to have a swing elector. An ad campaign that shifts opinion in California or Texas by 5 points gets you several votes, but is unlikely to do anything across the plains, even in a region with as large a population as California and Texas together.
>Short of getting rid of the Electoral College, the Maine/Nebraska approach should NOT be emulated. Choosing electors by Congressional district gives enormous power to whoever draws those district boundaries.
You've overlooked fixing gerrymandering within the solution space. It's far short of getting rid of the EC, but eliminates the objection to the ME/NE approach.
Hi Everyone,
I’m a long-time reader, sometimes commenter, and occasional meet-up go-er. I’ve got an announcement about a project I’m developing that may be of interest to your average SSC/ACX reader.
It’s an online platform for creating or joining campaigns for collective action in adversarial situations - with elements like participation-based activation thresholds to solve game-theoretic coordination problems. Think “Kickstarter,” but instead of crowdfunding products, it’s for safely recruiting and organizing participants for any project that requires a group effort. I’m tentatively calling it “Spartacus App” and you can get more info about it here: https://spartacus.carrd.co/. You can also follow the newly created Twitter account at https://twitter.com/AppSpartacus.
This is not an entirely novel concept - many of the underlying principles have been validated by other successful platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and Change.org, The Point, (before it pivoted to become Groupon) for different use cases.
The operating assumptions:
#1. A coordinated group effort breaks a bad status quo equilibrium where no single individual has an incentive to act first but would be willing to act if joined by others.
#2. A coordinated group effort would help achieve a set goal where any individual attempt would fail.
I hope to increase the expected value of organizing around true preferences by lowering the courage requirements for taking action (from heroic to average) and reducing individual actors’ risks (from potentially catastrophic to marginal).
About me:
I have a B.S. in Behavioral Economics, so I’ve always been interested in these types of problems. The germ of this idea preceded my first reading of “Meditations on Moloch'', but the impact of that essay galvanized me into attempting something more concrete one day. The pandemic and an evolving work-life balance created the opportunity to get it started.
As for my professional background, I have over 10 YEO working with tech startups in sales, marketing, business development, and project management. I’ve consulted with multiple seed-stage companies on revenue strategies, monetization models, product-market fit, and market research. I was also Employee #1 and Director of Sales for a VR HealthTech startup called Vivid Vision (www.seevividly.com).
Use Cases:
--Brenda wants better working conditions at her company.
--She knows if she speaks up, she’ll probably get fired. Besides, she needs X number of coworkers to join her to have any leverage to negotiate.
--Spartacus allows her to raise awareness for her plan and others to join her without exposing their identities, protecting them from intimidation and retaliation.
--If, (and only if), Brenda recruits a certain number of people, everyone’s identities are revealed simultaneously.
--The group, now public, can proceed with whatever plan of action they collectively decide to pursue.
The use cases for Spartacus App can vary widely and are ideologically agnostic by design. Some subjects and objectives would be out-of-bounds for legal reasons. Here are some hypothetical examples of campaigns:
--Unionizing Veggies R Us Distribution Center Workers.
--Presenting an alternative DEI training curriculum at Hopscotch inc.
--Uncovering sexual harassment in the Marketing Department at Frazzle.io
--Concerned parents of Cedar Country Day School against changes to the history curriculum.
--Faculty of University X in support of unjustly penalized colleague Y.
--Exposing accounting malfeasance at Enbition Energy Inc.
--Those yet to be named by Robespierre, against Robespierre.
On a personal level, why am I doing this?
--I believe social norms enforced by unquestionable orthodoxies are probably wrong and deserve scrutiny and challenge.
--I don’t like bullies, no matter where they’re from or how they justify themselves.
--Mafia-style intimidation and making “examples” out of people through disproportionate punishment to change social norms are illiberal and disgraceful but unfortunately effective tactics. But it creates fraudulent public discourse, which is anathema to the ideals of a liberal society.
--I think a social climate where people are honest rather than dishonest and where problems are confronted rather than repressed, is preferable.
--I believe that organized collective action and collective bargaining are one of the very few forms of leverage ordinary people have against self-perpetuating institutional power centers. Pitting atomized individuals armed with personal consumer choice and performative self-expression against powerful organizations is an unfair fight; I want to try evening the odds.
--I suspect there are all kinds of dormant preference cascades waiting to be triggered under the right circumstances.
Project Status:
I’m currently looking to recruit people for proof of concept experiments and beta testing.
I’d also love to connect with the following sorts of people in general:
--Anyone with a strong social science background who wants to be involved and/or offer input.
--Anyone who thinks they might be a potential user of the app.
--Anyone who wants to support this project through signal boosting online.
--Anyone with a SWE background who has experience with MVPs.
You can contact me in the thread, through the intake form on the site (https://spartacus.carrd.co/#contact), or via Twitter @AppSpartacus
Thanks!
I love the Idea, but I see a big Problem: Brendas Boss can just register a number of sockpuppets and expose her.
There are ways to mitigate spamming/trolling/astroturfing/sabotage. Real ID verification (probably through Facebook API) would be necessary, and maybe even a small financial transaction. We're going to test this. But at no point will anyone's PII be sitting on a server where it can be exposed by a security breach.
I think this is related to (the same thing as?) an assurance contract - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract for more. I agree assurance contracts are great and this seems like a neat idea.
Yes! It does operate according to the same principles as an assurance contract - "I'll do X but only if Y number of people also do it". I think the key differentiator is providing anonymity in the early stages, which can (hopefully) break the inertia of a stable equilibrium based on false preferences.
