Can anyone explain why generalist species like the human and the rat flourish so much when natural selection would seem to favor the creation of specialist species? Or is the assumption in the second half of my question just wrong?
People point to the Great Rift valley during the period hominids were evolving as a particularly unstable environment that contributed to our evolution.
You're thinking from the perspective of very recent history where Humankind's development and spread has drastically interrupted every ecosystem on the planet. It's no surprise that there isn't much stable equilibrium around for specialists to thrive in, while generalists that do well in chaos (men and rats) are doing well. If you looked back before the spread of humanity you'd find far more specialists doing the same things they had been doing for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years
Huh, I'd read mostly about evolution being a Red Queen game, where the underlying ecosystem and selective pressures are constantly shifting. But it looks like there's a counter movement pushing the Court Jester hypothesis, that change is largely driven by external factors, and evolution may be dominated by stability, allowing specialists to thrive like you say.
It seems like a matter of longstanding academic debate. Maybe there are periods or scales where each other theory dominates, giving evidence for both sides in different contexts.
Regardless, you're certainly right that for at least some ecosystems, specialists like the panda seem to have thrived for millions of years.
Seems similar to 'nature vs nurture' too – obviously _some_ synthesis is probably most correct. (The Chinese philosophers probably had it right – yin and yang and all.)
(I remember Stephen Jay Gould and his 'movement' pushing punctuated equilibrium over the then-reigning evolutionary 'gradualism'. The former seems very much like what you reference as "the Court Jester hypothesis".)
Absolutely, "Court Jester" is seen as a descendant of punctuated equilibrium.
The main differences are the focus on adding a more fleshed out "cause" for the punctuation (citing external environmental factors), and, well, the catchy name.
Never underestimate the importance of a catchy name.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
That's a skill I'd love to learn... if I didn't have to go through the student phase of practicing before I'm good at it. On dead animals maybe. That would make Greek Easter preparations interesting.
Do I have access to google while I'm doing it? Then probably, although it's not going to be pleasant for the poor bastard relying on me.
I expect results to be slightly better if I'm doing this for myself (assuming the circumstances of the broken bone involve me being conscious and able to move around) than someone else, although not by much.
Likewise, if I end up butchering a hog, it's going to be a rather shoddy job with results that are edible, but unlikely to suit most people's preferences, in this case probably whether or not I have access to google.
If I have to butcher a pufferfish, whoever eats it is going to die, there's no way around that one.
Local climates change and ecosystems evolve, with or without human intervention. If you're a specialist species and your ecosystem evolves away under you, the nearest alternative niche is probably a long distance away, so your colony is in peril. If you're a generalist, some of you will find a way to continue living locally. In fact some of you already moved out. So soon, you are everywhere. That's my take, anyway.
A brief search shows that there are many species of rats and some seem to be quite specialized, but the rats that do well on ships are more likely to spread. But I guess other kinds of rats would also do well if they made it to an island first?
We're not a generalist species. We're optimized for being migratory omnivores occupying plains. That's why we're so good at long distance running and moving long distances. We were fortunate that plains are about a third of the Earth's surface (though that's probably why we evolved to be in them). But fertile plains are where almost all of us live. We're the apex species of the dominant landform of Earth (excluding oceans) so we flourish.
I mean, forests yes (though we also tend to plant trees in landscapes where there's really none - we want savannas rather than steppes), but I wouldn't say humans have anything in particular against mountains. We level them when necessary to build roads, and there's not much to eat in Tibet, but if anything we seem to prefer rugged terrain ceterus paribus. (And East Africa is indeed pretty rugged.)
We don't have anything against mountains. But we do flatten the parts of them we use for houses, farming, roads, etc. We're not obligate plains dwellers where wide open space is equivalent to, say, water for fish. But we clearly prefer flat wide spaces to, say, tall ones.
We were absolutely great on the savanna. We could do a lot of unique things. Throw things accurately. Walk basically forever. Have you read about "persistence hunting?" Incredible.
But ignoring our tech tree still seems like a big ask.
Even without modern technology, we still get some impressive edge cases. The Polynesians saw the incomprehensibly vast Pacific, had a natural resource base that included approximately a certain type of tree, and were like, "yeah, we're on it."
But admittedly that's "can" not "is best suited for." So I think in some ways there are two distinct questions blurring together as "Are humans generalists?":
1. Do we have specific adaptations that help us survive in one particular environment over others?
2. What's the current range for humans, enveloped as we are by the comfy exoskeleton of modern technology and global supply chains?
I think either of those questions are reasonable and straightforward, but we probably need to know what bigger question we're trying to answer in order to know which of those is most useful at any given time.
I acknowledge technology allows us to live far outside our natural range. We have people living in space! But the vast majority of humans still live on wide open fertile planes or environments that have been terraformed to be similar to them. Even with the ocean, they cling to the flat part of islands and they travel over the broad, flat ocean rather than going under all that much. It all seems very much like a manifestation of instinctive preferences and thought processes. After all, how different is sailing from having to walk through a desert? They're both broad, flat, and hostile and have oases.
Anyway, I'm not an evolutionary anything like I said. But this is a pattern I've long thought is fairly obvious.
All the other great apes have restricted ranges, and so did our ancestors until not very long ago. Taming fire may have made far more habitats available.
Why are we inferior at climbing trees and optimized for long distance movement then? I'm not an evolutionary... anything but I'm repeating this from a textbook I had in highschool(?).
Fair question, and I don't know that much anatomy. But we may be more dexterous than chimpanzees, and can certainly throw more accurately. One possibility is that we specialised, in fact, to hunt larger prey, with longer legs, than chimpanzees can tackle. (And butcher it.) I've also seen a suggestion that we were long-range scavengers.
I do take your point that we are, like many birds, suited to change habitats with the seasons.
If we were specialized to hunt longer prey, wouldn't we be better at ambush? And move on all fours for maximum short term speed? Instead we're optimized for long distance speed. Exhaustion hunting is a thing where humans simply follow animals until they drop dead because we are that much better at it. Even compared to animals like horses that we think of as far ranging. There's a lot of things faster than a human in the short term but not much over long distances.
We may be inferior at tree climbing now but in one of my medical school anatomy classes the professor claimed that we have our complex larynx and thus ability to speak because distant mammalian ancestors were tree climbers and needed to be able to close the airway to stabilize the chest wall while climbing.
Either I'm badly misunderstanding or your professor spouted nonsense.
If our larynx is a tree-climbing adaptation, why is the primate that's best at talking one of the worst at climbing?
"Closing the airway" sounds like it means holding your breath. Which we don't do while climbing and apes *can't* do. Their breathing is completely involuntary, like our heartbeat. Also I'm not convinced the larynx is involved in holding your breath.
[boy does substack need an edit function, 2nd effort at this]
Nonsense spouting is certainly a possibility. I think the idea was that millions of years ago some pre-primate (something closer to a squirrel, I guess) developed structures in the throat for the purpose of climbing which our lineage repurposed for complex sound formation.
Some quick Googling seems to suggest that I wasn't completely imagining it but the professor may have been oversimplifying. For example "Comparative Anatomy of the Larynx and Related Structures" at https://www.med.or.jp/english/journal/pdf/2011_04/241_247.pdf
Maybe if I have the energy I'll try to summarize what I can find on the subject (spoiler: I probably won't).
Definite generalist! I just wrote about this actually:
"I’m a generalist. I have areas where I’m better read and areas where I have better access to information. I have consistent interests and opinions. But I write about whatever strikes my fancy. I do this because I enjoy it and because, if you’ll forgive the pretension, I think democracy requires generalists, citizens who are willing to weigh in without claiming the mantle of an expert. So I write about a broad range of topics."
In general, stable environments such as rainforests tend to have a wide variety of specialist species, if the environment is largely the same year after year they can evolve to exploit a tiny niche better than the competition, since that niche will continue to be there. Temperate environments have a smaller amount of generalist species, as they have to adapt to a wide range of environmental circumstances.
I'm not a biologist but I don't think the second half of your question can be assumed to be true. For one thing classic adaptive natural selection seems to be wildly overstated as a mechanism of evolutionary change. I believe the currently accepted view among biologists is that most evolution and most traits are actually "neutral", i.e. the result of genetic drift and statistical fluctuations in gene pools rather than adaptive traits that aid in survival. This is the so-called "Neutral Theory" of evolution and I don't think it has quite percolated through the public consciousness the same way we all learn classic Darwininan selection in high school biology. Maybe this is why everything doesn't get as hyper-specialized as you might it would think under classic Darwinian mechanisms.
Perhaps its a bit of a false dichotomy as well (as well as potentially semantic and subjective), evolutionary lineages and closely related species needn't be completely locked into either specialist or generalist modalities. It seems like generalists in particular could freely switch between the two modes as their environment shifts. Both strategies involve tradeoffs and benefits and drawbacks so it can't be taken for granted that one is necessarily better than the other. Many insects like caterpillars are notorious for only being able to eat some particular plants, they get really good at metabolizing one particular plant's leaves because most plants develop toxic defenses and they tend to devote all their evolution points into becoming "experts" and evolving along with a particular food source to the exclusion of most others. That said, dietary specialists seem to usually retain some capacity to vary their diet. Even Koalas, the poster children for crippling overspecialization, are known to occasionally eat stuff other than Eucalyptus. Who knows how they might be able to shift their diet under the right balance of stressors or evolutionary pressures: http://www.koalatracker.com.au/koalatracker-blog/we-dont-know-what-we-dont-know#.YIYZ9ZBKjb0
No, no, no. Most *mutations* are neutral. But most of them don't even affect the phenotype, which is why they are neutral in the first place!
Is a population that has 1 functional mutation in 100 mutations going to adapt more slowly to a given environment than a population with 1 functional mutation in 1000 mutations (at the same rate of functional mutations)? The proportion of functional vs neutral mutations is irrelevant here. What's relevant here is how quickly adaptive mutations show up as compared to how fast the environment changes.
Obviously to some extent a synthesis between neutral theory and selectionism is where the truth lies, but I don't think consensus is that strongly pro-neutral theory. Here's a good (selectionist, so obviously biased) take from Molecular Biology and Evolution for their 50th anniversary of Kimura's original paper on neutral theory: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/35/6/1366/4990884. (MBE also published some more celebratory review articles in the same issue that are worth reading too).
Specialization is optimization. Premature optimization (to quote Donald Knuth) is the root of all evil. In environments where optimization is always premature, resistance to optimization (slack or "inefficiency" or "fat in the system") is evolutionarily adaptive, it's the winning long-term strategy. Venkatesh Rao at Ribbonfarm calls such scenarios "infinite games" (in the sense of James Carse) -- in finite games (like sports) the goal is to win, in infinite games the goal is to survive. Evolutionary fitness landscapes are one such example, because they're always changing. So generalist species, having slack (because they aren't optimized for any particular evolutionary niche), out-survive specialist species over long enough periods.
I don't know how you're defining flourishing, but there's more biomass in cattle, a species specialized to the particular niche of living in symbiosis with humans, than there is in humans themselves.
There is actually a negative correlation between percentage of endozoochory (seed dispersal through fleshy fruit) and latitude. Probably because climatic bands at lower latitudes contract less during glaciations, making e.g. the tropics more stable, which favors this kind of relationships.
Other specialized relationships like insect pollinated plants with low population densities and their specialized pollinators that seek them out are rare at high latitudes, but more common in the tropics. Many orchids (one of the most species diverse group of plants) follow this strategy.
With vaccinations starting to become widespread, perhaps it's time to bring back SSC meetups. I'm still willing to host, and I live in Detroit. Anyone near me?
We're in south bay and used to host before Covid. I think our plan was to go back to hosting when everyone in the house was fully vaccinated, which should be early June.
At the moment there seem to be plenty of openings for vaccination, so I expect that by the time the two members of the household who got their first shot recently are fully vaccinated, almost everyone in the area who would want to come should be as well.
I plan to ask people not to come if they have not been vaccinated, with an exception for unvaccinated small children.
I've been doing online meetups, but with many fewer people.
Austin has been having regular digital meetups the whole time, in-person occasionally since last summer, and is generally moving back to all in-person. Anyone in the area is welcome to join!
Is there information about this? I've been in Austin since December, and will be here until the end of July, and would be interested in some sort of meet-up (particularly since I just got my second shot on Thursday).
I moved to Canada a few ago (BC to be specific) and so far I've hardly followed Canadian news. This is partly because I haven't found Canadian news sources that really engage me. I'd love some recommendations from Canadian SSC folks!
-- What are your favourite sources for Canadian news?
-- Who are your favourite writers on Canadian issues?
-- What are your favourite Canadian news podcasts/TV shows/radio shows?
Extra points for stuff that's BC specific.
I'd also like your recommendations for books that might give me the background to today's Canadian political issues.
* Sources of Canadian news: the standard sources are probably good enough, with the CBC, CTV, Global News (all broadcasters), the Globe and Mail and National Post (newspapers) will probably cover the major news stories with various levels of political bias. As with the US and elsewhere, local news media is dying in Canada, so that's probably sufficient to get up to speed.
* Writers on Canadian issues: Can't think of any of the top of my head, but I can give a short list of book recommendations. _The Illustrated History of Canada_ is a good generalist overview of the history of Canada. Its editor, the historian Christopher Moore (not related to the comedic novelist) wrote _1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal_, with covers the Confederation period in more detail. The late Michael Bliss's _Right Honourable Men_ is a series of biographical sketches of the major Prime Ministers up to Jean Chretien (resigned in 2004). For more recent history, Paul Wells, national affairs columnist for Macleans, has written books on premierships of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper; those pretty good as well. Moving to more local history, _The West beyond the West_ by Jean Barman is a generalist history of British Columbia.
I would also recommend _The Unfinished Empire_ by John Darwin, focused on the British Empire and _Replenishing the Earth_ by James Belich, focusing on what he calls the "Anglo-Wests" (e.g. the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) While not specifically focused on Canada, they do put its history in a larger global context that may be more enlightening than considering it by itself.
* I don't really follow podcasts that much, so I can't really help you there.
Unfinished Empire made a big impression on me. What I got from it was that Britain didn't so much decide to go conquer the world as establish trading relationships, then launch an endless series of wars and expansions ostensibly to maintain and protect those relationships. I'm curious if this is the consensus view of British colonialism.
I'd say it's not an unfair one. There are some notable points in British colonialism where the British are obviously quite annoyed at having colonies because they'd much rather just sell things and buy things as they wanted, but the local government's too unstable, or some stupid British people who moved there keep starting wars, or whatever.
Notably, while the British continually invaded China, they didn't try to conquer it as long as the Chinese government did what they wanted. That goes for a lot of other places, too.
Pierre Berton wrote a series of good, shortish books on specialized aspects of Canadian history. So far I've read "The Invasion of Canada (1812-1813)" and "The Great Depression". They won't tell you that much about what's happening now, but they'll give you a sense of what Canada was like at different points in history and they're relatively light reading.
I moved to QC a few years ago from the U.S., and I'm the same way. I only follow local COVID news and other stuff that very directly affects me. I still haven't transferred my emotional loyalties.
Hey! I read a lot of Canadian news so I can definitely help here. I'm very left leaning, so none of my recommendations are particularly sympathetic to conservatives, however.
Sources:
-The first thing that I recommend to people is to follow local news. I know that the Vancouver Observer was a widely respected, fantastic publication with really good research and reporting, but it's since been folded up into the National Observer. The National Observer is good, but very paywalled last I checked. But tbh when it comes to local reporting, I don't really think the difference between "high-quality" and "low-quality" reporting is that large, so honestly just pick up whatever.
-To supplement local coverage because there's zero money in it and everything's consolidating, I like reading the student newspapers from the universities that are near where I live
-The Tyee is based in BC, but I think I consider it a "leftist publication" more than I do a local one. However, much of its coverage is on BC.
-Briarpatch Mag is based in Saskatchewan but covers stuff from across Canada, from a far-leftist point of view.
-Canadaland is primarily a podcast network but they also do very extensively researched longform. They're funded through patreon and I'm a supporter there.
Podcasts:
-Canadaland when it started was a media watchdog - it critiqued mainstream media and the "inside baseball" that's played a lot in the field of journalism, but over time the team has really gone "fuck it, I'll report the news myself" and they honestly do a pretty good job imo.
-Canadaland Commons, another podcast they have, does like, multi-part series on things that are happening, that run roughly a dozen hour-long episodes each. It's immensely cool. They've done in-depth coverage of the pandemic, the state of policing in Canada and its history, and is just starting its new season, which is on real estate.
"The Morning After" by Chantal Hebert and Jean Lapierre about the 1995 referendum on separation in Quebec gives a good overview of the events while also providing a good story. It's not really a current issue but it's something that definitely still informs decisions at high levels.
Hebert is a strong columnist as well and often appears on CBC with Andrew Coyne who's also worth reading. Justin Ling is a freelancer who I've just started noticing as well.
Maclean's is a national magazine I don't think I've seen mentioned yet. And of course the Beaverton is the Canadian version of the Onion.
When reading Canadian political news it might be helpful to bear in mind some elements that can cause confusion with an American (I assume) context:
-Red and blue are swapped on political maps.
-The Prime Minister is significantly more powerful then the President relative to Parliament and cabinet (essentially the Speaker and President combined into one).
-The actual Speaker of the House is a mostly ceremonial role similar to the VP in the American Senate for practical purposes.
-The Canadian Senate is entirely different from the American Senate and is also mostly ceremonial (this has changed a little bit recently and occasionally makes news if they try to do something).
-Provinces are more powerful than states relative to the federal government. This might be debatable, but as an example several provinces have closed their borders to interprovincial travel during the Pandemic and I don't think states can do that.
-Provincial political parties have evolved differently within each province and are sometimes quite different than their counterparts in other provinces or the federal government. For example the BC Liberals are basically a coalition of Conservatives and right-leaning Liberals.
Provinces are absolutely NOT more powerful than states. Canadian federalism is specifically and explicitly designed to have a federal government that is more powerful than the provinces. The American Civil War was a rather notable influence on Confederation.
The provinces have jurisidiction over particular matters. The feds have jurisdiction over certain other matters, and ANYTHING that the constitution doesn't mention. Notably, the feds in Canada control criminal justice (though the courts occasionally give the provinces some nasty inroads that they shouldn't). The provinces are responsible for enforcing it, but criminal law is exclusively federal. The feds also have control over all national public works, which a sneaky federal government could probably use to justify just about anything.
Canadian provinces are closing their borders because Canadians are generally more willing to undertake draconian social measures without people whining about their rights than Americans are. Interestingly, since Canadians have an explicit constitutional right to move around Canada and US citizens DON'T, it looks like constitutionally US states could do it more easily than Canadian provinces. But they won't.
The Canadian Senate isn't THAT different than the American one - it's supposed to ensure regional representation of the provinces. They started out in somewhat similar places. Where they've ended up, on the other hand, is wildly different.
You should update the page to reflect that you didn't know the meaning of "stand by" when writing the predictions post. It remains the most obviously false thing on this blog, and despite the significant number of commenters pointing out your error, you have neither admitted it nor tried to argue the point.
I read this earlier today and was pretty surprised by it as well. Definitely below the what I perceive as the blogs standards. Given that he seemed astounded that people found this statement to racist you would think he would have read about why people found it racist
I believe, in this instance, it implies something along the lines of “Stay vigilant and await further instructions.” It does not mean “Relax. Don’t do anything.”
Does this difference MATTER given that the statement is purely symbolic anyway? Is this anything more than people going out of their way to find something to be offended over?
