If some populations purportedly have "lower average IQ" how come they all speak multiple languages when the "higher IQ" ones struggle with what they learn at school? Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies?
There's mounting research suggesting we teach languages in school astoundingly poorly. Traditional instruction puts a heavy emphasis on simply memorizing grammar patterns, which are (not quite but) close to useless. With massive amounts of input, your brain will just automatically do all the pattern matching for you in the background.
Terry Waltz claims that when she teaches using comprehensible input instead of traditional methods, there is basically no bell curve. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it sounds like other teachers have similar experiences. JFK High School switched to a mass immersion (extensive reading) approach, brought their AP Chinese pass rate from 50% to 100%. SEG Private School in Japan switched to a similar approach, the average student now scores in the top 2% on the national English exam, with their lowest scoring still in the top quartile. It tracks with family members I know who say that after moving abroad, they learned more in six months than from eight years of traditional study. It tracks with self reports from the second language learning community about the critical importance of high volumes of input.
So it seems to me like there is still a lot of low hanging fruit in institutional language learning, and some of the independent learners (with high metis!) are figuring this out on their own. There's still a profound open question as to why high schools and universities are not switching to CI methods more quickly. (I think there's like a <10% chance they have been right all along, >90% that some weird institutional pressures or switching costs have prevented adaptation.)
Even if Terry Waltz was exaggerating a bit, these methods leave little room for IQ to explain progress. Maybe it matters at the margins, but in general, the person with the most exposure to the language, especially comprehensible chunks, will develop the fastest.
I was confused on whether he was saying that we DO teach language well, and we still can't learn despite our average higher IQs, or that we have such higher IQs and still can't figure out how to teach well.
Another reason for the US in particular not being the best at teaching second languages through schools is that there isn't really a huge need for the average American to learn one. We have a ton of Hispanic immigrants yes, but most of them speak at least a little English and even if they don't, their kids do. And even if ALL hispanic immigrants spoke absolutely no english, that leaves huge swaths of the country that don't have many immigrants, meaning that students won't have any real need to use a second language. Add on top that as you said, we teach it poorly anyway and almost certainly we teach it too late.
Yes. If you want to learn a language, read up on a bit of the basics, and then just drown yourself in comprehensible input - the comprehensible part there is key. You won't learn shit from say, translated analytical philosophy. Everyday situations are a wonderful teacher. Our brains are pattern-matching machines, all you really need to do is give that machinery lots and lots of food.
I believe so. There are various debates on the specifics, but there's significant overlap across self taught communities: Enormous volumes of input, both reading and listening, supplemented by, but not over reliant on, spaced repetition software. It is a very long, time intensive process. Time on target matters a lot (that's why moving to a country is so useful, constant moments of opportunity to learn throughout each day).
I think he means Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and much of Sub-Saharan Africa (DRC, Nigeria, Tanzania, etc.). Linguistic diversity is fairly typical for traditional societies.
A possibly relevant example datum gleaned from reading a book about Romani (AKA 'Gypsy') musicians in Northern Greece - as professional musicians serving multiple ethnic groups (this is the Balkans) they have to be fluent in Greek, Albanian, Vlach, and Bulgarian/Macedonian. Their native language that they speak at home, also called Romani, is related to Sanskrit. They are greatly discriminated against, much like African Americans are in the US, and it's possible that generations of suffering prejudice and poverty causes an IQ loss.
IQ is tested in some medium other than the subject's own oral culture, so the ability to function effectively in that medium is going to be important. I would suggest that prejudice and poverty are always going to make individuals less adept at using various media than their non-discriminated against, richer peers (note the obvious exceptions here like East European urban Jews were not poor). But then again I believe IQ testing to be a self-fulfilling justification for bourgeoisie domination of society, so I have a clear bias here...
The Romani situation is directly comparable to the Ashkenazi Jewish situation (they existed in the same circumstances in the same location), so assuming that they're low-IQ just because of that seems pretty premature
It's hard to say anything without knowing more about what you're referring to, but language acquisition has a critical period when it must be acquired, after which it becomes much more difficult. I would presume your polyglot population has repeated and (critically) early exposure to multiple languages, which is atypical among much of the West. Studies of "feral" children and deaf children suggest this critical period begins to close around age 5, typically, and is fully closed by puberty.
I'd also be curious how "can speak multiple languages" is measured. Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent? The people I've known who were polyglots due to growing up in countries where many languages were spoken freely admit that they only speak one or two with any proficiency, but I'm not sure how typical that is.
No there are plenty of people learning languages past teenagehood. The only thing we know for sure becomes more difficult after childhood is getting the pronunciation right to "sound like a native".
>Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent?
Usually they use those languages as vehicular devices to conduct business transactions, follow media, interact with the government and so on so I expect a fairly high level of proficiency in any of them even if they don't write novels in it.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. My impression is that how many languages you easily speak mostly has to do with how many you're frequently exposed to. I would expect higher-IQ people to pick up languages they're exposed to slightly more easily, conditional on the same amount of exposure, but I'm not even sure about that.
Is any part of the standard IQ testing array about language ability? If not, I'm not sure that that expectation is well-founded. Intelligence need not equate to language-learning ability; the assumption it should is dangerous in that it conflates different intellectual processes into one basket labelled 'intelligence' without considering if there are very different things happening between e.g. language learning and ability to understand maths. I think the labelling of computing coding conventions as languages might help confuse this further as well: a language is not simply a logical system to be learnt and applied but rather a framing of thought and reality in a shared framework of concepts such that perfect translation is never possible. Intelligence may not necessarily correlate with the requirements to cope with multiple such frameworks.
They do test vocabulary and facility with manipulating concepts. But the vocab part is more things like ability to whip up definitions of words and knowing more esoteric ones - a less bright person exposed to many languages could be expected to be able to speak simply in many languages like he does in his native one.
But language comprehension is based on the language of the test, not different languages. Testing the ability of someone in one language tells us nothing about their ability in others. Again this seems to be an issue of labelling: whilst it's not inaccurate to call this language comprehension, it is not about comprehension of languages, just the one the test is in.
Yeah, I think I said as much. Perfectly reasonable to think that someone who's capable of complexity is in principle capable of it in many languages and someone who lacks that firepower can still manage his level in others. We mostly just teach foreign languages like shit.
You know the US have won the women's world cup (foitball/soccer) 5 times in 9 editions. That's 5 of the 17 possible world cup wins in the last 30 years, so way over 25%.
That's pretty good going for a nation bad at the sport...
As usual, the person means that American *men* are bad at soccer.
But my understanding is that the US dominates women's soccer so much because of Title IX - US schools are required to spend something on girl's sports, and soccer has become a girl's sport here, while in the rest of the world, old-fashioned sexism keeps girls out of sports, so the US just has a much deeper pool than other countries do for the women's team.
The mensteam aren't that bad either. They've been to 6 out of the last 7 finals which is as good a record as Italy or England for example. Came third in 1930 as well, so the idea this is a new thing can be out to bed. They're currently ranked 20th in the world, which translates as pretty good at football.
I think the main reason the women's game does so well is that there's so many kids playing so a huge talent pool. Note England's women's team has started to do well half a generation after a concerted effort to get more girls playing football, and traditional strong women's football nations such as Norway have very established female leagues at youth level. I think there's success us based on the popularity of soccer as a kids sport regardless of gender. Whilst the college thing undoubtedly helped I suspect few top-class footballers go that route nowadays as that's three years of peak earnings passed up on in the various women's professional leagues.
Not sure there's a correlation here. It could be argued that one of the effects of a high-IQ population is they develop the efficiency of a unified language via cities, trade, schools etc.
That's an interesting notion. Does openness to new experience, which correlates with high IQ, lead to language convergence? The question is outside my experience. And there seems like too many feedback loops and confounders (wealth -> better nutrition -> increased IQ -> wealth -> better nutrition and so on) to eek out much more than a correlation.
Who knows. I just think the utility of shared language (for trade, social trust, sharing ideas etc) is likely greater than any utility from exposing the brain to new languages.
Openness itself is not driven by a unitary mechanism. The more aesthetic receptivity side is at least partially grounded in latent inhibition - an unconscious mechanism that basically decides if connections are bullshit or not. The higher the inhibition, the more concrete a connection has to be to register as real and meaningful and not fanciful nonsense. Lower it, and more and more tenuous connections start seeming like there's something there.
If that sounds like presuming that things that aren't real are real, you're absolutely right: aesthetic openness is linked to things that are a risk factor for psychosis and mental illness tends to run in artists' families. The artists themselves have obviously been selected so they're not the most crippling sufferers.
The other half of the trait domain is the one more directly related to intelligence, and more than that to a willingness to expend effort in processing things even without external reward. It also contains narrower traits like self-assessed intelligence (which is not merely an inaccurate/noisy measure of the person's intelligence, it's a personality trait with its own network of correlations)
1. This is orthogonal to the point. Most regions *do* have a unified language for communication purposes, but their populations speak it *in addition* to their local language.
2. China is among the higher-IQ nations according to the "national IQ data" yet it features a lot of linguistic diversity, so even the point you're trying to make falls apart.
I don't want to beat the IQ point too hard because it's confounded to heck, but Mandarin has pretty good adoption in the higher IQ areas of China (central and the Eastern seaboard) and lower adoption in the lower IQ areas. I certainly don't want to push a 'one cause' model. But looking within China, adoption of Mandarin seems moderately well predicted by IQ in a relative sense. There's probably a good correlation with things like nutrition, industrialization, economic opportunity, etc.
That's just looking at a province-level map. There's also a pretty big divide between urban and rural areas in China, even within a province.
(I say this as someone who has taught English in China)
Do you mean they speak multiple languages approximately natively? First-language acquisition is hardcoded into the brain and is more or less unrelated to the processing needed for IQ tests. General intelligence varies a lot, but ability to understand grammatical rules necessary for communication varies very little (ability to understand grammatical rules for signalling prestige is a different thing). There are many instances of people with severe intellectual disabilities but normal language processing skills, and conversely people with high intelligence but disorders that make them unable to use language; for more detail read The Language Instinct or similar.
"Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies"
Speaking multiple languages at a 16th percentile level by first world standards is hardly the same as speaking one language at a 99th percentile level by first world standards.
There's no such thing as "percentile level" for language acquisition; you're either able to function in a given language environment, or you're not. There *are* tests that assess your ability to function in increasingly "difficult" environments, such as the CEFR scale (A1 to C2) or the DLI grading but they do not use percentiles because ranking people relatively doesn't make sense, it's an absolute thing.
Sure. If you want a slightly more meaningful one, compare Japan and Indonesia. When Japan had the same GDP per capita as a % of the U.S. Indonesia has now, it was making real progress in science. Today, despite having more than twice the population of Japan, Indonesia is a vast wasteland when it comes to scientific accomplishment (to such a degree that it's not even in the top 50 in the Nature Index): https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2020/country/all
I don’t know enough to agree or disagree but a more useful comparison would be Singapore. It’s not only in the same area of the world, it started from a similar base point as Indonesia and even contains a microcosm of Indonesia within its borders with ethnic Malays. So just as Singapore has outpaced Indonesia so have the ethnic Singaporean Chinese outpaced ethnic Singaporean Malays, much to the chagrin of the Singaporean govt which has done so much to erase the differences.
I feel like this argument doesn't quite cut the way you want it to.
Suppose we assume that:
1) IQ in a population follows a normal distribution
2) A country's scientific advancement is driven by the number of high-IQ outliers produced.
3) Different ethnic groups have genetic differences that cause them to have different mean IQs.
In this world, I would expect the high IQ ethnicities to punch above their weight technologically, but I wouldn't expect them to totally dominate. Bigger populations just have more chances to roll the dice, even when those dice are loaded against them.
Also, Indonesia is quite ethnically diverse, and therefore very diverse genetically, so you'd expect a place like Indonesia to have a greater chance of coughing up occasional outliers than a place like Japan that has a lot less genetic diversity.
I think the historical record suggests a very different model of technological advancement: every once in a while a geographical zone will, for complex reasons, become a hotbed of scientific activity, and end up drawing lots of people into a mutually supportive web. This boom of technological developments eventually burns itself out, and the torch is passed to the next up-and-coming innovation zone. Japan was home to a post-war boom that has since largely fizzled out, with Chinese and Korean firms stepping in to pick things back up in that region (and meanwhile back in the states, the Bay Area is nearing the end of its explosive period).
The fact that Africa, home to large populations and significant human biodiversity, is so totally left behind in the global tech game, IMO suggests strongly that technological advancement is about a lot more than a gene pool's ability to cough up geniuses.
This sounds like a good argument, but like every argument in this space it is inconclusive.
It is completely plausible that urbanization/ the agricultural patterns in the big river basins created a selection pressure that led to the populations being much higher in the sort of intelligence that is useful for twenty-first century economic success.
Note, this is not what I think: What I think is that we don't know enough to be confindent.
The window for language learning is more or less "infancy to early childhood" for most of the population, and even in nations with "higher IQ", children of families or communities that speak multiple languages don't seem to have a problem with that. I don't believe in the "lower average IQ" thing, but I think the languages argument isn't a valid argument against it - that's exactly what you'd expect in countries where lots of people can get by in a single language.
Snarky answer: The smart people figured out early on that having everyone speak the same one or maybe two standard languages is more efficient than having everybody try to learn many languages, and then the smart people invented A: television and B: economies that could give every family a television set so that they could be exposed to the same 1-2 standard languages in early childhood.
Dialing back the snark, it's the economic part that is doing the heavy lifting there, and there are lots of reasons beyond average national IQ that a nation might not be able to afford to put a television set in every household.
Re: Georgia voting laws, I think the sole good pint made in the comment is about giving out water and food to people on line. A minor point as in who cares.
The rest of the comment seems like a hasty overreaction to the hasty overreaction by Democrats.
By far the most important point in the bill is taking away power form the Sec. of State. To use a purposefully bad pun, that trumps all.
Here's the NYT's point by point analysis. Admittedly, not objective politically, but has the merit of referencing text of the legislation
What that article doesn't mention is the blindingly obvious fact that Georgia is a Biden state with two Democratic senators that is zooming left at a rate of roughly a 1 point margin per year.
The most popular one so far (by a multiple of 3) was with Alex Tabarrok (Scott has reviewed his book) He wrote a review of the Parasite that went against the standard view. It is a fun read and it is on the Marginal Revolution site here:
It doesn't say much more than the review but if you liked the film Burning you might enjoy the podcast too.
By the way if anyone can suggest good guests either with or without an ACX connection (and that I have a chance of reaching!) that would be really nice. Either in the comments or at my email: hogg dot russell at gmail dot com.
Wow. That Parasite review is so off base it’s genuinely sad.
*** Spoilers for Parasite (one of the best movies of the past ten years)***
If you haven’t already, go see Parasite. Don’t read any further until you have. Seriously, the movie is great. Don’t ruin it for yourself. Okay, here we go.
Bong Joon Ho does two brilliant things in Parasite. One is that he indicts the system and not rich people. A lesser artist would have made the rich couple the villains. Alex Taborrok is correct that that rich couple are not the villains. Taborrok misses that the capitalist system is the villain. Each character at all financial levels is stuck in their respective position in the system. The poor feed off of the rich and the rich feed off of the poor. Both are correct. Taborrok only sees one parasitic relationship.
The second brilliant piece of writing that sets Parasite above the typical upstairs/downstairs narrative is that Bong Joon Ho adds a sub-basement. This clearly expresses that the poor feed off of the poor as well as the rich. We often think (or are told) that capitalism isn’t a zero sum game. And it isn’t, as long as we only look at a section of it. Amazon has made Jeff Bezos wealthy, but it’s also brought a lot of value to millions and millions of people. Win-Win. Not zero-sum. Bong Joon Ho is suggesting that when we see that, we are only looking at a piece of the picture. We need to pull the camera back and see the whole picture.
The movie is suggesting that we’ve been brainwashed into believing that the system works and can lift everybody out of poverty. This is probably most clearly expressed by the son, at the end of the movie, believing that he will grow up to become rich and then rescue his father from the sub-basement prison his father is in.
Some updates on things I learned since making the Georgia voting law comment:
1) Although you can *vote* absentee with only a SSN, you cannot *request* the absentee ballot with only a SSN. People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address. This is burdensome enough that I now think it is reasonable to summarize the bill as saying you need an ID to vote absentee (even though you technically can get by with just a utility bill, paycheck, etc.).
2) Secretary of State Raffensberger clarified the new law will still permit nonpartisan groups to give unlabeled water bottles to poll workers, who can then distribute them. [1] I now feel more confident calling the claim that the law makes it illegal to distribute water "lacking important context."
3) Some people asked why existing voter intimidation laws didn't already ban political groups from distributing food or water at the polls. I think the answer is that they did, but in practice there were still issues because e.g. poll workers didn't realize this was illegal. See this comment [2] for some information about that.
4) I still overall feel that the law expands voting access, including in urban areas. However, it still might make sense to oppose it if you are very concerned about certain powers being stripped from the SoS and given to the legislature.
I would love to have an actual lawyer explain how the text of the bill supports SoS Raffensbergers claim. I've read the actual text, and it sure didn't seem to me that it allowed regular people, without any connections to campaigns, from giving out food/water. It seemed to pretty clearly prevent anyone from giving out anything in any context. If there is some special legal reason this isn't the case, then the text of the law, to a lay person, completely obscures this point.
Also, I generally agree with claims that the effects of the bill are dramatically overblown by the media/Democrats. I think the bill won't actually do very much, but I also think that the impulses behind the bill are pretty reprehensible (also, all that comparisons to other states convince me of is that _lots_ of states have really really bad laws around voter access)
I am an actual lawyer. Raffensberger is full of shit. The text of the law applies to any "person... giving... food and drink... to an elector" within 25 feet of any voter standing in line. There is no exception for nonpartisan groups. Given how easy it would be to prohibit electioneering activity (while still enabling nonpartisan groups), I don't see any way to avoid the conclusion that this provision was included, at least in part, to make voting in crowded districts less pleasant.
I wish we had a functioning media which could investigate the question of whether partisan groups handing out partisan-labelled water bottles to voters waiting in line is actually something that has happened or just some theoretical possibility.
What I _would_ say is that if there's regularly voting queues long enough that people need provisions while waiting in them, then _that's_ the problem that should be getting solved, and not all these other ones. The insistence on using expensive voting machines which limit the number of people who can vote in parallel rather than simple pencil-and-paper ballots seems to be a cause of a lot of voting problems in the US.
Take a look at link [2] above -- there were some cases of politicians handing out water or pizza, and Raffensperger was already trying to crack down on this before the 2020 election.
I agree that shortening voting lines should be a priority, and I also think the new law makes some changes aimed at shortening lines, like breaking up precincts where wait times get longer than an hour.
I think the point is that you need to give the water to poll workers, for them to distribute.
For an object-level account of why someone might want prohibitions on distributing food and water, take a look at link [2] above.
On a less object-level, I want to note that Raffensberger is someone whom I -- and I think most other observers -- trust a lot. He's the one who stood up to Trump's demands to find 11,000 more votes, and part of the new law seems to be a petty swipe at him for sending out absentee ballot applications to all Georgians against the legislature's will. He's also criticized the parts of the law which strip powers from the SoS. So when he voices support for the other parts of the law, including the parts that prevent distribution of food and water at polling places, I'm inclined to believe that he's not "full of shit" and defending laws whose only purpose is to "make voting in crowded districts less pleasant." I'm inclined to believe that he honestly thinks the laws are good (though it's always possible he's wrong).
That's a pretty gullible position. Raffensberger is desperately trying to hang on to his career as a Republican politician. I do not think that makes him a credible source. Regardless, I actually read the law, and it says the opposite of what he's claiming. Maybe he means certain people won't be prosecuted, but he's just wrong about what the law says.
Raffensberger* is seeing the consequences of his* integrity. I doubt he* anticipated them back in December/January. It's certainly plausible to expect that, in any future scenario, his* updated expectations may produce different behaviors. Whether their intent or not, this certainly seems to be a consequence of the new law.
*Really, this applies not just to Raffensberger but Republican elected officials.
I feel like we're talking past each other. Paragraph (e) makes an exception for poll workers making water available from an unattended receptacle. So I think the point is that if some election observers think people look dehydrated waiting in long lines, they are free to buy some water bottles, give them to the poll workers, and then the poll workers can put the water bottles out on a table or whatever. That's what I'm interpreting Raffensberger's clarification to mean, and I see no contradiction with the text of the law.
Anyway, someone pointed out below that this is a non-politics thread, so we should probably stop discussing here. Feel free to comment on the original comment from last week if you'd like to continue.
You don't think that decreasing the number of dropboxes and artificially requiring them to be only accessible during the hours that polling stations are open will have a very obvious effect on people's ability to vote? And reducing the number of drop boxes and polling places in general?
Some sort of divergence between local official results and local polling, or some example of someone getting caught doing something. If this is actually affecting results, you'd expect the former, and if this is common, you'd expect the latter.
The usual drop box for absentee ballots is a USPS box, of which there are thousands. “Drop boxes” outside polling stations would only come into play if you neglected to return your absentee ballot early enough for the mail. And installing, monitoring, and collecting a secure 24/7 temporary drop box away from a polling station seems a nontrivial challenge, for minimal gain.