Accruing (initially) anonymous support for something has its own drawbacks and failure modes, which I hope to address to the extent I can, but I propose #1, whatever risk accrues to individuals using the anonymity model is still less than having no anonymity, and #2, you have to weigh the range of outcomes, including the failure or sabotage of a campaign, against the alternative, which is presumably a perpetually bad status quo.
If you'd like to get updates as the project progresses, or know of anyone who might be interested in getting involved, please DM me.
I'll give you $1 for an NFT of this open thread.
Gotta at least cover the amount paid in transaction feesx2 for fees+carbon offset for fees. I offer $100
A Dutch post-election scandal:
One of the 'scouts' tasked with investigating which parties should start negotiating to form a government, let a piece of paper be photographed which showed: "Pieter Omtzigt, position (of employment) elsewhere."
Pieter Omtzigt is a Representative who played a central role in uncovering a government scandal that caused the previous government to fall. He is the only Representative from a mainstream party who is highly critical of 'the system,' giving him huge popularity. One of the pollsters polled people on who they would vote for in the hypothetical situation where Omtzigt founds his own party, which resulted in 23 seats, while the party he currently belongs to only got 15 seats in the recent election (although that poll probably overestimates how many votes he would actually get). Farmers from his province are meming: "Omtzigt for president." See: https://www.gelderlander.nl/oost-gelre/achterhoekse-boeren-willen-pieter-omtzigt-for-president~a4011aaa/201446927/
"Position elsewhere" was widely interpreted as an attempt to get rid of this Representative. The House of Representatives was up in arms. Various party leaders, including the Prime Minister denied that they made the suggestion that Omtzigt be given another position. The scouts claimed that the piece of paper that was photographed didn't reflect their discussions with the party leaders, but that it was an "assessment from multiple angles, including media reports," thereby insinuating that the media speculated about a new job for Omtzigt. However, people were quick to point out that there was no such media speculation. The House of Representatives demanded a debate before they would allow cabinet formation to continue, but that this debate would only be held if all scouting documents were made public, including the minutes of the pre-negotiation conversations with the party leaders. The Prime Minister said that this wouldn't happen, which is a weird thing for him to say, since he is obviously not in charge of the process of forming the new government, so this came across as a cover-up attempt, just like the scouts blaming the media looked like a cover-up.
When the documents were made public, it turned out to actually be the Prime Minister who said: "we have to do something with Omtzigt: make him a minister" (similar to secretary of state). The Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has established a bit of reputation for being rather forgetful or having incorrect memories about inconvenient facts, which some see as a tactic to withhold information from the House of Representatives, while still being able to claim to have not done so intentionally due to bad memory. However, in this case Rutte claimed to have forgotten after only a little more than a week, which is not very believable. Note that it is one of the two main tasks of the House of Representatives to review the actions of the cabinet, which requires being well-informed. Withholding information intentionally is generally regarded to be one of the worst transgression by the cabinet.
During the government scandal that Omtzigt exposed, it was also uncovered that bureaucrats use the term 'Rutte Doctrine' to describe a policy of withholding information from the House of Representatives by classifying most government documents as "personal policy views" of bureaucrats. It is legal to withhold personal opinions to allow bureaucrats to speak/write freely, preventing witch hunts. However, the 'Rutte Doctrine' expands that greatly. In the eyes of many, way beyond what is reasonable.
So we are now left with a bit of a mess. The leader of the largest party typically provides the Prime Minister, which would be Rutte. However, the entire opposition has supported a motion to 'fire' Rutte from the cabinet. This makes it hard for them to enter into a coalition with Rutte as the Prime Minister. So a logical choice might be to continue with the current coalition, but those parties have expressed strong disapproval, including doubting Rutte's integrity. That coalition would include Omtzigt's party, who cannot just ignore how their Representative was treated. Rutte could forego the job of Prime Minister, allowing a respected party member to take the job. However, he crafted his political persona around lacking an ideology, which makes it hard to return to being a Representative. Also, the party just lost their 'crown prince,' who left after being involved in a fairly minor and silly scandal, so there is no obvious replacement. It's also a possibility to allow another coalition member to provide the Prime Minister, but the job is associated with a substantial 'electoral bonus,' so it is unlikely that the largest party is willing to forego that benefit. Perhaps everything will fizzle out, like it often does in Dutch politics, but there is a chance that 'Teflon Rutte,' so nicknamed for surviving many a scandal with very little damage to his reputation or popularity, will be ousted, which in turn may cause a crisis in the largest political party.
Thank you very much! I enjoy those insights into dutch politics quite a lot.
"We have to do something with Omtzigt: make him a minister"
To my American ears, a minister sounds like a high position, a promotion from mere representative. Is this not how it works in the Netherlands?
It's complicated. In theory, a representative makes the law, verifies that the cabinet implements the law as desired and can 'fire' cabinet members or the entire cabinet. So constitutionally the cabinet members are mere flunkies who serve parliament. In theory, Representatives are also completely free to act/speak as they want.
In practice, there is great power in the executive, because of policy decisions that don't require law changes, the ability to sabotage and the ability to control the dissemination of information. However, a lot of this power is dependent on cooperation by the 'deep state.' The executive also consists of ministers who constitutionally are equals (even the Prime Minister) and who decide by majority vote. So essentially, the short term power that a minister has, depends substantially on support by a majority of the executive. Cabinet members have to support a majority decision, even if they disagree, so they cannot speak freely.
The executive is in practice quite restrained by the coalition agreement. This is an agreement between the coalition parties where they decide what laws will and won't be made during the governing period. This agreement gives lot of power to party leaders, who tend to negotiate it, while there is another class of representatives within these parties who merely get the choice to sign or not sign this agreement, where the latter typically means being kicked out of the party (and almost all of them became a Representative because they were selected by the party, not because they personally got enough votes to be elected, which makes them very dependent on the party).