Unlike antifa or BLM, Proud Boys didn't claim to be a "leaderless movement". It had leaders, it had chain-of-command. If Trump were secretly wanting the Proud Boys to do stuff on his behalf he wouldn't need to do so via coded messages constructed spontaneously in response to an unexpected debate question, he could just, you know, send them an email. Either he has actual power/control over them or he doesn't. If he doesn't, whatever he said in a debate is irrelevant because they don't listen to him; if he does, whatever he says in debate is misdirection (because he can contradict it via whatever backchannels are being used to exert said power). There doesn't seem to be any plausible world in which it would MATTER what he said in terms of the debate statement making an actual difference in what they do
In fact, the whole thing was an obvious "gotcha" question intended to rhetorically tie Trump to the Proud Boys no matter what answer he gave. If he doesn't say to stand down, this "obviously" proves he's in favor of them doing bad things because otherwise he'd tell them to stand down. If he does say to stand down, it "obviously" proves he's in control of them since they answer to his orders...which proves he's in favor of them having done bad things. If he flubs his words or tries to somehow split the baby people get to accuse him of BOTH bad things. So there is literally no good answer. No matter what he said he could have been criticized on essentially the same grounds, so what he said shouldn't matter to any actually-sensible people.
The first problem with your proposed statement is that the proud boys weren't white supremacist so it would be factually incorrect to call them such. A second problem is that he wasn't being asked to merely denounce, he was being asked to "tell them to stand down". It's specifically the "telling to stand down" part that has the "gotcha" aspect I mentioned so merely denouncing wouldn't have been responsive to the question. A third problem is that Trump HAD explicitly denounced "white supremacists" many many times before - you can find superclips of him doing it over a dozen times on youtube - and clearly it's never done the trick before or he wouldn't have been asked again this time, so it wouldn't have done the trick now.
But setting all that aside let's pretend he had *only* been asked to denounce and he gave the answer you give; the available options in response include:
(1) claim Trump "waited too long" to denounce and should have done it sooner (ignoring that he *had* done it sooner) which proves he's secretly on their side.
(2) claim he didn't denounce *strongly enough* - either the word choice or tone of voice proves he secretly supports them or he would have been more forceful.
(3) claim that waiting until somebody *asks* you to denounce is waiting too long; somebody who *truly* hated white supremacy would have denounced them without having been asked (ignoring the fact that he *had* done so, many times before).
...and so on. Or the media could just *ignore* that he answered the question perfectly this time and continue asking it again in the next interview as if he hadn't...just like they've been doing previously.
It's possible to interpret it that way. It is also possible to interpret it as Trump misstating "stand down" which he was asked to say 30 seconds earlier by the host. This was followed y several interjections by all three participants before Trump uttered, "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by." The way he said "stand back" (if you watch the video) sounds weird, as if he was trying to say something else, but that's what came out. Following that up with "stand back" could be interpreted as an attempt to say the correct phrase, "stand down," but failing again. I'm not saying this is the correct interpretation. I'm just saying that it's not an unreasonable one. I think Scott's conclusion is within the error bars.
If you search on Google for "stand by" definition, the first definition is:
>be present while something bad is happening but fail to take any action to stop it.
>"he was beaten to the ground as onlookers stood by"
The second definition is:
>be ready to deal or assist with something.
>"two battalions were on their way, and a third was standing by"
These definitions are from Oxford Languages, publishers of the renowned Oxford English Dictionary. So it appears to be Rand et al who don't know the meaning of the phrase.
Should we construe Trump's statement as racist? I think the dictionary definition is somewhat beside the point, because Trump doesn't know the official definitions of words and ad libs everything. It seems very improbable that this statement was premeditated.
*Maybe* you could argue that it's a verbal slip that goes to show how he sees the Proud Boys (a "pro-Western" group that engages in political violence and is lead by an Afro-Cuban) as a group that is his to command. But it doesn't seem reasonable to claim that's the only possible interpretation: it could be that Trump intended to use the first sense of the word, or that Trump was just stomping all over the English language with carefree abandon like he normally does when speaking. In any case it's suspicious that so many highlight this statement and ignore the stuff Trump said right before.
"you would think he would have read about why people found it racist"
In my experience, in these kind if situations, there is frequently little to no justification. People get conspicuously upset about something and furiously condemn everyone who isn't upset, without giving solid reasons to be upset. In this case, as I posted elsewhere in this thread, the first definition of "stand by" according to the OED is just: "be present while something bad is happening but fail to take any action to stop it." I'll be quite surprised if a single article written by a journalist who got conspicuously upset about "stand back and stand by" took note of this fact. They're preaching to the choir at best, riling up a misinformed mob at worst.
I agree this is Scott's largest uncorrected error.
I think the main problem is this:
It is most definitely not a condemnation. But it is telling the proud boys that he wants peace. The moderator asked for Trump to tell the proud boys to not add to the violence, so Trump did.
Scott focuses on this very point. The moderator asked for something very specific, and Trump delivered (albeit in a weaker form).
Ergo, according to Scott, it's not support. Which is true. Scott is technically correct.
Everyone else focusses on the substance of what Trump said. Trump told them to stop the violence temporarily but be ready to resume, and then made a call to action. Now, part of this is classic Trump: always attack, never defend. But it's important to know why that strategy works: because it unifies a diverse base (including the Proud Boys) against an enemy. When we focus on our differences, we splinter; when we focus on our common foe, we unite.
Trump's condemnation of Antifa is what a condemnation looks like. We see now the contrast: he tells the Proud Boys to be peaceful but be ready for more action later, and then declares Antifa an enemy.
That, Scott, is why everyone else is freaking out about this statement. He technically answers the moderator's second question. But in so doing, shows that he is specifically not answering the first one.
Now, there was a lot of crosstalk. We misspeak in debates. Trump may not have realised that his words could be interpreted as "make peace for now, but be ready for more violence." EXCEPT that's the way the Proud Boys took it. They claimed Trump as his own, and Trump did absolutely nothing to correct them of the notion.
If Trump misspoke and really wanted to condemn the Proud Boys, he would have when he realised they took it as support. He did not.
Trump said a very specific thing. There is no evidence that he did not mean that thing. Why, then, is it a perfect prediction?
Your interpretation is based on a bunch of assumptions, including whether Trump even believes that the Proud Boys use violence pro-actively more than incidentally, which is disputed among the right.
> Trump's condemnation of Antifa is what a condemnation looks like. We see now the contrast: he tells the Proud Boys to be peaceful but be ready for more action later, and then declares Antifa an enemy.
Antifa routinely seeks out and uses violence against right-wing demonstrators. The Proud Boys seem to largely work as a defense organization that mingles with protests or protests on their own and then gets into fights with Antifa who seek them out. Using violence against peaceful demonstrators is not the same as getting into fights with people like Antifa (and from my perspective, Proud Boys is a logical response to leftist acceptance of violence against the right).
> If Trump misspoke and really wanted to condemn the Proud Boys, he would have when he realised they took it as support. He did not.
You were talking about strategies, but you are ignoring the strategy that biased media uses all the time: create a reality by selectively highlighting certain events, applying double standards and then demanding that their political opponents respond to that 'reality.'
By doing this, you get to double-smear the opponent (as from research we know that denials tend to reinforce/increase belief in the accusation). The smart move is not to play along.
> he tells the Proud Boys to be peaceful but be ready for more action later, and then declares Antifa an enemy.
He simply wanted to pivot the debate to talk about left-wing violence and turn an attack into him, into an attack on Biden. It clearly was Trump strategy for much of the debate, which makes sense as the moderator was on Team Biden, so Trump could only talk about topics favorable to him by forcing the issue.
You are interpreting a basic "No u" in an extremely partisan way.
I agree with most of your analysis, but I think you are missing a very important point: Scott argued that this was a condemnation of the Proud Boys.
Trump responding "No u" was his strategy. And he did it there. You are correct.
Therefore, it is not a condemnation of the Proud Boys. It is a condemnation of leftist violence. As you said, it is a "No u."
Which is not support for the proud boys, of course. I do not disagree that the moderator sorted Biden more (whether this was justified because of Trump's disregard for the rules of debate is beyond the scope of this comment). Therefore, "no u" was a viable and effective strategy.
But I am not arguing that Trump explicitly supported the Proud Boys. I am arguing that it was not a condemnation.
I agree that it was not a condemnation, but he was never asked to condemn them by the moderator (but he was by Biden).
I just think that it is supremely silly to read so much into this single event, especially since Trump may already have felt the effects of Covid. He certainly wasn't sharp during the debate.
That this is supposed to be key evidence is itself telling IMO.
Trump answered that he was willing to do so, even though it it is a rather absurd question that conflates two very separate things. One part of the question is about ideology, while the other part is about organization/methods, even though you can have one without the other.
The National Guard is a militia, while Antifa and the Proud Boys are only a militia under a fairly broad definition of the word, at which point it may also includes groups that have very broad support, like citizens who patrol their neighborhoods.
Asking an opinion about two different things (that are vague even on their own) like this is a hugely dishonest 'gotcha' tactic. The question is very unclear and can be spun in very different ways, so the answer can be as well. You can just as easily criticize Trump for being willing to condemn the National Guard, which is a far stronger interpretation than the one that I commonly see, where 'sure' somehow is interpreted as "no."
Anyway, as a followup, the moderator asked Trump: "Are you prepared specifically to do it."
Trump then tried to pivot to left-wing violence, but then both Biden and the moderator asked Trump to specifically condemn, to which he very reasonably asked who he specifically should condemn. Then Biden and the moderator gave two different answers at the very same time:
Chris Wallace: (42:14)
White supremacist and right-wing militia.
Vice President Joe Biden: (42:14)
Proud Boys.
Trump then clearly addressed Biden's specific example, by making the famous statement. Note that Biden's statement was actually a specific example, unlikely the moderator's, who repeated his earlier generic and vague categories.
Immediately after, Trump said again that left-wing violence is the real issue, which is perfectly consistent with the belief that some of the right have: that the Proud Boys are a group that typically defends other right-wing protesters from attacks by violent left-wing extremists, while Antifa and the like will commonly attack peaceful protesters, so peaceful left-wing protesters don't have that much to fear, at least in comparison.
Of course, you may not consider this to be true, reasonable, etc; but the inability or unwillingness to interpret Trump's statements in good faith, based on what he may plausibly believe, is exactly the issue that Scott is addressing.
right. It may still be a scissor statement, and Scott could still argue as to if the statement had any deeper meaning or not... but those arguments just can not be 'stand by' == 'stand down'
You are just plain wrong in your interpretation. To me it seems obvious that it was a slip up and Trump could have just as easily said Stand-Down. Scott was completely right in his prediction, don't let your ego get in your way of your predictions. If your priors were wrong, they were in fact wrong and it is best to own upto it instead of still complaining that you are somehow right like a sore loser. How many times do you need Trump to condemn white supremacists before you believe that he has no problem doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGrHF-su9v8
The question is about the meaning of the words "stand by". "Stand by" means to be ready to act, that's the standard usage. Maybe Trump screwed up; not the point here. The point is that the ball is in Scott's court to stay that this was a Trumpian verbal fart, not that there is nothing there.
Scott's reply was bogus, irrespective of whether Trump supports white supremacists.
I note that you're saying "to me it seems obvious that it was a slip up". *Scott* says "Trump said the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down", the specific thing Wallace kept trying to make him say even though he had already condemned everybody." That is "Trump said exactly what he was asked to say!" This is a mistake. You're acknowledging that it was a mistake. Scott should own it.
Imagine writing a post about people crying wolf, about interpreting all words as negatively as possible, about considering everything a potential dog whistle with zero regard for alternative explanations... and then seeing commenters doing just that, unironically and without any self-reflection.
Allow me to register my opinion that this is nothing but an attempt to backdoor a political topic into a non-political open thread, and should be treated accordingly.
^This. Or rather, whether or not it was an "attempt" (which sounds like a judgement about OP's *intent*), the fact remains that it *is* a very strongly political topic in a non-political open thread, and should be removed.
I don't know why whether or not you're a Trump supporter pertains to the meaning of "stand by". This is not a new phrase, Scott should have known what it means (not "what Trump intended" but what it means as a command) and admitted his mistake when corrected.
And, as you and others have noted, this is a no-politics thread and people should avoid rehashing the previous debate here.
Oops, I tried to do an answer, commited a typo, attempted to fix that, deleted comment, forgot to save it. This is surprisingly stressful since I have things to do and I guess I am not going to be commenting here much until substack deigns to add an edit button.
Basically, "stand by" does not have single clear meaning, as is pretty normal for words (in deleted comment, I attempted to link to a dictionary inside a paragraph, but linking does not work very well here, see below). To determine whether it is fair to use Trump´s uttering this words as some grand proof that he is in a league with white supremacists (as many people did at that time (I am not an American and didn´t much care about presidential debates, but global internet was absolutely flooded with this phrase) , one needs to look at an overall context, which is exactly what Scott did in his post.
Does anyone have a good outside-view guide on nutritional supplements or multivitamins? My impression is
- multivitamins only work if you're unusually deficient in some vitamin (but they might still be good in expectation because you might not be aware of being deficient in something?)
- creatine/protein shakes and the like are probably useful if you're a serious lifter (how would you know you work out enough to need them though?), but may cause liver problems long-term so probably not worth it for most people.
- mealsquares are good because they have chocolate chips (this one isn't a nutritional opinion, I just like their taste and convenience. But I assume they also kinda work like multivitamins in that they're a good way to catch something you're deficient in).
Protein powder and creatine are not going to cause liver or kidney problems, that's a myth. Some people think that creatine causes problems because creatine supplementation causes raised creatinine levels which can be an indicator of kidney malfunction but this is a misunderstanding. The creatine isn't hiring your kidneys it's just messing with the indicator. And protein powder definitely isn't going to cause any issues, it's literally just a type of food that's really high in protein. It's a good thing to incorporate in your diet if you're not getting as much protein as you'd like.
Right, taking creatine is like placing a candle under the thermostat, then having your doctor tell you that the room is very, very hot.
Creatine and protein supplementation are very, very well studied and the kidney thing is as close to ruled out as anything can be in nutritional studies.
Shaked - if you are interested in this topic, listen to the Stronger by Science podcast. One of the hosts really, really knows his stuff. But don't expect to have your socks blown off, most supplementation isn't terribly impactful. In fact, all the supplements in the world not called "Protein" would get blown out of the water my my new supplement "Eat three more salads a week."
For multivitamins, that's my understanding as well. I'd suggest as an alternative, look up the common nutritional deficiencies and see if you're at risk of any. Iron, D (if you don't get sun), B12 (if you don't eat meat), magnesium, omega-3s, etc.
To second Michael's comment, I think the risks of creatine and protein supplements are widely misunderstood. If you don't already have kidney/liver problems, there's minimal risk when taking these at normal dosages. Both these supplements are incredibly well-studied. Your uranalysis will look a little funny compared to "normal" people so be sure to disclose to your doctor your supplements.
To help answer when do you need them: if you are lifting hard enough that you feel it the next day (sore/stiff/weak etc), you should probably be following the .7-1g/lb/day protein guideline. If you don't lift that hard but still work out regularly, I've heard suggestions of .6g/lb/day. You don't necessarily need any protein supplements, but a lot of times, it's hard to get all that from food. Creatine is optional but a lot of people find it noticeably effective for their performance in the gym. There's some theory creatine is also good for the brain, but I haven't looked into that research much.
I'd like to learn more about investing in apartment buildings as a source of passive income, but nearly every "guide to real estate investing" trips my internal "this is a scam" alarm. Can anyone suggest a trustworthy source of information? I'm specifically looking to purchase/invest in and around the Bay Area.
I have no expertise but you should bear in mind that a lot of people concentrate in the hinterlands precisely because the investment atmosphere in a place like the Bay is already so optimized and full of sharks. Like, there's tons of players involved in Bay area real estate who do exactly what you're looking to do, some of which are large firms with far more resources than you. So the odds of you being able to find a property that's legitimately underpriced compared to the environment so you can maximize your investment is small. Whereas in a recovering market like Cincinnati there's just vastly less players and so more opportunity to find unique value. Again, I don't have any expertise but I think that's a general condition worth contemplating.
This is true-ish. There are neighborhoods in cities that won't be as hot and smaller cities or rural areas might be better. You're probably not going to find a lot of deals in Palo Alto. But you might in Union City or Granada. You also don't have to source the deals yourself, depending on your resources.
Meh – I don't think they perform on-average better than the rest of the 'investable' companies. (I'm not assuming that this hypothetical investor, or Craig the commenter, can only invest in 'publicly tradable' companies.)
Based on some personal experience, and reinforced by many many 'outside view' sources, most 'investment companies' seem more like a way for some people (investment company managers) to make a living doing something with other people's money (the investment company's investors).
Investors _can_ and do sometimes make better-than-average returns – just probably not better-than-average on average (i.e. over 'the long term').
There _are_ some non-financial advantages to real estate – you really do own actual physical buildings and thus can do stuff with them other than earn rents.
beware that many / most places in the bay area have rent control which freezes rent with some de minimus annual growth pegged to inflation - and makes it very very hard to part ways with a tenant. even if you sign, say a 12 month lease, after 12 months, you can't ask them to leave if they don't want to. Way more restrictive than NYC rent control!!!
Oooh – not sure whether San Fransisco, or 'Bay Area', rent control is more restrictive than NYC! I think it'd be close at least, and I'm pretty sure there are several 'dimensions' along which they differ dramatically.
Rent 'stabilization' in NYC is nowadays much more common than rent 'control' – but even stabilization is pretty restrictive.
And I'm not sure that the Bay Area as a whole has strong 'rent control' – especially compared to NYC (which is an actual individual city with one mayor).
But the more general point about real estate being a (potentially) arbitrarily difficult investment to manage is very true! One way, and maybe _the_ way, to mitigate that risk, especially when you're starting out, is to discriminate strongly against renters that you think might not pay their rent, or move out when their lease ends. (I think this is one of the saddest consequences of 'rent control' – allowing renters to defect against owners and trap themselves in a bad equilibria thereafter.)
I know a lot about real estate, including investment. A lot of the information isn't publicly available. It's either a pay to learn model or passed through informal networks. But I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
I agree that truly passive income is something of a myth. But I think they overstate the amount of effort you necessarily need. And they definitely overstate how hard it is to make money. They worked in commercial property management which has undergone something of a massacre and is much higher variance than residential stuff. Like most businesses, you can substitute labor for capital so having a bit of money to spend on a good management company and lead sourcing and all that will make it a lot less ground work.
(Super pro-tenant states can be a problem though. I'd recommend seeing if you can get property in a more landlord friendly state if you're comfortable with remote instead of local. That's totally doable if you set it up right.)
There are, broadly, three ways to make money in real estate. Building it, renting it, or providing services (or money) to people doing one of those other two things. Since you're already set up in rental management, expanding there is probably the best way forward. I have thoughts but I'm not sure how much those'd be helpful. If you're just looking for an education I'd say read some books and show up to the local REIA. Plenty of people there will give advice or be coaches, though use your discretion before finding some new coach. That's more your level than the professional corporate events.
You can get rich from rentals but you need to make money on the buy and use that, combined with perhaps some minor repairs, get you really high returns. Buying on retail is almost always a terrible idea. I can talk about the formulae but ultimately it comes down to the fact that homeowners pay top dollar. You as a landlord are less picky: you just need a unit that will rent, not one that you personally love. For example, it's common to buy on the lower couple of floors since many tenants will compromise on a bit of rent rather than want the higher floor. But when people buy for themselves they love the penthouse. That's not a hard rule but it's the type of compromise I mean.
I worked for a commercial brokerage of apartment buildings & property management company- we sold & managed apartments, 'commercial' in this context just means like we weren't selling individual condos or single family homes. I only dealt with apartment buildings, no other class of real estate. I personally know and am familiar with the financial statements of dozens of wealthy apartment building owners.