Remember, the number of “drop boxes” in Georgia before 2020, and the number in the future had this law not passed, was zero.
Thanks, I was about to say this -- if the law were never passed (or if it were repealed now) then there wouldn't be any drop boxes at all.
Of course, you might still prefer for there to be even more drop boxes, or more accessible drop boxes. These are reasonable things to want. But I do think we should track the distinction between "this law is a too-small step in the right direction" and "this law is a big step in the wrong direction." Otherwise you end up punishing people for doing good things and rewarding them for doing nothing.
"People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address."
I don't know if I'd call that voter suppression, though. In my previous job in local government, we required proof of residence to support applications, and one particular case was a pain because all they had as proof of independent residence was the mailing label from a mail order catalogue. Not good enough. Utility bills etc. were the standard.
So from that alone, I can't see the Georgian public service as being unreasonable, it sounds as if they are simply applying the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms.
I don't think I would call that voter suppression either, or at least I don't think it's any more restrictive than the rules in most other states.
I just wanted to flag that I now consider "you need an ID to vote absentee" as a fair summary of that part of the law, whereas I previously thought it was a dishonest summary.
Many people from a design background think that the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms are citizen services suppression. Making people file taxes in order to get their child support would be an example.
I think I was somewhat surprised by this diagram. Unsurprisingly the state I liv sin is one where it's easy to vote, but I found myself surprised that it was hard to vote in NH.
Yeah, that is strange. As a college student in NH I believe I could same-day register to vote with just my student ID, so I got the impression it was very easy. Now I'm wondering if the process is significantly harder for non-students.
Note that the most convenient state, Oregon, exclusively does mail-in ballots.
There is a massive difference in ease of voting between "I have to go to a place on a specific time/day", and "I have a full 2 weeks to find an hour to go through a bit of mail at my convenience".
Someone who works a job and has to juggle children will struggle to find a good time to go to a polling place, but that same person might be able to spend 30 minutes at 10pm on a Friday filling in a ballot, and then just dropping it in the mail.
Oregon's mail-in ballots are sent to registered voters who have a confirmed address. This is quite different from mail-ins in other states that sent ballots to any name and address found anywhere on a government database. An Australian friend in California received ballots for three different people at his home. And mail-ins are just one problem. 1) some states also weakened or removed the need for signature checks, 2) many drop boxes have zero chain of custody on the way to the counting centers, 3) counts are not done with observers present etc. Further, Oregon is now considering mailing ballots to anyone with a drivers license at the same time they issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. There is no modern county in the world that engages in such reckless abandonment of basic election security. Not one. The American embrace of insecure voting in the last year is an incredibly approach that is guaranteed to erode trust in the process.
I've now realized this one's a no-politics thread. I disagree with the gist of your comment, but let's pick up the discussion on next week's thread, where politics is allowed.
Check out the chart of what they count as contributing to the cost of voting. Ask yourself if all of those things are clearly a bad idea if you care about the integrity of your state's vote.
Consider also that a lot of attitudes and habits in NH might contribute to an average NH resident not thinking that certain things are a hardship. For example, except in a few cities, there is not a lot of public transportation, and so most people have to drive and thus automatically have a driver's license on them. Also, large parts of the map have neither DSL nor cable, and residents there are not really looking forward to doing things online.
(Yes, I also think it's really easy to vote in NH, and I don't think I ever met anyone who thought it was hard.)
Yeah it seem like the metrics are designed for a certain set of circumstances that don’t match NH. Eg NH has lots of small polling places so lines are not bad and registering in person day-of is quick and easy, so there’s no need to do it online. Vs MA where I frequently failed to vote because I would move around the city to a different voting area, and you have to update your registration well ahead of voting day, and you can only *actually* do it online if you have an in-state ID card.
BTW you don’t actually need any ID to vote in NH, you can just sign an affidavit asserting you are who you are.
Coming from NH, this Georgia debacle about giving water to voters waiting in line to vote looks really strange. Personally, I don't think I ever had to wait long enough to as much as study my surroundings.
Consider: if, according to that study, it's hard to vote in NH, can we believe that other claims in it reflect reality?
That study has some serious issues, but I don't want to go into these in an odd-numbered thread.
I think when evaluating whether a state makes it easy to vote, you shouldn't be looking at the median *voter*, but something like the median *non*-voter or the median *marginal* voter. 90% of people do have drivers licenses, but somewhere between 5 and 10% of citizens in the United States don't. Something that's really easy for the average upper middle class person might be really hard for the person that might actually swing between voting and non-voting.
Looking at the typical non-voter will tell you what improvements you need to make to make voting more accessible. It does not tell you how accessible voting is in the state, or provide a useful basis for ranking across states.
In that case the statement of the problem should be up front in the article. I can't spare the time to read through the article and everything linked to it carefully enough, so I can't figure out what, if anything, the computed index is supposed to be predictive of. It's supposed to be descriptive of something called "cost of voting", but they don't seem to tell us for whom or how aggregated over the voting population.
The following claim is in one of the appendices: "In particular, and with considerable emphasis, scholars find the amount of time in advance of the election that one has to register to vote influences the likelihood of voting" (hurray, an actual meaningful result!) but I'm not seeing anything like this for the other measures they included, nor am I seeing any attempts to correlate the resulting index with any actual numbers. (I'm guessing that, had they actually made those attempts, the index wouldn't have included everything and the kitchen sink.)
When practical purposes recede, partisanship can have greater determination. There's little evidence for these laws having any effect at all, making them a sort of symbolic security theater.
The fact that this is all based on rankings seems like it's next to worthless, as it gives no idea of the actual degree of difference.
Maybe Oregon is a voters utopia where merely thinking about your desired candidate automatically registers a vote in their favor, and Texas a dystopian hellscape where you've got to crawl under 6 feet of barbed wire to get to the polling booth.
Or maybe all states largely identical and it's just a small degree of difference separating them.
This article and map would look identical in both cases.
That description of voting in Oregon is not far off. Basically any contact with the state registers you to vote. The ballot and info book are mailed to you about two weeks early. You fill it out and drop it in a box whenever you feel like, and the boxes are like 2 miles away. For extra credit you can go to a web page to verify it's been counted. The last voting rights debates I heard were whether to include stamps for people who can't drive and don't have stamps laying around, and whether to allow people to vote while they are currently in jail.
I never missed an election in 15 years in California. I missed three or four elections in 7 years in Texas, because I didn't even know the election was happening until a week before, and couldn't be bothered to study up in those last few days, find out when it was happening, and go to a polling place.
I've never missed a *federal* election in Texas, but the fact that I, a relatively politically engaged and high status individual, have missed a significant fraction of elections suggests that it's really bad here.
I have several relatives on my dad's side who have been diagnosed with serious mental disorders. Between grandparents, dad, aunts, uncles, cousins, my siblings, and self, we’ve got 6 diagnoses of bipolar or schizoaffective disorder (five of whom have been institutionalized at some point) out of a sample size of 21.
The new Mrs. and I are eager to settle down and having fun family planning talks, so I am curious: What would the Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting suggest for reducing the chances that the family propensity for mental disorders materializes in our future kiddoes?
I know nothing about the biodeterminist guide but as someone who has lost three family members to schizophrenia and then suicide, I would do all you can to impress upon your kids the importance of avoiding drugs. It seems that psychotropic drug use + genetic predisposition was a trigger for two of the three.
I’m sorry for your loss. The anecdotes on my side are similar, and this is advice I practice. Even if the direction of the causal arrow is officially undetermined, it is just not worth the risk to me.
I've referenced the Living Well With Schizophrenia channel here before, and I should note that the woman behind that did a video about marijuana & schizophrenia. To her there was no question in her experience that it makes her psychosis significantly worse and this wasn't worth it. She didn't indicate any reluctance at giving it up either, in contrast to her pattern of fearing her own anti-psychotic medication. She's also currently pregnant with her first child and has discussed her decision to have one and the risks given the heritability of schizophrenia.
I should have noted that she reported a 10% risk of her child having it given that she has it and her husband is not known to have any predisposition for it. If you are merely related to others who have it rather than having it yourself, it would presumably be significantly lower (though still above the base rate).
Start sooner rather than later. Increased paternal age increases the risk of schizophrenia. (Sry couldn’t paste the link from my phone but google it. There’s a study from 2001.)
There might be someone doing genetic counseling at your local hospital. They'll be able to tell you what you can get tested for, what your odds are of passing it along, and what else can be done to avoid it. They wouldn't know everything, but it's probably better than nothing.
Also don't know about the BGP, so this may not be the kind of advice you're looking for. But, having a high ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences Score) has a substantial correlation with both incidence and outcomes in severe mental illness, that is not due to genetics alone. (Unsurprisingly, it's thought to be G x E interactions.) Since some ACE events are not controllable, and I also assume you are not planning to abuse your kids, the only actionable recommendation I can think is to be vigilant about others' behavior around them. I think there's a sunnier way to think about this, though, which is that a having a childhood in a healthy home is a protective factor, and if you can swing that you're already doing a lot "right".
Seconding discouraging your kids from using cannabis, at the very least while they are minors, preferably until they age out of the critical window in young adulthood where SMI tends to emerge. The research is a bit more equivocal than the consensus that comes from clinicians and patients who have direct experience. But your family history especially lends to this recommendation, considering some folks are winding up further along the BD-SCZ continuum than others, and psychotic morbidity is correlated with poorer outcomes.
I'm sure you'll have thought of this yourself, but knowledge is power. If none of those six folks are you or immediate family, your kids' risk will be lower, but you also might not have as much experience with the clinical picture of bipolar/schizoaffective. Bipolar-type illness is progressive: it's hard to detangle cause and effect, but there's thought be a "kindling" process (a metaphor that's sort of borrowed from epilepsy, although the process could be in fact be physiologically related) whereby every mood episode you have increases the likelihood of further, more severe episodes. People who go on to develop bipolar often have recurring episodes of depression in childhood. If your kids experience mental health difficulties, expeditious treatment from informed professionals who are aware of the family history is probably a really good idea.
The bad news about bipolar is that it's highly heritable, but the good news is that it's highly treatable, and the sooner you catch it, the better. A bit of a discursion, but it's unfortunate that so much morbidity comes from lack of timely diagnosis and treatment, because the treatments are so effective (grading on a psychiatry curve). The other big issue, as you probably know, is treatment compliance.
I expect we'll have a better idea of how to prevent SMI in the coming years, so stay abreast of the research.
Thanks for the thoughts. Our family has a lot of super-smart individuals in it, so I think especially among the last generation there was a lot of denial and temptation to write off adolescent warning signs as part and parcel of so and so's brilliance/being misunderstood/something she will grow out of. Hopefully that's an area will be more attuned to.
It might sound kind of redundant to say that I like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocketlab, etc because they actually launch stuff into space, but before them a lot of space startups tended to follow a depressingly predictable pattern: they'd found a company with some minimal seed money, make a big press release saying they were going to do XYZ, and then hope to somehow use that attention to get the funding to see if they could actually do XYZ. It never worked.
There's still a few of those now, but they mostly just get ignored.
I've become a lot more pessimistic about the prospects for nuclear power over the past few years. It just can't seem to get past the burden of too-expensive upfront costs, not even with new reactor designs (the NuScale Power Plant is predictably going into cost overruns and delays, and it's looking like they've got a bootstrap problem with the "modular" idea - they need enough orders to make it profitable to build the module factory to meet those orders). If there is going to be any nuclear renaissance in the US, it will probably have to be built and operated by a US federal agency.
There is hope, not a lot, but some. First, the two in Georgia will be finished, they had bunches of troubles, two big ones were an incomplete design (the Chinese ones had a completely different secondary side) and trades that hadn't built nuclear in a long time and had lost the undemanding of nuclear standards. After these are done, the next two should be much faster and therefore cheaper.
There is some news of Southern Company, Bechtel, and Westinghouse building more in Poland. We'll see what happens. Turkey Point in Fl hasn't ruled out building but I haven't seen any news lately. We'll see when the ones in GA come online what they say, they don't have many good options to power Miami at the very end of the grid surrounded by ocean and swamp with a lot of hurricane risk.
SMRs will likely be built for no other reason than the military (Army) has wanted one for a very long time but after SL1 gave up for 50 years, but an SMR fills a need for them and the Govment will push hard to get it done. There will be problems getting the NRC to adapt the regulations to allow one crew to operate multiple reactors so it may never actually be used on the civilian side, but the military doesn't answer to the NRC, even Naval Reactors have a different regulatory body obviously called Naval Reactors or NR.
I wonder about the Army SMRs. If they can get them small and compact enough to be flown in by plane (or carried by helicopter or truck) while generating a few megawatts of electrical power, they'd be tremendously useful. My only real concern would be the politics of allied governments being willing to support having them in their territory, plus the greater danger in having to potentially leave them behind in a hurry.
It'd be a lot easier and simpler to make those if they could use Highly Enriched Uranium or Plutonium-239 as fuel. HEU probably is too dangerous to use out in the field besides in ships or (obviously) nuclear weapons, because if you've stolen some putting together a "gun-type" nuclear weapon isn't tremendously difficult. But Plutonium-239 actually would be pretty safe - you need an "implosion-type" nuclear weapon to actually use it, and that's not something a terrorist group is going to put together.
Not to mention that even weapons-grade plutonium isn't weapons-grade anymore after it's been in a reactor for a few weeks - 240Pu contamination is treated as irreversible even by state-level actors. I'm not saying a terrorist group wouldn't appreciate having a free nuclear reactor - to state the obvious, they need electricity too, and also if you can manage to dust it plutonium's a decent chemical/radiological weapon - but you're not making a nuke with that even if you actually have both the know-how and manufacturing precision to construct a Swan.
I'm not sure that you'd find it useless after that short a time. A couple weeks was typical at Hanford during breeding, and while they were trying to get as much Pu 239 as they could, they probably weren't pushing it to the limits of possibility. Unless you're thinking of things like the low-burnup Pu they used in the W80-1.
That's the 239Pu obtained from a couple of weeks of burning uranium (which is the equivalent of a bit under one week of burning the Pu as far as 240Pu contamination goes - 240Pu production is proportional to the amount of 239Pu that exists in the fuel, and 239Np has a 2.4-day half-life). I'm saying that if you take your bred 239Pu (presumably reprocessed from that already) and then use that as fuel for your mini-reactor, after a few weeks in the latter it's going to be rather significantly more contaminated (after 3 weeks you'd have ~quintupled your chance of predetonation fizzle).
I mean, admittedly I'm not sure of the exact numbers on how close they cut it in actual fission primaries, so you might still have a decent chance of it going off.
Nuclear 'anything' is unreasonably feared and hated in the US. Until that changes nuclear power gets nothing. I was listening to B. Weinstein's podcast and he said he wouldn't eat fish from the pacific ocean, because you could see traces of Fukushima in the radioactivity of the fish. Assuming that's true, what's the banana equivalent dose? (https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/)
I think this could confuse matters because some people would be getting more of their vitamin D from sunlight and also getting their nitric oxide, while other people would just be getting their vitamin D from supplements.
All the studies are confusing, but what I took away from them was that *if* you are deficient in Vitamin D *and* have other problems (old, fat, etc.) *and* manage to catch Covid-19, *then* supplementation helps (ideally before you get infected) because it's bringing you back up to where you should be with regards to Vitamin D levels, and Vitamin D has complicated role in blood pressure regulation, so having better blood pressure control etc. helps recovery from Covid-19, rather than Vitamin D *directly* affecting Covid-19.
I have no idea if that shakes out to "Vitamin D cures Covid" or not.
Georgia will be a blue state with or without the law; I don't even understand the hubbub. Rich suburbs used to be bastions of voter ID back in 2012; why do you guys think big companies have switched to opposing it now?
After reading https://www.270towin.com/states/Georgia, I think it's likely that Georgia will vote for a Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election. Am I right that you predict differently?
I saw a lot of comments about the most recent book review writer's style being similar to Scott's. I realize that these comments are meant as compliments, but they are a bit patronizing. This writer had very much his/her own voice and style. There are infinite ways to combine humor, insight, and coherence. Perhaps we can take it easy on the Scott "stan"-ing. (Aside: Love you SA. Huge fan.)
I disagree, I think they were both a bit too close to Scott than I'd prefer. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but things like the tendency to start with a long digression before actually discussing the point, and a tendency towards a narrative of personal curiosity (e.g. "the book said X, but I thought Y, so I looked it up in another place and couldn't figure it out one way or the other") seem rather Scott-ish in style (probably a bad choice of words). Other things about the flow, the structure, and the authorial voice in both reviews felt like someone trying to imitate Scott.
I understand the temptation, in a Slate Star Codex book review competition, to write something that sounds like a Slate Star Codex book review, but I do hope that people are thinking for themselves.
For one thing, both were too long to be written by Scott. Or rather, they had too many unnecessary words. One of the things I appreciate the most about Scott's writing is his efficiency. His posts (even his very long ones) are almost never longer than they need to be.
It was a very sweet article! Matching the subject matter. And specific enough to convince me to relax reflexively lumping all [nation-o]philes together.
Just for reference to anyone reading this and curious, the reason 4chan adopted weeaboo is because a word filter was put in place to automatically turn "wapanese" into weeaboo, and eventually it stuck. This is the only filter that really seems to have become a permanent part of the lexicon, although judging by some discord groups, they may have successfully introduced "desu" as an alternative to tbh.
As someone who experienced near-zero success in my dating life up until my mid-20s, I recently realized that my problem was in not realizing what date actually entails and how it is structured. For anyone who currently has similar struggles, I attempted to figure out first date workflow using backwards induction here.
You made me curious about the structure and mechanics of your "date", but there were only a few vague sentences about that. I think if you retitled the article as "How to get laid on the first date, often", it would be more on the money.
Yes, you're right, there are a lot of points I could go deeper in, and I plan to populate this article with hyperlinks to more focused articles later on. Which particular step you would be more interested in?
If this is working for you then I'm glad, but I think that overthinking and overintellectualising romantic interactions is what tends to cause intelligent men to be very bad at them.
It's like trying to catch a ball by doing the mathematics in your head to figure out the exact angles that your shoulders, elbows and wrists need to reach; it'll never work and the ball will just sail past. Instead, you catch a ball by instinct and practice.
If you have trouble turning off the intellectualising-and-systematising part of your brain I recommend booze.
It's definitely true that instinct and practice are important components of being good at dating, and a major problem I see in my less lucky friends is that they simply don't get enough practice to train an instinct of how and when to act. My hope is that by breaking down the whole process into substages, people could pinpoint the exact stage they are stuck on, and focus on finding solutions. To continue your analogy, "You should become better at baseball by practice" is not a very useful advice, but "you seem to be bad at catching balls, you should work more on that" is more actionable.
At the risk of reviving an old argument, I think this leaves out several things that many inexperienced interested-in-women nerds would find to be the hardest parts. These could perhaps be grouped together as "conveying that one is interested" -- things like, acting flirtatious, appropriate use of touch, and the actual act of asking someone on a date.
Yes, I would be interested to write a more in-depth guide on the topic of flirting if I can figure out how to write it in a way that doesn't make me look like a super cringey PUA dude. It's really easy to come off as distasteful when talking about that.
Huh, OK I read that. Well first I'm an old fart (62) and I want to suggest, that if the purpose is to find a 'life partner', then just be yourself. I tried online dating for a bit, but I found church (UU) to be a better place to find people I might like. If not church, then the gym, college, workplace adjacent, some other club.
You've taken some common sense and systematized it like a true rationalist.
You have defined sex as an indication of a fulfilling date. "But to keep things simple and easily defined, I will talk about sex as a desired outcome. Simply put, if someone's date ends with consensual sex, it's hard to call it an unfulfilling date."
I don't like these types of "How to get sex from women" posts/videos because people confuse it for how to get women. You have made good date as your goal and indicated sex as the indication of a good date. To me, a good first date wouldn't involve having sex with my date because my date would be the type to refuse that. Dates should be for forming relationships mostly, not one-time fun. You are optimizing for a certain type of woman. And I wouldn't ever recommend someone I know date you because you are the type of guy to write a blog post about how to systematize sleeping with women on the first date.
This point seems contradictory to using sex as an indicator rather than the goal: "don't drag the date for too long"
Thank you for the feedback. Indeed, I have poorly worded the point about "dragging the date for too long". It's certainly great if two people find genuine connection, stay up all night discussing their favorite topics and so on. I was, however, trying to gesture at another failure point I see my friends (and past self) make: misjudging the pacing of the date. I shudder to remember the first few dates I had, where we met in one place, had food at the second, walked along the third location, all while conversation gradually died off. Then repeated that on the second date, the third date, all that without even attempting to hold my date's hand or verbally flirt in any way. That was such a bore, and I'm happy I now know what to do in these situations. Certainly someone could still misjudge the pacing even if sex is not his goal on a date! And looking at myself and my shy male nerd friends, they are more likely to misjudge the pacing of the date on the slower side.