Note that just like in the US, political parties are a natural development, despite having a constitution that doesn't give parties official the means to control their members. In practice, most voters merely want to vote for a party/platform and have no preference for a specific Representative, which gives great power to those who decide who goes on the list of potential Representatives and at what position (in the US, primaries make that part more democratic).
In the past, Omtzigt was placed too low on the list of potential Representatives to be able to get elected by riding the coat tails of his party. This is typically how political parties get rid of dissident voices (and in general, how heterodox voices are pushed out of Dutch mainstream politics). However, Omtzigt was able to get elected anyway by getting enough personal votes. Also, a short while back there was a vote for party leader, where he barely lost (or even may have won, because it was a bit of a joke, where the online vote had to be redone when it turned out to be possible to inject many votes, but during the second vote, the system thanked Omtzigt's partner for voting for his opponent).
So right now, Omtzigt is in a strong position, where he is relatively immune to being silenced. Becoming a minister would greatly limit his ability to speak 'truth to power,' which is the one thing that many people like him for and instead would make him part of a system that he won't have the power to fundamentally change. In general, his agenda is to change the system to be more democratic, not just to get his way on a specific issue.
Your question actually speaks to a pretty strong divide between technocrats who think that people should be happy if the system moves a little to the left or the right; and those who have more fundamental criticism of the system itself.
I've tried to find more information about Omtzigt's positions, but I don't really understand what kind of reforms he advocates (I read a little Dutch, but infortunately a little is not enough). It just seems to boil down to wanting less EU power. Is there more to it? (thank you very much again!)
I've only ever seen Omtzigt be critical of EU policies, but never argue that the EU should have less power. If anything, the opposite.
He recently published a book for a "new social contract" (which is literally the name of the book). He makes 10 proposals:
1. A constitutional court
2. A regional electoral system for the House of Representatives
3. Representatives should debate more on whether laws work, rather than virtue signal about what the law claims to do
4. (Civil) law should protect citizens better (against the government)
5. Improve the bureaucracy. Get rid of the rules that ban top bureaucrats from staying at their job for a longer period, which results in these people staying at their job for an average of two years, which makes them constantly inexperienced. Also, better support for whistle blowers, harsher punishment for illegal behavior and the use of simpler language.
6. More independence for inspectorates, making all of the inspections public and having a tax ombudsman.
7. A more active and independent civil society. Currently, those are very often subsidized, making them reticent to be critical. There is also a strong tendency to regulate them, stifling initiative.
8. Make good on the constitutional obligations to provide good education, housing and lowercase social security (this is more of a general concept of being secure in a number of ways, for which there is not really an English term).
9. Fewer models and planning bureaus that create their own reality based on how one chooses to model things.
10. The government should obey the laws on providing information to the public and the Representatives.
Thanks for the clarification! I'm interested to learn the Netherlands don't have a constitutional court. And point 2 plus Omtzigt's fan-base being located in Guelders point to greater antagonism than I thought between the Randstad and more rural areas.
The executive and legislative branches are now supposed to monitor the constitutionality.
The House has been 'urbanizing.' In 2008, about 50% of Representatives were from the rural provinces, while that's 2/3rds now. 39% of Representatives are from the four largest cities, while only 13% of the population lives in those cities.
As a Parsifal fan - good name :)
@Scott
Ultimately, the scandal is not so much about official power, but that the choice of words was clearly about getting rid of Omtzigt as a critic of the government.
The "we have to do something with Omtzigt" part makes that clear. It was clearly interpreted that way by one of the scouts, who suggested making Omtzigt the chairman of the House, which is a position held by a Representative who has to act very impartially (they still get to vote, but can no longer debate).
But can they force him to accept a position as chairman of the House, or as minister, if he would prefer to remain a regular representative, which allows him more independence? Or is it about offering him enough carrot to shut up, rather than stick?
No, they cannot. There are plenty of people within his party that dislike him, or at least, his status. The new chairman of the party recently (implicitly) threatened him by saying 'nobody is bigger than the party.'
There are all kinds of ways in which people can be bullied and thereby incentivized to leave for greener pastures, although Omtzigt is probably not the guy to do that to.
Thanks for the update on the reviews! If we wrote a review and were a finalist, would we know by now?
I posted a comment to Brett & Heather's podcast, and got this reply:
"That’s nice, thanks for replying, you can send a message to my administrator on Watsap to earn in crypto especially bitcoin + 1.. (.. 7.. 6.. ). 2.. 8.. 4.. 7.. 4.. 7.. 0.. 8.. he’s excellent at what he does, tell him I referred you to him. His passionate strategies are top notch.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸"
Even granting that Watsap is a typo for Whatsapp, I still can't figure out what to do, and I consider unlikely that my comment is going to get me any bitcoin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYOpn7eDImE&ab_channel=BretWeinstein
Brett and Heather were discussing disgust, and what good it might do a deer for its decomposing body to smell bad to some mammals. They didn't discuss scavengers, and possibly they should have.
Anyway, I pointed out that bacteria have an interest in not getting eaten.
Maybe I should post my replies to Brett and Heather podcasts here instead of there.
That's... definitely a scam. What do you mean when you say you posted a comment to their podcast? seems very likely their podcast is being re-hosted by someone else with the intent to scam people.
I posted a comment on the youtube link for their podcast.
And it was their account that sent you this message?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYOpn7eDImE&lc=Ugw99lR6-2oD2weaDT94AaABAg.9Lj1Qa4_ErX9LkPWb2f9TI
It says it's from Bret Weinstein and that it's a highlighted reply.
I think you're right-- clicking on the name leads to an account which isn't Bret's main account.