I am sure you can make money renting apartments- I just think, if you're in the active wealth building phase of your life, you can get better returns out of equities. I am very confident that 99.9% of apartment building purchases don't exceed an S&P 500 index fund over 20-30 years, say, once you account for *all* of the expenses of owning a building in that time frame. These expenses include rare but very expensive maintenance like a new roof or new heating system- and, once a decade or so renovations to *stay at your current quality level*. If you're renting to middle class tenants now, you have to replace the kitchen, bath & everything else every 10-15 years just to stay at the same level! The building is, as the tax treatment suggests, constantly depreciating. Factor the true costs of *keeping your building at the same quality level* over 3 decades and then subtract that from your returns. It's like treading water- you can't stop!
Being a small landlord is the 'I'm entrepreneurial, I want to run my own retail business' of more well-off people
It is not and will never be 'passive income', this is an extremely common terrible framing. It is an active & highly regulated business (especially in California!), involving actual human beings. You are essentially buying a part-time job with no off hours- the heat could go out on Christmas Eve, say- and serious regulatory & downside risk. Your tenants can basically choose not to pay you and you have little recourse in a blue state. Having previously worked in commercial real estate, done property management, and gotten to know a lot of big investors in another blue state, I'm of the opinion that being a small landlord (like, less than 20 units) basically never makes sense as a wealth-building move. Anyone who 'got rich' in real estate did so via development, not via rentals.
But again- if you want to do it, you are buying yourself a part-time job. It is not 'passive' income. I agree that basically every 'guide to' is a scam. Paying a real estate attorney, accountant, and property manager for a walk-through as to how the business actually works on the ground would be a good intro. (Wait till you learn that you will automatically lose every fight in court with a tenant in California!)
This is good advice, but I should have clarified in my original post--my wife and I already own about 20 units, managed by a competent company. My wife has more experience than I do with the matter--I'm trying to find an efficient way to learn more to better participate and expand our holdings.
If I were you (well, if I were you I'd get the hell out of renting apartments). But if I were you, wanting to do this, I would hire a CPA firm that works with other landlords and run your building finances by them, get their perspective. I'd hire a real estate attorney that does lots of litigation and get an idea of the risks. Maybe run your books by another property management company and see where they say they'd improve things. Chat with an experienced broker and pretend to be more sophisticated than you are, get market info out of them while not being sold on anything- they're in the business of talking shop with folks like you. I did this dozens & dozens of wealthy investors in Tier 1 US City.
I'd say other landlords, but..... landlords are in general much crazier than the average population. (This was a running joke in the office when I worked at that commercial brokerage). Just a lot of whackos, many many foreigners too. There's also a ton of 'more money than sense' high-income folks who bought an apartment building because they're doctors, say, and everyone knows real estate is a great investment! They read this on Biggerpockets.com, after all. And now they lose money every month and don't understand why.
And lots of professional landlords may not match your financial profile or time horizon. Tons of them in a Tier 1 city like San Fran are uber-independently wealthy, and buy money-losing properties because they figure over a 30+ year span they'll eventually be profitable. They literally don't care about losing money now, and collect cool buildings the way other rich folks collect classic cars or sailboats or artwork! Or they're parking money from China or Russia, and again don't care about turning a profit, etc. So, they may not have useful advice for your particular situation.
Literally nothing online has any value whatsoever, and sites like Biggerpockets.com could be nuked from orbit as far as I'm concerned
To clarify- "I'd hire a real estate attorney that does lots of litigation and get an idea of the risks"- like, where do landlords typically lose in court? Over what issue? What are the top 10 things I should be doing now to minimize legal risk, Mr. Attorney? Etc.
It's entirely possible, of course, that I'm of the same mind as those foolish doctors and will waste my efforts on this, but that's why I'm looking for more information. On the other hand, they probably think they're also exceptions, and on we go in a circle forever. Oh well.
Toward your earlier note--if not apartment buildings, then what would you consider a more worthwhile investment category for anyone able to mobilize the relevant amount of funds?
Equities? Index funds? :) Sounds like you need a financial advisor. If you're really interested in real estate, you could try your hand at development like condo conversions say?
You can know if you're in the doctor category or not, by seeing if you turn a profit every month. Yes, many recent buyers in Tier 1 cities are actually losing money, in spite of the Greedy Landlord image you see popularized
> Yes, many recent buyers in Tier 1 cities are actually losing money, in spite of the Greedy Landlord image you see popularized
That's a weird general pattern I've seen too! Most "greedy landlords" are really whackos with more money than sense, they're probably mostly losing money on their real estate, might not even keep their books well enough to really know, and pretty regularly (statistically) do crazy things like move in to one of their rental properties (and often end up fighting the tenants) when some other stupid un-profitable business(es) of theirs take a big hit or fail outright.
Restaurants are another good example – it's a terrible business investment as a class or category!
And the funny thing then is that a lot of these 'businesses' ('investments') are – effectively – charities; generally really really terrible charities and mostly net-negative ones too, but still not _functionally_ profitable 'going concerns'.
Dang – this is great, and it matches what I gleaned working at an investment company that did real estate. Most of that company's investments were new developments but they got shamed into dabbling in their 'hometown' (a big city) and (almost?) always got hosed because of (stupid) tenant disputes and the like.
(And I strongly suspected all of that company's investors were a bunch of (mostly foreigner) "whackos".)
I actually really enjoyed 'discovering' that tiny slice of the weird world we live in tho! It was fascinating (and at least a little bit horrifying)!
Doesn’t this depend a lot on what you rent out and who you rent it to? I’ve rented out my previous residences for a few years and never had to so more than replace a washer/dryer. My rentals have always been new-ish (built >2008) and rented to white collar workers and it very much felt like passive income.
That's what's meant by it's not passive income. Picking a renter is a huge part of the job. Also, back in my 20s I had an apartment where the rent didn't go up for 10 years. The landlord accepted far below market rents because I was never a problem. Ever year the landlord had to ask themselves, "Do I increase the rent and risk him leaving? Or do I keep it the same and save myself a headache?"
To your point about white collar workers, my old landlord had a few terrible experiences because while they had great credit scores they were also very demanding and litigious.
I am trying to figure out dental stuff, and it turns out that I knew nothing. I thought that brushing your teeth was mainly about removing bits of food stuck in your teeth, but it seems that at least half of the story is about recoating ("remineralizing") your enamel with the flouride in the toothpaste, and rebalancing the pH in the mouth (acid pH = weak enamel, so erosion that leads to cavities).
First issue: I live in an area with little to no fluoride in water, in which water is not artificially fluoridated (but I grew up in an area with high fluoride in water). So it seems like it would be a nice idea to supplement fluoride in my diet, in addition to the one in toothpaste. I thought about fluoridated table salt, which is a mainstream idea in scientific studies apparently... and, of course, I couldn't find it to buy on the internet (unless I import it from Germany, which costs a fortune thanks to recent Brexit). So I need more fluoride than I currently get, but there doesn't seem to be a decent solution.
Further, it seems that xylitol has beneficial effects in repairing damaged enamel, but only in concentrations between 6-10g/day (it gives you diarrhea if you get >45g/day). Great, I thought! Since chewing sugarfree gum after meals is good for teeth anyway (more saliva = better pH), I thought I'd set up the following routine:
-Brush my teeth in the morning 30 minutes after breakfast (I work from home!)
-Chew gum after lunch
-Chew gum after dinner
-Brush my teeth before bedtime
(plus use mouthwash after snacks if I don't want more gum)
...but it turns out that it's really hard to find gums with decent xylitol content, and it's impossible to find toothpaste with ANY xylitol in it, at least where I live (the UK). It drives me quite mad: why?
It seems like there might be a market for a high-xylitol dental product, since the research on it is somewhat solid at this point. I don't want to chew 6 gums per day to slightly improve my teeth.
Has anyone already done the heavy lifting here, to point me to a supplier or a somewhat unconventional source of xylitol/fluoride that I could exploit?
As the son of a dentist, I would recommend talking to one (if you haven't already) before obsessing over stuff like fluoride and xylitol. Just like with other medical fields, Internet research isn't really a substitute for a professional who's not only directly keeping up with the latest science in their field, but also has practical experience from seeing people come in and observing directly what works and what doesn't. Your tooth care routine looks decent so far, but my second-hand advice would be instead of, or in addition to chewing gum, add mouthwash AND flossing to your toothbrushing.
Oh, yes, I do floss! When I brush my teeth before going to bed. I did see a dentist (which explained the fluoride coating stuff to me), I am just annoyed by the surge in cavities ever since I moved here, so I want to take a radical approach instead of doing the bare minimum as I used to do.
I second your recommendation not to fuss about the frills. When I adopted a regular habit of brushing and flossing my mouth stabilized and I haven't had dental issues in years. One thing that dentists don't teach us is that the softest brush available does the trick. Also, I use a rinse called Closys, which is a great disinfectant. I don't get a commission. It's the same stuff they irrigate your mouth with when you get oral surgery. It might also kill C19 germs.
I just had a lot of dental work done at the local dental school. In the U.S., the Trident Vibes brand has Xylitol as the first ingredient. ACT is a brand that claims dental benefits; they have lozenges and gum. My dental resident prescribed fluoride toothpaste for me. The high concentrations are not available over the counter. You can sometimes get high-fluoride toothpaste from online Indian pharmacies if you really, really don't want to ask your dentis.
I agree that fluoride is good for your teeth, but fluoride is toxic elsewhere. I think just brushing your teeth a lot should do the trick w.r.t. dental health.
Don't forget to consider your diet. For example, drinking a lot of coffee outside of meals, and without brushing afterward, can lead to a big surge in cavities.
3. There's no good evidence that regular (prophylactic) flossing is helpful. In particular, if there's any beneficial effect, it's very weak (evidence summary: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=22161438).
Thanks! I use an electric toothbrush whose head is changed every three months or so. I also use a water flosser, which is thought to be just as effective as regular flossing but it's so much more convenient to use. I like it so I don't mind flossing this way.
I noticed Epic but... it's 1g per chewing gum, it's still 6 gums per day to get the minimum amount shown to be effective. I don't want to chew 6 gums per day! I'll probably just buy that and get less xylitol, as the act of chewing gum per se has benefits. I only want to reduce/eliminate further cavities, I don't care about perfection (for once).
The cause of cavities is dental plaque remaining on your teeth harboring bacteria.
So one thing that seems so obvious to me now, but I had not realized for a very long time, is that you can just check for plaque on your teeth by yourself.
It's not very easy to see directly, so take some suitably pointy object (I use a dull needle, but you can probably also get the thing a dentist would use) and scrape around close to your gums in various places. If you find a spot where you can scrape off lots of white stuff, you know you'll want to brush a bit more thoroughly there.
I do this once a week after brushing my teeth. This drastically improves the feedback loop of whether you are brushing effectively or not. Compared to it taking months until your next dentist appointment or cavity, the feedback is basically instant.
A second realization I had regarding flossing: while flossing you can check after each tooth gap whether you actually removed stuff vs not. And if something gets stuck on the floss, go in again until it stays clean. Doing that I realized that I had one gap that was particularly wide in which lots of food got stuck all the time. (Which, surprise, was adjacent to a tooth that liked to develop cavities...)
I wasn't aware that you don't have fluoridated salt in the UK. Why not? Indeed, in Germany it is ubiquitious. Salt with iodide and fluoride for 19 ct / 500g everywhere. With folic acid 69 ct, and a nice yellow colour.
I have often commented in annoyance about the general (mis)understandings around the Great Library of Alexandria and Hypatia. And now there's a handy-sized two-part explanation of why what you might think you know on these subjects is probably wrong! History for Atheists tackles the topic with Part One here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRXwDHnixc0
Highly recommended (us Irish Catholics have to stick together, even if he's Australian of Irish descent and very definitely ex-Catholic) 😁
He has a good review from 2009 on his old website about the movie "Agora" which starred Rachel Weisz as Hypatia. Now, I understand why the filmmaker made the choices he did - apart from his personal life, he wanted to make a particular story in a particular way, and a fairy tale about a young, beautiful woman battling the forces of the patriarchy and fanaticism and falling victim to them makes a great movie (and we can throw in a thoroughly non-historical romance sub-plot while we're at it).
But as history, it's bunk. And the problem, as O'Neill points out in his review, is that some people *were* taking it as history, as real true facts, and regurgitating it on their personal blogs and social media, and further perpetrating the myth.
O'Neill has some historical training ("I have a Bachelors Degree with Honours in English and History and a research Masters Degree from the University of Tasmania, with a specialisation in historicist analysis of medieval literature") and this is what annoys him: fake history getting sieved through pop culture and passed around as really true truth.
"Now normally I'd be delighted that someone was making a film set in the Fifth Century (at least, one that wasn't another fantasy about "King Arthur" anyway). After all, it's not like there's a shortage of remarkable stories to tell from that turbulent and interesting time. And normally I'd be even more delighted that they are actually bothering to make it look like the Fifth Century, rather than assuming because it's set in the Roman Empire everyone needs to be wearing togas, forward combed haircuts and lorica segmentata. And I would be especially delighted that they are not only doing both these things but also casting Rachel Weisz in the lead role, since she's an excellent actress and, let's face it, pretty cute.
So why am I not delighted? Because Amenabar has chosen to write and direct a film about the philosopher Hypatia and perpetuate some hoary Enlightenment myths by turning it into a morality tale about science vs fundamentalism."
O'Neill's History for Atheists post on Hypatia herself:
Generally, that Hypatia was associated with the Library of Alexandria, that the Library of Alexandria was a publicly accessible source and a bastion for science capable of catalyzing significant technological advancement if it had only been preserved, and that an angry Christian mob stormed it and burned its scrolls in a fit of anti-intellectual religious hysteria.
I'm not sure how many people have these misconceptions. They were passed to me by a Greek uncle who wished to educate me by showing me a movie (Agora) with all of these misconceptions in it. The History for Atheists guy makes it sound like new atheists often deploy these claims in anti-Christian arguments.
Too bad that Carl Sagan perpetuated the myth. Good reminder to always stop and think twice when a scientist with an axe to grind speaks so far outside his field.
They certainly do not seem to be perpetuated in academia, as these all sound preposterous to me - certainly the unhistorical linkage with Hypatia, who lived after the Library had already ceased to exist.
I wish people would actually stick to their area of expertise, and be satisfied with that. Scientists commenting on history is like an art historian explaining marine biology.
Yeah, it doesn't make much sense the other way around.
Speaking as someone with a scientific background, I wonder if part of the cross-disciplinary problem is that scientists and historians exercise different kinds of discernment when it comes to the literature. Listening to the History for Atheists guy, I have the impression that historians assume their source material could be distorted, and they therefore look for multiple sources and corroborating evidence. To build confidence in their claims, they try to accrue various documents in agreement with each other. And I imagine that, when they read secondary literature, they look for evidence the author has done the same, or is referencing someone who has done the same.
Scientists, on the other hand, put a lot of trust in the experimental results of a single paper if the methods are sound and the data collected was sufficient. They might repeat an experiment to confirm the results, or they might look for more evidence when they are trying to support a complex argument. But when they make claims in the discussion section of a paper that are simple and unambiguous, they often cite a single primary source per reported fact. They check their sources by reading the methods and results, not by looking for six papers with the same conclusion (unless the study itself is ambiguous and the results have low statistical significance to begin with).
So perhaps Sagan had no idea how to sort through information and draw strong conclusions regarding history.
But it sounds like Sagan wasn't checking his sources either way. It sounds like he was just putting the cart before the horse.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Perhaps I was also being a bit harsh - I don't mean to imply that no one can develop generalized knowledge about many different things, or that a scientist/historian should never comment on topics pertaining to history/science. Sometimes the studies of one can compliment the other, such as with scientific analysis of archaeological finds or ecological history explaining current environmental conditions. It's only really an issue when someone assumes a position of authority one way or the other without having the qualifying background to support that.
From the historical side, there are indeed several factors to consider when evaluating an ancient source, and corroborating evidence is only one of them and not always entirely accurate itself - for example, multiple authors repeating a particular legend that has no basis in fact. A good historian would be able to point out to you not just the various sources on a given topic, but also which of those literary sources and bits of evidence are *more* reliable than the others. That's a judgment call that takes years of study.
I tend to give Sagan a lot of the benefit of the doubt (unlike the modern remake of Cosmos) because I don't think he had a particular axe to grind, he was - as the video points out - writing and making the show at the tail-end of the 70s when the Doomsday Clock was issuing dire warnings https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/1980%20Clock%20Statement.pdf and a few years later Reagan would make several speeches referencing the "Evil Empire". So he was very worried, as were a lot of people, about imminent Armageddon and trying to call for reason, calm, and "can't we just all sit down and talk it out?"
And Science versus Religion/Science versus The Darkness of Superstition was one of the great beliefs of liberals. The printing press! The Galileo Affair! Darwin versus Wilberforce! Penicillin and medicine and man on the moon and the undoubted, undeniable benefits of modernity and progress! The phrasing of the debate as the Enlightenment (or maybe as far back as the Renaissance) when great thinkers dared think for themselves and come out from under the tyranny of the Church imposing mindless faith in order to keep control over the masses, resulting in Science and Progress, was the great legend and myth that "everybody knows", the kind of popular history and popular culture floating around.
Why *should* Sagan doubt what "everybody knows" when it came to the great victory of Progress over Darkness? The very tool he was pinning his hopes on, that we would all overcome our differences of race, creed and country and come together as humans on fragile spaceship Earth? He wasn't inclined to sift out what Gibbon and Voltaire had added in as polemic from what was recorded as fact, that wasn't what he was doing or what he wanted to urgently talk about.
Yeah, the problem is that this is the pop culture understanding, not anything remotely academic. I'm sympathetic to Sagan - I was one of the kids watching the Cosmos show with my father when it was first broadcast, and it was really a great general science popularisation for the public show and Sagan was charismatic, intelligent and persuasive.
Sagan wasn't a historian and was just repeating in good faith the pop culture notions he had learned. Science versus Religion is always a good story, especially if you feel that you are on the heroic, right side.
Much of it is sort of trendy teenager wall posters, if you can understand what I'm getting at. Young adults on social media who like books and history in a general "I effin' LOVE Science!" way only for history rather than science like to put up posts about "still mad about the Great Library" and so on. But they don't seem to exhibit much understanding of the facts or what the history of the Library was, they just put up cool pictures of burning library and "ultrafacts" which could be complete legends.
The Hypatia stuff gets added in for a mix of feminism and even witchcraft/Wicca - the development of the legend of Hypatia was that she was a sorceress (this is back when Hypatia's character got a bad rap on the other extreme) and so there is a brand of person who takes that and runs with it in a "two fingers up to the patriarchy, yeah ancient feminine divine wisdom hell yeah!" way. But there is the modern extreme of taking her as a feminist genius martyr for Science, as exampled in this Smithsonian magazine article from 2010: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hypatia-ancient-alexandrias-great-female-scholar-10942888/ The article does try to give the facts and be even-handed, but it does incline to the "Hypatia great thinker and feminist martyr" side of the fence. Then again, a neat "science versus religion" story is always appealing to those on the science side who feel they are being threatened by the religious or that research is being stifled or in general "it's us as the last bastions of reason and common sense against the superstitious crazies".
Possibly the worst kinds of historical errors are made when people merge anachronistic sentiments into their interpretations about the motivations of others in the past.
It is interesting, and mildly alarming, that despite the more-or-less traditional tension between religion and science, the two subjects seem equally in favour of finding martyrs for their respective causes. The alarming bit is when one is willing to overlook 'details' so long as it makes for a good story.