Speaking about sex, I'm at a loss how to clearly get my point across that backwards induction can be carried from any preferred dating milestone, not just sex. I wrote two paragraphs about how it's perfectly okay to have more conservative goals such as kissing or even just pleasant discussion, yet my post still reads as "How to get sex from women" type. Perhaps you could suggest how to reword it so that it's clear that not having sex if you don't want it is also okay?
I'm also not a big fan of categorizing all sex-positive women as "a certain type", this feels a bit like slut shaming to me. I'd struggle to fit all the partners I had into a single category, they range from fashionable instagram models to geeky programmers, and from one-night stands to FWB and even those who indicated they would be happy with a relationship, so I don't see the basis behind "one-time fun" comment. And even if that was the case, if a man has an easy time finding "one-time fun" dates, do you genuinely believe he'd struggle to find a relationship if he wanted to?
I think that I was harsh in my wording and you were kind in your response. I should have put things a little more kindly. I apologize for that. Not good communication on my part.
Paragraph #1: Makes sense to me in that context.
Paragraph #2: You are right. You could use this method with different goals. I was critiquing this specific use. I have a different view of a good date and whether or not it should involve sex at the end than you but not a specific issue with the method.
Paragraph #3: I did not use the term slut but I am definitely insinuating that the characteristics and nature of people with many sex partners are different from that of those with few on average. You can always find different people who are promiscuous, of course. There is some trade-offs involved. The type of man or woman who likes to have sex with lots of different people is usually the type of man or woman to be less able or willing to form a stable relationship. If a man is good at sleeping with women, he is probably able to find a woman to be his girlfriend. The type of girlfriend he attracts is usually less suitable for being a girlfriend though. This is all on average and is a tendency, exceptions exist.
I don't believe people should sleep around so much. I don't think it's good for them or society on an emotional level. However, I'm not a prude. I don't think we are going to see eye-to-eye on this because it's largely driven by personality differences probably.
Which movies deserve to be remade because they had great plots but suffered from poor execution at the hands of directors, actors, or stingy studio execs?
I think "Fire in the Sky" should be remade because the depiction of the alien abduction is almost totally different from what the abductee claimed (interesting he let the project go forward with so little personal involvement).
In spite of its divergence from the novel, Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" is a great movie in its own right. Only a person with his unique background and perspective could draw such uncanny parallels between modern American and Nazi society.
That said, there should be a remake that is faithful to the novel. Call it "Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers."
I probably would like ST the movie more if I hadn't loved the book as a kid/ young adult. Speaking of YA Heinlein "The Red Planet" would make a great Lucas style movie... keep all the dialog.. and include the alien sex stuff.
Probably cheating to say "most book adaptations" but it feels like it.
I think one that stands out to me is that Ender's Game actually got a lot of things pretty right, but really struggled to fit the book's plot into a single movie - I know "multi-part movies" is somewhat incendiary, but I think it would have worked well in this case - the first movie could have focused on Battle School and the second on Command School.
I think "Robocop 2" and "Robocop 3" should be remade. Again, there should be two, two-hour movies, but filmed back-to-back and with the same cast. This time, they should stick to Frank Miller's original script. Both movies must be rated R.
We get movie remakes but I've never heard of a book remake. Do they exist?
The one I'd nominate for that was Peter F. Hamilton's "Pandora's Star" and its sequel. The plot-line is fantastic (if you want a space opera), the pacing is good and the writing is serviceable but just not great. Dialogue and descriptions of women were sometimes embarrassingly bad. I don't consider myself picking with these things but it really stood out. It feels dated even though being not that old (2004). I strongly got the impression that the author thought he was writing Strong Female Characters when really he was doing the opposite (one is genetically modified to not have normal emotions, the other two succeed via their inheritance and sleeping with the right people). The descriptions of one of the women are classic /r/menwritingwomen cringe material.
I don't know about a "great plot", but Jupiter Ascending always struck me as a movie that had a lot of potential if it had been a film trilogy with one or two rewriting passes from people besides the Watchowskis.
I mean, a girl who is the reincarnation of an alien space vampire queen and inherits Earth while dealing with the children of the woman she's a reincarnation of has such promise, it's a shame that it ended up the way it did.
Someone showed me the Youtube channel "World of Wonder" ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUUUpaMp8DV6KUOfQwoIiLg ) the other day and it reminded me of a video I'm pretty sure was posted on Slate Star Codex, probably in a links post some years ago. I don't remember much about the video but it was a transsexual youtuber doing comedy. Might even have been one of the hosts on that channel. I remember too little to find it by searching, which bugs me. Does anyone now which video this was?
1) Vernor Vinge, despite being probably one of the most influential scifi authors in history, and the originator of the term "singularity" isn't talked about very much these days. I reread A Deepness in The Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep recently and they both hold up extremely well, containing a lot more density of interesting ideas than many modern books. The novella True Names is one of the foundational books of cyberpunk, and has a bit of a case of zeerust, but is quite interesting as a historical artefact.
2) I also recently read A Memory Called Empire and greatly enjoyed it. Its more on the social scifi side than hard scifi, but probably the first book I've read that really gives a good intuitive sense of what is meant by cultural imperialism, and the mixture of positive and negative emotions one feels towards a dominant culture. Also using Mayan cultural tropes in a scifi setting, without it being a gratuitous human sacrifices and scary rituals caricature, is very interesting.
3) Have been thinking a lot about how shared universes deal with inconsistent canon, and the general problems of having multiple authors play in one setting. Some franchises like star wars have responded by very strictly defining what is and isn't canon, and changing that over time as new things come out, leading to fractured canon. Others like star trek or marvel use alternate universes liberally. Or with something like Warhammer 40k they take the attitude that everything is being written from an in universe perspective, so any inaccuracies are the result of unreliable narrators, misinformation, etc. Are there any approaches I've missed? What do people think of the pros and cons of the different approaches.
x) Add your own subthreads about interesting scifi books below
I've heard good things about Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer, but I haven't actually read it yet (my own book club will be starting it in a couple weeks).
I don't really like most of the original Culture cycle (to the point that I haven't read the continuation). 5 of 7 are shaggy dogs, and 3 of 7 (Use of Weapons, State of the Art, Inversions) reek of True Art.
If someone likes shaggy dogs and True Art, then sure, it's a great rec. But while I'd recommend Excession to anyone who likes SF, the others are very much conditional on that.
Louis M. Bujold is a fav of mine. She's more romantic these days and much less space opera. But maybe "Shards of Honor" of "The Warrior's Apprentice"? And a second vote for E.E. Smith, who in my mind sorta defines the space opera. "Skylark of Space" maybe?
3) There's also the King Arthur approach: countless authors, none of whom cared about continuity with each other, even though most of them pretended they were writing history. (I get the impression comic books do this too, except they make up excuses to justify it.)
James Bond movies are my favourite example of this kind of continuity.
How is James Bond young in 2006 when he was also young in 1963? Is he English or Scottish? Is he or is he not a widower? Shut up and look at the car chase!
I've heard that some of the movies were made with that theory in mind and some weren't.
My favorite theory is that 007 isn't a real spy at all; he's there to distract the enemy from the real spies doing realistic, boring spy work. The crazy villains serve the USSR in the same way.
That was rather explicitly the premise of the 1967 version of "Casino Royale". David Niven played the original, long-retired Bond, and more actors and actresses(*) than I can count played subsequent Bonds. There might have been a gem of a good idea in that, but the execution was horribly botched.
And I've seen it done several times since, but only in parodies and deconstructions. I don't think any of the canonical films support it at all; the most that can be said is that they don't explicitly rule it out. And I think the running gag of Moneypenny's longstanding crush on Bond doesn't really work in this context. But as a deconstruction, particularly of the films, it's an obvious and effective route to take.
[*] Including Ursula Andress, which means she's the only performer to pull off the Bond Girl Hat Trick: Playing the first literary Bond Girl (Vesper Lynd), first cinematic Bond Girl (Honey Rider), and James Bond "himself" (Vesper Lynd after promotion).
My impression is that comics typically have one "main" timeline and then a bunch of "what if" timelines to explore other takes on the characters. These what-ifs can be one-shots, alternate universes, or more elaborate things like the Ultimate Marvel series, which was basically a complete reboot separated from the existing canon.
Every so often, someone will realize there are too many damn alternate timelines and it's making it hard for new readers to get into the hobby, so they'll have some sort of big crossover event. For longtime fans, it's a chance to see all the continuity finally come to a head, for newcomers, a chance to wrap up all the dangling plot threads so the series can get a fresh start.
I suspect the reason Vinge isn't talked about much is because lately people have mistaken 'Dystopia' for 'serious and thoughtful and realistic'.
It's the biggest thing that bugs me about the otherwise fun Jean le Flambeur novels. The Sobornost's goals and views toward mind uploading make no sense if they're willing to heap suffering on copies. Part of me wonders if he just thought nobody would take it seriously if it didn't have some dystopia thrown in.
I first wrote this post in the subreddit where it was really well received and linked to in a number of other places, so I converted it into a blog, which I thought people on here would be interested in as well.
The article describes how a basketball statistic changed how I see the world. It's a meditation on the relationship between optimization and metrics, Goodhart's law and group dynamics.
Interesting read! As someone without mental illness, the closest thing to this kind of intrusive thought I had is "Call of the Void" I experience when standing at great heights and feeling a little voice inside my head telling me I could easily jump to my death.
Thank you for this. Here's a relevant question that bothers me. It's good to know that people with this problem are perfectly harmless and won't do any of these things when in their right mind, but will this still be the case when they are not - e.g. if they are on drugs, if they are victims of steroid psychosis, a stroke, or dementia?
My understanding is that there are no documented cases of anyone with harm OCD or any similar form of OCD acting out their fears.
I'm not sure why, but I would take a guess based on research and opinions I've seen as to why. Generally speaking the disorders you mention don't make people suddenly want to do things they previously desperately wanted not to do. Instead they make fail to recognize that barriers exist to their actions. Even if you don't understand what the consequences of, say, attacking someone are, due to steroid psychosis, this won't make you attack someone unless, on some level, you want to attack them.
A psychologist once gave me the following example. Alcohol might release the inhibitions stopping you from sleeping with your friend's partner, but if you ingenue have absolutely zero interest in sleeping with your friend's partner, you still won't do it. Drugs etc. can remove inhibition, but not create motivation ex nihilo.
One possible concern is that there's probably not a lot of data on these things, because generally people probably don't want to go on record reporting harm OCD. Also, alcohol and drugs are not quite the same situation as the other problems I mentioned, so perhaps the explanation does not apply.
I'm sorry, every time I read anything about ivermectin I immediately think of cattle drench because of years of these kinds of ads on the radio and telly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyVnidd9_nU
I'm trying to get more knowledgable about philosophy, but having a tough time, especially with the jargon. Reading the articles on wikipedia makes my brain hurt and my eyes glaze over - that's over my head. I should try Philosophy For Dummies. Having trouble understanding the term 'qualia', maybe because Dennett's argument that the concept is incoherent is correct. Hoping y'all can help with my questions. Here's my thought experiment. It's not like the bogus ones like the Chinese room and the trolley problem - this one could actually be done, but we don't need to. Pluck a guitar string to produce a note, which you hear. The ineffable essence of your perception is a quale, yes? Call it quale 1. Pluck a second time, and you hear the same thing. Do we now have 2 different qualia, or are there 2 instances of the same quale? Now pluck it again, this time lightly touching the string at the halfway point to produce the first harmonic overtone. You hear a tone an octave higher, so that's a different quale, yes? Call it quale 3. Now that higher pitch was contained in the sound from the first pluck, but you didn't perceive it because the fundamental pitch is louder. So is quale 3 contained in quale 1? Now that you've heard that octave higher overtone, you can listen for it and do pluck #4, which is identical to plucks 1 & 2. But being primed and motivated to listen for it, you will now perceive it. So even though the sensory input is the same we have a different quale, yes? Alternate phrasing - are qualia dependent on the perceiver's attitude and intention?
You forgot the most important question: how many qualia can dance on the head of a pin?
Honestly I don't know, I find the whole "qualia" debate to be one of the most pointlessly annoying dead-ends of 20th-21st century analytic philosophy.
If we must discuss mental experiences in terms of qualia, though, I would say that each quale is a unique experience. Quale 1 and quale 2 are different qualia, even if they're as similar as two qualia can possibly be.
Quale 3 does not contain any other qualia because qualia don't "contain" other qualia; allowing qualia to contain other qualia doesn't seem like it's going to make the concept of qualia any better, it's just going to lead to further pointless questions.
I think any sensible sort of definition of a quale needs to take into account the perceiver's attitude and intention and everything else about the perceiver's mental state at the particular moment of the stimulus.
When people talk about qualia, they are generally talking about the raw, in-the-moment experience. So like, imagine if you turn on a tape recorder and then play the same note three times. If you analyzed the waveform, you would see that it peaks three times. Saying that it is the "same" note is going up an extra level of abstraction - it is noting that the there are important similarities between the three sounds that were recorded. That's a level of abstraction too high for qualia. You have to have three raw experiences first in order to compare them and see that they were similar in important ways.
My favorite example of qualia involves colorblindness. Consider someone whose eyes do not distinguish red and green. He then receives some glasses with a filter that allow green light to pass but not red. By wearing or removing the glasses, he can now distinguish between red and green. [1] Functionally, he can do anything a non-colorblind person can do: he can pass any test designed to identify red-green colorblindness. But has he really experienced red?
[1] I'm sure that actual glasses designed to correct for red-green colorblindness are more sophisticated than this.
The whole frame of your question I think misses the point of qualia as a concept. Your frame is something like "Given that everything is external and objective (and thus transitive, comparable, whatever), <insert your question>" -- but that given is not a given.
Qualia is like starting with "Suppose there is some irreducible, basically incomparable raw material of subjectivity--let's call that raw material Qualia."
So yeah, the objective characteristics of a perceived signal are only secondarily related to the qualia per se. And yes, all qualia cannot be untied from the subject's internal state, so attitudes and intentions definitely affect what qualia arises from outside input.
I think the standard view, for people who believe in qualia, is that yes, they are dependent on attitude and intention, but quale 3 is not contained in quale 2, unless a person has a really weird experience of sound, so that they perceive the overtones as distinct simultaneous experiences (which might be how we perceive someone speaking and background music that go on at the same time).
I'll repeat the recommendation for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It might be pretty jargon-filled as well, but it's more often written by someone who has at least taught the material, rather than by a student that has just learned it.
I can’t wrap my brain around the fact that Marvel put out a Captain America issue where they used Jordan Peterson’s likeness as the “nazi agent Adolf Hitler protege” villain Red Skull. Is this kind of thing typical in comics or is this just a sign of the times and how crazy it’s got?
Can you point me to where JP's likeness was used? The only related thing that I saw was that in one of the issues the Red Skull has a youtube channel, and on the background of one of the videos there was a sign that said "10 rules for life".
Speaking to history, Superman famously spent a fair amount of time beating up the KKK at a time in American history when the KKK was politically significant. I think Captain America punched Hitler even before the US entered WWII (and when Nazi sympathy was a fringe but not unheard of view). I'm not like a huge comics scholar, but there's a pretty rich tradition of comics commenting on the politics of the day.
When you hire Ta-Nehisi Coates to write a comic, you get . . . Ta-Nehisi Coates writing a comic. Whether it's crazy or not depends on your point of view. I'm given to understand that Marvel has long been the political comic company, with Professor X and Magneto representing the Martin Luther King Jr vs Malcolm X dynamic of US race relations in the 60s and the original storyline for Civil War being about the War on Terror and Steve Rodgers rejecting it while Tony Stark embraced it, but I don't really read the comics so I've only heard these things at second hand.
Eh, these sorts of political potshots are nothing new for comics in general. Captain America once went up against a terrorist organization that was secretly led by a thinly-veiled version of Richard Nixon. DC Comics gave us G. Gordon Godfree AKA Glorious Godfrey, a sort of evangelist of evil, that was based on Billy Graham and named after Nixon operative G. Gordon Libby.
Not only did he go up against Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was revealed to be the head of an evil conspiracy within the United States government, and committed suicide in the Oval Office after being unmasked by Captain America, who was so disillusioned by the experience he resigned as Captain America.
This story came out in 1974, when Watergate was big news, but Nixon had not yet resigned.
Marvel has never been particularly shy about politics, especially not in Captain America comics. One of the comics inspirations for the current storyline on the current Marvel TV series 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier' was a story from a few years back where it was revealed that before the super-soldier program that created Captain America, the government tested the serum out on hundreds of black soldiers first to see if any of them would survive; one of them did, and became a black supersoldier who was mistreated by the military and the government and kept a state secret.
For that matter, the original Captain America comic featured him punching Hitler in the face on the cover - in March of 1941, when America had not yet entered the war, and whether or not we should do so was still a topic of political debate.
In other words, a comic where the Red Skull is radicalizing youths on Youtube and they throw in a jab at Jordan Peterson isn't exactly the height of politics in a Captain America comic.
What are some productive activities/hobbies that don't require much energy, travel, time, or planning to do?
(That is the real question; if you have an answer, you can feel free to share it and ignore the following convoluted digression. It's sort of "The Straw Vulcan's Case for Trying to be an Extreme Normie.")
That is, (at least it seems to me) activities that have some combination of going outside, taking risks, tangible accomplishments, using practical skills that you can demonstrate to others, physical activity, and developing friendships with other people, like hang gliding, playing tennis, and dancing, are highly valued by society. This in contrast to consumption activities like watching movies and television, reading books, newspapers, and blogs, and playing video games, which are typically solitary, sedentary, indoors, and don't require taking risks or demonstrating skills, and which I think are not highly respected by society.
Now, I, personally, am a nerd and a dork and much prefer the latter sort of activity. But I also recognize that there's, unfortunately, no percentage in being a nerd, unless it's directly related to advancing your job/career. There's usually just no benefit beyond momentary pleasure to using your scarce time and memory to learn about fictional worlds or abstract subjects like politics or science beyond their narrow bearing on your particular life. (Again, unless learning about them is part of your job and thus related to acquiring resources and status.) And there's nothing wrong with pleasure, but presumably it would simply be objectively better, if possible, to do something instead that is both enjoyable *and* advantageous to you, e.g. going bowling with your friends.
However, many of these ceteris paribus superior activities that I can think of involve nontrivial energy, travel, time, and planning to do. And those things are obviously in limited and diminishing supply as you develop a career, get married, and have children. It's thus often easy, after a long day at work, to just collapse onto the sofa and watch TV or play video games. So, I want to develop as habits positive activities that account for this---the fact that in the future I know that I'll often be tired and unwilling/unable to do much traveling/coordination. What are some things that are only, at most, slightly more effortful and complicated than watching TV, but that are still reasonably enjoyable, relaxing, productive, and make your future self glad that you did them?
One thing I wish I had done before I had children was join a cycling group. Depending on where you live, it’s pretty easy to find a group of bicyclists that rides weekly or so at any skill level. On top of the social aspect and exercise, you get to know your city or region more intimately than if driving is your sole means of transportation. As I said, I never joined a group, but I started exploring Pittsburgh by bike about 5 years after I moved to the city, and it completely changed my relationship with the city. I’m now in the suburbs and have only ridden my bike a handful of times in the last five years, but I miss it tremendously.
Guitar (nylon string). Its the easiest instrument this side of a triangle, you can learn from youtube and static diagrams, you don't have to sing, noodling quickly becomes mindless and relaxing, and you can pretty quickly achieve a pleasant sound if you have restraint and a tiny bit of good taste (if not you might make something interesting but that's not what we're going for)
Recorder is an easy instrument to learn to pick out a tune on, but you will sound terrible and nobody will be willing to listen to you.
Guitar is the easiest instrument to actually sound _good_ on. A couple of months' practice and you too can be plucking the chords to Wonderwall in the back of your van.
It's probable that what is easy for one person is not so easy for another. Perhaps enough breath control and dexterity to make pleasant sounds on a recorder came naturally to me, while guitar made more demands (hand strength? reach?) so I gave up on it.
I believe you as far as technical stuff goes, but does piano fit in your life when you feel drained? im talking easy like, exhausted slouched on the couch with your feet on the coffee table and your mouth full of chips, and the poor disrespected guitar still obliges. That's not my whole practice, but it's a whole lot of it.
You can literally sit down and slap the keys, and chances are that it'll sound like something that you can make into a melody. So, in other words, yes.
On a similar note, I found blues harmonica incredibly easy to pick up and chill out with.
Figuring out the proper embouchure and basic bending shouldn't take more than a few weeks, maybe even days if you're dedicated and good with learning weird movements. Once that is behind you, you start really enjoying how you sound even if you have no idea what you're doing.
Clawhammer is not so difficult. But you can strum a banjo just like you strum a guitar. There are plenty of old time references to strumming on a banjo. Sounds great and easy to play a 1-4-5 progression in G.
I got as far as the Foggy Mountain Breakdown, at about half the speed.
I would really like to play something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCW-Oc3_GmE&t=73s Listening carefully to it, I get the suspicion that it isn't really so complicated. It sounds definitely easier than the Foggy Mountain Breakdown, but I'm a bit stumped about how to get there, although I have the chords, and also figured out the melody. But maybe I'm totally mistaken, considering that the song is in D and not in G.