There's a checkmark next to Brett's name under the video, but there isn't one next to the replyer's name. Check out any Elon Musk tweet to see the same thing in his replies, eg https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1379018148570091522
14 finalists in the book reviews plus 89 non-finalists - I am definitely here for the Times Literary Supplement edition of the site! 😁
I know you're quoting Scott's numbers, but surely they don't add up - 105 entries, 14 finalists leaves... 91 non-finalists, not 89? Unless there were a couple of disqualifications. Or I'm being particularly dense today.
I still don't really understand NFTs* . So, the buyer gets to own a blockchain address which contains either some work of art, or metadata containing a link. But - what prevents someone else from putting exactly the same information somewhere else on the blockchain? Are there safeguards in the blockchain preventing this? Is there some ultimate authority who determines what is the real thing?
*After reading the linked article and the first 7 or 8 google results. I really wish the people writing explanation pieces would read eliezers article on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2TPph4EGZ6trEbtku/explainers-shoot-high-aim-low .
Nothing prevents it. In fact, since there are multiple non-interacting blockchains, nothing *can* prevent an NFT of the same thing existing in multiple places. Additionally you can do it without proof of authorship: any rando can make an NFT of whatever jpg or URL they care to upload. Though there is a public chain of ownership that can be traced to find which account minted it so that one can ask the author if it came from them. As far as I'm aware, neither "fraudulent" nor duplicated-across-several-blockchains NFTs are a big thing (yet, growth mindset) which suggests that whatever it is people value about them has to do with some concept of authenticity.
I feel like the sequence book reviews are posted might make a difference in how voting goes. Actually, what sort of voting system will you have? Just a single vote for a favorite seems like it'll be hard to decide on, but ranked choice would also be difficult with that many options.
If my entry is a finalist, is it okay for me to share a link off the site to show my friends what I wrote, or would that be considered to be violating the blinding?
As long as a large majority of voters won't know it's you, seems fine.
Let's suppose that a strain of covid develops that the current vaccines don't apply to.
How would we know?
My guess is that we'd notice very quickly, because [significant numbers of] people would start showing up in hospitals and they'd say "hey, I have covid even though I got the vaccine", and this would be major news.
And my guess is that the fact this hasn't happened means the vaccine protects against all currently extant strains of covid.
Does this sound right?
Sounds reasonable to me. And it does look like the CDC and various State-level agencies are attempting to track this: the search term is "vaccine breakthrough cases".
One caveat is that there's a pretty high noise floor to differentiate breakthrough cases caused by a strain the virus mutating away from the vaccine vs. the known baseline of the vaccines not being 100% effective. Another caveat is that we're not necessarily identifying every breakthrough cases: fully-vaccinated people who have asymptomatic breakthrough cases will likely miss it completely, and those who have mild breakthrough cases will probably be more likely write it off as a cold or allergies than unvaccinated people.
One metric that would catch viral escape from the existing vaccines that I don't know if it's being attempted to track would be to do genetic analysis of viral samples from breakthrough cases to see if certain novel strains are vastly overrepresented in breakthrough cases relative to the general population. Of course, this would only be a reasonable metric if there were enough known breakthrough cases for the comparison to be statistically significant.
My thought is that, especially with the vaccinated social distancing less, you'll fairly quickly have a superspreader-amongst-vaccinated event with dozens of infected, that it will be spotted fairly easily.
With dozens of infected, there's a good chance someone will have suspicious enough symptoms to get at test, and then they'll call everybody else and tell them to test. Then if there are lots of infected vaccinated, I'm quite sure it will become worldwide news very quickly.
I wish there was a way to know whether a link was going to (1) open a new tab/window, (2) move the current tab somewhere else, or (3) run some javascript.
I often find myself reading long pages where I want to open a bunch of links in new tabs. I usually middle-click all the interesting links without looking at them, planning to read them later. This works fine as long as they were actually normal links. But with the Newfangled Internet this ends up opening a blank "javascript.void(0);" page half the time because it was trying to run javascript to give me the option to open the links (like the way google docs does links) and by the time I notice, I've lost my place on the original page so I never get to read whatever it was. I'm usually not willing to just normal-click on a link, because that runs the risk of taking me away from whatever I'm currently reading.
Does anyone here have a way of dealing with this? Maybe I should make a plugin/extension or something. Yeah, yeah, I could just take the extra second to see whether the link opened properly or not, but I don't want to.
You can usually see the link target at the bottom of the browser window (where the status bar has traditionally been), while hovering the link with the mouse. If it shows a reasonable URL, it will probably work; if it shows nothing or "javascript.void(0);", it won't. It may depend on your browser; most browsers have got rid of a permanent status bar by default, but Firefox and Chromium still show the URL when hovering a link. I believe this is default behavior, if not, you have to configure it.
Someone should offer me money for no reason as well so I can pay rent next month
Scott, just an FYI Polymarket recently released a P2P feature that enables direct transfer into a polymarket account for no fees. Effectively, you setup a polymarket account, another polymarket user transfers $x of USDC to your polymarket address, and then you Venmo/CashApp/etc. them equivalent cash. Works well enough for modest amounts - I was able to find someone to support my P2P in just a few minutes on the polymarket discord after previously failing to transfer in money via Metamask. Anyways, thought you might want to know as I initially found the site from your post!
I am basically certain I have ADHD. (I have never been able to do work until it's guaranteed to be late; I lose things constantly; I got a near perfect score on some self-diagnosis test; etc.) It's becoming a somewhat desperate situation because I am struggling to manage things at my job. How I can get prescribed Adderall? I emailed a couple clinics about ADHD testing; the first clinic told me it could cost $4000 to get an initial evaluation and neuropsychological testing and that they don't accept insurance, though they said maybe I could get partially reimbursed. The second only told me they aren't booking until June, and I feel this is somewhat urgent.