Yeah, I can see how different groups have taken turns crafting their own version of Hypatia. The way the Smithsonian article is written, you'd think she was murdered for being a female mathematician and philosopher... until you read a bit further down and there's stuff about her connection to Orestes and politics.
I think she makes a good feminist hero for the simple fact that she thrived so well in a traditionally male field. That's not easy. I do get suspicious any time I hear stuff about "the only female mathematician of the time" or "the only female painter" etc. I mean, I see that Hypatia had a predecessor. And I've seen enough articles along the lines of "Surprise! Medieval women were decorating illuminated manuscripts!" that I'm always wondering how many women seemingly disappeared from majority-male fields because nobody bothered to write about them.
I'm feeling a little more sympathetic now toward Carl Sagan. I think his mistake is an easy one to make. Being a communicator of science to the general public, he was out to synthesize general ideas into narratives people could get behind. Maybe when he was young in the fifties, the Hypatia myth was the only accessible version, so he took it as fact. It seems like, the earlier you go back in the 20th century, the more the narrative would have been dominated by the Enlightenment version of Hypatia.
Indeed. We can say a fair bit about women's contributions in a given area on the basis of other indicators, like education or inheritances, but others are more obscure. It seems likely, on the one hand, that we are missing many writings from upper class women. Agrippina the Younger wrote a memoir of her family and its misfortunes which would have granted enormous insight into the lifestyle of Roman women had it survived. On the other hand, few of these survived precisely because the works considered important enough for preservation and distribution were writings in fields which were predominately masculine, like politics, philosophy, etc.
I have to say that I remain unsympathetic. It is definitely an understandable thing to latch onto a historical narrative that illustrates a general point, but it understandable in the way that someone with no knowledge of trigonometry might understandably try and fail to solve a physics equation. The scholarship surrounding the actual fate of the Alexandrian Library and Hypatia was available in his time, as were many of the more preposterous theories, such as those found in 'Women in Mathematics' by Lynn Osen (the existence of which, incidentally, proved that even MIT was capable of publishing dubious works every now and then).
The trouble with getting the history wrong is not so much that the history is itself damaged for it, since the sources and actual facts are still there for anyone who wants to know more. It does, however, mislead contemporary thought and narrative about the subject, which *can* have a damaging effect on the histories we write in the future. We're now seeing students coming into classrooms of higher education with not just misunderstandings of the past, but an unwillingness to let go of them when presented with contrary evidence. I believe this has to do with the strong emotional connections made with stories that resonate with people - regardless of whether those stories are true or not.
Thanks for correcting me on that. It must be frustrating to encounter misrepresentations of history so often, similar to how I'm frustrated every time someone tries to tell me about the geometric patters formed by water molecules. Do you teach history, then?
Some of the time, yes - as a TA in university. To tell you the truth, I enjoy a certain amount of fictionalized history for fun or entertainment's sake (especially when satirical, like the glorious Life of Brian).
I'm just waiting for the day when a student quotes a movie reviewer as a secondary source. Then film critics will be our historians, and I shall write plays.
Thanks for sharing. I had this myth passed to me by a relative in typical "here's another reason religion sucks" fashion. He does a good job of tackling auxiliary ideas stemming from the central myth. I like how he dismantles the notion that the great scholars of the time were practicing science as we know it, or that they were on their way toward big advancements in engineering or technology.
Mythos aside, the Mouseion at Alexandria sounds like it would have been a cool place to hang out.
Crazy thing I found out about recently: Leonid Ksanfomality's claims of detecting life on Venus's surface (in the pictures from the Venera landers).
Now, this is a respected scientist who worked on the landers themselves. In the mid-2000s there was reanalysis of the images via computer, and Ksanfomality's group found changes over time that they attributed to motion of living creatures. My impression is of a large number of conclusions drawn from a small number of pixels, but it's still a claim published in a leading journal, not obviously wrong, about macroscopic life on another planet (I don't think it needs to be said how big a deal this would be), and weirdly it seems to be very little-known.
(Aside: Venus's surface obviously can't support terrestrial life, but life there is less absurd than might be thought, despite the 750K temperature. There's an analogy with the ocean bottom - supercritical CO2 taking the place of water - and you also have energy from above, with some sunlight getting through the clouds. It would have to be completely different chemistry than Earth, but it's not so hot as to make chemistry impossible.)
I mean, there's *some* writing about it, but not as much as I'd expect. As to "proven false", the article you linked is not 'proof', it's an argument that the images are too low-resolution and that Ksanfomality is seeing things in the noise. Which, admittedly, is probably true, but lower-resolution "aliens" have gotten more press.
The article also says that he misidentified a camera lens cap ejected from the lander as a life form. Doesn’t make him seem very credible. Crank ‘scientists’ identify life forms in pictures from the Mars rovers all the time and get coverage only in the tabloid press.
On that part the article is, as best as I can tell, based on a misunderstanding. The original article wasn't talking about the lens cap, but about a number of rather more subtle shifts.
A better skeptical writeup is (https://www.planetary.org/articles/3338), which concludes that it's just noise and Ksanfomality went insane from staring at the same pictures of Venus for three decades, which I can certainly believe. For the original articles, there's a bunch of stuff at various levels of paywalls, the originals being in Russian, but one being (https://www.scirp.org/html/7-4500130_29456.htm?pagespeed=noscript).
To be clear on my own opinion: I do think this is evidence for life on Venus' surface, albeit extremely weak evidence that shouldn't move one's priors much. The thing is, it's also a strong argument that, if there *was* macroscopic life on Venus' surface, we wouldn't have noticed it, because we really only have the Venera images and they're low-resolution and few in number. I'd assumed, previously, that we had enough imagery to rule out anything macroscopic; I'm no longer confident of that.
That sceptical write up also seems extremely damning. He was doing image analysis using the “sharpen” tool in Microsoft Paint?? It really just seems like he was seeing patterns in noise.
Certainly you can’t completely rule out some kind of macroscopic life based on the images alone (it could be beneath the surface, limited to the poles, a flat “lichen” that just looks like rock from a distance etc).
It seems like the (possible and disputed) presence of phosphine in the atmosphere is way more interesting. It seemed like that was a mistake but now there is another analysis of probe data from the 70s that indicates phosphine and chemical disequilibrium:
That is more of a “why is nobody talking about this” finding IMO. Life must have some kind of metabolism and it’s likely to involve changing the atmosphere in a detectable way, so this seems like a better line of inquiry than the images.
There is a very good, and fundamental reason, why life may not be possible except within the narrow band of temperatures where water is a liquid.
It arises from the fact that life is *not* just "chemistry" -- it's *precision* chemistry. It's chemical reactions that are extremely precisely controlled, both in terms of what reacts with what, and in terms of reaction rate. If you don't have this level of control over what happens on the femtosecond time scale, there's just no way you can have stable meaningful behaviour at the second time scale -- even the tiniest failure of precise control means over those 15 orders of magnitude chaos takes over and you don't get life, you just get some interesting regularity in your chemical reactions over a few microseconds.
The only way we know to have precision control over chemistry is mechanical: you have to basically pick out molecules very specifically and arrange them in very specific ways so only the reactions you want happen to the reactants you want. In all forms of known life, this is what protein enzymes do -- they control chemical reactions very precisely and reliably.
Now there's certainly no reason you couldn't build structures out of something *other* than amino acids to make enzymes. But there is a limitation: you need a situation where you have strong forces holding your enzyme together (so it keeps its shape, which is critical to its operations), and at the same time *moderately* strong forces that the enzyme can use to guide the substrate molecules into their correct positions and hold them there against the random buffeting of thermal noise.
That means you need a force, of some kind, which is significantly weaker than the covalent bonding forces that hold enzymes together (whatever they're made of) but also significantly stronger than the random thermal forces that arise at any T > 0. There is only one such force of which we know: hydrogen bonding. At the temperature of liquid water, H-bonding is much stronger than random thermal fluctuations, so it can be used to easily guide and manipulate the interaction between substrate and enzyme. But it's much weaker than covalent forces, so its actions won't break or bend your enzymes.
But if you go to much lower or higher temperatures, this is no longer true. At much higher temperatures, H-bonding forces are *no longer* strong enough to stand random thermal buffeting. At much lower temperatures, they are too strong, and it's you can't break them when you need to (to let go of a molecule).
The fact that *water* is the basis for life is sort of an accident, the key is the use of H-bonding and operating at the temperature where H-bonds are just about the right strength, neither too strong nor too weak. But of course the properties of water are dominated by H-bonding, and at that particular temperature water is a liquid. Since water is also the most common neutral molecule in the universe, it's not surprising it is the natural basis for life.
Water is not the most common neutral molecule; that's H2. I think it's #2, though.
I buy that you can't have biological life at over, let's say, 500 K because of these sorts of effects. Not so sure it's impossible at, say, 200 K; the important bit is the proportionality, not the rate itself.
Ha ha yeah sorry I meant most common neutral molecule *other than H2* which is kind of obvious. I appreciate the correction.
200K might work. You'd need some different chemistry, because that's not really enough to provide the activation energy for the organic reaction with which we're familiar, but -- who knows? It would be fascinating to find some bugs on Europa that had made it work.
I don't see why "everything is slowed down by a factor of 1000" is a dealbreaker. As long as you've got the proportionality, you've got the potential for life (though probably not the potential for *intelligent* life, star lifetimes being what they are).
I agree with the point you raised elsewhere in the thread i.e. nonpolar interactions don't have the specificity you need for life. That *is* a lower bound on temperature, because below ~175 K all the polar stuff gets locked up in ices (I think some mixtures with HF might be able to get lower, but high concentrations of HF seem implausible).
Yeah but Asimov was a physical chemist, he didn't know much molecular biology, and for that matter the 1980s (when he wrote this) is for molecular biology kind of like the 1900s for physics -- so long ago the understanding has changed enormously since then. He's focused on the most trivial aspect, which is solution chemistry, but I think the really important question is chemical *control* -- how do you get exactly the reaction you want, when you want it, and nothing else? That is essentially the key to life -- very, very precise control of chemical reactions. So the ultimate question is: can we imagine some other way to do it than enzymes using H-bonding forces?
Ok, hydrogen bonding is just right at normal temperature and does not do the job at higher or lower temperatures. So water based life can exist at normal temperatures and cannot exist at higher or lower temperatures. But is there some other type of bonding that could work at higher or lower temperatures?
Well no. That's the problem. At one end of the scale we've got covalent bonding forces, which have characteristic temperatures 1000-10000K, so we need to stay far away from that so we can build molecules that are stable. At the other end we have dispersion forces, which have characteristic temperatures of like 1-50K for small molecules, and we need to be well above *those* so our reactions actually proceed at a reasonable pace. The problem is: there's nothing in between except H-bonding.
The one exception I can imagine is that electrostatic forces can under the right circumstances, play this role. Indeed, enzymes often use charges in various ways to hold substrates and catalyze reactions. When charges are held at the right position and are in the right number density, then can fit the bill. Of course, in our biochemistry the charges most often used are those formed by acid/base reactions, so NH3+ or O- et cetera, and again we're back to the temperature regime where H+ pops on and off electronegtative atoms readily (which is not coincidentally the temperature range of liquid water).
But maybe that would work at a different temperature, if we imagine building around something else that could be pulled off and on atoms to generate charges. Maybe halogens and Period 3 elements?
AFAIK H-bonding is just a special case of dipole-dipole interaction, so I think this could possibly extend to other elements. Also:
- Aren't there Van der Waals forces? (They're fairly weak, but I think they are somewhat important.)
- Even taking this argument prima facie, the bounds for temperature and chemistry that it implies are fairly weak: the temperature has to be roughly above 50K and below 1000K (which is ~1 OOM) and the chemistry has to use H-bonding (which occurs in water, but also occurs in some other compounds involving nitrogen/oxygen/flouride/etc.)
Yes, H-bonding is frequently taught to freshman as a special case of dipole-dipole forces. Why that particular misleading error has become so widespread among basic instruction I do not know, but the quantum aspects of H-bonding are absolutely critical to its dynamics (which is what's important here).
Yes, there are van der Waals forces, in particular dispersion forces can be quite strong, depending on the size of the molecule, but for small molecules they are very small, and for large molecules they are so nondirectional that they are relatively useles in terms of promoting catalysis by stabilizing a transition state. (That's not to say they play no role at all.) Also bear in mind in order for your molecules to move around briskly, you need generally to be *above* the characteristic temperature of the dispersion forces affecting your substrates. Otherwise everything is just frozen in place.
I'm not sure why you see those limits. At 50K an H-bond is as unbreakable (by thermal activation) as a covalent bond, so you wouldn't be able to detach your substrate from your enzyme after the reaction. At 1000K an H-bond is as labile as dispersion forces, so your substrate wouldn't stick to your active site long enough to react.
Yes, H-bonding occurs with other electronegative atoms, but that doesn't change the range of temperature over which it is strong enough to provide stability for the duration of a catalyzed reaction but not so strong that it can't be disrupted by forces less than those that break covalent bonds. H-bonding to N is already extensively used in biochemical reactions.
Using H-bonding is itself dependent on temperature and imposes harsher limits. Below ~175 K (the lowest water-ammonia eutectic), protic compounds have all frozen solid and become inaccessible to biochemistry. Above ~600 K, H-bonding won't hold things together (and that's the hard limit, based on stuff like the critical point of water and the melting of aramids or melamine/cyanuric acid; more complex stuff is going to fall apart before that).
I'm confused by GVB's argument on this point. The only thing I heard in that podcast that suggests vaccination could be bad for the recipient is the possibility that the vaccine could render the recipient's innate immune system powerless against the disease. This is fine so long as the acquired immune system is properly trained by the vaccine, but could be disastrous if a different strain came along that dodged that acquired immunity.
If this is true, why should the age of the recipient matter? Surely no matter what their age they'd be worse off without their innate immunity, no? Why would this only be a problem for the young?
Right that was my limited understanding, trained immunity 'may' not be as good as natural immunity. Honestly, I'm clueless about natural immunity. But if true then the young, who are much less at risk from dying, may benefit from natural immunity from a more traditional vaccine. If you're old, then getting the virus is a danger you want to avoid, so get whatever vaccine and 'not to worry' about long term danger... I may be dead by then. (I'm an old fart who has a vaccine, so it could be confirmation bias. :^)
If I'm following the argument correctly, that only works if there's a new strain that A) is different enough to dodge the vaccine, B) is more dangerous to young people than the current strains (or else getting natural immunity is no safer than risking the new strain) but C) is not different enough to dodge naturally acquired immunity. I'm not sure how plausible all that is but it seems fairly speculative compared to the known costs of getting COVID, even in non-fatal cases.
Also a significant factor is that the more people acquire natural immunity through becoming infected, the more chances there are for new strains to develop.
His counterargument to your first paragraph is that this is a known risk with SARS-1, so it's really not such a stretch to suggest it might be a risk with SARS-2. And to your second paragraph he replies that we have excellent data on the progress of the 1918 flu pandemic, and it didn't mutate at all over the course of time, so the crazy speed with which COVID is spitting out new strains isn't what we'd predict from just letting the virus run its course.
I'm not qualified to judge the quality of either of these counters, but he does provide them in the Dark Horse podcast.
"we have excellent data on the progress of the 1918 flu pandemic, and it didn't mutate at all over the course of time" - how exactly do we have that data? They reconstructed the 1918 flu virus based on a few samples including preserved lung tissue and a victim who was buried in permafrost: https://science.sciencemag.org.sci-hub.do/content/310/5745/77.full - with Covid they can fully sequence millions of samples, so it's not exactly surprising that we're aware of more variants, but it seems very unlikely that the 1918 flu didn't ever mutate by a single base.
I think part of Geert's idea, is that we will have viruses infecting people, who have recently been vaccinated (so not full immune response yet) getting infected with a different strain of the virus. And the virus will then be 'trained' (it will evolve) to get around the vaccine. It may be that this does not happen. But it's at least something to think about.
That's definitely part of his argument, but that's more of a tragedy of the commons thing - it doesn't suggest that the particular individual receiving the vaccine would have been better off without.
Have you listened to the podcast? GVBs argument is that these risks only apply to mass, non-sterilizing vaccinations given in the midst of a pandemic of an easily-mutating pathogen. This combination just hasn't ever happened before.
The vaccine is definitely not sterilizing - it only immunizes people from the spike protein of the current dominant strain. Recall the hullabaloo about whether a vaccinated person could be a carrier of the virus, whether they'd still need to wear masks, etc. None of that would be in question if we had a fully sterilizing vaccine.
(Incidentally, GVB makes the claim in the podcast that only attenuated virus vaccines are fully sterilizing, and that therefore only very few modern vaccines are in this category - he cited polio as an example of such a vaccine. As elsewhere, I don't have the expertise to evaluate that claim, but interesting if true. )
It was my impression from the video, that we could be making a 'traditional' vaccine. But it takes a few years. I have no idea what that means, or if it's true.. and if the dang thing is mutating quickly, what's the point? Is there a virologist in the house?
"Recall the hullabaloo about whether a vaccinated person could be a carrier of the virus, whether they'd still need to wear masks, etc. None of that would be in question if we had a fully sterilizing vaccine."
My understanding is this was basically driven by clueless people and fear-mongering, with the argument that "we don't know FOR SURE that it will be sterilizing". But all evidence is that it is.
I didn't read CDC study. Your linked to article says vaccinated people are less likely to get sick, at 90% rate. So maybe ~1/2 got the two dose 95% vaccine and 1/2 the J&J at 77%? This is news?
Not sure about sterilizing, but isn't whatever third wave is going on in places now, mostly from one or more mutated virus that has gotten better at spreading fast? There's an English strain, but the Brazilian one is 'better' ?
I got the J&J vaccine 77% effective. What does 77% mean? (Sorry the last is a rhetorical question, no need to answer.)
It shouldn't be rhetorical because it's a good question. My understanding is that it was estimated from the study that 77% (now estimated to be higher) were immune to the level of never getting any symptoms at all- which makes it virtually if not entirely impossible to transmit to anyone else (number of truly asymptomatic people (not pre-symptomatic) who were found to have transmitted have been found to be a rounding error). The remainder could get infected but not seriously and none required hospitalization. Is that right?
Yeah I think that is right. I can still get the virus but less likely and less likely to be severe. One also assumes that the severity of the infection relates to how infectious you are. So there should be less transmission.
Didn't click the link, but since no one else is mentioning it I'll remind that the variants have been hitting lower age groups than the original virus.
It's not quite what I was recalling, i was thinking it was a bigger shift than "more infectious virus = more cases at all ages", but that's still important and relevant to the original topic of "should young folks get vaccinated?", in my mind.
Wow. Thanks that's great! So this NK vaccine he was talking about is what he does research on. Maybe not a loonie, but I'm sorry I gave him a signal boost.
A while back I came across an interesting problem in investing. When using the TDAmeritrade platform, buying Vanguard index funds incurs a fee of $25 per transaction, regardless of transaction size. I have an account which accrues money at certain amount per week - how frequently should I buy in in order to maximize my return?
Now, in practice the answer is "buy ETFs, which don't carry a commission", with a side order of "simulate it week by week in Excel". But I'd still like to know the answer in the general case: if investable money accrues at a rate of $A per year, investing that money incurs a commission of $B, and the investment account (continually compounding) has an APY of C%, what equation gives me the optimal time between investment buys?
I've tried everything I can think of, and the only thing that's worked is an infinite series which allows me to simulate the answer in Excel. But that's time consuming, as each combination of variables has to be simulated individually. Is there a simpler way?
Not sure, If your expected profit in a month (say) is more than $25, then no reason to hold the money in cash. If less then hold until the cost of holding.. in lost profits, exceeds $25.