G tuning is the most common, but people use many tunings for the banjo, and for a song in D it might be tuned differently. After strumming then Round peak, or clawhammer style and a G tuning is a good entry point. Or Bum ditty stroke.
Productive activities that are sustainable through raising a small child while working full time tend to be in the realm of things parents have traditionally done, often involving plants, animals, visits to nature, religious communities, and crafts.
Something to consider is that the activation energy for some things goes up enormously with children (sitting down for four hours to write without constant interruption, for instance), while the activation energy required for other things actually goes down. I only have a toddler, but from what I can tell, this varies with children's existence and then age. In a stable relationship but with no children, the activation energy for going out and enjoying city life goes down quite a lot. With an infant it goes up enormously, but I, at least, was pushed into taking lots of nature walks by the fact that the alternative involved hours of unbearable wailing (babies love drives and sitting in slings or backpacks while their parents walk around... something about reminding them of their pre-birth existence).
I'm not a natural gardener, and most of my plants die. But now that I have a toddler, I'm becoming much more appreciative of having sand, gravel, and fountains around, and might as well garden instead of just yelling at my daughter not to move the gravel around.
My parents did a lot of crafty things and got a lot of animals when I was younger, and went to a lot of church events. They took up quilting, wood carving, built a pigeon loft, and participated in a number of potlucks, for instance. My father kept taking calculus night classes over several years, at the cost of having to talk about calculus quite a lot.
I'm not sure if this has any implications ahead of time, or not. Sustainable hobbies aren't so much about being cheap, quick, and easy (for instance, "homesteading" is a very stable parental hobby), so much as ones that can shift and take on different forms over time, and as circumstances change. Anything related to what you could imagine a peasant in a village doing is a promising direction to go in.
This is great! Your kids will love helping out... having the kids help wash and dry the dishes may take longer and cause some breakage, but it's time well spent. I'm afraid to say how young my son was when I let him drive the lawn mower by himself.
Look at whatever hobbies are enjoyed by high-status respectable people of your sex, age, social class and location, filter out the excessively difficult/expensive/time-consuming ones and the ones you think you'd really hate, and look at what remains.
Our company has a golf league that plays on a course just a couple miles from the office once a week. Decent way to network with some people at the office you wouldn’t otherwise see, physical without being strenuous, and unless you really want to take it seriously, only costs you a couple hours a week of your time. Not a cheap hobby, but for someone in the OP’s position sounds like time and mental energy is tighter than cash
Not cheap but not super expensive either unless you want it to be. A set of clubs costs about as much as a bicycle, and a game of golf at my local course costs only a little more than seeing a movie.
Beer and/or bread making. Takes a long time, but most of it is hands off. The initial gear is relatively cheap (and infinitely expandable if you like it). The excess product can be given away as a thoughtful gift, and something to talk about. Both have extensive online and published communities.
Yeah making bread is a nice thing to do if you are home all day. It’s a few minutes of work with some hours of waiting in between. Not hard, but the timing can be touchy if you’re not going to be home - you need to be there when it is ready to go. And then you need to eat the bread, ideally within a couple days.
Beer is easier for the office worker. Spend an evening or a weekend morning brewing, and then it just sits for a couple weeks to ferment. Not particularly time sensitive, if you need to wait a few extra days till you have time to bottle, it’s totally fine, then once it is in the bottles it is good for months.
It became a meme because it suddenly became a thing lots of people have reasons to do.
Making sourdough bread is way more satisfying than I expected, especially if you refine the process to spend minimum effort for infinite supply of on-demand tasty bread. Self-sufficiency is a reward of its own.
I thought the whole purpose of a hobby was to suck up time and money. :^)
I really enjoy doing things with my hands. So satisfaction comes from anywhere. Some nice food, a garden in bloom, fresh mowed lawn, a painted room, a pile of logs...
The last stanza from "Two Tramps in Mud Time" R. Frost,
For art, try getting into soap carving. It's as cheap as buying a few bars of Ivory soap at a supermarket and using your kitchen utensils or other knives/etc. you might have for carving.
This may have come across as more confrontational than I intended. I'm more just wondering what the actual boundaries for Open Threads here are: is it "No politics generally, but topics called out in the main article are an exception?"
Yeah Aapje made a (humorous) remark on this last open thread. Scott is playing Satan, and tempting us to sin. "Oh no, I'm not touching that Georgia peach."
"the Bayes factor for my series of ambidexterity experiments is 216"
This is sketchy for a couple reasons. First because the Bayes factor should be between the null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis. In this case Jacob's alternative hypothesis was that ambidextrous people are .2 SD more authoritarian. Second because there's still the issue of multiple comparisons. You can't just multiply the Bayes factors for each trait you looked at (that's called [naive Bayes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier)).
I analyzed a pattern I've seen in communities. I'm sure this is not an original idea, does anyone have a link to someone who has analysed sth similar?
The basic idea is:
There are some communities that doesn't filter who enters, and that has no mechanism for excluding/rehabilitating obnoxious people. This structure often leads to a situation akin to bad workplaces: people with options leave, people without stay.
At first it might be fine, but as soon as one really obnoxious person enters, you will have a gradual brain-drain-esque situation, as increasing levels of obnoxiousness incentivises more and more people to leave. The ones that leave first will be the ones you really want in the community, the people left behind will be comprised of obnoxious people and altruistic people that want to rehabilitate/improve.
This is distinct from, but related to, "evaporative cooling of groups" - when you've got a group organized around some sort of belief, the ones that leave are more likely to be the moderate ones, so the median of the remaining group gets farther from moderation, until it's condensed to a hard core:
In the last election for the Governor of Georgia (Kemp v Abrams 2018), Brian Kemp was the Secretary of State and oversaw the election that he ran in. This was massively controversial at the time [1-3]. "Secretary of State runs for Governor" isn't that unusual of a thing to happen. It is better to not have such obvious potential for a conflict of interest.
So, a friend of mine has recently been considering seeking ECT (electroconvulsive therapy.) They've definitely been having a hard enough time for a while now to justify it, and they have the record of other treatment methods. But they're also worried about the potential memory loss side effects, particularly because they're currently studying for a degree on scholarship in a foreign country, and can't afford to forget anything important for long enough that it would cause them to lose the scholarship.
Does anyone have the domain knowledge to know how well-founded a worry this is? If the ECT actually works without major side effects, it would definitely make meeting the responsibilities of the scholarship easier rather than harder, along with a major increase in quality of life, but the success of the treatment can't be taken for granted.
If you're interested in anecdata, I know one person (good friend of my brother) who has had ECT for depression. It helped him, but the memory issues were a real problem. I have had TMS for depression which may have a similar action-mechanism, and found it very helpful with no memory issues. Happy to answer questions or talk more about either. (I'd have to ask my brother for ECT details).
Unfortunately, they're investigated TMS and found it to be a non-option in practical terms because there's nowhere accessible which offers it on a schedule that's reconcilable with attending the classes they need to keep the scholarship.
I have a friend who used to have a photographic memory, or something like, and lost it after ECT. This was after medical school and before the certifying exam (boards?) which led to a years long struggle to get a license to practice.
OTOH, suicide is a common cause of death in his immediate and extended family, and he was struggling with suicidal ideation. Now (so far as I know) he's not.
- It very often (40-50% IIRC, but I'd recommend reading up on it) wipes out a significant chunk of already-existent memories (and by "wipes out" I mean that those memories are gone, never coming back, treatment consists of coming to terms with it and/or relearning that stuff). If this is a deal-breaker, stay the hell away. They often undersell this, both from what I've heard from people who were subjected to it and from what I've seen of the studies, so be very dubious if someone proposing ECT says this isn't a serious issue.
- Cognitive abilities (including the ability to form *new* memories) can take a dip for a short time, but that almost always recovers (timeframe is apparently ~weeks).
- It is by far the most effective treatment for depression, although it doesn't fix the long-term predisposition to depressive bouts.
To me, it seems that all short-term side effects of Covid vaccination are well-covered/studied, and not worth much concern (UK blood clots being a sign in favor there, that such a small reaction was caught).
What should I say to family members who are worried about long-term unknown-unknown problems? E.g. "If I take this vaccine, maybe I get cancer in 30 years." "If I take the vaccine, maybe I'm infertile in 10 years". With other vaccines, there's a long track record to point to, but mRNA (and to a lesser extent, adenovirus) vaccines don't have that.
Is there some mechanism-of-effect information that points to those being implausible outcomes? I struggle to find any info online about this, because any searches are swamped by antivax/provax/short-term information.
Most common OTC medication have long track records, and therefore don't provoke this vague unease. Most uncommon, short-track-record medication have acute importance that obviously outweighs long-term concerns.
The Covid vaccine is a middle ground. It is preventing, as Scott mentioned in the last open thread, a 1/10.000 death rate amongst 25-34yos. That is meaningful, but not comparable to taking, say, newly-developed anti-clotting meds after a heart attack.
You don't seem to be engaging with me in good faith, so I'm going to end this thread here, possibly someone else has some thoughts.
Typically people take medicine when they're sick, weighing an immediate need for restoration against the potential for side effects, both short term and long. This often happens in direct consultation with a doctor to determine if the trade off is worthwhile. With a vaccine, this one in particular, the immediate need is less known. About half of the people who get COVID have no symptoms at all, and less than half of the population has or will get COVID. Of the ~25% or less who will get COVID (even in a worst case scenario spread) and have symptoms, the majority get relatively mild symptoms (ultimately similar in strength but longer duration) than results from the vaccines themselves. It's only a pretty small minority, generally older and with a particular set of pre-existing conditions, that have an obvious positive trade off for getting the vaccine.
It's helpful to mention that this vaccine being a "new thing" (and thus unstudied in the long-term) is somewhat analogous to Covid itself being a "new thing". They say "if I take this vaccine, maybe I get cancer in 30 years". Remind them that it's also true that "If you get Covid, maybe you're infertile in 10 years".
Then, explain that the vaccine is probably less long-term risky than getting Covid. We have seen that Covid can cause permanent lung and heart problems. We understand the mechanism of the RNA vaccines pretty well, and we have no reason to suspect that they will cause long term problems. Also, don't forget that the vaccine prevents you from getting sick! People die from Covid, and even if you don't die, getting really sick sucks.
(Disclaimer: I have not actually tried this with anyone)
This is a genuinely good argument. But the obvious counterargument is that at this point, you've probably either already had asymptomatic COVID (sunk cost) or never will. But if you take the vaccine, you're definitely getting the vaccine.
No; in any epidemic or pandemic there comes a point where the odds are very much against contracting the disease even if you take no precautions whatsoever. This happens well before the disease is fully eradicated, and almost certainly happened a couple of months ago in the United States.
The argument is *stronger* for people who plan to stay locked down another 3-6 months, but at this point it is valid for anyone.
By "a couple of months ago" you surely mean late February, because during January and February a significant fraction of the United States population got infected.
If we stay at 20 infections per 100,000 per day for the next few months, with no big rises, and gradually taper off, that seems like another few percent of the so-far-uninfected population will eventually get it, but I guess that's right that it's much smaller than the number that got it in January and February.
"Looking at the Pfizer graph, the protection level is nearly binary: none, and then all. Day 11 after the first shot seems to be the magic point beyond which you can consider yourself vaccinated."
1. Is this right? If so, 2. What is the mechanism that explains this? 3. Say you contracted Covid 7 days after getting the Pfizer vaccine. Would your vaccination be useless, or would it reduce the severity of the illness?
The precise number of days is difficult, because infections surely aren't detected in the study on the day they actually happened.
Note also that the article says "none, then all" by eyeballing a chart - and it's probably right that the shift from 0% protection to 80% protection is pretty fast. But the article is a bit fast and loose between 80% and 90% and 100%.
A while back on one of the SSC open threads I was involved in a brief discussion (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/03/open-thread-155-25/#comment-907078) over whether or not lowering speed limits a bit (e.g. 70 mph -> 65 mph) in the United States would be a net gain or loss, and I wanted to do a better analysis of the question - ignoring factors like “whether people would follow a lower speed limit” or any complex effects on The Economy - just to see if, under relatively ideal assumptions, it’s something worth looking into.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety put out an analysis (https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2188) which looks at data from 1993 - 2017 and finds that a 5 mph increase on the speed limit led to 13,638 additional fatalities on interstates and freeways. Because we’re just worried about the impact of a 70 mph -> 65 mph change, interstates and freeways are the most relevant places.
Averaging out Farmer’s total death count, the speed increase led to about 545 deaths per year. Using data from https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-by-age-group/ and a weighted average, the average age of a death via car crash is about 40 years old (~42.3). With a life expectancy of 80, that’s about 40 years lost per death, for a total loss of 21.8 thousand years.
Last time someone brought up the good point that slower speeds wouldn’t affect how much time professional drivers like truckers spend driving, since they’re driving ~8 hours per day no matter what. I think “non-professional driver traffic” corresponds well to the “light duty vehicles” section of this table (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2016/vm1.cfm), so about 676 billion miles were driven on interstates in 2016 by people who could conceivably be doing other things.
It’s safe to assume most travel will be around the speed limit of 70 mph, and so those miles take 1.10 million person-years to drive each year. If we were to drop the speed limit to 65 mph, then they would take 1.19 million person-years instead.
So under fairly ideal assumptions, the tradeoff we’re looking at is 90,000 person-years driving for 21,800 regular person-years. Unfortunately, evaluating how good of a deal this is or isn’t depends on how much worse time spent in a car is than time spent doing other things.
Even ignoring the effects on productivity from time lost (since I’m trying to ignore second-order effects), the question of how much worse the experience of driving a car is compared to something else is both subjective and hard to quantify. I think the best way to evaluate this is to consider whether I would personally trade X years of life for Y years of life that I have to spend driving, and then derive the value of driving-time to regular-time from my answer to that question.
For example, I think at best (if I had very good podcasts) I *might* trade regular-life for driving-life at a 1:3 ratio. This would mean I value a driving year at about 0.33 regular years, and the tradeoff is a net-gain if one driving year is worth more than 0.24 regular years.
Realistically, I don’t think I would take a trade at that ratio (very good podcasts are a scarce resource, and I don’t like driving), and I think this bodes very poorly for the idea of lowering speed limits, at least for these reasons. That said, I’m curious about how much other people would say they value driving-time relative to regular time.
There are second-order effects here too. If travel speeds get slower, people don't just go to the same destinations and take more time getting there - they often choose an option that is almost as good as the first but closer. Just to illustrate, if it takes 10 minutes to drive across town to your favorite coffee shop, but traffic increases so it takes 60 minutes, the question isn't how bad those lost 50 (or 100) minutes are, but rather how bad it is to take 10 minutes walking to your local coffee shop compared to going to your favorite one. (Or to make your own coffee at home.)
Assuming people are making rational decisions, the time increase you calculate is an upper bound on the costs, but not the costs themselves.
Tangently related - at one time in my life I had to take a job that required a long commute, so I did some math. I could drive 65 (then the limit) and take 1 hour, or drive 80 (which half the cars were doing) and take 49 min. That's 11 minutes each way, so 22 minutes/day total. Given how precious my time was then, I went with the flow and saved myself some sleep deprivation. The bad side effect was getting used to driving 80 - I now have to be careful not to when I don't need to.
I think it’s probably not changeable on the platform, but substack masking external links is crazy annoying.
I get why it’s happening — author inserts a link, and then substack routes it through a tracking url before delivering the viewer to the final destination. It’s understandable and not nefarious, but it breaks what turns out for me to be a major piece of usability, which is that I hover over links to see the url tooltip, and a large part of my decision to click is based on what I see. I’m not sure I can fully explicate what I’m looking for, but examples might be that I’m more likely to click a private blog url than I am to click the link to an abstract to a paper I don’t have access to.
But in any case, I can’t do this anymore on substack because all urls are just substack with some some ID hash. It’s aggravating. Am I the only who uses links this way?
If some populations purportedly have "lower average IQ" how come they all speak multiple languages when the "higher IQ" ones struggle with what they learn at school? Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies?
>when the "higher IQ" ones struggle with what they learn at school?
Do you mean that higher IQ nations struggle with learning another language at school?
There's mounting research suggesting we teach languages in school astoundingly poorly. Traditional instruction puts a heavy emphasis on simply memorizing grammar patterns, which are (not quite but) close to useless. With massive amounts of input, your brain will just automatically do all the pattern matching for you in the background.
Terry Waltz claims that when she teaches using comprehensible input instead of traditional methods, there is basically no bell curve. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it sounds like other teachers have similar experiences. JFK High School switched to a mass immersion (extensive reading) approach, brought their AP Chinese pass rate from 50% to 100%. SEG Private School in Japan switched to a similar approach, the average student now scores in the top 2% on the national English exam, with their lowest scoring still in the top quartile. It tracks with family members I know who say that after moving abroad, they learned more in six months than from eight years of traditional study. It tracks with self reports from the second language learning community about the critical importance of high volumes of input.
So it seems to me like there is still a lot of low hanging fruit in institutional language learning, and some of the independent learners (with high metis!) are figuring this out on their own. There's still a profound open question as to why high schools and universities are not switching to CI methods more quickly. (I think there's like a <10% chance they have been right all along, >90% that some weird institutional pressures or switching costs have prevented adaptation.)
Even if Terry Waltz was exaggerating a bit, these methods leave little room for IQ to explain progress. Maybe it matters at the margins, but in general, the person with the most exposure to the language, especially comprehensible chunks, will develop the fastest.
I was confused on whether he was saying that we DO teach language well, and we still can't learn despite our average higher IQs, or that we have such higher IQs and still can't figure out how to teach well.
Another reason for the US in particular not being the best at teaching second languages through schools is that there isn't really a huge need for the average American to learn one. We have a ton of Hispanic immigrants yes, but most of them speak at least a little English and even if they don't, their kids do. And even if ALL hispanic immigrants spoke absolutely no english, that leaves huge swaths of the country that don't have many immigrants, meaning that students won't have any real need to use a second language. Add on top that as you said, we teach it poorly anyway and almost certainly we teach it too late.
Is this information actionable if you're self-teaching?
Yes. If you want to learn a language, read up on a bit of the basics, and then just drown yourself in comprehensible input - the comprehensible part there is key. You won't learn shit from say, translated analytical philosophy. Everyday situations are a wonderful teacher. Our brains are pattern-matching machines, all you really need to do is give that machinery lots and lots of food.
I believe so. There are various debates on the specifics, but there's significant overlap across self taught communities: Enormous volumes of input, both reading and listening, supplemented by, but not over reliant on, spaced repetition software. It is a very long, time intensive process. Time on target matters a lot (that's why moving to a country is so useful, constant moments of opportunity to learn throughout each day).
Can you be more specific? What are these "low-IQ" nations that widely speak multiple languages?
I think he means Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Philippines, and much of Sub-Saharan Africa (DRC, Nigeria, Tanzania, etc.). Linguistic diversity is fairly typical for traditional societies.
A possibly relevant example datum gleaned from reading a book about Romani (AKA 'Gypsy') musicians in Northern Greece - as professional musicians serving multiple ethnic groups (this is the Balkans) they have to be fluent in Greek, Albanian, Vlach, and Bulgarian/Macedonian. Their native language that they speak at home, also called Romani, is related to Sanskrit. They are greatly discriminated against, much like African Americans are in the US, and it's possible that generations of suffering prejudice and poverty causes an IQ loss.
> it's possible that generations of suffering prejudice and poverty causes an IQ loss.
What would be the mechanism for that?
The inverse of whatever the Flynn effect is, I imagine.
IQ is tested in some medium other than the subject's own oral culture, so the ability to function effectively in that medium is going to be important. I would suggest that prejudice and poverty are always going to make individuals less adept at using various media than their non-discriminated against, richer peers (note the obvious exceptions here like East European urban Jews were not poor). But then again I believe IQ testing to be a self-fulfilling justification for bourgeoisie domination of society, so I have a clear bias here...
The Romani situation is directly comparable to the Ashkenazi Jewish situation (they existed in the same circumstances in the same location), so assuming that they're low-IQ just because of that seems pretty premature
> Odd-numbered open threads will be no-politics, even-numbered threads will be politics-allowed.
I assume 'politics' includes culture war topics, which certainly includes comparative discussions involving population-level IQ.
I forgot to include that disclaimer on here until now, so I can't blame Pp.
Currently the even-numbered disclaimer appears above, but the thread is odd-numbered.
Thanks, fixed.
I do hope we have this discussion on an even thread sometime.
It's hard to say anything without knowing more about what you're referring to, but language acquisition has a critical period when it must be acquired, after which it becomes much more difficult. I would presume your polyglot population has repeated and (critically) early exposure to multiple languages, which is atypical among much of the West. Studies of "feral" children and deaf children suggest this critical period begins to close around age 5, typically, and is fully closed by puberty.
I'd also be curious how "can speak multiple languages" is measured. Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent? The people I've known who were polyglots due to growing up in countries where many languages were spoken freely admit that they only speak one or two with any proficiency, but I'm not sure how typical that is.