Will PCPs prescribe it?
It's legal for PCPs to prescribe, but most of them don't and many insurance companies won't pay for it unless it's prescribed by a psychiatrist. If you have a PCP, you can ask them - I predict 75% chance they say no, 25% chance yes.
You should forget ADHD testing and make an appointment with a psychiatrist (though this may also have a long wait list). Psychiatrists are qualified to diagnose ADHD through clinical interview (ie talking to you) only, and this is cheaper and faster than getting a test. Depending on the psychiatrist they might ask you to get the test anyway, or ask you to jump through other hoops, and there's no good way around this. You probably don't want to ask them about this first because it would make you look like a drug seeker.
In my experience, most PCPs are willing to manage a prescription based on a previous diagnosis and course of treatment established by a psychiatrist, at least if the prescription is for a medication the PCP is familiar with managing for ADHD. I've gone on and off ADHD meds several times over the decades, and I've never had a PCP say no to writing a prescription based on a previous course of treatment (after verifying based on a copy of old medical records or me bringing in an old prescription bottle), or to titrating the dosage of the same medication (Ritalin or Adderall) up or down within normal parameters. I've only been kicked over to psychiatrists for my initial diagnosis as a child (my pediatrician sent my to a psychiatrist for evaluation, then wrote Ritalin prescriptions based on the psychiatrist's diagnosis and recommendations) when I wanted to consider changing medications to something other than Ritalin or Adderall (I'm currently on Modafinil, managed by a psychiatric PA). I've never had problems with insurance, but then I've usually had a PPO plan through work; HMO, Managed Care, Medicare/Medicaid, or ACA Exchange plans may be quite a bit pickier.
Of course, that's all tangential to BadAtChess's situation, since they don't seem to have an existing diagnosis.
I was in a similar position, though I had the benefit of being diagnosed as a kid. Worked with a psychologist who worked extensively with ADHD, got a diagnosis (no check of past diagnosis), then got a prescription from my PCP with the understanding that I continued to see the psychologist (not psychiatrist!). I was new to the area, so I asked my psychologist for a recommendation for a PCP who would be amenable - you can go shopping like that.
What is the research on how groups behave in regard to ideological changes? I'm not familiar with the field, but I want to know. In order to create a piece of convincing fake news (which I am not going to do, I just want to understand the dynamics), how many actors per population need to give a "truth" signal for most of the rest of the population to flip to giving a "truth" signal? For example, one signal in a field of 100,000 won't do it, but is 1,000 enough? Or 5,000? I am sure that somewhere out there is a lot of research on this, maybe in the context of marketing and advertising. Anyone know?
In terms of voting, I used to think of elections as decided by individual votes, taken en bloc. But I'm beginning to think that strategists are not interested in convincing individuals, they are releasing signals into information environments as if people were cellular automata or something, theorizing that a certain type of signal will turn 30% of type X blue, while that signal will turn 10% of type Y red and only 5% of type Y blue. Where is all this research?
This article (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/machine-learning-confronts-the-elephant-in-the-room?utm_source=pocket-newtab) on neural networks came up on my Pocket suggested articles. It discusses what to my mind seems like predictive processing, essentially stating that most neural networks don't have the capacity for what predictive processing would call "surprisal." Am I reading this correctly? If so, are there neural network models that incorporate surprisal?
If by surprisal you mean the negative log probability of the observation, that's the explicit training target for training language models. DALL-E is basically a language model which is additionally trained to generate images so I imagine its visual representation could be said to be trained using surprisal. I'd also not expect it get screwed up by sticking an elephant in its pictures since it actually seems to be able to represent weird combinations of objects.
Here is the least surprising news ever about college admissions:
"Inconvenient Facts for the War on Testing: College admission based on personal essays helps affluent students." By The Editorial Board | April 4, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-facts-for-the-war-on-testing-11617563017
"Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. ...
"But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive.
"... the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.
"The Stanford researchers ran nearly 60,000 student essays submitted to the University of California in 2016 through a computer program. The computer identified the essay topics and “linguistic, affective, perceptual, and other quantifiable components of essay content.” The essays predicted the student’s family income better than SAT scores. ..."
https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp21-03-v042021.pdf
Only a lottery system for college admissions can be both fair to everyone and not biased by any external factors.
Define "fair".
It's easy to argue that it's not fair to encourage people who are highly likely to leave college with massive debts and no degree to attend college in the first place.
The failure mode of trying to pick the smart ones is picking more of those with high parental SES - but still to some extent at least picking those who are smarter and/or better motivated and/or better prepared, even if those things don't correlate at all with parental SES. (It only fails if they are negatively correlated with parental SES, which seems unlikely.)
The failure mode of random selection is a complete lack of correlation between ability and admission. This does no one any favours.
Fortunately many of those who want everyone to attend college - or at least everyone to have a "fair" (i.e. equal) chance of attending college - also believe that everyone is capable of succeeding both at college, and at the well paying job they believe a bachelor's degree still guarantees. I disagree.
I'm not sure how they explain away numerous drop outs, graduates who can't get career jobs - and mostly work precarious minimum wage service jobs, if they work at all.
Probably they assume it's all discrimination - no cisgendered heterosexual white Christian males from high SES backgrounds are (in their worldview) among the college educated barristas etc. I'd be unsurprised if there was not some correlation between failure and oppression, but I'd be even more surprised if it were anywhere near 1. (Correlations run from -1 to +1)
Wish I could edit:
Meanwhile, a bachelor's degree mostly doesn't cut it in the job market. You need a graduate degree of some kind to get into most well-paying career tracks, or luck, nepotism, etc. (Or connections - see "high parental SES")
But this couldn't possibly be because we're sending too many people to college, and then dumbing it down so that more of them can "succeed" - or at least stay - and pay - a bit longer before dropping out.