I'm not sure what time frame to use... Plug (in numbers) and play may be needed?
If you are forced to use TDA (instead of opening a free Vanguard account with no fees) then the answer is to buy the ETFs instead as you already know. There is no reason to pay fees that you do not need to pay no matter how you space it out or strategize it.
We're therefor trying to choose T to maximise f(T) = (aT- b)/(e^cT- 1). Differentiating gives us
f'(T) = (a(e^cT-1) - (aT-b)c e^cT) /(e^cT-1)^2
Setting this to zero is a matter of solving
a(1-cT) +bc - a e^-cT = 0
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure there's no closed form for this - equations like this combining a polynomial and an exponential term usually don't have one. But you can approximate the solution numerically very easily with Newton-Raphson or interval bisection.
I’m quickly running out of Critical Role to listen to; could anybody recommend me a good non-fiction podcast instead? I’m an aspiring biomedical data scientist (currently at university), but I love good content from outside of my field, too.
I mostly enjoy the german podcast wrint (Holger Klein, wrint.de - pick a category you like, e.g. the one on history or on science. Holgi is both very good at normal conversation and difficult topics, e.g. talking to a person right after gender transition or someone terminally ill, so if this is interesting for you, I can dig up a few of those episodes)
My favorite German podcast is Raumzeit (https://raumzeit-podcast.de/). It's about spaceflight and technology related to it. Not so sure about B2, but if you are into that kind of topic give it a try.
Against the Rules (Michael Lewis), Behind the Bastards, Blindspot (road to 9/11), Bundyville (about the pacific northwest far-right), Darknet Diaries (hacker stories), Factually, It Could Happen Here (fiction, hopefully), It's Going Down (anarchist news), Popular Front (conflict journalism), Radiolab, Reveal (investigative journalism), Jordan Harbinger (interviews), Two Minutes Past Nine (Oklahoma city bombing).
I'd be interested in what others think of the Huberman Lab Podcast. It seems like good, solid information on health and the human body. But my base knowledge is insufficient to judge Andrew Huberman's arguments/claims.
I like Martyrmade, for trying really hard to show both sides of an issue. Also, not strictly speaking a podcast, but a lot of universities put really interesting lectures up on YouTube.
OmegaTau is my favorite podcast, it's a non-commercial podcast with no ads by a German programmer / glider pilot, who travels the world talking to scientists, engineers and other adjacent disciplines. He's talked to people at CERN about the Standard Model, ESA about software verification, Oak Ridge National Lab about supercomputing for COVID modeling, SOFIA about airborne infrared astronomy, ITER about fusion, etc. And he does episodes in German as well! Check it out: https://omegataupodcast.net/
The Academy Awards have moved from the Dolby Theatre, their home for the last 20 years, to Los Angeles Union Station. Obviously COVID protocols would prevent the usual packed house full of paid seat fillers, someplace more spread out would work better, but why a train station? Especially considering that the LA Metro insisted that the ceremony not interfere with its usual operations, so trains and buses will be running through and the food court will stay open.
The relatively low roof also helps distract from how few people there will be.
Supposedly, the waiting room is insulated sufficiently from the noise (besides, they'll be wearing top-tier microphones anyway). I expect them to route passengers around the waiting room, through the north and south patio. The passage from the waiting room to the food court will probably be blocked off.
Judging by the website of the company who owns the property, who seems to want to turn it into a cultural destination and change its reputation for the better, I expect them to have gotten a great deal. I wouldn't be surprised if they can use it for free.
Trains are boring, so most every city's Union Station (they've all got one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Station) adds a bit of gratuitous architecture to stand out. High-profile train station are genuinely visually interesting places to spend a few hours.
As Aapje notes, the Los Angeles version is A: recently and expensively upgraded and B: deliberately styled after the glitz and glamour of Golden-Age Hollywood. Because Los Angeles. It's also deliberately laid out for lots of people to go about their business without getting in each other's way in either the physical or audible sense. So, not a bad place for a bunch of people to stand around while "socially distancing" but still projecting Hollywood Glamour for the cameras.
I mean, the station was itself built in 1937, as the last of the great Union Stations in the United States. So it comes by its Golden Age Hollywood look honestly. About ten blocks down Broadway from the station is where the dozen glitzy 1920s movie palaces were ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_Theater_District_(Los_Angeles) ) but by the time Union Station was built, the new glitzy theaters had moved west to Hollywood. In the past decade or so, various historic conservation societies have been trying to get the movie palaces to reopen for showings, and Union Station has also been revitalizing as the hub of the modern public transit system in LA, so there's a natural synergy of bringing back a couple classic periods of Los Angeles history.
Does anyone have a good way of figuring out how long it will be before the Fed raises interest rates? In a strange twist, I am considering not buying a house into interest rates rise/the housing market cools.
Who knows. You could check forward markets. Long-term treasury markets seem to be pricing in somewhat higher future rates. If we have substantial inflation, we should at least see a rise in nominal rates (though one would also expect a rise in nominal inflation). Using standard US monetary policy logic you would expect the fed to begin tightening once it is clear that we are past covid and the associated economic slowdown - so my wet thumb in the air would be q1 2022, but even then I would expect the rate hikes to be modest unless something spurs Powell to change his approach
Fed fund futures currently price the first Fed tightening in q4 2022. Tightening prior to mid 2022 is quite unlikely based on forward guidance which expects that tightening will not occur prior to the US reaching full employment and core pce inflation trend above 2%. Mortgage rates however are a term rate (whereas the Fed raises the overnight rate) and will, in general, rise well before actual Fed tightening. If you're waiting for housing market cooling, that could be a while though. It's regionally variable of course, but nationally home inventories for sale are shockingly low (i.e. the lowest in the history of the series) which suggests a very strong housing market for quite a while.
If houses are priced by max affordable monthly payment, you’d expect house prices to fall when interest rates rise. Holding monthly payment constant you’d rather have a high interest rate and lower price because you can possibly refinance down in the future.
You should consider that the interest rate might not be the only thing driving the current craziness in the market. It's certainly a factor, but there's other stuff likely at play:
The millennials are now the largest living generation and are coming into peak house-buying age, while the baby boomers still own a lot of the existing houses. And COVID and an increase in "work at home" (the latter which may be sticking around) has generally increased demand for house-buying. And there just hasn't been as much new housing made in the last decade, due to the 2010s collapse.
The interest rate is certainly intensifying things, but a lot the other factors are longer-term so the market may not go back to normal even if the interest rate goes down.
Plus, even if the interest rate goes down, house prices can be a bit "sticky", so they might not drop to prior prices, anyway. It'll be easier to find a house if demand slackens, but it might not actually be much cheaper.
You know, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do recall a realtor saying very similar things to me while showing me houses circa 2006-07. I just didn't buy it, and a year or two later I was looking at houses that had gone from $800k to $500k in a few months. Some of the stories of the people who were selling were horrifying, some were about to lose a quarter of a million in lifetime savings and just be relieved to walk away not owing anything or having their credit ruined.
As I said, I'm not saying you're wrong, but my experience of waiting through the 05-08 boom and buying right in the middle of the subsequent crash convinced me real estate is deeply unpredictable, at least in coastal areas. (I don't attribute my decision to brilliant insight or anything, also, it was mostly dumb luck.)
I wasn't actually making any concrete predictions. Yes, the market might crash again, and yes, I agree the real estate market is very hard to predict.
My point was that the OP's reasoning seemed to be based on the idea that the interest rate was the main (or perhaps only) factor contributing to the current market craziness, and that doesn't appear to be true.
I dunno that it's a strong argument per se. You're adducing long-term trends, and those are not usually the best explanation of short-term craziness. They may empower it in some underlying sense, but even when change is driven by long-term trends an abrupt manifestation of it is usually due to short-term events. That is, the trends you cite would be a good argument for a gradual steady rise in housing prices. But for example my house appreciated (so they say) by something like 15% since last spring. That's insane, that's not at all the result of long-term trends, that's a fluctuation driven by market disequilibrium -- which may indeed be caused by strenuous monetary and fiscal stimulus, including the absurd level of modern interest rates, or by a Boccaccio-like fleeing of the cities, a lack of faith in other inflation hedges and a fear of what $trillions in conjured Federal spending, and a fierce Democratic determination to crank up wages, will do in the next few years -- who knows?
> but even when change is driven by long-term trends an abrupt manifestation of it is usually due to short-term events.
Well, yeah, that's pretty much what I'm saying. Obviously the direct catalyst is COVID, but even the "low interest rate" is something of a longer-term cause as they've been on a fairly steady decline for the last 40 years.
And a lot of the COVID-induced changes might not be short-term anomalies, but an abrupt shifting to a new normal. I think the increased demand for homes due to more working-from-home, while abruptly brought on by COVID, is likely to be a "new normal".
Again, all I'm really saying is the idea that "if we wait for interest rates to go back to normal, house prices will go back to normal too" isn't necessarily a safe bet.
Anyone else ever spends time perusing the BLS detailed data on US occupations? Surprisingly granular, so there are lots of interesting little tidbits to be found - like, there are 50k people employed as floral designers??? and how about 100k phlebotomists? and there are still 50k Locomotive engineers and operators??
Random thoughts: Childhood/ “Second Hand” Disability Insurance
As a working adult, you can buy disability insurance, which provides you with replacement income in case you experience an injury or disease that prevents you from earning a salary.
However, you cannot buy disability insurance for a child. Supposedly, children do not need disability insurance because they are not expected to work, so there is no lost income that must be replaced. Expenses directly related to the treatment of the disability fall under the domain of health insurance.
This logic doesn’t hold water, though. Any (non trivial) childhood disability will be expensive even excluding medical costs--it will require unpaid labor by the child’s guardians or caregivers that prevents them from working lucrative jobs. So, when you have a child, you run the risk of his disability requiring your outsize attention and resulting in a loss of income at your job. But there is no “second hand disability insurance” you can purchase to pay for childcare in case such a disability is diagnosed.
As someone who will very shortly be a parent, having a disabled child is one of my biggest fears. Isn’t the purpose of insurance to pay for ‘peace of mind’--to have the confidence that even if the worst happens (disease, death, natural disaster), you or your loved ones will have the resources to deal with it without too much sacrifice from other parts of life? Having a child with a severe disability would require enormous amounts of labor on my part, and/or expensive caretaking to allow me to participate in other parts of my adult life--work, vacation, alone time, etc. Why is there not an insurance market to offset some of these risks?
Probably because you have to fork out all at once, instead of over time the way you do for ordinary disability insurance. I found a Nature paper that asserts the probability of a lifetime disabling birth defect is about 2%. If each such child were to get a $1 million payout from a putative insurance policy, and the insurance co cut is 30%, then the premium works out to be about $30,000. That wouldn't be bad at all if spread out over 20-30 years, the way it is with ordinary disability insurance (you pay the premiums over many decades against the once-in-a-lifetime possibility of permanent disability). But you can't do that insuring against birth defects, you only have a window of 9 months to collect the premium, and $30,000 over 9 months is a lot of money.
I thought about that too, but it doesn't seem insurmountable. 2% prevalence could be cut down a lot by eliminating payouts for self-imposed disorders like FASD & the underwriting process could easily avoid payouts for chromosomal disorders by screening for them in-utero. Additionally, as with life insurance, those in the 'preferred' category would have much lower premiums than parents-to be who have genetic conditions themselves that would likely be passed down. A lump sum of ~$10,000 over 9 months seems very reasonable to me.
Well...if you can readily raise $10k in cash over that time period, you are probably sufficiently well off that the worst case outcome isn't going to completely ruin you financially. I mean, the burden of a several disabled child is not primarily financial, you know -- I think the emotional and social burden is much, much higher.
Plus you've got to factor in that people have very strong feelings about their children around their birth. Look at how agonized people get over a Down's diagnosis in utero: some people immediately abort, some people agonize, some people who thought they would change their mind. There are fierce legal debates about it, which I think are proxies for the strong feelings people have about newborns. It's just not an area where many people can muster up cool rationality. So that would definitely be a cramp on marketing.
That said, one thing that might work is to have people start paying insurance premiums from the moment they marry, or even earlier. They could be for such things as severe disability, of course, but could also be for whatever other large unexpected costs accrue to child-rearing -- a childhoold diagnosis of leukemia, for example, or a car accident requiring amputation and rehab, or God forbid TBI and rehab. There's are a lot of minefields there not all of which are covered by ordinary medical insurance, so one might just start selling newlyweds insurance coverage for any and all unexpected things that might happen to their future kids. That way you can spread the costs over more years. Also, since not everyone who pays premiums would even end up having kids, the premiums would be spread out over some fraction of nonparents, too (like taxes to pay for school) and be a little lower.
Interesting ideas, but not quite what I'm talking about.
"To get private long term insurance, we could let kids sign insurance contracts when young, or empower their parents or grandparents to agree on their behalf. Note that today parents could, but usually do not, implement partial poverty insurance by insisting that their richer kids transfer to their poorer kids."
Not what I'm going for. I would hope none of my children would sign a contract like this. It could only be signed by those 18+ to be legally enforceable, and by that point both parties would have a pretty good idea who's going to be earning more. The higher earning party has nothing to gain from this (he can always give his siblings money cause he wants to) and everything to lose (e.g. I would have been forced to sponsor a family member's drug addiction). I think it's much better to instill cultural values of "take care of your family members but also don't indulge their bad behaviors"--some financial gifts should be conditional.
I imagine there’s a big cultural component here, compounding whatever personality traits your parents have as individuals.
One thing I would say is talk about end-of-life stuff early. Demand to know their preferences and write them down. My mom was always fairly pragmatic about death but we never got into specifics. When she became terminally ill, it suddenly became almost impossible to talk about her final wishes at all. The sicker she got, the less able we were to discuss those topics. When she passed, I had to make about 1000 expensive decisions in three days. I’ve seen this play out similarly for friends since then. I could kiss my in-laws for providing their sons with a packet containing their wills and all sorts of in-advance arrangements they made for themselves long before it became crucial. Tell your parents what a gift that is to give their kids.
One of the nicest things my mother did for us was to plan her own funeral. She picked the music, the food, everything. We just had to show up and it was a lot easier to manage.
When my dad got really sick, all of his (5) kids gathered to be with him. There were questions about what sort of care to provide and we didn't have someone whose decision this was. There were the stirrings of an argument. "Dad wouldn't want this." "Yes, he would. What he wouldn't want is this . . . "
One of my sisters suggested that we check his papers, and it turned out he had a living will and that it was specific. What he wanted, what he didn't. It was a generous document and it spared us the burden of deciding how and when he would die. It let us do the death watch without half of us being pissed at the other half for either withholding or insisting upon this or that measure.
The mortality part is easier if you've been eased into it. My parents talked very frankly about their preferred end-of-life care, funeral arrangements, etc. when I was growing up so it's not a frightening or forbidden topic now. Obviously I'm not looking forward to their deaths but it's going to happen regardless so it's better to focus on the aspects that I can control.
The hard part for me is keeping in touch. I never developed the habit of calling regularly, and it causes a lot of headaches compared to my girlfriend who keeps in closer contact with her family. If you weren't raised in a culture that values parental relationships it's a habit that you have to deliberately cultivate and work into your schedule.
Re: keeping in touch. I might be just rephrasing what you already said, but I've found that actually scheduling regular phone or video calls completely solved this problem for me. No more hurt feelings over the amount of contact and no more resigned sighs at being interrupted by an unexpected phone call I feel bad rejecting because it's been a while since we talked.
I'm reading "The Scout Mindset" by Julia Galef and just wanted to note that Scott's name comes up a few times in her anecdotes. I wasn't expecting that.
When my son and I jump on the trampoline, we build up a static charge with each other or with ground.
I'm interested, for pedagogical reasons, in *measuring* our charge. Can we do this with an analog multimeter? Are we actually at different voltage levels?
Related question, during the winter, when humidity is low, I get a static shock at work several times per day. Where does all that energy go when it's humid? Does the moisture constantly drain potential energy from me, or is the energy being generated as heat instead?
Based on memory from a long-ago physics class, I think both of those are correct. I think any voltage differentials you accumulate will create small currents through the ambient moisture, equalizing the voltage, preventing charge buildup. These small currents would in turn generate small amounts of heat
The capacitance of your body is too low; a conventional multimeter is measuring voltage across a known resistance, and that resistance is typically low enough to bleed a static charge off before it can get a measurement.
The actual measuring tools for this are somewhat expensive, but you can make home-made devices that can demonstrate the existence of a static charge easily enough.
(This might be a duplicate.) That's right. The human body has a capacitance of ~100pF. (Assuming a spherical human of 1m radius, C= 4*pi*epsilon_0*Radius,) Typcial input impedances are 10 Meg Ohm, for an R*C time constant of about 1 millisecond. If you have an oscilloscope, you can discharge yourself through the x10 'scope probe. The RC time constant will be a measure of your capacitance. And the height of the pulse will be a measure of your charge. But I don't know how to calibrate it.
You can take qualitative measurements fairly easily with a gold leaf electroscope (you can use aluminium foil instead of gold). It's a standard high school physics experiment and can be DIY'ed with a jam jar, a wire and some foil.
it might be possible to use two small polystyrene balls hanging from a piece of floss in place of the foil leaves. Measure the angle to which the electrostatic force pushes the balls apart (the angle between the two lengths of floss). If you know the weight of the balls, you can calculate the amount of force needed to push them to that angle. Measure the distance between the two balls (or derive it using trig) and pretend they are point charges. Use Coulomb's law to estimate the charges needed to exert that electrostatic force between the balls.
Yeah, good ideas. Electro-static measurements are difficult 'cause there is often some unseen charge leakage path. Not quite the same, but I've always wanted to make an Electric Field Mill. http://a-tech.net/ElectricFieldMill/
You can make a nice electroscope from an aluminum pie pan, styrofoam cup and Al foil. (I don't remember all the details.) I can't find a good link with pictures. Down on this page a way, I searched for pie pan electrometer.
I really enjoy the speculation about the future found in Nick Bostrom’s talk of ending aging, Robin Hanson’s description of “Age of Em”, and the like. Does anyone have any good sci-fi recommendations that combine great writing and deep characters with explorations of interesting possible futures?
Try Accelerando, by Charles Stross, or maybe Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson (the second is a single book, just with a weird title/subtitle combination).
Are any IQ tests worth taking? If so, which ones and what can you learn about yourself by taking them (looking especially for claims backed up by empirical literature).
Every online IQ test is fake, and their claims about being endorsed by... whoever... are also fake.
Raven's progressive matrices are good to learn your IQ. If you want to learn something other than IQ, take a personality test instead.
Other serious IQ tests, and serious tests including IQ... well, I obviously don't know them all, but in my experience, they often disappoint in the IQ area by giving you a very vague answer like "you IQ is somewhere above 115", which you probably already knew.
I assumed the online tests were garbage. What about the IQ tests used in empirical research? (The ones that talk about the relationship between IQ and outcomes, for instance?)
IQ tests are only accurate if you take them in a controlled environment. That means that online IQ tests, even serious tests like the one on the Norwegian Mensa site, will often underestimate your IQ because you can become distracted easily, or because you don't commit to the test 100%.
The easiest way to take an IQ in person is probably through your local Mensa organization. In most countries those tests are optimized to discriminate most accurately between individuals with an IQ greater or lower than 130, so if you score far away from that, the test is not very accurate. In my opinion, Mensa itself is a weird organization that attracts many annoying people, but the IQ test is very much legit.
Nutrition question: I want to eat this whole bag of jellybeans. I'm happy to skip a meal and/or skate a marathon or whatever tomorrow to ensure I don't gain weight from such behavior. What's the argument to still forgo the jellybeans? (It will have to be pretty good because I really like jellybeans.)