No there are plenty of people learning languages past teenagehood. The only thing we know for sure becomes more difficult after childhood is getting the pronunciation right to "sound like a native".
>Do they have basic proficiency, ie can conduct basic business? Or are they fully fluent?
Usually they use those languages as vehicular devices to conduct business transactions, follow media, interact with the government and so on so I expect a fairly high level of proficiency in any of them even if they don't write novels in it.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about. My impression is that how many languages you easily speak mostly has to do with how many you're frequently exposed to. I would expect higher-IQ people to pick up languages they're exposed to slightly more easily, conditional on the same amount of exposure, but I'm not even sure about that.
Is any part of the standard IQ testing array about language ability? If not, I'm not sure that that expectation is well-founded. Intelligence need not equate to language-learning ability; the assumption it should is dangerous in that it conflates different intellectual processes into one basket labelled 'intelligence' without considering if there are very different things happening between e.g. language learning and ability to understand maths. I think the labelling of computing coding conventions as languages might help confuse this further as well: a language is not simply a logical system to be learnt and applied but rather a framing of thought and reality in a shared framework of concepts such that perfect translation is never possible. Intelligence may not necessarily correlate with the requirements to cope with multiple such frameworks.
They do test vocabulary and facility with manipulating concepts. But the vocab part is more things like ability to whip up definitions of words and knowing more esoteric ones - a less bright person exposed to many languages could be expected to be able to speak simply in many languages like he does in his native one.
But language comprehension is based on the language of the test, not different languages. Testing the ability of someone in one language tells us nothing about their ability in others. Again this seems to be an issue of labelling: whilst it's not inaccurate to call this language comprehension, it is not about comprehension of languages, just the one the test is in.
Yeah, I think I said as much. Perfectly reasonable to think that someone who's capable of complexity is in principle capable of it in many languages and someone who lacks that firepower can still manage his level in others. We mostly just teach foreign languages like shit.
Why are americans so bad at soccer? Why are brazilians so bad at hockey?
You know the US have won the women's world cup (foitball/soccer) 5 times in 9 editions. That's 5 of the 17 possible world cup wins in the last 30 years, so way over 25%.
That's pretty good going for a nation bad at the sport...
As usual, the person means that American *men* are bad at soccer.
But my understanding is that the US dominates women's soccer so much because of Title IX - US schools are required to spend something on girl's sports, and soccer has become a girl's sport here, while in the rest of the world, old-fashioned sexism keeps girls out of sports, so the US just has a much deeper pool than other countries do for the women's team.
The mensteam aren't that bad either. They've been to 6 out of the last 7 finals which is as good a record as Italy or England for example. Came third in 1930 as well, so the idea this is a new thing can be out to bed. They're currently ranked 20th in the world, which translates as pretty good at football.
I think the main reason the women's game does so well is that there's so many kids playing so a huge talent pool. Note England's women's team has started to do well half a generation after a concerted effort to get more girls playing football, and traditional strong women's football nations such as Norway have very established female leagues at youth level. I think there's success us based on the popularity of soccer as a kids sport regardless of gender. Whilst the college thing undoubtedly helped I suspect few top-class footballers go that route nowadays as that's three years of peak earnings passed up on in the various women's professional leagues.
Not sure there's a correlation here. It could be argued that one of the effects of a high-IQ population is they develop the efficiency of a unified language via cities, trade, schools etc.
That's an interesting notion. Does openness to new experience, which correlates with high IQ, lead to language convergence? The question is outside my experience. And there seems like too many feedback loops and confounders (wealth -> better nutrition -> increased IQ -> wealth -> better nutrition and so on) to eek out much more than a correlation.
Who knows. I just think the utility of shared language (for trade, social trust, sharing ideas etc) is likely greater than any utility from exposing the brain to new languages.
Oh, I agree.
Openness itself is not driven by a unitary mechanism. The more aesthetic receptivity side is at least partially grounded in latent inhibition - an unconscious mechanism that basically decides if connections are bullshit or not. The higher the inhibition, the more concrete a connection has to be to register as real and meaningful and not fanciful nonsense. Lower it, and more and more tenuous connections start seeming like there's something there.
If that sounds like presuming that things that aren't real are real, you're absolutely right: aesthetic openness is linked to things that are a risk factor for psychosis and mental illness tends to run in artists' families. The artists themselves have obviously been selected so they're not the most crippling sufferers.
The other half of the trait domain is the one more directly related to intelligence, and more than that to a willingness to expend effort in processing things even without external reward. It also contains narrower traits like self-assessed intelligence (which is not merely an inaccurate/noisy measure of the person's intelligence, it's a personality trait with its own network of correlations)
1. This is orthogonal to the point. Most regions *do* have a unified language for communication purposes, but their populations speak it *in addition* to their local language.
2. China is among the higher-IQ nations according to the "national IQ data" yet it features a lot of linguistic diversity, so even the point you're trying to make falls apart.
I don't want to beat the IQ point too hard because it's confounded to heck, but Mandarin has pretty good adoption in the higher IQ areas of China (central and the Eastern seaboard) and lower adoption in the lower IQ areas. I certainly don't want to push a 'one cause' model. But looking within China, adoption of Mandarin seems moderately well predicted by IQ in a relative sense. There's probably a good correlation with things like nutrition, industrialization, economic opportunity, etc.
That's just looking at a province-level map. There's also a pretty big divide between urban and rural areas in China, even within a province.
(I say this as someone who has taught English in China)
Do you mean they speak multiple languages approximately natively? First-language acquisition is hardcoded into the brain and is more or less unrelated to the processing needed for IQ tests. General intelligence varies a lot, but ability to understand grammatical rules necessary for communication varies very little (ability to understand grammatical rules for signalling prestige is a different thing). There are many instances of people with severe intellectual disabilities but normal language processing skills, and conversely people with high intelligence but disorders that make them unable to use language; for more detail read The Language Instinct or similar.
"Surely learning and being able to communicate in multiple languages requires a modicum of intelligence above the 75-to-90 scores reported by the "national IQ" studies"
Speaking multiple languages at a 16th percentile level by first world standards is hardly the same as speaking one language at a 99th percentile level by first world standards.
There's no such thing as "percentile level" for language acquisition; you're either able to function in a given language environment, or you're not. There *are* tests that assess your ability to function in increasingly "difficult" environments, such as the CEFR scale (A1 to C2) or the DLI grading but they do not use percentiles because ranking people relatively doesn't make sense, it's an absolute thing.
"There's no such thing as "percentile level" for language acquisition"
Sure there are; see the ACT and SAT.
Possibly illustrates that you shouldn't take population level IQ figures at face value as telling you anything very meaningful
They're meaningful.
Thank you for that detailed and informative response
Sure. If you want a slightly more meaningful one, compare Japan and Indonesia. When Japan had the same GDP per capita as a % of the U.S. Indonesia has now, it was making real progress in science. Today, despite having more than twice the population of Japan, Indonesia is a vast wasteland when it comes to scientific accomplishment (to such a degree that it's not even in the top 50 in the Nature Index): https://www.natureindex.com/annual-tables/2020/country/all
I don’t know enough to agree or disagree but a more useful comparison would be Singapore. It’s not only in the same area of the world, it started from a similar base point as Indonesia and even contains a microcosm of Indonesia within its borders with ethnic Malays. So just as Singapore has outpaced Indonesia so have the ethnic Singaporean Chinese outpaced ethnic Singaporean Malays, much to the chagrin of the Singaporean govt which has done so much to erase the differences.
"it started from a similar base point as Indonesia"
No it didn't; it was the richest part of Asia during the 1930s. Singapore is too small to extrapolate from, in my opinion.
I feel like this argument doesn't quite cut the way you want it to.
Suppose we assume that:
1) IQ in a population follows a normal distribution
2) A country's scientific advancement is driven by the number of high-IQ outliers produced.
3) Different ethnic groups have genetic differences that cause them to have different mean IQs.
In this world, I would expect the high IQ ethnicities to punch above their weight technologically, but I wouldn't expect them to totally dominate. Bigger populations just have more chances to roll the dice, even when those dice are loaded against them.
Also, Indonesia is quite ethnically diverse, and therefore very diverse genetically, so you'd expect a place like Indonesia to have a greater chance of coughing up occasional outliers than a place like Japan that has a lot less genetic diversity.
I think the historical record suggests a very different model of technological advancement: every once in a while a geographical zone will, for complex reasons, become a hotbed of scientific activity, and end up drawing lots of people into a mutually supportive web. This boom of technological developments eventually burns itself out, and the torch is passed to the next up-and-coming innovation zone. Japan was home to a post-war boom that has since largely fizzled out, with Chinese and Korean firms stepping in to pick things back up in that region (and meanwhile back in the states, the Bay Area is nearing the end of its explosive period).
The fact that Africa, home to large populations and significant human biodiversity, is so totally left behind in the global tech game, IMO suggests strongly that technological advancement is about a lot more than a gene pool's ability to cough up geniuses.
This sounds like a good argument, but like every argument in this space it is inconclusive.
It is completely plausible that urbanization/ the agricultural patterns in the big river basins created a selection pressure that led to the populations being much higher in the sort of intelligence that is useful for twenty-first century economic success.
Note, this is not what I think: What I think is that we don't know enough to be confindent.
The window for language learning is more or less "infancy to early childhood" for most of the population, and even in nations with "higher IQ", children of families or communities that speak multiple languages don't seem to have a problem with that. I don't believe in the "lower average IQ" thing, but I think the languages argument isn't a valid argument against it - that's exactly what you'd expect in countries where lots of people can get by in a single language.
Snarky answer: The smart people figured out early on that having everyone speak the same one or maybe two standard languages is more efficient than having everybody try to learn many languages, and then the smart people invented A: television and B: economies that could give every family a television set so that they could be exposed to the same 1-2 standard languages in early childhood.
Dialing back the snark, it's the economic part that is doing the heavy lifting there, and there are lots of reasons beyond average national IQ that a nation might not be able to afford to put a television set in every household.
Re: Georgia voting laws, I think the sole good pint made in the comment is about giving out water and food to people on line. A minor point as in who cares.
The rest of the comment seems like a hasty overreaction to the hasty overreaction by Democrats.
By far the most important point in the bill is taking away power form the Sec. of State. To use a purposefully bad pun, that trumps all.
Here's the NYT's point by point analysis. Admittedly, not objective politically, but has the merit of referencing text of the legislation
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/georgia-voting-law-annotated.html
And here's Derek Thompson in The Atlantic with a "pox on both houses" article.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/georgia-voting-rights-fiasco/618537/
What that article doesn't mention is the blindingly obvious fact that Georgia is a Biden state with two Democratic senators that is zooming left at a rate of roughly a 1 point margin per year.
I was very happy that Scott mentioned the podcast. Thank you Scott! A lot of the guests do seem to have an ACX connection.
Here is the latest with Bean https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/8312646-bean-on-battleships-and-much-else-besides
I find my interviewing technique is still pretty poor though I think I did best on the one about the role of plague and climate change in the fall of the Roman Empire. https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7554679-the-fate-of-rome-with-kyle-harper
The most popular one so far (by a multiple of 3) was with Alex Tabarrok (Scott has reviewed his book) He wrote a review of the Parasite that went against the standard view. It is a fun read and it is on the Marginal Revolution site here:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/the-gaslighting-of-parasite.html
If you have time for the podcast it is at:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/5262949-alex-tabarrok-versus-the-people-parasite-and-burning-reviewed
It doesn't say much more than the review but if you liked the film Burning you might enjoy the podcast too.
By the way if anyone can suggest good guests either with or without an ACX connection (and that I have a chance of reaching!) that would be really nice. Either in the comments or at my email: hogg dot russell at gmail dot com.
Thanks again Scott for the mention.
Wow. That Parasite review is so off base it’s genuinely sad.
*** Spoilers for Parasite (one of the best movies of the past ten years)***
If you haven’t already, go see Parasite. Don’t read any further until you have. Seriously, the movie is great. Don’t ruin it for yourself. Okay, here we go.
Bong Joon Ho does two brilliant things in Parasite. One is that he indicts the system and not rich people. A lesser artist would have made the rich couple the villains. Alex Taborrok is correct that that rich couple are not the villains. Taborrok misses that the capitalist system is the villain. Each character at all financial levels is stuck in their respective position in the system. The poor feed off of the rich and the rich feed off of the poor. Both are correct. Taborrok only sees one parasitic relationship.
The second brilliant piece of writing that sets Parasite above the typical upstairs/downstairs narrative is that Bong Joon Ho adds a sub-basement. This clearly expresses that the poor feed off of the poor as well as the rich. We often think (or are told) that capitalism isn’t a zero sum game. And it isn’t, as long as we only look at a section of it. Amazon has made Jeff Bezos wealthy, but it’s also brought a lot of value to millions and millions of people. Win-Win. Not zero-sum. Bong Joon Ho is suggesting that when we see that, we are only looking at a piece of the picture. We need to pull the camera back and see the whole picture.
The movie is suggesting that we’ve been brainwashed into believing that the system works and can lift everybody out of poverty. This is probably most clearly expressed by the son, at the end of the movie, believing that he will grow up to become rich and then rescue his father from the sub-basement prison his father is in.
And any thoughts on Burning? Which I preferred to Parasite.
I haven’t seen it yet. I’ll try to watch it this week and get back to you.
If you do please do get back to me. Will be very interested to hear.
Some updates on things I learned since making the Georgia voting law comment:
1) Although you can *vote* absentee with only a SSN, you cannot *request* the absentee ballot with only a SSN. People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address. This is burdensome enough that I now think it is reasonable to summarize the bill as saying you need an ID to vote absentee (even though you technically can get by with just a utility bill, paycheck, etc.).
2) Secretary of State Raffensberger clarified the new law will still permit nonpartisan groups to give unlabeled water bottles to poll workers, who can then distribute them. [1] I now feel more confident calling the claim that the law makes it illegal to distribute water "lacking important context."
3) Some people asked why existing voter intimidation laws didn't already ban political groups from distributing food or water at the polls. I think the answer is that they did, but in practice there were still issues because e.g. poll workers didn't realize this was illegal. See this comment [2] for some information about that.
4) I still overall feel that the law expands voting access, including in urban areas. However, it still might make sense to oppose it if you are very concerned about certain powers being stripped from the SoS and given to the legislature.
[1] https://www.onlineathens.com/story/news/2021/03/30/georgia-gov-kemp-voting-chief-raffensperger-defend-election-overhaul-law/4810602001/
[2] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-166#comment-1666144
I would love to have an actual lawyer explain how the text of the bill supports SoS Raffensbergers claim. I've read the actual text, and it sure didn't seem to me that it allowed regular people, without any connections to campaigns, from giving out food/water. It seemed to pretty clearly prevent anyone from giving out anything in any context. If there is some special legal reason this isn't the case, then the text of the law, to a lay person, completely obscures this point.
Also, I generally agree with claims that the effects of the bill are dramatically overblown by the media/Democrats. I think the bill won't actually do very much, but I also think that the impulses behind the bill are pretty reprehensible (also, all that comparisons to other states convince me of is that _lots_ of states have really really bad laws around voter access)
I am an actual lawyer. Raffensberger is full of shit. The text of the law applies to any "person... giving... food and drink... to an elector" within 25 feet of any voter standing in line. There is no exception for nonpartisan groups. Given how easy it would be to prohibit electioneering activity (while still enabling nonpartisan groups), I don't see any way to avoid the conclusion that this provision was included, at least in part, to make voting in crowded districts less pleasant.
I wish we had a functioning media which could investigate the question of whether partisan groups handing out partisan-labelled water bottles to voters waiting in line is actually something that has happened or just some theoretical possibility.
What I _would_ say is that if there's regularly voting queues long enough that people need provisions while waiting in them, then _that's_ the problem that should be getting solved, and not all these other ones. The insistence on using expensive voting machines which limit the number of people who can vote in parallel rather than simple pencil-and-paper ballots seems to be a cause of a lot of voting problems in the US.
Take a look at link [2] above -- there were some cases of politicians handing out water or pizza, and Raffensperger was already trying to crack down on this before the 2020 election.
I agree that shortening voting lines should be a priority, and I also think the new law makes some changes aimed at shortening lines, like breaking up precincts where wait times get longer than an hour.
I think the point is that you need to give the water to poll workers, for them to distribute.
For an object-level account of why someone might want prohibitions on distributing food and water, take a look at link [2] above.
On a less object-level, I want to note that Raffensberger is someone whom I -- and I think most other observers -- trust a lot. He's the one who stood up to Trump's demands to find 11,000 more votes, and part of the new law seems to be a petty swipe at him for sending out absentee ballot applications to all Georgians against the legislature's will. He's also criticized the parts of the law which strip powers from the SoS. So when he voices support for the other parts of the law, including the parts that prevent distribution of food and water at polling places, I'm inclined to believe that he's not "full of shit" and defending laws whose only purpose is to "make voting in crowded districts less pleasant." I'm inclined to believe that he honestly thinks the laws are good (though it's always possible he's wrong).
That's a pretty gullible position. Raffensberger is desperately trying to hang on to his career as a Republican politician. I do not think that makes him a credible source. Regardless, I actually read the law, and it says the opposite of what he's claiming. Maybe he means certain people won't be prosecuted, but he's just wrong about what the law says.
Raffensberger* is seeing the consequences of his* integrity. I doubt he* anticipated them back in December/January. It's certainly plausible to expect that, in any future scenario, his* updated expectations may produce different behaviors. Whether their intent or not, this certainly seems to be a consequence of the new law.
*Really, this applies not just to Raffensberger but Republican elected officials.
(For those following along, the part of the law we're discussing is Section 33, on page 21 here: https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20212022/201121 )
I feel like we're talking past each other. Paragraph (e) makes an exception for poll workers making water available from an unattended receptacle. So I think the point is that if some election observers think people look dehydrated waiting in long lines, they are free to buy some water bottles, give them to the poll workers, and then the poll workers can put the water bottles out on a table or whatever. That's what I'm interpreting Raffensberger's clarification to mean, and I see no contradiction with the text of the law.
Anyway, someone pointed out below that this is a non-politics thread, so we should probably stop discussing here. Feel free to comment on the original comment from last week if you'd like to continue.
You don't think that decreasing the number of dropboxes and artificially requiring them to be only accessible during the hours that polling stations are open will have a very obvious effect on people's ability to vote? And reducing the number of drop boxes and polling places in general?
Perhaps, but on the other hand surely it would provide a greater degree of security against ballot tampering/stuffing?
for which there is what evidence exactly?
What kind of evidence would you expect?
Some sort of divergence between local official results and local polling, or some example of someone getting caught doing something. If this is actually affecting results, you'd expect the former, and if this is common, you'd expect the latter.
The usual drop box for absentee ballots is a USPS box, of which there are thousands. “Drop boxes” outside polling stations would only come into play if you neglected to return your absentee ballot early enough for the mail. And installing, monitoring, and collecting a secure 24/7 temporary drop box away from a polling station seems a nontrivial challenge, for minimal gain.
Remember, the number of “drop boxes” in Georgia before 2020, and the number in the future had this law not passed, was zero.
Thanks, I was about to say this -- if the law were never passed (or if it were repealed now) then there wouldn't be any drop boxes at all.
Of course, you might still prefer for there to be even more drop boxes, or more accessible drop boxes. These are reasonable things to want. But I do think we should track the distinction between "this law is a too-small step in the right direction" and "this law is a big step in the wrong direction." Otherwise you end up punishing people for doing good things and rewarding them for doing nothing.
"People without an ID can still request an absentee ballot, but they need to upload a photo of a utility bill, paycheck, or some other document that shows their name or address."
I don't know if I'd call that voter suppression, though. In my previous job in local government, we required proof of residence to support applications, and one particular case was a pain because all they had as proof of independent residence was the mailing label from a mail order catalogue. Not good enough. Utility bills etc. were the standard.
So from that alone, I can't see the Georgian public service as being unreasonable, it sounds as if they are simply applying the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms.
I don't think I would call that voter suppression either, or at least I don't think it's any more restrictive than the rules in most other states.
I just wanted to flag that I now consider "you need an ID to vote absentee" as a fair summary of that part of the law, whereas I previously thought it was a dishonest summary.
Many people from a design background think that the kinds of standards that are commonplace when dealing with local government and requesting forms are citizen services suppression. Making people file taxes in order to get their child support would be an example.
This is yet another instance of politics-in-an-odd-numbered-open-thread. Please take this to an even-numbered open thread.
https://newsroom.niu.edu/2020/10/13/how-hard-is-it-to-vote-in-your-state/
I think I was somewhat surprised by this diagram. Unsurprisingly the state I liv sin is one where it's easy to vote, but I found myself surprised that it was hard to vote in NH.
Yeah, that is strange. As a college student in NH I believe I could same-day register to vote with just my student ID, so I got the impression it was very easy. Now I'm wondering if the process is significantly harder for non-students.
Note that the most convenient state, Oregon, exclusively does mail-in ballots.
There is a massive difference in ease of voting between "I have to go to a place on a specific time/day", and "I have a full 2 weeks to find an hour to go through a bit of mail at my convenience".