Every proposal I've seen for lotteries for college admission is about randomly choosing from everyone who's above some standard. This does leave the question open of what the standard should be. The purpose of a lottery is to prevent people putting in huge efforts to get a slight edge to satisfy an arbitrary admission system.
The local STEM magnet high school (not college this time) appears to be about to be killed by random selection of future students. If there's any standard, it hasn't been mentioned in the local paper, which has covered the story, so I'm presuming it's "managed to graduate from the prior grade, possibly via 'social promotion'" (aka "is the right age").
Once most of the students can't handle what's presently taught, the school will presumably modify their curriculum until a reasonable proportion of their students can handle it - producing something closely resembling a random high school.
Of course this isn't college, but I've seen the same logic applied to state supported universities - though sometimes with a qualification somewhat above "has high school diploma/GE". The typical result in my youth was a freshman class double the size of the sophomore class, and weed-out classes to separate the sheep from the goats. I don't know how this is currently handled, but suspect this is now considered equally "unfair", and even the better qualified graduates now graduate with worse skills than they'd have had from a more selective institution, even back-door selective via weed-out classes.
Also, of course, these qualifications are generally numeric results on some test. I can't really see the anti-standardized-test people accepting standardized tests in this role either.
The standard should be a high school diploma. After all, everybody "knows" that grades and SAT scores are products of systematic racism.
In the best of all possible worlds were would have a system of examinations like the French baccalauréat or the German Abitur, but American high schools cannot deliver the content and American parents won't make their kids study.
@DinoNerd:
"Define "fair"."
The opponents of using standardized testing in admissions define fairness in terms of the results for the "identities" for which they advocate -- i.e. fairness is results. They believe that college admission is a golden ticket, and they want their share of the golden tickets. The believe that test scores and other forms of merit are a sham designed to impoverish and oppress them.
You may not agree, and you may have reams of statistics to buttress your belief, but you will not convince them of anything other than your arrogant perfidy.
The study I quote shows that removing standardized testing from the current admissions process will not only not make it more fair as defined in the first graf above, it will make the process even more manipulable by the upper class. Sadly, no policy other than overt discrimination could make the fairness fanatics happy, and that would undoubtedly not pass legal muster
My random draw proposal is a second or maybe third best idea. It is not illegal like overt discrimination and no way can complain about the judgment of prejudiced people interfering in the process.
"It's easy to argue that it's not fair to encourage people who are highly likely to leave college with massive debts and no degree to attend college in the first place."
True enough, but that is endemic to the current system. The real issue is that way too many jobs are square pegs pounded into the round hole of higher education. Teutonic apprenticeship systems are really what the vast majority of American youth need.
"The failure mode of trying to pick the smart ones is picking more of those with high parental SES - but still to some extent at least picking those who are smarter and/or better motivated and/or better prepared, ... The failure mode of random selection is a complete lack of correlation between ability and admission."
The failure mode of the current system, and the cancer eating at its bowels is political illegitimacy. I think you dramatically overestimate the intellectual difficulty of American undergraduate institutions. To be sure higher mathematics is difficult, but it is the same everywhere, and only a very tiny percentage of college students harsh their mellows with that stuff. It takes nothing to major in most humanities and social science programs. I think it is no more difficult to get a degree from Harvard than it is to get a degree from Kent State.
"Fortunately many of those who want everyone to attend college - ... - also believe that everyone is capable of succeeding both at college, and at the well paying job they believe a bachelor's degree still guarantees. I disagree."
Again, you are confounding issues. Admissions is not much related to the value of the education once you are admitted. Or the job you can find and hold down after you graduate.
"Probably they assume it's all discrimination - no cisgendered heterosexual white Christian males from high SES backgrounds are (in their worldview) among the college educated barristas etc."
It is more common than you might believe. But, it has nothing to do with admissions.
As a Dutchman with a Political Science background, I wanted to comment on last open thread's comment about the Dutch elections:
I do think polarization is taking place in Holland, and last elections showed that. To give some examples:
1) The main story of last elections should not be the "victory of the center". Yeah, D66 and VVD (left- and right-liberals) won, but the other traditional centrist party CDA lost 4 seats. Together, these parties won 2 seats (out of 150) which is hardly significant. By historical standards, their number of seats is nothing impressive.
2) More significant: the humiliation of the three traditional large left-wing parties (Socialists, Labour, Greens) who combined lost 11 seats and had their worst election ever and the victory of the populist-right (PVV, FvD, JA21) who combined won 6 seats and got their best election result ever.
3) Extremism got a place in Dutch Parliament: newcomer BIJ1 is the most far-left party we have seen in decades in Holland, with a "Kill the Boer"-chanting EFF-supporter on the list. FvD, the big winner of the elections, has a leader, Thierry Baudet, who has claimed that COVID was designed by George Soros for world domination, asked a colleague "what is it with your crusade against anti-semitism, everyone I know is an anti-semite", who called the Jews a "parasitical culture" preying upon "White European Civilization", questioned the holocaust, et cetera et cetera. He has also allowed his party to split up over him defending the party's youth wing, which sung the Nazi Horst Wessel Song on summer camp and has people in leadership positions sharing SS-quotes in germanic rhunes on their Instagram.
FvD got 8 seats, which is roughly 5% of the vote, having the largest gains of any party in the elections. It is quite beyond me how you can speak of "little polarization" here.