I think the possible answers are on a continuum.
One extreme is: Health at any size! Sugar is basically poison, regardless of whether it makes you overweight. All that matters is eating real food and exercising.
The other extreme is: Excess body fat kills. As long as you eat some vegetables occasionally (or take multivitamins), calories are calories. All that matters is maintaining a healthy weight and exercising.
I imagine neither extreme is correct but is one of them more correct? If you had to pick a number from 0 (health at any size) to 10 (if you can eat it and stay thin, go for it), what would you pick?
I was thinking that in terms of short-term quality of life, buffer the jelly beans (before or after) with some high fat, high protein food. This probably means I don't have one of those golden metabolisms.
I find that a little hard to believe, for a molecule as small as sucrose. Maybe for polysaccharides, or even oligosaccharides. Do you have some empirical study to which you could point me that supports this understanding? TIY
I feel as if my position doesn't actually match anywhere on this continuum, because I disagree with your premises?
Sugar is not poison. I'm not experienced enough to know whether, if you were burning a sufficient number of calories, having all the calories above-and-beyond the ones you're using to get useful nutrition be sugar would be a problem. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't; there's various stuff about sugar consumption and diabetes that I really don't understand enough. But poison is way too strong. I'm not convinced a small amount of sugar per day will do you any harm if you're exercising enough and don't have diabetes (I'm less sure about the entire bag of jellybeans).
At the same time, if you take multivitamins and do nothing else, you will get a deficiency. Multivitamins are probably a nice precaution but relying on them for all your vitamins is unwise-to-put-it-mildly. You need to exercise *some*, and you need to get a sufficient amount of a very long list of nutrients, and the amount you need is calculated in "nutrient actually absorbed" not "nutrient consumed", so anything that affects absorption matters - which I *think* is where the pill-vs-food thing comes in though it might also be the food having nutrients we haven't identified yet (or haven't confirmed are needed yet) or possibly to some extent stuff like fiber/protein that we know about but mostly don't put in pills. Oh, and we don't actually know what the amount is; we have estimates but they're not 100% reliable. And of course, I'm using the word "need", but actually it's "doing more of this produces benefits up to a point, you can min-max it or you can do a minimal level and call it good or wherever in between the sensible tradeoff falls for you." It's less "you must do X" and more "not doing X has a cost, how high depending on how little X you do."
So um... to summarize, my position is basically: To maximize health, get all the nutrients you need and some minimal exercise. My guess is you can trade off more exercise vs. more sugar above that but there may be levels at which it doesn't work, through some combination of exercise injuries, more exercise requiring more protein, and "no, a whole bag of jellybeans in an hour really is different from an eighth of the bag every day for eight days in a qualitative not quantitative way, giant sugar shock something something mess up your system something something". You should talk to someone who knows more than I do for that one; I think it's plausible but I don't know enough to say it's definitely true for everyone always. I am super not a nutritionist.
tl;dr: If you can eat it and stay thin/in good health/not tired all the time/no deficiencies/no feeling weird from sugar highs/etc., go for it. Body fat is a relevant variable but not the be-all and end-all.
PS: I am not an expert, have no qualifications, and am going on a mix of what I've read and personal experience, please take this with a heaping tablespoon of salt.
I'm not familiar with the "health at any size" slogan- that sounds like an anti-fatshaming thing? But excess body fat does kill. Most people who choose to stay fat do so not because fat is healthy, but because dieting is difficult and tiresome to do right and dangerous to do wrong. Nonetheless, core body fat will spike your likelihood of dying from all causes (fat in arms and legs is much less dangerous, possibly even good). That's not the same as "calories are calories", though, not for sugar. Almost all commercially available sugars are sucrose and fructose, which produces fat in your liver, which does not handle fat well. Too much can cause liver disease.
And the correct strategy is to eat real food, exercise, AND maintain a healthy weight. Maintaining decent muscle mass is especially important, so don't neglect cardio or weights.
"Health at any size" is a fat-acceptance thing. The idea is to cultivate health as much as possible (good food, sensible exercise) without trying to change one's fat %.
Assuming you aren't like diabetic or have another medical issue, its fine. A "bag" looks to have about 2,000. That's roughly 2/3.5 of a lb of body fat, by the back of the envelope metric that says 3,500 calories per pound gained/lost. Or a Chipotle burrito, guac and chips, and non-diet coke. Not ideal for most people, but not the end of the world.
Here are some potential hiccups:
--No micronutrients. If the rest of your diet includes lots of veggies and fruit, you are fine. If its all non-whole-grains and processed carbs, well, you need (for best health) to change that anyway.
--No fiber. And in fact, jelly beans are really sticky. Eat a large salad or plate of broccoli for dinner and you are good. Maybe get a bottle of Miralax and keep it in the pantry just in case. (this is good advice for any time, its a wonder drug)
--Drop the moral value of food, and think of it in terms of fuel. You are loading your body up with a giant pile of quick acting carbs aka readily available energy that will spike and either get used for make you feel bad. Don't eat this then expect to sit at your desk for 6 hours pushing buttons on the keyboard. Your life will improve if you instead do this on a day when you need to go do a bunch of landscaping, or taking a nature hike, or clean the garage, or something active.
(PS - Excess body fat kills, but its not a healthy weight you want to maintain, its a healthy level of fat and lean tissue, which for most people would be an *increase* in net weight.)
Why do you want to eat a particular entire bag of jellybeans in the first place? If it's for a dare or something I'm fine if you skip a meal or two. If it's just because you happen to have a bag of jellybeans in your home I would be more reticent about advising you to eat it and would probably advise you to not buy jellybeans or something (depending on the context), but I don't know of course.
I don't remember if the last survey asked this (and could therefore be a resource), but since we've learned that ~15% of people don't have an internal monologue, are there statistically significant differences in occupation (etc) that may this leads to?
Have we "learned" this? This seems like a difficult thing to verify, because it seems to me that I would answer the question in a variety of different ways, depending on exactly how it's posed and when you ask. Are there people who report *never* imagining verbal vocalizations, even when carefully and slowly reading something? Are there people who report *always* having verbal monologue, even when doing extended exercise?
I am often fascinated by these discussions about an internal monologue, since I consider myself as not having one, and apparently I am in the minority. But isn´t it confounded by different descriptions of equivalent experiences?
Single discernible difference that I picked up in some random discussion is that people without an internal monologue tend to be fast readers, but who knows whether this would hold under scrutiny.
Has anyone used a reel lawn mower (and unpowered lawn mower, no gas or electricity)? I'm having another bout of hippie-dom ad thinking of getting one. This would not be my sole mower (I'd keep a gas one for emergencies). But is it something that actually works, or will I regret it because it doesn't do the job?
I used one for several years as a kid back in the 80s and 90s. Based on that single data point:
- It is basically unbreakable. You hit a rock, it's just going to go "clonk!" (and possibly give you or the nearest car a bump, unless today's mowers are better shielded).
- It has a small number of simple parts, so it should be repairable.
- You have to move it at a certain speed to cut effectively. This means you can't easily cut small areas where you can't push for at least ~50 cm before hitting what you're trying to cut. Not enough momentum means nothing gets cut.
- It will not cut as big things as a powered mower. If all you have to cut is lawn grass, that's fine, but tufts, straw, roots and the like will likely stop it in its tracks.
- In my experience it doesn't cut quite as close to edges as a powered lawn mower, because the cutting action happens under the middle of the reel, which is about 20 cm from the front and back and ~10 cm from each side.
- It is more work, since you're responsible for the cutting as well as the moving.
I used them growing up and my wife still cuts our lawn with one. You have to remember to mow the grass before it exceeds 7 or 8" height because above that the tips of the grass blades stand too high for the reel to catch them. Tall weeds like dandelions sometimes get left uncut. A power mower has a fan effect that lifts taller grass & weeds upright so handles those better. The reel mower is not good for a first pass on neglected weed patches
Just as for saws and axes, sharpening makes a big difference. Very little effort to cut grass when the reel is sharp, gets gradually harder over the season till the next sharpening. It can be hard to find a shop that still sharpens reel mowers. There are special grinding jigs for this -- I happened to find and buy a used one on craigslist and sharpen ours once or twice a year but otherwise the nearest professional shop I know of is 150 miles away.
I bought one when I bought my house about 15 years ago, mostly because of the low cost. They do work. However, I found that how well they work depends upon the type of grass. Some of my grass was more likely to be knocked flat and not spring up into the cutting mechanism. Long-term, this left me with long blades of grass matted down.
I ultimately replaced it with a battery-powered electric mower which is far more environmentally-friendly and quieter than a gas mower. I've been incredibly happy with it and would recommend that instead.
Yeah, but it might be the case that the gas mower doesn't have a very efficient engine and could be sending the gas out unburned or incompletely combusted. You want a 4 stroke engine, not a 2 stroke.
I have a city house and a tiny yard. We have one of these. It's . . . fine. A powered one will be faster and do a better job, but it works. I clean up tough spots after I'm done with a weed wacker.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in other replies is that they are pretty difficult to push. It's not like pushing free rotating wheels. It's comparable to when you try to start pushing the pedals of a bike using a low gear, the push actually takes effort, and that effort does add up over an entire lawn.
On the contrary, I once used a self-propelling lawnmower, and it was *absolutely terrifying* (because I was always scared that I would let it go too far and damage something). I would much rather push a lawnmower myself than use a self-propelled one. I'm fine with using power to mow, just not to push.
I had one at my previous house, where I had a very small small (c. 1000 ft^2) grassy front yard. It worked pretty well. The main advantage besides the obvious is that it's much, much quieter than powered mowers, which is nice both because I heartily dislike engine noise and because I can mow any time of day or night without the noise disturbing my neighbors.
The main disadvantages were that it's enough effort to push that I wouldn't recommend it for a significantly larger lawn, it tends to jam on the grass if you go too long between mowings, and it becomes harder to push and more jam-prone over the years as the blades get dull (they can be sharpened, but I never got around to learning how).
Yeah, if you run over something you might not want to step in.. look out! It's coming right where you are walking/ pushing. I love mowing my lawn/ trails with my old tractor. Ferguson TO-20. Maybe 10-20 gallons a year. Less than my car or heating the house so I don't worry about it too much.
Any thoughts about potassium supplementation? Lately (probably starting a year or so ago), I've been getting muscle cramps in my legs and/or feet when I wake up.
Potassium citrate (200 mg) daily solves the problem, but any thoughts about what's going on? Best low-carb sources of potassium if I want to get some of it from food?
For what it's worth, calcium, potassium, and sodium ions are all participants in muscle contraction, and a deficit in any one of them can lead to muscle dysfunction (e.g. cramps).
I'm not a physician, but my understanding is that screwy electrolytes are more often the result of inappropriate excretion than any dietary lack, at least in the West. The canonical case is very strenuous exercise in hot weather, where a large output of sweat can push down sodium levels a bit. Malfunctioning kidneys, even slightly malfunctioning, can excrete too much potassium. Changes in water consumption may have an effect, because that influences the rate of urine production and excretion (which is where most of these electrolytes go, although Ca+2 is excreted in the bowel too I believe).
I find magnesium supplements help with night-time muscle cramps in my legs, but if potassium works for you, great!
Bananas are a recommended source but they're high-carb. Looking it up, one recommendation for low-carb and high-potassium foods are: avocados, edamame beans, beef, salmon, mushrooms, nuts, leafy greens especially spinach, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, pork chops, coconut water and aubergines/eggplant. The keto diet people have a lot of recommendations on this.
Personally speaking, I think coconut water tastes like sweat but that is probably because of the electrolytes in it and the balance of them, so if you can stand it, drink a cup in the morning?
Does anyone have advice about buying cryptocurrency for an American citizen living abroad. From what I can tell American companies don't like working with non-residents, and non-American companies don't like working with American citizens (nor does the US government like it either). (Note, I am a complete beginner in this area, so a multistep process needing deep technical knowledge won't work for me)
thanks I will look at that, I don't have an in principled problem with KYC (should I?). As far as you know, no American companies accept US passport + American bank account as sufficient for non-residents?
Right. It's an under discussed issue that the process of purchasing the libertarian currency of the future currently resembles a minor bureaucratic nightmare.
Just to highjack this briefly, what's the best service to use as an Australian? While you can buy with Coinbase, you can't sell, which seems to be a significant downside.
First, have you tried Coinbase Pro? You should be able to access it by just going to pro.coinbase.com after you’ve logged in, although things might be different for Australians.
If that doesn’t work, some others to try are Binance, FTX, and Blockfolio. I don’t know for sure if they work for Australians but I would guess yes.
Don’t tell them you’re abroad. Give an American address during KYC and use a VPN if necessary. The odds that eg KuCoin (an exchange in Japan) is going to somehow try to mail you something or do a real thorough job of checking your address is not high. If you’re still worried about something going wrong after you open an account, just move your funds into your own wallet instead of leaving them in the exchange.
Oh I totally glossed over the issue of funding it. Yeah I second the question about what went wrong with Coinbase. As far as I know you should be good to sign up with just a US passport.
We've been talking about class a lot lately, and what the different classes are, and what their interests/behavior/markers are. But I'm stuck on something more basic: what _is_ class?
How can we look at a society as aliens coming from Mars and declare: this society is class-less, this other one is very class-ful (stratified?)? Even without the society outright saying there are class restrictions, and even before arguing about what the classes are exactly.
A few hypotheses:
1. Class is that which you are born into, marry within and socialize within. In a class-ful society, we expect to find different groups which (mostly) marry within group, socialize within group, and have children who belong to the same group. In a class-less society you can't predict at birth who will be a child's friends/spouses. -> But what if they're different religions (Catholics & Mormons), or geographic areas (East & West) - separate but equal? Do these count as classes? Do classes have to be stratified - with some at the top and some at the bottom?
2. Class limits your opportunities. If we can predict at birth that someone would not be able to access various opportunities (e.g. be a member of the House of Lords, be a national politician), that means there is a class restriction. -> But how can we distinguish this from heritability of certain positive traits?
There is no fixed definition of social class or a fixed set of classes, because class is about how people perceive others and what they care about. In societies where land-ownership is important, that can be an important part of what makes you lower or higher class. In another society, education level may be key. In yet another society, wealth matters hugely. In yet another society, it is all about behavior. Etc.
However, social class seems to typically involve a bunch of different things. So you have and/or do a sufficient number of them to be seen as being of a certain class and you can even become classless: rejected by all classes because you fit in none.
The way people respond to class also differs. However, there is commonly a hierarchy, although that doesn't mean that those lower on the hierarchy can't and won't discriminate against those higher up.
> But what if they're different religions (Catholics & Mormons) or geographic areas (East & West) - separate but equal
They can be part of the same class, or be part of similar class structures that don't recognize each other. Or the class structures can be very different.
> But how can we distinguish this from heritability of certain positive traits?
Social class is entirely cultural, so if the exact same person gets treated differently due to certain cultural trait, then that is a restriction or opportunity due to that trait.
So what is the difference between a society where class is very important and one where it's not important at all?
The features you described were probably present in Victorian Britain and in contemporary UK/USA, and in some futuristic very egalitarian society. How can we quantify the fact that class is more important in one than in the other? Is it how extreme people's perceptions are of the different classes? The power balance between them? Something else?
There are people who like Buffy and people who like Star Trek, and they are seen as belonging to different groups. But we wouldn't say they're different classes, if that's all the difference between those groups, right? So what makes two groups be separate classes, and not just two (disjoint) groups? Shouldn't there be an element of being born into it, or having it restrict your opportunities in some way? If all people, irrespective of ancestry, randomly and independently acquire some taste and habits, which influences how they are treated and perceived - is this class, or is this just a society where not everyone is identical? I feel like there's a missing piece here, but can't put my finger on it.
In some class systems, it really matters whether you were born into it and/or whether your entire family line is pure. But in others, a story about starting life in a manger, born to a carpenter, but ending up with a much higher status can actually boost your status.
I think that the desire to quantify or objectify too much is something you need to resist, actually, because it just tends to lead you to search for your keys under the lamp post.
It is fuzzy and if you try to pin it down, you'll just come across different societies, sub-societies, parts of history, or have society change on you, that no longer fits the model, but still is perceived as class.
> There are people who like Buffy and people who like Star Trek, and they are seen as belonging to different groups. But we wouldn't say they're different classes, if that's all the difference between those groups, right?
Yet liking Shakespeare vs romance novels is very much a class signifier. In general, there are a lot of preferences that are stronger or weaker class signifiers.
Ultimately, this is a fuzzy social process. At one point, MMA and WWE can be only for the underclass and the next moment, it can be an upper middle class activity (although not necessarily by mixing it up with lower class fans/practitioners).
There is even a fashion element to it, especially since people also jockey for status within classes and being ahead of the curve itself gives status (while being behind detracts status, unless you are so far behind that you are ahead again...like in fashion).
And some things are just very neutral or weak class signifiers, that don't matter that much.
> If all people, irrespective of ancestry, randomly and independently acquire some taste and habits
That has nothing to do with actual human beings though. They mimic those around them, seek to behave in ways that make their life better (but are limited by their natural gifts and the means provided to them by their family & community), etc.
> So what makes two groups be separate classes, and not just two (disjoint) groups?
Perhaps these things matter:
- A common basis that makes people even consider the other as a part of the same whole.
- A (mutual) dependency, where they can't just ignore each other, but have to interact in a way where the differences matter.
- An (often unconscious) sense of group values and benefits. A lower class community can admire their self-reliance, willingness to help each other out without asking money, etc; and look down on higher classes that don't have these values as much. Lower class people don't necessarily want to leave their class.
Or perhaps this is just nonsense.
Again, it's probably to fuzzy to make confident statements.
There are innumerable books and articles on the subject. Class is a dominant theme in sociology, and has been so since this discipline got off the ground approx. a hundred years ago.
Two dominant "recent" approaches is that of John Goldthorpe (who emphasise economic positions) and Pierre Bourdieu (who emphasise cultural positions). There are decent wiki entries on them and their theories.
However, I would primarily recommend a classic: Max Weber's famous essay Class, Status, Parties from 1922. It is more nuanced and analytically stringent than similar texts by Marx.
Weber's take on the concept, including his analytical distinction between class and status, has been extremely influential; he is still the standard go-to classical reference in sociology as well as political science. Highly recommended. Link to the wiki entry here:
Very lucidly written. Weber had a knack for making clear analytical distinctions. I would go so far as to say his approach is still a better starting point for empirical analysis than more recent writers, including Goldthorpe and Bourdieu.
One time I tried to reason through the definition of class by using a metaphor with high school (like Scott kind of did in the Nixon post). Here's how it went:
In a class-ful high school:
(i) not everyone is always invited to the parties, there are separate "clusters" of students that exclusively socialize with each other, and
(ii) membership in "clusters" have a ranking such that if someone in cluster N throws a party, most members of clusters k < N will WANT to attend, but may not always be invited, but members of clusters m > N may NOT WANT to attend, but are always invited.
I think this runs into trouble when trying to generalize to outside a school setting.
For your characterization of class, it seems to me like there should be a distinction between a caste system (a caste is a group you are born into and marry within) and a true class system. Whereas a caste system is defined by some set of rules and traditions, a class system emerges spontaneously out of social networks and normal human behavior within those networks.
I like this analogy. So let's try to generalize to a country, allowing some errors in translation and replacing "being invited" with "having opportunities".
1) Segregation. There are different groups which interact mostly within each one.
2) Stratification. There is a ranking of the groups, where the higher ones have more opportunities than the lower ones. People generally (reasonably) prefer to be in the higher ones.