Someone who works a job and has to juggle children will struggle to find a good time to go to a polling place, but that same person might be able to spend 30 minutes at 10pm on a Friday filling in a ballot, and then just dropping it in the mail.
Oregon's mail-in ballots are sent to registered voters who have a confirmed address. This is quite different from mail-ins in other states that sent ballots to any name and address found anywhere on a government database. An Australian friend in California received ballots for three different people at his home. And mail-ins are just one problem. 1) some states also weakened or removed the need for signature checks, 2) many drop boxes have zero chain of custody on the way to the counting centers, 3) counts are not done with observers present etc. Further, Oregon is now considering mailing ballots to anyone with a drivers license at the same time they issue drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. There is no modern county in the world that engages in such reckless abandonment of basic election security. Not one. The American embrace of insecure voting in the last year is an incredibly approach that is guaranteed to erode trust in the process.
I've now realized this one's a no-politics thread. I disagree with the gist of your comment, but let's pick up the discussion on next week's thread, where politics is allowed.
Oops. This seems to be a recurring pattern.
Check out the chart of what they count as contributing to the cost of voting. Ask yourself if all of those things are clearly a bad idea if you care about the integrity of your state's vote.
Consider also that a lot of attitudes and habits in NH might contribute to an average NH resident not thinking that certain things are a hardship. For example, except in a few cities, there is not a lot of public transportation, and so most people have to drive and thus automatically have a driver's license on them. Also, large parts of the map have neither DSL nor cable, and residents there are not really looking forward to doing things online.
(Yes, I also think it's really easy to vote in NH, and I don't think I ever met anyone who thought it was hard.)
Yeah it seem like the metrics are designed for a certain set of circumstances that don’t match NH. Eg NH has lots of small polling places so lines are not bad and registering in person day-of is quick and easy, so there’s no need to do it online. Vs MA where I frequently failed to vote because I would move around the city to a different voting area, and you have to update your registration well ahead of voting day, and you can only *actually* do it online if you have an in-state ID card.
BTW you don’t actually need any ID to vote in NH, you can just sign an affidavit asserting you are who you are.
Coming from NH, this Georgia debacle about giving water to voters waiting in line to vote looks really strange. Personally, I don't think I ever had to wait long enough to as much as study my surroundings.
Consider: if, according to that study, it's hard to vote in NH, can we believe that other claims in it reflect reality?
That study has some serious issues, but I don't want to go into these in an odd-numbered thread.
I think when evaluating whether a state makes it easy to vote, you shouldn't be looking at the median *voter*, but something like the median *non*-voter or the median *marginal* voter. 90% of people do have drivers licenses, but somewhere between 5 and 10% of citizens in the United States don't. Something that's really easy for the average upper middle class person might be really hard for the person that might actually swing between voting and non-voting.
Looking at the typical non-voter will tell you what improvements you need to make to make voting more accessible. It does not tell you how accessible voting is in the state, or provide a useful basis for ranking across states.
In that case the statement of the problem should be up front in the article. I can't spare the time to read through the article and everything linked to it carefully enough, so I can't figure out what, if anything, the computed index is supposed to be predictive of. It's supposed to be descriptive of something called "cost of voting", but they don't seem to tell us for whom or how aggregated over the voting population.
The following claim is in one of the appendices: "In particular, and with considerable emphasis, scholars find the amount of time in advance of the election that one has to register to vote influences the likelihood of voting" (hurray, an actual meaningful result!) but I'm not seeing anything like this for the other measures they included, nor am I seeing any attempts to correlate the resulting index with any actual numbers. (I'm guessing that, had they actually made those attempts, the index wouldn't have included everything and the kitchen sink.)
Surprised by how closely it correlates to partisanship.
When practical purposes recede, partisanship can have greater determination. There's little evidence for these laws having any effect at all, making them a sort of symbolic security theater.
The fact that this is all based on rankings seems like it's next to worthless, as it gives no idea of the actual degree of difference.
Maybe Oregon is a voters utopia where merely thinking about your desired candidate automatically registers a vote in their favor, and Texas a dystopian hellscape where you've got to crawl under 6 feet of barbed wire to get to the polling booth.
Or maybe all states largely identical and it's just a small degree of difference separating them.
This article and map would look identical in both cases.
That description of voting in Oregon is not far off. Basically any contact with the state registers you to vote. The ballot and info book are mailed to you about two weeks early. You fill it out and drop it in a box whenever you feel like, and the boxes are like 2 miles away. For extra credit you can go to a web page to verify it's been counted. The last voting rights debates I heard were whether to include stamps for people who can't drive and don't have stamps laying around, and whether to allow people to vote while they are currently in jail.
I never missed an election in 15 years in California. I missed three or four elections in 7 years in Texas, because I didn't even know the election was happening until a week before, and couldn't be bothered to study up in those last few days, find out when it was happening, and go to a polling place.
I've never missed a *federal* election in Texas, but the fact that I, a relatively politically engaged and high status individual, have missed a significant fraction of elections suggests that it's really bad here.
I have several relatives on my dad's side who have been diagnosed with serious mental disorders. Between grandparents, dad, aunts, uncles, cousins, my siblings, and self, we’ve got 6 diagnoses of bipolar or schizoaffective disorder (five of whom have been institutionalized at some point) out of a sample size of 21.
The new Mrs. and I are eager to settle down and having fun family planning talks, so I am curious: What would the Biodeterminist’s Guide to Parenting suggest for reducing the chances that the family propensity for mental disorders materializes in our future kiddoes?
I know nothing about the biodeterminist guide but as someone who has lost three family members to schizophrenia and then suicide, I would do all you can to impress upon your kids the importance of avoiding drugs. It seems that psychotropic drug use + genetic predisposition was a trigger for two of the three.
It could be that they had a predisposition to seek out drugs.
I’m sorry for your loss. The anecdotes on my side are similar, and this is advice I practice. Even if the direction of the causal arrow is officially undetermined, it is just not worth the risk to me.
I've referenced the Living Well With Schizophrenia channel here before, and I should note that the woman behind that did a video about marijuana & schizophrenia. To her there was no question in her experience that it makes her psychosis significantly worse and this wasn't worth it. She didn't indicate any reluctance at giving it up either, in contrast to her pattern of fearing her own anti-psychotic medication. She's also currently pregnant with her first child and has discussed her decision to have one and the risks given the heritability of schizophrenia.
Here's the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCENqBB_xNax3mLX_WGLf2Lg/videos
I should have noted that she reported a 10% risk of her child having it given that she has it and her husband is not known to have any predisposition for it. If you are merely related to others who have it rather than having it yourself, it would presumably be significantly lower (though still above the base rate).
Thanks. Appreciate the link.
Start sooner rather than later. Increased paternal age increases the risk of schizophrenia. (Sry couldn’t paste the link from my phone but google it. There’s a study from 2001.)
Autism as well, probably a lot of different disorders due to accumulating genetic damage or whatever the mechanism is.
I'm not an expert, but I'd seriously consider a sperm bank.
There might be someone doing genetic counseling at your local hospital. They'll be able to tell you what you can get tested for, what your odds are of passing it along, and what else can be done to avoid it. They wouldn't know everything, but it's probably better than nothing.
Also don't know about the BGP, so this may not be the kind of advice you're looking for. But, having a high ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences Score) has a substantial correlation with both incidence and outcomes in severe mental illness, that is not due to genetics alone. (Unsurprisingly, it's thought to be G x E interactions.) Since some ACE events are not controllable, and I also assume you are not planning to abuse your kids, the only actionable recommendation I can think is to be vigilant about others' behavior around them. I think there's a sunnier way to think about this, though, which is that a having a childhood in a healthy home is a protective factor, and if you can swing that you're already doing a lot "right".
Seconding discouraging your kids from using cannabis, at the very least while they are minors, preferably until they age out of the critical window in young adulthood where SMI tends to emerge. The research is a bit more equivocal than the consensus that comes from clinicians and patients who have direct experience. But your family history especially lends to this recommendation, considering some folks are winding up further along the BD-SCZ continuum than others, and psychotic morbidity is correlated with poorer outcomes.
I'm sure you'll have thought of this yourself, but knowledge is power. If none of those six folks are you or immediate family, your kids' risk will be lower, but you also might not have as much experience with the clinical picture of bipolar/schizoaffective. Bipolar-type illness is progressive: it's hard to detangle cause and effect, but there's thought be a "kindling" process (a metaphor that's sort of borrowed from epilepsy, although the process could be in fact be physiologically related) whereby every mood episode you have increases the likelihood of further, more severe episodes. People who go on to develop bipolar often have recurring episodes of depression in childhood. If your kids experience mental health difficulties, expeditious treatment from informed professionals who are aware of the family history is probably a really good idea.
The bad news about bipolar is that it's highly heritable, but the good news is that it's highly treatable, and the sooner you catch it, the better. A bit of a discursion, but it's unfortunate that so much morbidity comes from lack of timely diagnosis and treatment, because the treatments are so effective (grading on a psychiatry curve). The other big issue, as you probably know, is treatment compliance.
I expect we'll have a better idea of how to prevent SMI in the coming years, so stay abreast of the research.
Thanks for the thoughts. Our family has a lot of super-smart individuals in it, so I think especially among the last generation there was a lot of denial and temptation to write off adolescent warning signs as part and parcel of so and so's brilliance/being misunderstood/something she will grow out of. Hopefully that's an area will be more attuned to.
It might sound kind of redundant to say that I like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocketlab, etc because they actually launch stuff into space, but before them a lot of space startups tended to follow a depressingly predictable pattern: they'd found a company with some minimal seed money, make a big press release saying they were going to do XYZ, and then hope to somehow use that attention to get the funding to see if they could actually do XYZ. It never worked.
There's still a few of those now, but they mostly just get ignored.
I've become a lot more pessimistic about the prospects for nuclear power over the past few years. It just can't seem to get past the burden of too-expensive upfront costs, not even with new reactor designs (the NuScale Power Plant is predictably going into cost overruns and delays, and it's looking like they've got a bootstrap problem with the "modular" idea - they need enough orders to make it profitable to build the module factory to meet those orders). If there is going to be any nuclear renaissance in the US, it will probably have to be built and operated by a US federal agency.
There is hope, not a lot, but some. First, the two in Georgia will be finished, they had bunches of troubles, two big ones were an incomplete design (the Chinese ones had a completely different secondary side) and trades that hadn't built nuclear in a long time and had lost the undemanding of nuclear standards. After these are done, the next two should be much faster and therefore cheaper.
There is some news of Southern Company, Bechtel, and Westinghouse building more in Poland. We'll see what happens. Turkey Point in Fl hasn't ruled out building but I haven't seen any news lately. We'll see when the ones in GA come online what they say, they don't have many good options to power Miami at the very end of the grid surrounded by ocean and swamp with a lot of hurricane risk.
SMRs will likely be built for no other reason than the military (Army) has wanted one for a very long time but after SL1 gave up for 50 years, but an SMR fills a need for them and the Govment will push hard to get it done. There will be problems getting the NRC to adapt the regulations to allow one crew to operate multiple reactors so it may never actually be used on the civilian side, but the military doesn't answer to the NRC, even Naval Reactors have a different regulatory body obviously called Naval Reactors or NR.
I hope they work out.
I wonder about the Army SMRs. If they can get them small and compact enough to be flown in by plane (or carried by helicopter or truck) while generating a few megawatts of electrical power, they'd be tremendously useful. My only real concern would be the politics of allied governments being willing to support having them in their territory, plus the greater danger in having to potentially leave them behind in a hurry.
It'd be a lot easier and simpler to make those if they could use Highly Enriched Uranium or Plutonium-239 as fuel. HEU probably is too dangerous to use out in the field besides in ships or (obviously) nuclear weapons, because if you've stolen some putting together a "gun-type" nuclear weapon isn't tremendously difficult. But Plutonium-239 actually would be pretty safe - you need an "implosion-type" nuclear weapon to actually use it, and that's not something a terrorist group is going to put together.
Not to mention that even weapons-grade plutonium isn't weapons-grade anymore after it's been in a reactor for a few weeks - 240Pu contamination is treated as irreversible even by state-level actors. I'm not saying a terrorist group wouldn't appreciate having a free nuclear reactor - to state the obvious, they need electricity too, and also if you can manage to dust it plutonium's a decent chemical/radiological weapon - but you're not making a nuke with that even if you actually have both the know-how and manufacturing precision to construct a Swan.
I'm not sure that you'd find it useless after that short a time. A couple weeks was typical at Hanford during breeding, and while they were trying to get as much Pu 239 as they could, they probably weren't pushing it to the limits of possibility. Unless you're thinking of things like the low-burnup Pu they used in the W80-1.
That's the 239Pu obtained from a couple of weeks of burning uranium (which is the equivalent of a bit under one week of burning the Pu as far as 240Pu contamination goes - 240Pu production is proportional to the amount of 239Pu that exists in the fuel, and 239Np has a 2.4-day half-life). I'm saying that if you take your bred 239Pu (presumably reprocessed from that already) and then use that as fuel for your mini-reactor, after a few weeks in the latter it's going to be rather significantly more contaminated (after 3 weeks you'd have ~quintupled your chance of predetonation fizzle).
I mean, admittedly I'm not sure of the exact numbers on how close they cut it in actual fission primaries, so you might still have a decent chance of it going off.
Nuclear 'anything' is unreasonably feared and hated in the US. Until that changes nuclear power gets nothing. I was listening to B. Weinstein's podcast and he said he wouldn't eat fish from the pacific ocean, because you could see traces of Fukushima in the radioactivity of the fish. Assuming that's true, what's the banana equivalent dose? (https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/03/19/radiation-chart/)
I don't think this is a US thing. I think it's pretty universal, except maybe in France.
https://scitechdaily.com/sunlight-linked-with-lower-covid-19-deaths-and-not-because-of-vitamin-d/
I think this could confuse matters because some people would be getting more of their vitamin D from sunlight and also getting their nitric oxide, while other people would just be getting their vitamin D from supplements.
All the studies are confusing, but what I took away from them was that *if* you are deficient in Vitamin D *and* have other problems (old, fat, etc.) *and* manage to catch Covid-19, *then* supplementation helps (ideally before you get infected) because it's bringing you back up to where you should be with regards to Vitamin D levels, and Vitamin D has complicated role in blood pressure regulation, so having better blood pressure control etc. helps recovery from Covid-19, rather than Vitamin D *directly* affecting Covid-19.
I have no idea if that shakes out to "Vitamin D cures Covid" or not.
There was a comment with an alternative hypothesis about sunlight on an earlier open thread:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-160#comment-1328941
Georgia will be a blue state with or without the law; I don't even understand the hubbub. Rich suburbs used to be bastions of voter ID back in 2012; why do you guys think big companies have switched to opposing it now?
After reading https://www.270towin.com/states/Georgia, I think it's likely that Georgia will vote for a Republican presidential candidate in the 2024 election. Am I right that you predict differently?
Yes.
Georgia votes 4 points redder than the country. I don't think it makes sense to call it a "blue state".
I saw a lot of comments about the most recent book review writer's style being similar to Scott's. I realize that these comments are meant as compliments, but they are a bit patronizing. This writer had very much his/her own voice and style. There are infinite ways to combine humor, insight, and coherence. Perhaps we can take it easy on the Scott "stan"-ing. (Aside: Love you SA. Huge fan.)
Neither post had a writing style similar to Scott.
They were less like Scott than Scott's fiction is like Scott's non-fiction.
Agreed.
I disagree, I think they were both a bit too close to Scott than I'd prefer. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but things like the tendency to start with a long digression before actually discussing the point, and a tendency towards a narrative of personal curiosity (e.g. "the book said X, but I thought Y, so I looked it up in another place and couldn't figure it out one way or the other") seem rather Scott-ish in style (probably a bad choice of words). Other things about the flow, the structure, and the authorial voice in both reviews felt like someone trying to imitate Scott.
I understand the temptation, in a Slate Star Codex book review competition, to write something that sounds like a Slate Star Codex book review, but I do hope that people are thinking for themselves.
For one thing, both were too long to be written by Scott. Or rather, they had too many unnecessary words. One of the things I appreciate the most about Scott's writing is his efficiency. His posts (even his very long ones) are almost never longer than they need to be.
Noah Smith https://twitter.com/Noahpinion did a post on the "weeb" subculture that would probably be of interest to this community https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/weebs
It was a very sweet article! Matching the subject matter. And specific enough to convince me to relax reflexively lumping all [nation-o]philes together.
Just for reference to anyone reading this and curious, the reason 4chan adopted weeaboo is because a word filter was put in place to automatically turn "wapanese" into weeaboo, and eventually it stuck. This is the only filter that really seems to have become a permanent part of the lexicon, although judging by some discord groups, they may have successfully introduced "desu" as an alternative to tbh.
As someone who experienced near-zero success in my dating life up until my mid-20s, I recently realized that my problem was in not realizing what date actually entails and how it is structured. For anyone who currently has similar struggles, I attempted to figure out first date workflow using backwards induction here.
https://www.see-elegance.com/post/dating-by-induction
I'm new at blogging so I welcome any feedback.
You made me curious about the structure and mechanics of your "date", but there were only a few vague sentences about that. I think if you retitled the article as "How to get laid on the first date, often", it would be more on the money.
Yes, you're right, there are a lot of points I could go deeper in, and I plan to populate this article with hyperlinks to more focused articles later on. Which particular step you would be more interested in?
If this is working for you then I'm glad, but I think that overthinking and overintellectualising romantic interactions is what tends to cause intelligent men to be very bad at them.
It's like trying to catch a ball by doing the mathematics in your head to figure out the exact angles that your shoulders, elbows and wrists need to reach; it'll never work and the ball will just sail past. Instead, you catch a ball by instinct and practice.
If you have trouble turning off the intellectualising-and-systematising part of your brain I recommend booze.
It's definitely true that instinct and practice are important components of being good at dating, and a major problem I see in my less lucky friends is that they simply don't get enough practice to train an instinct of how and when to act. My hope is that by breaking down the whole process into substages, people could pinpoint the exact stage they are stuck on, and focus on finding solutions. To continue your analogy, "You should become better at baseball by practice" is not a very useful advice, but "you seem to be bad at catching balls, you should work more on that" is more actionable.
At the risk of reviving an old argument, I think this leaves out several things that many inexperienced interested-in-women nerds would find to be the hardest parts. These could perhaps be grouped together as "conveying that one is interested" -- things like, acting flirtatious, appropriate use of touch, and the actual act of asking someone on a date.
Yes, I would be interested to write a more in-depth guide on the topic of flirting if I can figure out how to write it in a way that doesn't make me look like a super cringey PUA dude. It's really easy to come off as distasteful when talking about that.
Huh, OK I read that. Well first I'm an old fart (62) and I want to suggest, that if the purpose is to find a 'life partner', then just be yourself. I tried online dating for a bit, but I found church (UU) to be a better place to find people I might like. If not church, then the gym, college, workplace adjacent, some other club.
Thank you for the suggestion, George! I'll keep it in mind until I hit my sixties :)
You've taken some common sense and systematized it like a true rationalist.
You have defined sex as an indication of a fulfilling date. "But to keep things simple and easily defined, I will talk about sex as a desired outcome. Simply put, if someone's date ends with consensual sex, it's hard to call it an unfulfilling date."
I don't like these types of "How to get sex from women" posts/videos because people confuse it for how to get women. You have made good date as your goal and indicated sex as the indication of a good date. To me, a good first date wouldn't involve having sex with my date because my date would be the type to refuse that. Dates should be for forming relationships mostly, not one-time fun. You are optimizing for a certain type of woman. And I wouldn't ever recommend someone I know date you because you are the type of guy to write a blog post about how to systematize sleeping with women on the first date.
This point seems contradictory to using sex as an indicator rather than the goal: "don't drag the date for too long"
Thank you for the feedback. Indeed, I have poorly worded the point about "dragging the date for too long". It's certainly great if two people find genuine connection, stay up all night discussing their favorite topics and so on. I was, however, trying to gesture at another failure point I see my friends (and past self) make: misjudging the pacing of the date. I shudder to remember the first few dates I had, where we met in one place, had food at the second, walked along the third location, all while conversation gradually died off. Then repeated that on the second date, the third date, all that without even attempting to hold my date's hand or verbally flirt in any way. That was such a bore, and I'm happy I now know what to do in these situations. Certainly someone could still misjudge the pacing even if sex is not his goal on a date! And looking at myself and my shy male nerd friends, they are more likely to misjudge the pacing of the date on the slower side.
Speaking about sex, I'm at a loss how to clearly get my point across that backwards induction can be carried from any preferred dating milestone, not just sex. I wrote two paragraphs about how it's perfectly okay to have more conservative goals such as kissing or even just pleasant discussion, yet my post still reads as "How to get sex from women" type. Perhaps you could suggest how to reword it so that it's clear that not having sex if you don't want it is also okay?
I'm also not a big fan of categorizing all sex-positive women as "a certain type", this feels a bit like slut shaming to me. I'd struggle to fit all the partners I had into a single category, they range from fashionable instagram models to geeky programmers, and from one-night stands to FWB and even those who indicated they would be happy with a relationship, so I don't see the basis behind "one-time fun" comment. And even if that was the case, if a man has an easy time finding "one-time fun" dates, do you genuinely believe he'd struggle to find a relationship if he wanted to?