3) Some Dutch political scientists, such as the great electoral geographer have pointed towards the "Eastern-Europeanization" of Dutch politics. Similar to countries such as Poland (and France!), politics is increasingly a battle between centre-to-centre-right parties in the larger cities: culturally liberal, economically centrist, cosmopolitan, environmentally conscious and pro-EU and populist-right parties in the country-side: culturally conservative (mostly on immigration/integration issues), economically divergent (the largest populist-right party in the Netherlands, the PVV, have developed left-of-centre views on healthcare, pensions, social security. While in America, "pro-worker conservatism" is largely posturing imho, in Holland, France and Poland it exists), opposed to environmentalism and anti-EU. In this political landscape, the big loser is the left, whose existence is based on a sense of understanding and solidarity between academics, artists and PMCs that no longer exists.
between academics, artists, PMCs and the working class*
What is also an interesting development in Dutch politics, for ACT-readers:
Dutch PM Mark Rutte got into a lot of trouble last week for leaked notes which suggested he or his aides wanted to "promote away" Pieter Omtzigt, a Christian Democrat MP.
Pieter Omtzigt is a most curious man. He is a member of probably the most "establishment"-party there is, but has always held on to his independence and was seen as the fiercest critic of Rutte's last cabinet (while being a coalition member!). His work on a child-benefit scandal, in which up to a 100.000 parents were falsely accused by the Dutch state, led to the resignation of the cabinet. Polling shows that if he would run for parliament with his own party, he would gain the #1 spot. He has popular appeal on left, right and centre.
So what's his main critique? Well, he's an econometrist. And he criticizes the Dutch modelling agencies for being "not accounting for uncertainties", making two-hour long YouTube videos on the failures of economic forecasting and the complexity of the Dutch welfare state. He argues for "more think tanks, and proper policy evaluation", "less reliance on modelling and more on the rule of law" and "more constitutional guarantees in dealing with basic rights of poor people being crushed by the welfare state".
More than any other politician in Holland recently, Omtzigt has managed to articulate wide-spread resentment towards policy elites. He has gained respect from friend and foe: the far-right wanted to make him PM, the liberal youth party deemed him "liberal of the year", while actually working most together with a PM from the Socialist Party. He is a hero of the people, with a platform that is all about intricate arguments over tax policy, Seeing-like-a-state critiques of model-making and procedural reform.
I think Omtzigt serves as an inspiration for reform-oriented politicians all across the West and proves to show that there does not have to be a choice between between "popular" and "wonkish".
I've been hearing a lot about increases in violent crimes and/or hate crimes against Asians in the US, possibly because of Covid. Trying to research(google) this a bit myself, I found many articles repeating this thesis, but I found the data in all of them to be very thin. Has anyone here found more comprehensive data that could be used for investigating this thesis? I don't have any particular reason to doubt this narrative, but any time I see the same story being picked up in a lot of places it makes me want to look at the foundations to see what it is all based on. One thing that I noticed is when I tried a quick search for violent crimes targeting Asians--everything that came up was about hate crimes, but I expect data about hate crimes to be harder to find/not as reliable, and indeed many of the results are about why it is hard to find this data. But more general crime statistics that don't rely on the hate crime designation seem like they might be easier to find.
I'm guessing many of your sources are going from this document:
https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/FACT%20SHEET-%20Anti-Asian%20Hate%202020%203.2.21.pdf
or from this
https://secureservercdn.net/104.238.69.231/a1w.90d.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/210312-Stop-AAPI-Hate-National-Report-.pdf
I got these links from the article
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/25/surge_in_asian_hate_crimes_more_bogeyman_than_fact_145473.html
(For the future, if you want links to articles linking to actual data, I found that it pays to start with Googling something like "asian crimes site:realclearpolitics.com", which is how I got to that article. RealClearPolitics loves linking to or posting articles that pick apart statistics and will happily link to writings from both sides of the aisle.)
That reinforces my sense that these articles are based on thin data but doesn't really provide any better data to give me a clearer idea of what is going on. Just because the data is bad doesn't imply there isn't a surge in racially motivated crimes. Thanks for the link though!
Can you figure out if there's generally a violent crime spike? It would stand to reason that if violent crime is going up in general, violent crime against Asians would also go up.
Then the question would be, did crime against Asians go up more than crime against non-Asians, or is everyone suffering from the same problem?
Yeah, that is what I was hoping I could find, general crime statistics and then narrow down by ethnicity. However, I became discouraged while trying to find this data, so I was curious if anyone here knew of a good data source for this. Maybe it is not something you can get a lot of details for just from googling.
I did find several sites with interesting data on crime, but all of them seemed insufficient to come close to helping answer the question of "was their a surge in violent crimes against Asians in 2020", for example a lot of data isn't provided for the last 2-3 years.
I haven't searched very hard though, it isn't very important to me to answer this question, but I am definitely curious about this.
So here's a hypothesis as to why Asians might be hardest hit in a general violent crime spike. From Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_Americans "
"The Asian American population is greatly urbanized, with nearly three-quarters of them living in metropolitan areas with population greater than 2.5 million."
So 3/4 Asians live in areas that have most violent crime and worst violent crime spikes. I'm sure there are confounding factors, but it seems Asians as a group would tend to get hit hardest, no matter what.
A metro area include both high-crime and low-crime areas. Do you have data on which part Asian-Americans are more likely to live in? Stereotype would suggest they're engineers living in the suburbs.
After hesitating, I decided to get the vaccine.
https://demurray.substack.com/p/vaccination
Does anyone else feel that lately they are spending prohibitive amounts of time fighting bad code not at work but in real life?