I think (1) + (2) are still not quite sufficient outside of a setting such as a school. So I want to add:
3) Ancestry. I take your point that class isn't as determined at birth as caste. But if it's independent of birth, is that really class? Suppose your class is completely independent of your parents' and early environment. Isn't that some people succeeding and others not, with a touch of assortative socializing (where people socialize with their rough "equals")? Isn't that perfect equality of opportunity and a class-less society? If the kids with good grades in college, each from a different background, hang out with each other, and can get into honors classes that others can't - is that social class?
The importance of a class in a society can be measured by the strength of each of the 3 criteria - if segregation is very tight, and higher classes have many more opportunities, and being born into the right family determines your class absolutely, then class is very important in that society.
Hmm, I think one way to argue in favor of dropping (3) would be to talk about something like this:
The early-life environment and your family actually DOES influence which class you (later in life) will belong to, but this could also be thought of as just an empirical question which is useful for predicting which class you will belong to later in life. So your ancestry, (3), is useful for PREDICTING your class, but looking at society from an alien's perspective, we must ask whether it helps the alien categorize (classify?) human society as class-ful.
You mention the idea of a society satisfying (1) + (2) but not (3). I will try to argue that this is not necessarily perfect equality of opportunity. As my counter-example, consider a society with a rigid, formal system such that rank membership (I will later try to argue that the "ranks" can be identified as classes) is assigned at birth with a lottery and kids are sent to different schools based on their ranks. In order to satisfy (2) the higher ranked schools will have more opportunities: even poor students will be able to get some kind of cushy civil service job after graduating, but the highest-performing students will become scientists, political leaders, etc.
The society described above clearly satisfies (2), and it satisfies (1) as a consequence of kids growing up and forming friendships within different schools. Due to the lottery system, (3) does not matter for the ranks. Now, why is it that I call this "rank system" a particular case of a class system? I would say that the aliens looking at this society would say "yes, this society has tight segregation and higher classes have many more opportunities - it is a class society". They would also note that family is not a good predictor of class, but family conditions would only come up as an empirical question.
On the other hand, the opposite case would be that I have defined something weaker, more general than a class system. If we want to go down that road, we should argue whether the word "class" should point to "society satisfying (1) + (2)" or "society satisfying (1) + (2) + (3)". I have no good answer for this.
For 2, distinguishing them should be straightforward if the trait is quantifiable. If class membership is limiting, you should still expect to see an effect from class even after controlling for whatever heritable positive trait correlates with it. Thus, if class membership isn't predictive when looking at two people with comparable levels of heritable positive traits you can reasonably conclude that class isn't limiting in that case.
In my view, class is mostly about your network: similar to your 1 but a little more practical. The advantage of a high-class education or church isn't the quality of the institution itself but simply being connected with other well-connected people. That means knowing about job or investment opportunities before they become public knowledge, having an easier time with references and otherwise getting people to trust you, etc. Basically the ability to avoid the faceless bureaucracy and deal with decision-makers on a human level where they're more accommodating and forgiving.
Interesting. Help me out a bit. What would that mean in a standard contemporary capitalist country? Is it stratified, or is there no ranking? Are the self-employed a different class? Or only business owners? Only large business owners? How about high-payed CEOs, or influential political figures - where do they fit in?
Small business owners are petite bourgeoisie. You can start with simple works by Marx and Engels to get an idea how class works in contemporary society:
One measure of oppression is how much people try to get away from a place, both the number of people leaving and the risks they are willing to take to get away.
Thank you, this is very enlightening! It's an interesting thought experiment to consider the US as as oppressive in it's own way as a communist state. I think my instinctive response is that getting locked up for whatever crime, thought or material, is a problem if there is no due process. From what I've read of memoirs of former gulag prisoners there was absolutely no due process and that was one of the most oppressive things they experienced. But due process didn't affect Jim Crow!
The Marxist analysis of class is correct and useful even if you don't agree with every little thing that has occurred in places that have had their revolutions.
Thank you for responding! I'm genuinely delighted! I think therein lies my problem with Marxism and why I'm hesitant to, let's say, convert. I don't view mass murder and imprisonment and slavery as little things. I have an instinct that the poor and oppressed are special, not more morally worthy, but more beloved by God, maybe, is a better way to put it. But I feel like Marxism simply flips the pyramid and those who were oppressed start to oppress. Maybe Marx's diagnosis, his analysis of class, was correct, but his solution seems to be "do the same thing as the bad guys but it's ok because you are good guys." Am I wrong? Is Marx saying something else that I'm misunderstanding? Basically I guess at heart I feel like capitalism oppresses and communism oppresses so why do you think communism is better than capitalism?
Short recap: Dutch PM was accused of trying to get rid of a Representative, Omtzigt, best known for demanding that the government acts differently and for his work on another scandal: bureaucrats falsely prosecuting people for childcare allowance fraud, resulting in financial ruin for many.
Dutch news now claims that the cabinet decided to withhold information from the Representatives about the childcare allowance fraud. Allegedly, one minister complained about the information being withheld, pointing to the constitution. Depending on what justification the people present used to withhold this information, they may get in trouble with the House. Amusingly, the leader of Omtzigt's party allegedly said in that meeting that they attempted to teach Omtzigt to have more sensibility, but that they failed.
In an unprecedented move, the cabinet agreed to publish the minutes of the meeting, later today (in the Dutch evening). The minutes are secret and are typically only published after decades have passed. The PM noted that the contents would be 'explosive.'
Can I make a plea for commenters to not make the lack of book review authors perfect anonymity even worse? It annoys me that just because it is possible in some cases to find out the identity of some of the authors, commenters seem to think it helpful to shout it from the rooftops, explain how the anonymity can be broken, and then complain about the fact that anonymity isn't utterly bulletproof.
There's some painful irony in that it reminds me of the supposed reasoning of people who said Scott's real name was identifiable with a small amount of research and therefore he couldn't claim to be anonymous, couldn't be doxxed, and, by the way, THIS IS HOW I FOUND OUT HIS NAME.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. I prefer to have a norm that says even if you can find out the identity of any of the book review authors, you don't start talking about it, because it rather obviously makes the problem worse. Just keep schtum!
Maybe a better approach would be to treat it like any other kind of security exploit?
I'm under the impression that if you find a vulnerability in some computer system, the correct thing to do isn't to pretend you never found it but to reach out to the person or organization privately and give them a chance to fix things before publishing the vulnerability so that people can avoid it in the future. By analogy, the way to deal with poor anonymity here would be to reach out to Scott and the author so that they could edit the post before revealing the means that you used to find the author's identity. It's not perfect, since someone could always go to an archived copy, but frankly it's still better in my mind than just pretending that their anonymity is intact.
Especially given the sophistication of potential attackers here, as evidenced by the American newspaper of record doxxing Scott, relying on security through obscurity seems like a bad idea.
I think that misunderstands what the anonymity is about. I don't think it's a big deal and therefore isn't an absolute either/or. Scott said he started off reading the reviews not knowing who the authors were, lost that at some point, but carried on as best he could. I think we should do the same.
If absolute anonymity was important, Scott would have made some efforts to remove all the clues from the reviews - he didn't, and I guess that's because if a few people know the identity of a few of the authors (or at least the names under which they comment here) then so what? Not a big deal.
Or at least it wouldn't be if commenters didn't feel the need to publicise the means of finding out authors names!
I don't think it has anything to do with 'potential attackers'. It's just a way of reducing the influence of an authors 'knownness', either as a public figure or a familiar commenter here. As soon as the votes have been cast, the authors will be revealed anyway.
Concerning that story about the copied personality from the last link post (MMacevedo):
What's your take on brain simulation with silicon hardware. If we use a current super computer to simulate a brain, is there really an entity feeling all that, that the transistors simulate?
1. Depends what you're using them for. Antipsychotics are legit better than benzos for psychosis. They're not as good for anxiety, but nobody actually teaches you to use them for anxiety, they just say really loudly not to use them, then say even louder not to use benzos, and you've got to use something, so some people use the antipsychotics. My impression is that about 50% of people do okay on scheduled benzos, 50% of people do very not okay, and both groups think it's outrageous that anyone claims that the other group exists.
2. Depends what you mean by DID and "fake". My guess is that mild versions of it are heavily a culture-bound syndrome, but real enough if someone gets suggestible-d into it. I think the current strategy of minimizing it by not suggestible-ing more people into it is going pretty well.
3. If this is false, I guess I've fallen for it (well, teen and early adulthood) - what do you think it is, and what's your evidence?
First, my views are heavily colored by talking to those who survived severe childhood trauma.
> Antipsychotics are legit better than benzos for psychosis.
Indeed.
> say even louder not to use benzos, and you've got to use something, so some people use the antipsychotics
yes, that's the issue. Those with CPTSD-borne flashbacks and insomnia seem do much better when they get breaks from the constant hypervigilance and anxiety they tend to live in, and benzos/z-drugs for sleep, without the debilitating long-term side effects of antipsychotics.
> Depends what you mean by DID and "fake". My guess is that mild versions of it are heavily a culture-bound syndrome, but real enough if someone gets suggestible-d into it.
Traumagenic DID is a covert disorder. Most sufferers often doubt they have it themselves, because they really really really hate being a system, and they do not volunteer anything about it to anyone in the position of authority, like a psychiatrist. "you are in psychosis", "you are faking", "you must be borderline" and so on are the usual reactions. I suspect that you have a huge blind spot in that area, Scott. Consider joining an online group such as https://www.facebook.com/groups/144606832699719/ and just reading the posts there to get a better picture.
> If this is false, I guess I've fallen for it (well, teen and early adulthood) - what do you think it is, and what's your evidence?
They certainly present that way. And DBT plus meds tends to help them deal with life better, at least in some cases and for a time. But if you dig deeper, it's almost always the result of a childhood trauma severe enough to leave the person unable to deal with their emotions later in life. Pete Walker (I assume you've heard of him) in, say, http://pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm mentions how narcissism and codependence is often a fight/fawn response to trauma. According to the twin studies described in https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081216114100.htm borderline is roughly half-genetic, half-environmental, but it's common to slap the borderline label on (mostly female) patients without figuring out whether the real affliction is CPTSD. Hope this makes some sense, not sure if any of this is new to you.
Can anyone give me suggestions for interesting Twitter accounts to follow? For my part, I recommend Rolf Degen, Frank Luntz, ProMED-mail, and History through Pictures.
Rather niche question: Does anybody know what embassy security was generally like in interbellum-era Europe, or does anybody know where I could look to find this information? Nowadays, of course, embassies are normally quite heavily guarded -- armed guards, body scanners, sometimes bomb-proof walls, etc. -- but I was wondering whether this was always the case (mutatis mutandis for technological differences, of course), or whether it's a more recent development.
I ask because I'm currently writing a story set in the 1920s which is partly set in an embassy, and I wanted to know what sort of things my characters could expect to deal with as they go in.
Is there a good general (moderate preference for scholarly) history of post-Soviet Russia that you'd recommend? I'm not looking for one of those Peril: Putin's Perfidious Plot to Poison Political Pluralism books, just a sober overview of the major political, economic, social, etc. developments in Russia post-1991. (And thanks to everyone who recommended books the last time I asked a similar question; I've started reading, and am quite enjoying, Lenin's Tomb and can't wait to read The Commanding Heights.)
I'd love to learn whether MDMA has any medium to long term negative effects on the brain. Anyone have any good articles, posts, or other resources to recommend?
I'm sure this question has been asked 10 million times, but does anyone have advice on dating re finding people (women specifically in my case) with a 'rationalist' temperament? Is there a good site for such people? Or some code words I don't know about to look for in someone's profile? Is Myers-Briggs type actually a good approximation of this? One might think meetups would be a good place to meet people, but I've always felt it was kind of weird to even have that in the back of my mind while going to meetup, as if it's an ulterior motive.
When you say "rationalist temperament" do you mean someone who's generally more stoic and analytical or are you looking for someone who likes the Culture novels and has a policy with Alcor?
The Rationalist subculture is disproportionately male and trans*, so if you're looking for a woman who fits that niche you're almost certainly going to have to make compromises on other factors. Including potentially monogamy and trans status, which are typically deal breakers.
Women with a calmer more analytical personality on the other hand aren't nearly as uncommon but may be harder to find in online or app-based dating. Meeting people face-to-face is difficult right now but it might be worth checking your extended friend group to see if they know anyone who's single and low-maintenance.
Someone more analytical and stoical is more what I have in mind (I guess in the context of a relationship, someone who favors direct articulation of emotions, wants, etc. as opposed to greater expectations of/reliance on implicit social cues and such).
The thing is... I don't really have an extended friend group; partly because I moved to where I live not long ago (a few months before the pandemic) and also I guess for the same reasons I struggle at dating. I suppose you might say 'step 1 is make friends.' Which for me since college has generally meant trying meetups).
Yeah, sorry that's a pretty rough situation. I don't know what you can really do until things fully re-open beyond taking this time to expand your friend group generally.
I asked my girlfriend what she thought last night, since your question had kind of stuck in my craw and she's probably the most emotionally mature / rational person I know. Her suggestion was to focus on meeting women in their mid twenties currently in professional or graduate school (implicitly referring to STEM programs) since even the more dramatic people will have had to get their shit together. There's a certain logic to it since we met in grad school and the gender ratio is generally favorable for men, but I'm not sure how broadly applicable it is.
How do we feel about vaccination rollouts being triaged by race? In Hamilton, Ontario, under pressure from community activist groups consisting of academics and critical race theorists, the municipal health agency is now admitting registration for anyone 18+ in hotspot neighborhoods who identify as Black or racialized. White people have to be aged 40+ to be eligible for vaccination.
On the ground, the response to this is generally negative. There are a few supporters who repeat the correlative fact that Hamilton's makeup is only 19% POC yet POC comprise 51% of COVID cases... but race, obviously, isn't the causal factor.
To me, prioritizing a healthy 20-year-old Black man over, say, an obese schizophrenic 39-year-old smoker who's white and happens to live in the same postal code seems irrational and gravely mistaken. It seems that this policy, motivated by political pressure from rent-seeking activist groups, will cost lives. Clearly, race isn't the causal factor - it's geographical location, job, family size, comorbidities, etc. So why not triage by those factors?
My first instinct is that this seems fine, but I'm fairly woke.
Questions: What is "racialized"? Why is race clearly not the causal factor? You mentioned this twice in three paragraphs but didn't say why. Race is causal in at least one disease (sickle cell anemia), so it's at least plausible that it's causal here. My impression is that the 'rona is too new for us to have a great handle on it.
Well this is very interesting to me - you are the first self-identified ‘woke’ person I have met who implies that disproportionalities in Covid outcomes by race are due to HBD rather than the usual systemic racism argument.
Well, what I'm trying to imply is that I don't think we know, or can know, yet. I'd prefer to avoid the moniker HBD, as what's meant by that is rarely the difference in prevalence of some diseases among various ethnicities. But my views of wokeness and HBD are definitely culture war, and so not a good fit for this thread.
In my county (Santa Clara County, CA), African Americans have a percentage of cases slightly lower than their percent of the population, which suggests that the cause is not a greater racial vulnerability. Latinos have a fraction of cases about twice their fraction of the population. For deaths, Latinos are only a little above average, as are African Americans.
My guess at what is going on is that Latinos are a younger population and taking fewer precautions.
Incidentally, deaths (but not cases) are substantially higher for males than for females. Should males get priority in vaccination?
Interesting. I think we should prioritize by risk generally, so I would be ok with that, but I can't imagine that that policy would be palatable. If we're really going to have trouble with 40% of people deciding not to vaccinate, I think an important factor is avoiding pissing people off.
Is male actually the difference maker there? Or are males more likely to have the cluster of characteristics that make covid dangerous? Probably another thing we don't know yet.
Something I'm still confused about: Why are vaccination rollouts being triaged at all, rather than vaccines just freely given to everyone? I heard it's a supply thing, but I'm still not sure.
Let me guess, you don't live in a big city. Please ship some to big cities first.
I only became eligible for the vaccine on April 18th. The first open slot I could book was on April 25th, and that seems only because I was on the waiting list early.
Apropos of nothing but a weird dream I had recently: In my dream, I was reading some Substack comment asking whether AIs could be conscious in principle, and I wrote in response something like that my experience consists of two different things (feelings/sensations or intelligence, and a "thing looking at things"), and that, although AIs would necessary have the former, they would lack the latter and thereby not be conscious. After I woke up, I thought that this was possibly related to the idea of a "tripartite soul" (which possibly recurs in Greek/Egyptian/Christian/etc mythology according to certain people).
So, ACT commenters: Can AIs be conscious? And does this dream shed any insight on this topic?
(For context: In the rest of my dream, I asked dream!dad about this, who responded that he also lacked the "thing looking at things" - which, I realized outside of the dream, effectively made him a philosophical zombie. Later, we went on a long raised platform that people, including me and dream!dad, ritually walked back and forth on, supposedly to commemorate some kind of genocide or something. I fell off the edge of the platform and went sliding down on an absurdly slippery slope of colorful sand, which I had to claw my way back up from. Also, before I read the dream!Substack comment, I had entered a small, plain building, where I socialized with the other dream!people but unfortunately got into tensions with one - but after learning that this was a *North Korean* person and somewhat in authority in the context of this building, I hurriedly left.)
Thanks I suppose (although you shouldn't credit conscious!me, but rather subconscious!me). I've routinely had dreams this weird and complicated since ~2016, but very few that raise discussion questions at all, let alone this clearly.
on the AI question though, what the heck is a "thing looking at things" and what properties of computers preclude them from having it? They have senses (webcam, mouse, keyboard) as well as a brain (CPU). Functionally they could operate as slighly more metallic humans without any trouble. Once we develop AGI we legitemately need to consider its sapience imho.
Sorry, dream!me wasn't very clear; I think his* response reflects my opinion that intelligence/sapience and consciousness/sentience are generally orthogonal. By a "thing looking at things", dream!I meant the thing that is doing the experiencing of qualia.
*I'm male, for the record. I'm using third-person pronouns
oops i wrote sapience when i meant sentience. anyway i dont think the I in AGI makes it sentience. more G in AGI. general intelegence means AGI can be aware of itself
Ha, whoops. I would think median would be a more representative figure since it wouldn't be pulled up by extreme luxury apartments -- does this chart surprise anyone else? Rent doubling as average wages increase like 50% seems very concerning
Definitely the popular narrative but in my experience at SSC there were a lot of skeptics of that, so I suppose I was looking for a Nybbler type to say things are not what they seem from that chart.
The external links in the PDFs of the book reviews appear to be broken. They are formatted as links (blue & underlined) but don't actually link to other URLs. (The links in the tables of contents still work.)
Stumbled across a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSG0p-uflA) where Michael Vassar claims that "only about 4% [of the native-english-speaking non-mentally-retarded U.S. population] can give the price to carpet a room, consisting entirely of rectangles with integer-length sides, when the price per square meter of carpet is given." (timestamp for the quote is about 23:50)
Four percent seems implausibly low to me. I've done seem googling to try and find the source of this statistic, but haven't had any luck. Does anyone here know the source, or any studies with similar/dissimilar results?
Can anyone explain why generalist species like the human and the rat flourish so much when natural selection would seem to favor the creation of specialist species? Or is the assumption in the second half of my question just wrong?
TierZoo covered this in the episode on which bear is best. https://youtu.be/wYk2i070I2I
Hypothesis. The niches for specialist species aren't all that stable.
Or, more likely, the niches for generalist species are larger, and "flourishing" means being more numerous.
People point to the Great Rift valley during the period hominids were evolving as a particularly unstable environment that contributed to our evolution.