I think that I was harsh in my wording and you were kind in your response. I should have put things a little more kindly. I apologize for that. Not good communication on my part.
Paragraph #1: Makes sense to me in that context.
Paragraph #2: You are right. You could use this method with different goals. I was critiquing this specific use. I have a different view of a good date and whether or not it should involve sex at the end than you but not a specific issue with the method.
Paragraph #3: I did not use the term slut but I am definitely insinuating that the characteristics and nature of people with many sex partners are different from that of those with few on average. You can always find different people who are promiscuous, of course. There is some trade-offs involved. The type of man or woman who likes to have sex with lots of different people is usually the type of man or woman to be less able or willing to form a stable relationship. If a man is good at sleeping with women, he is probably able to find a woman to be his girlfriend. The type of girlfriend he attracts is usually less suitable for being a girlfriend though. This is all on average and is a tendency, exceptions exist.
I don't believe people should sleep around so much. I don't think it's good for them or society on an emotional level. However, I'm not a prude. I don't think we are going to see eye-to-eye on this because it's largely driven by personality differences probably.
Which movies deserve to be remade because they had great plots but suffered from poor execution at the hands of directors, actors, or stingy studio execs?
I think "Fire in the Sky" should be remade because the depiction of the alien abduction is almost totally different from what the abductee claimed (interesting he let the project go forward with so little personal involvement).
"The Believer," which was about a Neo-Nazi who was secretly Jewish, was a fascinating concept, but the execution was bad, especially in the final act.
I wouldn't mind seeing Lynch try making Dune again.
a new dune is out in october (not by Lynch)
Huh, I think Dune is one of the best adaptions I've seen. Starship Troopers was disappointing.
In spite of its divergence from the novel, Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" is a great movie in its own right. Only a person with his unique background and perspective could draw such uncanny parallels between modern American and Nazi society.
That said, there should be a remake that is faithful to the novel. Call it "Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers."
I probably would like ST the movie more if I hadn't loved the book as a kid/ young adult. Speaking of YA Heinlein "The Red Planet" would make a great Lucas style movie... keep all the dialog.. and include the alien sex stuff.
(Which when cut ruins the theme of the book.)
Probably cheating to say "most book adaptations" but it feels like it.
I think one that stands out to me is that Ender's Game actually got a lot of things pretty right, but really struggled to fit the book's plot into a single movie - I know "multi-part movies" is somewhat incendiary, but I think it would have worked well in this case - the first movie could have focused on Battle School and the second on Command School.
Another big problem with the Ender's Game movie was that it insisted on constantly foreshadowing what is supposed to be a twist ending...
8 Million Ways To Die (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Million_Ways_to_Die). Excellent book, terrible movie.
battlefield earth
The Most Dangerous Game was butchered in film; I liked the greyness of the original Rainsford and Zaroff.
It would be great if someone finally made a good Punisher movie.
I think "Robocop 2" and "Robocop 3" should be remade. Again, there should be two, two-hour movies, but filmed back-to-back and with the same cast. This time, they should stick to Frank Miller's original script. Both movies must be rated R.
https://www.cbr.com/frank-miller-robocop-sequel/
We get movie remakes but I've never heard of a book remake. Do they exist?
The one I'd nominate for that was Peter F. Hamilton's "Pandora's Star" and its sequel. The plot-line is fantastic (if you want a space opera), the pacing is good and the writing is serviceable but just not great. Dialogue and descriptions of women were sometimes embarrassingly bad. I don't consider myself picking with these things but it really stood out. It feels dated even though being not that old (2004). I strongly got the impression that the author thought he was writing Strong Female Characters when really he was doing the opposite (one is genetically modified to not have normal emotions, the other two succeed via their inheritance and sleeping with the right people). The descriptions of one of the women are classic /r/menwritingwomen cringe material.
I don't know about a "great plot", but Jupiter Ascending always struck me as a movie that had a lot of potential if it had been a film trilogy with one or two rewriting passes from people besides the Watchowskis.
I mean, a girl who is the reincarnation of an alien space vampire queen and inherits Earth while dealing with the children of the woman she's a reincarnation of has such promise, it's a shame that it ended up the way it did.
Someone showed me the Youtube channel "World of Wonder" ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUUUpaMp8DV6KUOfQwoIiLg ) the other day and it reminded me of a video I'm pretty sure was posted on Slate Star Codex, probably in a links post some years ago. I don't remember much about the video but it was a transsexual youtuber doing comedy. Might even have been one of the hosts on that channel. I remember too little to find it by searching, which bugs me. Does anyone now which video this was?
We have some fans of Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) here, it was likely one of hers. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNvsIonJdJ5E4EXMa65VYpA
Yes, this has to be the one. I recognize the style. Thanks!
**Science fiction books thread**
1) Vernor Vinge, despite being probably one of the most influential scifi authors in history, and the originator of the term "singularity" isn't talked about very much these days. I reread A Deepness in The Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep recently and they both hold up extremely well, containing a lot more density of interesting ideas than many modern books. The novella True Names is one of the foundational books of cyberpunk, and has a bit of a case of zeerust, but is quite interesting as a historical artefact.
2) I also recently read A Memory Called Empire and greatly enjoyed it. Its more on the social scifi side than hard scifi, but probably the first book I've read that really gives a good intuitive sense of what is meant by cultural imperialism, and the mixture of positive and negative emotions one feels towards a dominant culture. Also using Mayan cultural tropes in a scifi setting, without it being a gratuitous human sacrifices and scary rituals caricature, is very interesting.
3) Have been thinking a lot about how shared universes deal with inconsistent canon, and the general problems of having multiple authors play in one setting. Some franchises like star wars have responded by very strictly defining what is and isn't canon, and changing that over time as new things come out, leading to fractured canon. Others like star trek or marvel use alternate universes liberally. Or with something like Warhammer 40k they take the attitude that everything is being written from an in universe perspective, so any inaccuracies are the result of unreliable narrators, misinformation, etc. Are there any approaches I've missed? What do people think of the pros and cons of the different approaches.
x) Add your own subthreads about interesting scifi books below
Two weird ones come to mind-- EE Smith and Olaf Stapledon.
Stapledon's _Last and First Men_ is also a big ideas book, and then the ideas get even bigger in Star Maker.
I've heard good things about Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer, but I haven't actually read it yet (my own book club will be starting it in a couple weeks).
Liu Cixin, The Three Body Problem and its sequels - big ideas SF and really different from everything else on your list.
Iain M. Banks would be my suggestion. Use of Weapons or The Player of Games I think are the best intros to his Culture series.
It's a good choice and you're very welcome!
I don't really like most of the original Culture cycle (to the point that I haven't read the continuation). 5 of 7 are shaggy dogs, and 3 of 7 (Use of Weapons, State of the Art, Inversions) reek of True Art.
If someone likes shaggy dogs and True Art, then sure, it's a great rec. But while I'd recommend Excession to anyone who likes SF, the others are very much conditional on that.
Louis M. Bujold is a fav of mine. She's more romantic these days and much less space opera. But maybe "Shards of Honor" of "The Warrior's Apprentice"? And a second vote for E.E. Smith, who in my mind sorta defines the space opera. "Skylark of Space" maybe?
If "Big Idea SF" is what you want, you should give her 'Neuromancer' by William Gibson.
You already have Brin on the list, but I would have suggested 'Earth' rather than 'Existence'.
I will second the suggestion for Ada Palmer's 'Too Like the Lightning' and Iain M. Banks 'Use of Weapons' (or 'Look to Windward'.)
3) There's also the King Arthur approach: countless authors, none of whom cared about continuity with each other, even though most of them pretended they were writing history. (I get the impression comic books do this too, except they make up excuses to justify it.)
James Bond movies are my favourite example of this kind of continuity.
How is James Bond young in 2006 when he was also young in 1963? Is he English or Scottish? Is he or is he not a widower? Shut up and look at the car chase!
The theory I always heard is that 007 and the name "James Bond" are merely titles and the agents who use them have lifespans measured in months.
I've heard that some of the movies were made with that theory in mind and some weren't.
My favorite theory is that 007 isn't a real spy at all; he's there to distract the enemy from the real spies doing realistic, boring spy work. The crazy villains serve the USSR in the same way.
That sounds like a good movie premise.
That was rather explicitly the premise of the 1967 version of "Casino Royale". David Niven played the original, long-retired Bond, and more actors and actresses(*) than I can count played subsequent Bonds. There might have been a gem of a good idea in that, but the execution was horribly botched.
And I've seen it done several times since, but only in parodies and deconstructions. I don't think any of the canonical films support it at all; the most that can be said is that they don't explicitly rule it out. And I think the running gag of Moneypenny's longstanding crush on Bond doesn't really work in this context. But as a deconstruction, particularly of the films, it's an obvious and effective route to take.
[*] Including Ursula Andress, which means she's the only performer to pull off the Bond Girl Hat Trick: Playing the first literary Bond Girl (Vesper Lynd), first cinematic Bond Girl (Honey Rider), and James Bond "himself" (Vesper Lynd after promotion).
My impression is that comics typically have one "main" timeline and then a bunch of "what if" timelines to explore other takes on the characters. These what-ifs can be one-shots, alternate universes, or more elaborate things like the Ultimate Marvel series, which was basically a complete reboot separated from the existing canon.
Every so often, someone will realize there are too many damn alternate timelines and it's making it hard for new readers to get into the hobby, so they'll have some sort of big crossover event. For longtime fans, it's a chance to see all the continuity finally come to a head, for newcomers, a chance to wrap up all the dangling plot threads so the series can get a fresh start.
I suspect the reason Vinge isn't talked about much is because lately people have mistaken 'Dystopia' for 'serious and thoughtful and realistic'.
It's the biggest thing that bugs me about the otherwise fun Jean le Flambeur novels. The Sobornost's goals and views toward mind uploading make no sense if they're willing to heap suffering on copies. Part of me wonders if he just thought nobody would take it seriously if it didn't have some dystopia thrown in.
I think a more obvious reason is just that he hasn't released a new book in ten years.
I first wrote this post in the subreddit where it was really well received and linked to in a number of other places, so I converted it into a blog, which I thought people on here would be interested in as well.
https://danfrank.ca/how-a-basketball-statistic-changed-how-i-see-the-world/
The article describes how a basketball statistic changed how I see the world. It's a meditation on the relationship between optimization and metrics, Goodhart's law and group dynamics.
I hope you enjoy!
Something I wrote on a peculiar form of OCD. Be warned, it's a fairly intense read.
https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/harm-ocd-a-brief-introduction
Interesting read! As someone without mental illness, the closest thing to this kind of intrusive thought I had is "Call of the Void" I experience when standing at great heights and feeling a little voice inside my head telling me I could easily jump to my death.
Yep. Imagine call of the void, but you can't get it out of your head, and you're not sure whether you'll actually do it. Best way too describe it.
Thanks for writing this. It reminded me of Pamela Hobart's earlier essay *How OCD Prepared Me for the Invasive Thoughts of Motherhood* (https://medium.com/@amelapay/how-ocd-prepared-me-for-the-intrusive-thoughts-of-motherhood-7f1c5ab4f81c). Curious to know what you think of that?
Broadly agree with it
Thank you for this. Here's a relevant question that bothers me. It's good to know that people with this problem are perfectly harmless and won't do any of these things when in their right mind, but will this still be the case when they are not - e.g. if they are on drugs, if they are victims of steroid psychosis, a stroke, or dementia?
My understanding is that there are no documented cases of anyone with harm OCD or any similar form of OCD acting out their fears.
I'm not sure why, but I would take a guess based on research and opinions I've seen as to why. Generally speaking the disorders you mention don't make people suddenly want to do things they previously desperately wanted not to do. Instead they make fail to recognize that barriers exist to their actions. Even if you don't understand what the consequences of, say, attacking someone are, due to steroid psychosis, this won't make you attack someone unless, on some level, you want to attack them.
A psychologist once gave me the following example. Alcohol might release the inhibitions stopping you from sleeping with your friend's partner, but if you ingenue have absolutely zero interest in sleeping with your friend's partner, you still won't do it. Drugs etc. can remove inhibition, but not create motivation ex nihilo.
*but if you genuinely have...
Thank you for the explanation. It's very helpful.
One possible concern is that there's probably not a lot of data on these things, because generally people probably don't want to go on record reporting harm OCD. Also, alcohol and drugs are not quite the same situation as the other problems I mentioned, so perhaps the explanation does not apply.
Thanks so much for sharing this. A very enlightening piece.
Hasn’t ivermectin gotten enough buzz to turn your analytical attention in that direction?
I'm sorry, every time I read anything about ivermectin I immediately think of cattle drench because of years of these kinds of ads on the radio and telly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyVnidd9_nU
I'm trying to get more knowledgable about philosophy, but having a tough time, especially with the jargon. Reading the articles on wikipedia makes my brain hurt and my eyes glaze over - that's over my head. I should try Philosophy For Dummies. Having trouble understanding the term 'qualia', maybe because Dennett's argument that the concept is incoherent is correct. Hoping y'all can help with my questions. Here's my thought experiment. It's not like the bogus ones like the Chinese room and the trolley problem - this one could actually be done, but we don't need to. Pluck a guitar string to produce a note, which you hear. The ineffable essence of your perception is a quale, yes? Call it quale 1. Pluck a second time, and you hear the same thing. Do we now have 2 different qualia, or are there 2 instances of the same quale? Now pluck it again, this time lightly touching the string at the halfway point to produce the first harmonic overtone. You hear a tone an octave higher, so that's a different quale, yes? Call it quale 3. Now that higher pitch was contained in the sound from the first pluck, but you didn't perceive it because the fundamental pitch is louder. So is quale 3 contained in quale 1? Now that you've heard that octave higher overtone, you can listen for it and do pluck #4, which is identical to plucks 1 & 2. But being primed and motivated to listen for it, you will now perceive it. So even though the sensory input is the same we have a different quale, yes? Alternate phrasing - are qualia dependent on the perceiver's attitude and intention?
You forgot the most important question: how many qualia can dance on the head of a pin?
Honestly I don't know, I find the whole "qualia" debate to be one of the most pointlessly annoying dead-ends of 20th-21st century analytic philosophy.
If we must discuss mental experiences in terms of qualia, though, I would say that each quale is a unique experience. Quale 1 and quale 2 are different qualia, even if they're as similar as two qualia can possibly be.
Quale 3 does not contain any other qualia because qualia don't "contain" other qualia; allowing qualia to contain other qualia doesn't seem like it's going to make the concept of qualia any better, it's just going to lead to further pointless questions.
I think any sensible sort of definition of a quale needs to take into account the perceiver's attitude and intention and everything else about the perceiver's mental state at the particular moment of the stimulus.
When people talk about qualia, they are generally talking about the raw, in-the-moment experience. So like, imagine if you turn on a tape recorder and then play the same note three times. If you analyzed the waveform, you would see that it peaks three times. Saying that it is the "same" note is going up an extra level of abstraction - it is noting that the there are important similarities between the three sounds that were recorded. That's a level of abstraction too high for qualia. You have to have three raw experiences first in order to compare them and see that they were similar in important ways.
Not a philosopher, but I think that the simple answer to your question is yes.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the best source I know of for an amateur to learn philosophy. Here is their article on qualia:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/
My favorite example of qualia involves colorblindness. Consider someone whose eyes do not distinguish red and green. He then receives some glasses with a filter that allow green light to pass but not red. By wearing or removing the glasses, he can now distinguish between red and green. [1] Functionally, he can do anything a non-colorblind person can do: he can pass any test designed to identify red-green colorblindness. But has he really experienced red?
[1] I'm sure that actual glasses designed to correct for red-green colorblindness are more sophisticated than this.
The whole frame of your question I think misses the point of qualia as a concept. Your frame is something like "Given that everything is external and objective (and thus transitive, comparable, whatever), <insert your question>" -- but that given is not a given.
Qualia is like starting with "Suppose there is some irreducible, basically incomparable raw material of subjectivity--let's call that raw material Qualia."
So yeah, the objective characteristics of a perceived signal are only secondarily related to the qualia per se. And yes, all qualia cannot be untied from the subject's internal state, so attitudes and intentions definitely affect what qualia arises from outside input.
I think the standard view, for people who believe in qualia, is that yes, they are dependent on attitude and intention, but quale 3 is not contained in quale 2, unless a person has a really weird experience of sound, so that they perceive the overtones as distinct simultaneous experiences (which might be how we perceive someone speaking and background music that go on at the same time).
I'll repeat the recommendation for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It might be pretty jargon-filled as well, but it's more often written by someone who has at least taught the material, rather than by a student that has just learned it.
Thanx for suggesting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Just glanced at it and it looks like not-quite-so-far-over-my-head. Will give it a try.
I can’t wrap my brain around the fact that Marvel put out a Captain America issue where they used Jordan Peterson’s likeness as the “nazi agent Adolf Hitler protege” villain Red Skull. Is this kind of thing typical in comics or is this just a sign of the times and how crazy it’s got?
Can you point me to where JP's likeness was used? The only related thing that I saw was that in one of the issues the Red Skull has a youtube channel, and on the background of one of the videos there was a sign that said "10 rules for life".
Was there something else?
They also have "Chaos and Order" on the same panel, which is what clinches it for me that the comic is referring to Peterson.
Speaking to history, Superman famously spent a fair amount of time beating up the KKK at a time in American history when the KKK was politically significant. I think Captain America punched Hitler even before the US entered WWII (and when Nazi sympathy was a fringe but not unheard of view). I'm not like a huge comics scholar, but there's a pretty rich tradition of comics commenting on the politics of the day.
When you hire Ta-Nehisi Coates to write a comic, you get . . . Ta-Nehisi Coates writing a comic. Whether it's crazy or not depends on your point of view. I'm given to understand that Marvel has long been the political comic company, with Professor X and Magneto representing the Martin Luther King Jr vs Malcolm X dynamic of US race relations in the 60s and the original storyline for Civil War being about the War on Terror and Steve Rodgers rejecting it while Tony Stark embraced it, but I don't really read the comics so I've only heard these things at second hand.
Eh, these sorts of political potshots are nothing new for comics in general. Captain America once went up against a terrorist organization that was secretly led by a thinly-veiled version of Richard Nixon. DC Comics gave us G. Gordon Godfree AKA Glorious Godfrey, a sort of evangelist of evil, that was based on Billy Graham and named after Nixon operative G. Gordon Libby.
Not only did he go up against Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was revealed to be the head of an evil conspiracy within the United States government, and committed suicide in the Oval Office after being unmasked by Captain America, who was so disillusioned by the experience he resigned as Captain America.
This story came out in 1974, when Watergate was big news, but Nixon had not yet resigned.
Marvel has never been particularly shy about politics, especially not in Captain America comics. One of the comics inspirations for the current storyline on the current Marvel TV series 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier' was a story from a few years back where it was revealed that before the super-soldier program that created Captain America, the government tested the serum out on hundreds of black soldiers first to see if any of them would survive; one of them did, and became a black supersoldier who was mistreated by the military and the government and kept a state secret.
For that matter, the original Captain America comic featured him punching Hitler in the face on the cover - in March of 1941, when America had not yet entered the war, and whether or not we should do so was still a topic of political debate.
In other words, a comic where the Red Skull is radicalizing youths on Youtube and they throw in a jab at Jordan Peterson isn't exactly the height of politics in a Captain America comic.
What are some productive activities/hobbies that don't require much energy, travel, time, or planning to do?
(That is the real question; if you have an answer, you can feel free to share it and ignore the following convoluted digression. It's sort of "The Straw Vulcan's Case for Trying to be an Extreme Normie.")
That is, (at least it seems to me) activities that have some combination of going outside, taking risks, tangible accomplishments, using practical skills that you can demonstrate to others, physical activity, and developing friendships with other people, like hang gliding, playing tennis, and dancing, are highly valued by society. This in contrast to consumption activities like watching movies and television, reading books, newspapers, and blogs, and playing video games, which are typically solitary, sedentary, indoors, and don't require taking risks or demonstrating skills, and which I think are not highly respected by society.
Now, I, personally, am a nerd and a dork and much prefer the latter sort of activity. But I also recognize that there's, unfortunately, no percentage in being a nerd, unless it's directly related to advancing your job/career. There's usually just no benefit beyond momentary pleasure to using your scarce time and memory to learn about fictional worlds or abstract subjects like politics or science beyond their narrow bearing on your particular life. (Again, unless learning about them is part of your job and thus related to acquiring resources and status.) And there's nothing wrong with pleasure, but presumably it would simply be objectively better, if possible, to do something instead that is both enjoyable *and* advantageous to you, e.g. going bowling with your friends.
However, many of these ceteris paribus superior activities that I can think of involve nontrivial energy, travel, time, and planning to do. And those things are obviously in limited and diminishing supply as you develop a career, get married, and have children. It's thus often easy, after a long day at work, to just collapse onto the sofa and watch TV or play video games. So, I want to develop as habits positive activities that account for this---the fact that in the future I know that I'll often be tired and unwilling/unable to do much traveling/coordination. What are some things that are only, at most, slightly more effortful and complicated than watching TV, but that are still reasonably enjoyable, relaxing, productive, and make your future self glad that you did them?