The oven in my GE stove was coded by someone who didn't realize that people might have more than one cooking task and might follow a higher-temperature task with a lower-temperature task. So if you first bake something at 450F, then set temperature at 350F, it will not attempt to cool itself but will immediately signal that it is at 350F, and the only way around this is to turn it off for a few minutes and let it cool down to below 350F and then to turn it on to bake at 350F.
The elevators in our building have a much shorter delay for closing doors after someone arrived on the elevator than after the elevator arrived empty to pick you up. Unfortunately, if the elevator you were waiting for arrived with someone who pressed the button to get off on your floor, the someone-just-arrived case will be executed instead of the someone-is-waiting case, and the doors will close really fast without giving you time to enter (and will actually sometimes hit you).
Elevators and the oven (and Alexa's speech recognition screw-ups) are what I have to deal with every day.
Within the last year also the following things happened:
- My bank account (which had never been overdrawn, never violated any terms of service, never had a low balance) was closed without an explanation by what appears to have been an algorithm. No human is on record as having made any decisions, and no human was able to explain what happened.
- One of my identical twins got completely different bills for the same services with the same provider than the other twin. It's been some months and a lot of phone calls, and nobody can explain what's going on.
- Our propane company thrice generated bogus bills for repairs that were supposed to be covered by the service plan. Two of these were eventually explained away as user mistakes. Nobody could explain the third one, but they were nice and refunded it anyway.
- My attempts to pay to our power company from my bank account resulted in two payments disappearing into the blue. The bank debited my account and swears that the payments were delivered. All the data on the payments is correct as far as everyone can tell. The power company swears they never got them.
I'm not even going to tell you about all those cases of websites (including government websites) doing really strange things when faced with a web browser they don't like. My favorite one was a website that was using stylesheets that would not display data entry boxes if it didn't like your web browser (resulting in me not being able to figure out how to sign up for their waiting list).
Is it just me? If it's not just me, would you say it used to be as bad as this, or would you also say it got much worse lately?
I'd file a complaint about that elevator. The doors should never hit you, whether it's expecting you or not. It should immediately stop closing when someone or something is in the doorway.
I considered complaining when this happened, but I had too many things to fight and forgot. And now I don't think it makes a lot of sense to complain because the elevators seem to be correctly programmed to stop closing their doors when there is any resistance (such as your foot or another item at the very bottom) even if their sensors cannot see its source, so the risk of injury is minimal.
Is there a solid Rationalist review of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto I can look at after I read it? I sometimes fear that I fall victim to compelling arguments and need a trusted additional perspective for calibration. Also, I can bring it to my book club for some extra perspective.
Does anyone know if there's an advantage to getting your second mrna vaccine in a different arm? I vaguely remember reading something about the vaccine getting to a different lymph node but I can't find it anywhere. Any insight would be much appreciated!
I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but when you were writing Meditations on Moloch, did you have any idea it would become one of if not your single most popular posts? If so, did you approach it significantly differently than any other of your posts?
What is the thing I should read to understand what everyone means when they describe things as legible?
_Seeing Like a State_ by James C. Scott, though I think I can explain it.
Legible things are what an authority can keep track of. One of the things James C. Scott studied was governments assigning distinct names to people. It makes taxation easier.
I haven't seen explicit discussion of making one's own life more legible to oneself, for example by keeping track of everything one spends.
Thanks!
It's probably time for another Naval Gazing update. I've finished my Polaris series (starting at https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-1, finishing at https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-5), looked at Iowa's Auxiliary Machinery spaces (https://www.navalgazing.net/Pictures-Iowa-Auxiliary-Machinery) posted some Completely Correct Battleship Facts (https://www.navalgazing.net/Completely-Correct-Battleship-Facts) and told the story of Vincent Capodanno, a Chaplain in Vietnam: https://www.navalgazing.net/Father-Capodanno.
And I'm now starting a look at what happened to the French Fleet when France surrendered in 1940: https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Fate-of-the-French-Fleet-Part-1.
Hello.
Hopefully this isn't too much of a fishing expedition, but:
Those who can see the hidden articles - are they all CW-related, as Scott said when setting this up?
No, the hidden open threads are also general conversation. I'm not keeping careful track, but I don't think they're more CW than the CW-permitted public open threads.
Not talking about the hidden open threads. I don't care about those. I mean the hidden Scott articles, which so far are "Technocracy-Zilla: Origins", "Movie Review: Gabriel Over the White House" and "They're Made Out of Meta".
I don't remember the first two well enough. The third is humorous fiction, and I hope it's published publicly at some point.
I think there's a market for a book of Scott's short fiction.
The movie review was about a movie from just before the Nazis became a thing which was basically encouraging FDR to go the full Mussolini. It was really interesting, and really political, but not really in a CW sorta way.
Committee for the Future of Finnish Parliament had a hearing with GPT-3.
>At the meeting, MPs first asked questions orally and then via chat. Committee experts wrote the questions for the AI on a shared screen. The answers were discussed, and further questions asked. The members of the committee asked the AI questions particularly related to the UN Agenda2030 on which the committee is currently preparing a report. The discussion focused, among other things, on the causes of poverty, unemployment, education, and the role of technology in poverty eradication and sustainable development. GPT-3 also highlighted Finland's opportunities in regional Talent Hubs.
>The final discussion analysed the significance of technologies such as artificial intelligence as an opportunity and a threat. The aim has not been to come up with the best possible answers to problems, but to provide as illustrative examples as possible of how artificial intelligence handles problematic issues and how it responds to them.
https://www.eduskunta.fi/EN/tiedotteet/Pages/Committee-for-the-Future-heard-AI-probably-as-the-first-parliamentary-committee-in-the-world.aspx