One thing I wish I had done before I had children was join a cycling group. Depending on where you live, it’s pretty easy to find a group of bicyclists that rides weekly or so at any skill level. On top of the social aspect and exercise, you get to know your city or region more intimately than if driving is your sole means of transportation. As I said, I never joined a group, but I started exploring Pittsburgh by bike about 5 years after I moved to the city, and it completely changed my relationship with the city. I’m now in the suburbs and have only ridden my bike a handful of times in the last five years, but I miss it tremendously.
+1
Guitar (nylon string). Its the easiest instrument this side of a triangle, you can learn from youtube and static diagrams, you don't have to sing, noodling quickly becomes mindless and relaxing, and you can pretty quickly achieve a pleasant sound if you have restraint and a tiny bit of good taste (if not you might make something interesting but that's not what we're going for)
I think recorder is easier than guitar.
Recorder is an easy instrument to learn to pick out a tune on, but you will sound terrible and nobody will be willing to listen to you.
Guitar is the easiest instrument to actually sound _good_ on. A couple of months' practice and you too can be plucking the chords to Wonderwall in the back of your van.
It's probable that what is easy for one person is not so easy for another. Perhaps enough breath control and dexterity to make pleasant sounds on a recorder came naturally to me, while guitar made more demands (hand strength? reach?) so I gave up on it.
I blame my small hands for my giving up on the guitar. I bought my daughter a ukulele.
> Guitar (nylon string). Its the easiest instrument this side of a triangle
Piano is also pretty easy to figure out how to play. (Source: am piano player.)
I believe you as far as technical stuff goes, but does piano fit in your life when you feel drained? im talking easy like, exhausted slouched on the couch with your feet on the coffee table and your mouth full of chips, and the poor disrespected guitar still obliges. That's not my whole practice, but it's a whole lot of it.
You can literally sit down and slap the keys, and chances are that it'll sound like something that you can make into a melody. So, in other words, yes.
On a similar note, I found blues harmonica incredibly easy to pick up and chill out with.
Figuring out the proper embouchure and basic bending shouldn't take more than a few weeks, maybe even days if you're dedicated and good with learning weird movements. Once that is behind you, you start really enjoying how you sound even if you have no idea what you're doing.
Banjo is easier than guitar. The open tuning means you have a nice chord without doing anything. 5 strings are easier than 6. Ukulele is even easier.
Really, is it? What technique do you use? I found bluegrass three-finger picking a pretty acrobatic challenge, if you want it to sound nice.
Technique requirements for bluegrass and old-timey banjo are quite different. Then there's also 4 string tenor banjo.
Clawhammer is not so difficult. But you can strum a banjo just like you strum a guitar. There are plenty of old time references to strumming on a banjo. Sounds great and easy to play a 1-4-5 progression in G.
I got as far as the Foggy Mountain Breakdown, at about half the speed.
I would really like to play something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCW-Oc3_GmE&t=73s Listening carefully to it, I get the suspicion that it isn't really so complicated. It sounds definitely easier than the Foggy Mountain Breakdown, but I'm a bit stumped about how to get there, although I have the chords, and also figured out the melody. But maybe I'm totally mistaken, considering that the song is in D and not in G.
G tuning is the most common, but people use many tunings for the banjo, and for a song in D it might be tuned differently. After strumming then Round peak, or clawhammer style and a G tuning is a good entry point. Or Bum ditty stroke.
Productive activities that are sustainable through raising a small child while working full time tend to be in the realm of things parents have traditionally done, often involving plants, animals, visits to nature, religious communities, and crafts.
Something to consider is that the activation energy for some things goes up enormously with children (sitting down for four hours to write without constant interruption, for instance), while the activation energy required for other things actually goes down. I only have a toddler, but from what I can tell, this varies with children's existence and then age. In a stable relationship but with no children, the activation energy for going out and enjoying city life goes down quite a lot. With an infant it goes up enormously, but I, at least, was pushed into taking lots of nature walks by the fact that the alternative involved hours of unbearable wailing (babies love drives and sitting in slings or backpacks while their parents walk around... something about reminding them of their pre-birth existence).
I'm not a natural gardener, and most of my plants die. But now that I have a toddler, I'm becoming much more appreciative of having sand, gravel, and fountains around, and might as well garden instead of just yelling at my daughter not to move the gravel around.
My parents did a lot of crafty things and got a lot of animals when I was younger, and went to a lot of church events. They took up quilting, wood carving, built a pigeon loft, and participated in a number of potlucks, for instance. My father kept taking calculus night classes over several years, at the cost of having to talk about calculus quite a lot.
I'm not sure if this has any implications ahead of time, or not. Sustainable hobbies aren't so much about being cheap, quick, and easy (for instance, "homesteading" is a very stable parental hobby), so much as ones that can shift and take on different forms over time, and as circumstances change. Anything related to what you could imagine a peasant in a village doing is a promising direction to go in.
This is great! Your kids will love helping out... having the kids help wash and dry the dishes may take longer and cause some breakage, but it's time well spent. I'm afraid to say how young my son was when I let him drive the lawn mower by himself.
Look at whatever hobbies are enjoyed by high-status respectable people of your sex, age, social class and location, filter out the excessively difficult/expensive/time-consuming ones and the ones you think you'd really hate, and look at what remains.
So, for instance, maybe golf?
Our company has a golf league that plays on a course just a couple miles from the office once a week. Decent way to network with some people at the office you wouldn’t otherwise see, physical without being strenuous, and unless you really want to take it seriously, only costs you a couple hours a week of your time. Not a cheap hobby, but for someone in the OP’s position sounds like time and mental energy is tighter than cash
Not cheap but not super expensive either unless you want it to be. A set of clubs costs about as much as a bicycle, and a game of golf at my local course costs only a little more than seeing a movie.
That’s true, probably more expensive than reading or video games though. Bowling (or if you’re in Canada, curling) leagues work as well.
Beer and/or bread making. Takes a long time, but most of it is hands off. The initial gear is relatively cheap (and infinitely expandable if you like it). The excess product can be given away as a thoughtful gift, and something to talk about. Both have extensive online and published communities.
Wait isn't this related to how making sourdough bread became a meme* last summer or so?
*I might take this back because I don't understand internet culture well enough.
Yeah making bread is a nice thing to do if you are home all day. It’s a few minutes of work with some hours of waiting in between. Not hard, but the timing can be touchy if you’re not going to be home - you need to be there when it is ready to go. And then you need to eat the bread, ideally within a couple days.
Beer is easier for the office worker. Spend an evening or a weekend morning brewing, and then it just sits for a couple weeks to ferment. Not particularly time sensitive, if you need to wait a few extra days till you have time to bottle, it’s totally fine, then once it is in the bottles it is good for months.
It became a meme because it suddenly became a thing lots of people have reasons to do.
Making sourdough bread is way more satisfying than I expected, especially if you refine the process to spend minimum effort for infinite supply of on-demand tasty bread. Self-sufficiency is a reward of its own.
I thought the whole purpose of a hobby was to suck up time and money. :^)
I really enjoy doing things with my hands. So satisfaction comes from anywhere. Some nice food, a garden in bloom, fresh mowed lawn, a painted room, a pile of logs...
The last stanza from "Two Tramps in Mud Time" R. Frost,
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.
I recently started juggling. Find an intro Youtube video and spend 5-10 minutes a day. You'll likely be able to keep 3 balls going within a few weeks.
For art, try getting into soap carving. It's as cheap as buying a few bars of Ivory soap at a supermarket and using your kitchen utensils or other knives/etc. you might have for carving.
I don't understand why you're directly calling for comments on the Georgia voting reform law on an ostensibly no-politics Open Thread.
This may have come across as more confrontational than I intended. I'm more just wondering what the actual boundaries for Open Threads here are: is it "No politics generally, but topics called out in the main article are an exception?"
Yeah Aapje made a (humorous) remark on this last open thread. Scott is playing Satan, and tempting us to sin. "Oh no, I'm not touching that Georgia peach."
Yeah, sorry, I missed this up.
Maybe when your comment of the no-politics-week is CW, you should add it as a bonus comment of the fortnight on the next even-numbered thread
+1
"the Bayes factor for my series of ambidexterity experiments is 216"
This is sketchy for a couple reasons. First because the Bayes factor should be between the null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis. In this case Jacob's alternative hypothesis was that ambidextrous people are .2 SD more authoritarian. Second because there's still the issue of multiple comparisons. You can't just multiply the Bayes factors for each trait you looked at (that's called [naive Bayes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier)).
I analyzed a pattern I've seen in communities. I'm sure this is not an original idea, does anyone have a link to someone who has analysed sth similar?
The basic idea is:
There are some communities that doesn't filter who enters, and that has no mechanism for excluding/rehabilitating obnoxious people. This structure often leads to a situation akin to bad workplaces: people with options leave, people without stay.
At first it might be fine, but as soon as one really obnoxious person enters, you will have a gradual brain-drain-esque situation, as increasing levels of obnoxiousness incentivises more and more people to leave. The ones that leave first will be the ones you really want in the community, the people left behind will be comprised of obnoxious people and altruistic people that want to rehabilitate/improve.
LessWrong article related to this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
This is distinct from, but related to, "evaporative cooling of groups" - when you've got a group organized around some sort of belief, the ones that leave are more likely to be the moderate ones, so the median of the remaining group gets farther from moderation, until it's condensed to a hard core:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs
Your point is that it can also happen with an abrasive personality, independent of polarization.
In the last election for the Governor of Georgia (Kemp v Abrams 2018), Brian Kemp was the Secretary of State and oversaw the election that he ran in. This was massively controversial at the time [1-3]. "Secretary of State runs for Governor" isn't that unusual of a thing to happen. It is better to not have such obvious potential for a conflict of interest.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/02bf11f29ada46d0833be6e3091b0c31
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/georgia-voters-file-lawsuit-seeking-block-kemp-overseeing-election-results-n932566
[3] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/30/18118264/georgia-election-lawsuit-voter-suppression-abrams-kemp-race
So, a friend of mine has recently been considering seeking ECT (electroconvulsive therapy.) They've definitely been having a hard enough time for a while now to justify it, and they have the record of other treatment methods. But they're also worried about the potential memory loss side effects, particularly because they're currently studying for a degree on scholarship in a foreign country, and can't afford to forget anything important for long enough that it would cause them to lose the scholarship.
Does anyone have the domain knowledge to know how well-founded a worry this is? If the ECT actually works without major side effects, it would definitely make meeting the responsibilities of the scholarship easier rather than harder, along with a major increase in quality of life, but the success of the treatment can't be taken for granted.
If you're interested in anecdata, I know one person (good friend of my brother) who has had ECT for depression. It helped him, but the memory issues were a real problem. I have had TMS for depression which may have a similar action-mechanism, and found it very helpful with no memory issues. Happy to answer questions or talk more about either. (I'd have to ask my brother for ECT details).
Unfortunately, they're investigated TMS and found it to be a non-option in practical terms because there's nowhere accessible which offers it on a schedule that's reconcilable with attending the classes they need to keep the scholarship.
I'm definitely interested about any more information you have on how the memory issues manifested, how long they lasted, etc.
I have a friend who used to have a photographic memory, or something like, and lost it after ECT. This was after medical school and before the certifying exam (boards?) which led to a years long struggle to get a license to practice.
OTOH, suicide is a common cause of death in his immediate and extended family, and he was struggling with suicidal ideation. Now (so far as I know) he's not.
My understanding is this:
- It very often (40-50% IIRC, but I'd recommend reading up on it) wipes out a significant chunk of already-existent memories (and by "wipes out" I mean that those memories are gone, never coming back, treatment consists of coming to terms with it and/or relearning that stuff). If this is a deal-breaker, stay the hell away. They often undersell this, both from what I've heard from people who were subjected to it and from what I've seen of the studies, so be very dubious if someone proposing ECT says this isn't a serious issue.
- Cognitive abilities (including the ability to form *new* memories) can take a dip for a short time, but that almost always recovers (timeframe is apparently ~weeks).
- It is by far the most effective treatment for depression, although it doesn't fix the long-term predisposition to depressive bouts.
Anyone have a good probiotic that they like? I was using https://www.generalbiotics.com/ but wondering if the hivemind here has researched the topic.
Yoghurt?
I use Culturelle on and off. I've had some good results, which have been durable despite sometimes going weeks or months without it.
To me, it seems that all short-term side effects of Covid vaccination are well-covered/studied, and not worth much concern (UK blood clots being a sign in favor there, that such a small reaction was caught).
What should I say to family members who are worried about long-term unknown-unknown problems? E.g. "If I take this vaccine, maybe I get cancer in 30 years." "If I take the vaccine, maybe I'm infertile in 10 years". With other vaccines, there's a long track record to point to, but mRNA (and to a lesser extent, adenovirus) vaccines don't have that.
Is there some mechanism-of-effect information that points to those being implausible outcomes? I struggle to find any info online about this, because any searches are swamped by antivax/provax/short-term information.
Do they take any other medication?
Sure, but most common medication also have a 20+ year track record.
Then we have no idea if they will cause cancer in 30 years, do we?
Most common OTC medication have long track records, and therefore don't provoke this vague unease. Most uncommon, short-track-record medication have acute importance that obviously outweighs long-term concerns.
The Covid vaccine is a middle ground. It is preventing, as Scott mentioned in the last open thread, a 1/10.000 death rate amongst 25-34yos. That is meaningful, but not comparable to taking, say, newly-developed anti-clotting meds after a heart attack.
You don't seem to be engaging with me in good faith, so I'm going to end this thread here, possibly someone else has some thoughts.
Statins only date to the 1990s, right?
Typically people take medicine when they're sick, weighing an immediate need for restoration against the potential for side effects, both short term and long. This often happens in direct consultation with a doctor to determine if the trade off is worthwhile. With a vaccine, this one in particular, the immediate need is less known. About half of the people who get COVID have no symptoms at all, and less than half of the population has or will get COVID. Of the ~25% or less who will get COVID (even in a worst case scenario spread) and have symptoms, the majority get relatively mild symptoms (ultimately similar in strength but longer duration) than results from the vaccines themselves. It's only a pretty small minority, generally older and with a particular set of pre-existing conditions, that have an obvious positive trade off for getting the vaccine.
It's helpful to mention that this vaccine being a "new thing" (and thus unstudied in the long-term) is somewhat analogous to Covid itself being a "new thing". They say "if I take this vaccine, maybe I get cancer in 30 years". Remind them that it's also true that "If you get Covid, maybe you're infertile in 10 years".
Then, explain that the vaccine is probably less long-term risky than getting Covid. We have seen that Covid can cause permanent lung and heart problems. We understand the mechanism of the RNA vaccines pretty well, and we have no reason to suspect that they will cause long term problems. Also, don't forget that the vaccine prevents you from getting sick! People die from Covid, and even if you don't die, getting really sick sucks.
(Disclaimer: I have not actually tried this with anyone)
Comic version of a more emotional version of this argument (that COVID is probably riskier than vaccines): https://xkcd.com/2397/
Thanks, this is a good point, I'll give it a try!
This is a genuinely good argument. But the obvious counterargument is that at this point, you've probably either already had asymptomatic COVID (sunk cost) or never will. But if you take the vaccine, you're definitely getting the vaccine.
The "never will" only applies to people that are maintaining their social distancing until they get vaccinated, right?
No; in any epidemic or pandemic there comes a point where the odds are very much against contracting the disease even if you take no precautions whatsoever. This happens well before the disease is fully eradicated, and almost certainly happened a couple of months ago in the United States.
The argument is *stronger* for people who plan to stay locked down another 3-6 months, but at this point it is valid for anyone.
By "a couple of months ago" you surely mean late February, because during January and February a significant fraction of the United States population got infected.
If we stay at 20 infections per 100,000 per day for the next few months, with no big rises, and gradually taper off, that seems like another few percent of the so-far-uninfected population will eventually get it, but I guess that's right that it's much smaller than the number that got it in January and February.
"Looking at the Pfizer graph, the protection level is nearly binary: none, and then all. Day 11 after the first shot seems to be the magic point beyond which you can consider yourself vaccinated."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/how-soon-does-the-covid-vaccine-work-pfizer-moderna-j-and-j.html
1. Is this right? If so, 2. What is the mechanism that explains this? 3. Say you contracted Covid 7 days after getting the Pfizer vaccine. Would your vaccination be useless, or would it reduce the severity of the illness?
That goes along with the fact that T cells take 7-14 days to mature.
The precise number of days is difficult, because infections surely aren't detected in the study on the day they actually happened.
Note also that the article says "none, then all" by eyeballing a chart - and it's probably right that the shift from 0% protection to 80% protection is pretty fast. But the article is a bit fast and loose between 80% and 90% and 100%.
A while back on one of the SSC open threads I was involved in a brief discussion (https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/03/open-thread-155-25/#comment-907078) over whether or not lowering speed limits a bit (e.g. 70 mph -> 65 mph) in the United States would be a net gain or loss, and I wanted to do a better analysis of the question - ignoring factors like “whether people would follow a lower speed limit” or any complex effects on The Economy - just to see if, under relatively ideal assumptions, it’s something worth looking into.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety put out an analysis (https://www.iihs.org/api/datastoredocument/bibliography/2188) which looks at data from 1993 - 2017 and finds that a 5 mph increase on the speed limit led to 13,638 additional fatalities on interstates and freeways. Because we’re just worried about the impact of a 70 mph -> 65 mph change, interstates and freeways are the most relevant places.
Averaging out Farmer’s total death count, the speed increase led to about 545 deaths per year. Using data from https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-by-age-group/ and a weighted average, the average age of a death via car crash is about 40 years old (~42.3). With a life expectancy of 80, that’s about 40 years lost per death, for a total loss of 21.8 thousand years.
Last time someone brought up the good point that slower speeds wouldn’t affect how much time professional drivers like truckers spend driving, since they’re driving ~8 hours per day no matter what. I think “non-professional driver traffic” corresponds well to the “light duty vehicles” section of this table (https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2016/vm1.cfm), so about 676 billion miles were driven on interstates in 2016 by people who could conceivably be doing other things.
It’s safe to assume most travel will be around the speed limit of 70 mph, and so those miles take 1.10 million person-years to drive each year. If we were to drop the speed limit to 65 mph, then they would take 1.19 million person-years instead.
So under fairly ideal assumptions, the tradeoff we’re looking at is 90,000 person-years driving for 21,800 regular person-years. Unfortunately, evaluating how good of a deal this is or isn’t depends on how much worse time spent in a car is than time spent doing other things.
Even ignoring the effects on productivity from time lost (since I’m trying to ignore second-order effects), the question of how much worse the experience of driving a car is compared to something else is both subjective and hard to quantify. I think the best way to evaluate this is to consider whether I would personally trade X years of life for Y years of life that I have to spend driving, and then derive the value of driving-time to regular-time from my answer to that question.
For example, I think at best (if I had very good podcasts) I *might* trade regular-life for driving-life at a 1:3 ratio. This would mean I value a driving year at about 0.33 regular years, and the tradeoff is a net-gain if one driving year is worth more than 0.24 regular years.
Realistically, I don’t think I would take a trade at that ratio (very good podcasts are a scarce resource, and I don’t like driving), and I think this bodes very poorly for the idea of lowering speed limits, at least for these reasons. That said, I’m curious about how much other people would say they value driving-time relative to regular time.
There are second-order effects here too. If travel speeds get slower, people don't just go to the same destinations and take more time getting there - they often choose an option that is almost as good as the first but closer. Just to illustrate, if it takes 10 minutes to drive across town to your favorite coffee shop, but traffic increases so it takes 60 minutes, the question isn't how bad those lost 50 (or 100) minutes are, but rather how bad it is to take 10 minutes walking to your local coffee shop compared to going to your favorite one. (Or to make your own coffee at home.)
Assuming people are making rational decisions, the time increase you calculate is an upper bound on the costs, but not the costs themselves.
Tangently related - at one time in my life I had to take a job that required a long commute, so I did some math. I could drive 65 (then the limit) and take 1 hour, or drive 80 (which half the cars were doing) and take 49 min. That's 11 minutes each way, so 22 minutes/day total. Given how precious my time was then, I went with the flow and saved myself some sleep deprivation. The bad side effect was getting used to driving 80 - I now have to be careful not to when I don't need to.
I think it’s probably not changeable on the platform, but substack masking external links is crazy annoying.
I get why it’s happening — author inserts a link, and then substack routes it through a tracking url before delivering the viewer to the final destination. It’s understandable and not nefarious, but it breaks what turns out for me to be a major piece of usability, which is that I hover over links to see the url tooltip, and a large part of my decision to click is based on what I see. I’m not sure I can fully explicate what I’m looking for, but examples might be that I’m more likely to click a private blog url than I am to click the link to an abstract to a paper I don’t have access to.
But in any case, I can’t do this anymore on substack because all urls are just substack with some some ID hash. It’s aggravating. Am I the only who uses links this way?