You're thinking from the perspective of very recent history where Humankind's development and spread has drastically interrupted every ecosystem on the planet. It's no surprise that there isn't much stable equilibrium around for specialists to thrive in, while generalists that do well in chaos (men and rats) are doing well. If you looked back before the spread of humanity you'd find far more specialists doing the same things they had been doing for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years
Huh, I'd read mostly about evolution being a Red Queen game, where the underlying ecosystem and selective pressures are constantly shifting. But it looks like there's a counter movement pushing the Court Jester hypothesis, that change is largely driven by external factors, and evolution may be dominated by stability, allowing specialists to thrive like you say.
It seems like a matter of longstanding academic debate. Maybe there are periods or scales where each other theory dominates, giving evidence for both sides in different contexts.
Regardless, you're certainly right that for at least some ecosystems, specialists like the panda seem to have thrived for millions of years.
Seems similar to 'nature vs nurture' too – obviously _some_ synthesis is probably most correct. (The Chinese philosophers probably had it right – yin and yang and all.)
(I remember Stephen Jay Gould and his 'movement' pushing punctuated equilibrium over the then-reigning evolutionary 'gradualism'. The former seems very much like what you reference as "the Court Jester hypothesis".)
Absolutely, "Court Jester" is seen as a descendant of punctuated equilibrium.
The main differences are the focus on adding a more fleshed out "cause" for the punctuation (citing external environmental factors), and, well, the catchy name.
Never underestimate the importance of a catchy name.
Interesting – thanks!
I wonder why I haven't encountered the catchy name before? Where have you encountered it?
Benton (2009). "The Red Queen and the Court Jester: Species Diversity and the Role of Biotic and Abiotic Factors Through Time". Science.
doi:10.1126/science.1157719
Stumbled on it on when searching to refresh myself on Red Queen, caveat, I'm not sure how much it dominates the lit.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
So. Can you set a bone?
I'm pretty sure I could write a sonnet, pitch manure and act alone. As for the rest of the list…
Unless you're badly disabled, you can change a diaper.
Right you are. Truth be told I'm also not a bad cook and I have been known to cooperate from time to time.
There you go. You're 6/21sts of the way to being a well-rounded human. :)
By the time you've proven whether you can die gallantly, it's a little late.
Yes. Assuming it's a simple straight fracture. You wouldn't want me to, though.
That's a skill I'd love to learn... if I didn't have to go through the student phase of practicing before I'm good at it. On dead animals maybe. That would make Greek Easter preparations interesting.
Dad: Did you finish skinning the lamb?
Me: I'm setting its tibia.
Dad: What happened to its tibia?
Me: One day you'll thank me for learning this!
Do I have access to google while I'm doing it? Then probably, although it's not going to be pleasant for the poor bastard relying on me.
I expect results to be slightly better if I'm doing this for myself (assuming the circumstances of the broken bone involve me being conscious and able to move around) than someone else, although not by much.
Likewise, if I end up butchering a hog, it's going to be a rather shoddy job with results that are edible, but unlikely to suit most people's preferences, in this case probably whether or not I have access to google.
If I have to butcher a pufferfish, whoever eats it is going to die, there's no way around that one.
Setting a bone is unpleasant even when the people doing it are experts, trust me.
Thank you Lazarus Long
Local climates change and ecosystems evolve, with or without human intervention. If you're a specialist species and your ecosystem evolves away under you, the nearest alternative niche is probably a long distance away, so your colony is in peril. If you're a generalist, some of you will find a way to continue living locally. In fact some of you already moved out. So soon, you are everywhere. That's my take, anyway.
A brief search shows that there are many species of rats and some seem to be quite specialized, but the rats that do well on ships are more likely to spread. But I guess other kinds of rats would also do well if they made it to an island first?
What are your numbers? Do you count number of species or number of individuals?
I'm thinking there are more species that are specialized, but I don't have any numbers.
only a few species that are generalists. (rats are mostly living off humans.)
Humans may not have always flourished so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck#Humans
We're not a generalist species. We're optimized for being migratory omnivores occupying plains. That's why we're so good at long distance running and moving long distances. We were fortunate that plains are about a third of the Earth's surface (though that's probably why we evolved to be in them). But fertile plains are where almost all of us live. We're the apex species of the dominant landform of Earth (excluding oceans) so we flourish.
To wit: when we live in forests or mountains, we tend to uproot and level them. In other words, we make them more like plains.
I mean, forests yes (though we also tend to plant trees in landscapes where there's really none - we want savannas rather than steppes), but I wouldn't say humans have anything in particular against mountains. We level them when necessary to build roads, and there's not much to eat in Tibet, but if anything we seem to prefer rugged terrain ceterus paribus. (And East Africa is indeed pretty rugged.)
We don't have anything against mountains. But we do flatten the parts of them we use for houses, farming, roads, etc. We're not obligate plains dwellers where wide open space is equivalent to, say, water for fish. But we clearly prefer flat wide spaces to, say, tall ones.
We were absolutely great on the savanna. We could do a lot of unique things. Throw things accurately. Walk basically forever. Have you read about "persistence hunting?" Incredible.
But ignoring our tech tree still seems like a big ask.
Even without modern technology, we still get some impressive edge cases. The Polynesians saw the incomprehensibly vast Pacific, had a natural resource base that included approximately a certain type of tree, and were like, "yeah, we're on it."
But admittedly that's "can" not "is best suited for." So I think in some ways there are two distinct questions blurring together as "Are humans generalists?":
1. Do we have specific adaptations that help us survive in one particular environment over others?
2. What's the current range for humans, enveloped as we are by the comfy exoskeleton of modern technology and global supply chains?
I think either of those questions are reasonable and straightforward, but we probably need to know what bigger question we're trying to answer in order to know which of those is most useful at any given time.
I acknowledge technology allows us to live far outside our natural range. We have people living in space! But the vast majority of humans still live on wide open fertile planes or environments that have been terraformed to be similar to them. Even with the ocean, they cling to the flat part of islands and they travel over the broad, flat ocean rather than going under all that much. It all seems very much like a manifestation of instinctive preferences and thought processes. After all, how different is sailing from having to walk through a desert? They're both broad, flat, and hostile and have oases.
Anyway, I'm not an evolutionary anything like I said. But this is a pattern I've long thought is fairly obvious.
All the other great apes have restricted ranges, and so did our ancestors until not very long ago. Taming fire may have made far more habitats available.
Why are we inferior at climbing trees and optimized for long distance movement then? I'm not an evolutionary... anything but I'm repeating this from a textbook I had in highschool(?).
Fair question, and I don't know that much anatomy. But we may be more dexterous than chimpanzees, and can certainly throw more accurately. One possibility is that we specialised, in fact, to hunt larger prey, with longer legs, than chimpanzees can tackle. (And butcher it.) I've also seen a suggestion that we were long-range scavengers.
I do take your point that we are, like many birds, suited to change habitats with the seasons.
If we were specialized to hunt longer prey, wouldn't we be better at ambush? And move on all fours for maximum short term speed? Instead we're optimized for long distance speed. Exhaustion hunting is a thing where humans simply follow animals until they drop dead because we are that much better at it. Even compared to animals like horses that we think of as far ranging. There's a lot of things faster than a human in the short term but not much over long distances.
We may be inferior at tree climbing now but in one of my medical school anatomy classes the professor claimed that we have our complex larynx and thus ability to speak because distant mammalian ancestors were tree climbers and needed to be able to close the airway to stabilize the chest wall while climbing.
Would this be different from chimpanzees and other cousins more suited to tree life?
Either I'm badly misunderstanding or your professor spouted nonsense.
If our larynx is a tree-climbing adaptation, why is the primate that's best at talking one of the worst at climbing?
"Closing the airway" sounds like it means holding your breath. Which we don't do while climbing and apes *can't* do. Their breathing is completely involuntary, like our heartbeat. Also I'm not convinced the larynx is involved in holding your breath.
[boy does substack need an edit function, 2nd effort at this]
Nonsense spouting is certainly a possibility. I think the idea was that millions of years ago some pre-primate (something closer to a squirrel, I guess) developed structures in the throat for the purpose of climbing which our lineage repurposed for complex sound formation.
Some quick Googling seems to suggest that I wasn't completely imagining it but the professor may have been oversimplifying. For example "Comparative Anatomy of the Larynx and Related Structures" at https://www.med.or.jp/english/journal/pdf/2011_04/241_247.pdf
Maybe if I have the energy I'll try to summarize what I can find on the subject (spoiler: I probably won't).
Freddie, if we substitute blogosphere for biosphere, which are you, specialist or generalist?
Definite generalist! I just wrote about this actually:
"I’m a generalist. I have areas where I’m better read and areas where I have better access to information. I have consistent interests and opinions. But I write about whatever strikes my fancy. I do this because I enjoy it and because, if you’ll forgive the pretension, I think democracy requires generalists, citizens who are willing to weigh in without claiming the mantle of an expert. So I write about a broad range of topics."
You did, and I read it just the other day.
In general, stable environments such as rainforests tend to have a wide variety of specialist species, if the environment is largely the same year after year they can evolve to exploit a tiny niche better than the competition, since that niche will continue to be there. Temperate environments have a smaller amount of generalist species, as they have to adapt to a wide range of environmental circumstances.
And the even colder climates are where you see fewer species but in some cases, much larger numbers for each species.
"Or is the assumption in the second half of my question just wrong?"
Yes.
I'm not a biologist but I don't think the second half of your question can be assumed to be true. For one thing classic adaptive natural selection seems to be wildly overstated as a mechanism of evolutionary change. I believe the currently accepted view among biologists is that most evolution and most traits are actually "neutral", i.e. the result of genetic drift and statistical fluctuations in gene pools rather than adaptive traits that aid in survival. This is the so-called "Neutral Theory" of evolution and I don't think it has quite percolated through the public consciousness the same way we all learn classic Darwininan selection in high school biology. Maybe this is why everything doesn't get as hyper-specialized as you might it would think under classic Darwinian mechanisms.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/02/14/the-state-of-modern-evolutionary-theory-may-not-be-what-you-think-it-is/
Perhaps its a bit of a false dichotomy as well (as well as potentially semantic and subjective), evolutionary lineages and closely related species needn't be completely locked into either specialist or generalist modalities. It seems like generalists in particular could freely switch between the two modes as their environment shifts. Both strategies involve tradeoffs and benefits and drawbacks so it can't be taken for granted that one is necessarily better than the other. Many insects like caterpillars are notorious for only being able to eat some particular plants, they get really good at metabolizing one particular plant's leaves because most plants develop toxic defenses and they tend to devote all their evolution points into becoming "experts" and evolving along with a particular food source to the exclusion of most others. That said, dietary specialists seem to usually retain some capacity to vary their diet. Even Koalas, the poster children for crippling overspecialization, are known to occasionally eat stuff other than Eucalyptus. Who knows how they might be able to shift their diet under the right balance of stressors or evolutionary pressures: http://www.koalatracker.com.au/koalatracker-blog/we-dont-know-what-we-dont-know#.YIYZ9ZBKjb0
No, no, no. Most *mutations* are neutral. But most of them don't even affect the phenotype, which is why they are neutral in the first place!
Is a population that has 1 functional mutation in 100 mutations going to adapt more slowly to a given environment than a population with 1 functional mutation in 1000 mutations (at the same rate of functional mutations)? The proportion of functional vs neutral mutations is irrelevant here. What's relevant here is how quickly adaptive mutations show up as compared to how fast the environment changes.
Obviously to some extent a synthesis between neutral theory and selectionism is where the truth lies, but I don't think consensus is that strongly pro-neutral theory. Here's a good (selectionist, so obviously biased) take from Molecular Biology and Evolution for their 50th anniversary of Kimura's original paper on neutral theory: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/35/6/1366/4990884. (MBE also published some more celebratory review articles in the same issue that are worth reading too).
Because of slack.
Specialization is optimization. Premature optimization (to quote Donald Knuth) is the root of all evil. In environments where optimization is always premature, resistance to optimization (slack or "inefficiency" or "fat in the system") is evolutionarily adaptive, it's the winning long-term strategy. Venkatesh Rao at Ribbonfarm calls such scenarios "infinite games" (in the sense of James Carse) -- in finite games (like sports) the goal is to win, in infinite games the goal is to survive. Evolutionary fitness landscapes are one such example, because they're always changing. So generalist species, having slack (because they aren't optimized for any particular evolutionary niche), out-survive specialist species over long enough periods.
Scott Alexander wrote more about this here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
I don't know how you're defining flourishing, but there's more biomass in cattle, a species specialized to the particular niche of living in symbiosis with humans, than there is in humans themselves.
There is actually a negative correlation between percentage of endozoochory (seed dispersal through fleshy fruit) and latitude. Probably because climatic bands at lower latitudes contract less during glaciations, making e.g. the tropics more stable, which favors this kind of relationships.
Other specialized relationships like insect pollinated plants with low population densities and their specialized pollinators that seek them out are rare at high latitudes, but more common in the tropics. Many orchids (one of the most species diverse group of plants) follow this strategy.
With vaccinations starting to become widespread, perhaps it's time to bring back SSC meetups. I'm still willing to host, and I live in Detroit. Anyone near me?
anyone in the sf bay area?
Naah, nobody lives there any more, it's too crowded. (h/t Yogi Berra) Actually I'm in the South Bay, but not eager to drive more than a few miles.
Yep, south bay but can drive
We're in south bay and used to host before Covid. I think our plan was to go back to hosting when everyone in the house was fully vaccinated, which should be early June.
At the moment there seem to be plenty of openings for vaccination, so I expect that by the time the two members of the household who got their first shot recently are fully vaccinated, almost everyone in the area who would want to come should be as well.
I plan to ask people not to come if they have not been vaccinated, with an exception for unvaccinated small children.
I've been doing online meetups, but with many fewer people.
Anyone in the east bay?
Austin has been having regular digital meetups the whole time, in-person occasionally since last summer, and is generally moving back to all in-person. Anyone in the area is welcome to join!
Can you send me the link to chandlerjburke@gmail.com?
We announce events by e-mail, join this Google group: https://groups.google.com/g/austin-less-wrong
If you can't seem to subscribe, let me know and I should be able to add you
Is there information about this? I've been in Austin since December, and will be here until the end of July, and would be interested in some sort of meet-up (particularly since I just got my second shot on Thursday).
We announce events by e-mail, join this Google group: https://groups.google.com/g/austin-less-wrong
If you can't seem to subscribe, let me know and I should be able to add you
While we're on the topic of meetups, if anyone else is in the Temecula Valley area I am willing to host/meet up.
+1, Have you met anyone from SSC community in the Temecula area?
I have literally seen nor heard anyone closer than Irvine until you just now, haha.
I moved to Canada a few ago (BC to be specific) and so far I've hardly followed Canadian news. This is partly because I haven't found Canadian news sources that really engage me. I'd love some recommendations from Canadian SSC folks!
-- What are your favourite sources for Canadian news?
-- Who are your favourite writers on Canadian issues?
-- What are your favourite Canadian news podcasts/TV shows/radio shows?
Extra points for stuff that's BC specific.
I'd also like your recommendations for books that might give me the background to today's Canadian political issues.
Thanks for your recommendations!
I'm jealous. I would enjoy having less engaging news.
Any good news anywhere? Sports and weather is about all I can listen to.
CBC hockey night in Canada is a must, aye? :^)
* Sources of Canadian news: the standard sources are probably good enough, with the CBC, CTV, Global News (all broadcasters), the Globe and Mail and National Post (newspapers) will probably cover the major news stories with various levels of political bias. As with the US and elsewhere, local news media is dying in Canada, so that's probably sufficient to get up to speed.
* Writers on Canadian issues: Can't think of any of the top of my head, but I can give a short list of book recommendations. _The Illustrated History of Canada_ is a good generalist overview of the history of Canada. Its editor, the historian Christopher Moore (not related to the comedic novelist) wrote _1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal_, with covers the Confederation period in more detail. The late Michael Bliss's _Right Honourable Men_ is a series of biographical sketches of the major Prime Ministers up to Jean Chretien (resigned in 2004). For more recent history, Paul Wells, national affairs columnist for Macleans, has written books on premierships of Paul Martin and Stephen Harper; those pretty good as well. Moving to more local history, _The West beyond the West_ by Jean Barman is a generalist history of British Columbia.
I would also recommend _The Unfinished Empire_ by John Darwin, focused on the British Empire and _Replenishing the Earth_ by James Belich, focusing on what he calls the "Anglo-Wests" (e.g. the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) While not specifically focused on Canada, they do put its history in a larger global context that may be more enlightening than considering it by itself.
* I don't really follow podcasts that much, so I can't really help you there.
Unfinished Empire made a big impression on me. What I got from it was that Britain didn't so much decide to go conquer the world as establish trading relationships, then launch an endless series of wars and expansions ostensibly to maintain and protect those relationships. I'm curious if this is the consensus view of British colonialism.
I'd say it's not an unfair one. There are some notable points in British colonialism where the British are obviously quite annoyed at having colonies because they'd much rather just sell things and buy things as they wanted, but the local government's too unstable, or some stupid British people who moved there keep starting wars, or whatever.
Notably, while the British continually invaded China, they didn't try to conquer it as long as the Chinese government did what they wanted. That goes for a lot of other places, too.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, C. J.! There are some great suggestions here. I've ordered some of the books you suggest.
Pierre Berton wrote a series of good, shortish books on specialized aspects of Canadian history. So far I've read "The Invasion of Canada (1812-1813)" and "The Great Depression". They won't tell you that much about what's happening now, but they'll give you a sense of what Canada was like at different points in history and they're relatively light reading.
I moved to QC a few years ago from the U.S., and I'm the same way. I only follow local COVID news and other stuff that very directly affects me. I still haven't transferred my emotional loyalties.
Thanks for the advice! I'm glad to hear that it's not just me!
r/vancouver subreddit is excellent, assuming you are in the Lower Mainland. Also https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/, https://dailyhive.com/vancouver.
Radio: cbc radio 1. News1130 in the Vancouver area.
Thanks!
One of those sites appears to have a very pro-Vancouver bias, and the other is clearly in the tank for bees.
Steve Paikin on The Agenda is an excellent interviewer. Unfortunately it's focused on Ontario, not BC, but there are often still good topics.
Here's a good one on Canadian courts during Covid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP02mMK0R_0&t=1157s
Thank you! I've subscribed.
Hey! I read a lot of Canadian news so I can definitely help here. I'm very left leaning, so none of my recommendations are particularly sympathetic to conservatives, however.
Sources:
-The first thing that I recommend to people is to follow local news. I know that the Vancouver Observer was a widely respected, fantastic publication with really good research and reporting, but it's since been folded up into the National Observer. The National Observer is good, but very paywalled last I checked. But tbh when it comes to local reporting, I don't really think the difference between "high-quality" and "low-quality" reporting is that large, so honestly just pick up whatever.
-To supplement local coverage because there's zero money in it and everything's consolidating, I like reading the student newspapers from the universities that are near where I live
-The Tyee is based in BC, but I think I consider it a "leftist publication" more than I do a local one. However, much of its coverage is on BC.
-Briarpatch Mag is based in Saskatchewan but covers stuff from across Canada, from a far-leftist point of view.
-Canadaland is primarily a podcast network but they also do very extensively researched longform. They're funded through patreon and I'm a supporter there.
Podcasts:
-Canadaland when it started was a media watchdog - it critiqued mainstream media and the "inside baseball" that's played a lot in the field of journalism, but over time the team has really gone "fuck it, I'll report the news myself" and they honestly do a pretty good job imo.
-Canadaland Commons, another podcast they have, does like, multi-part series on things that are happening, that run roughly a dozen hour-long episodes each. It's immensely cool. They've done in-depth coverage of the pandemic, the state of policing in Canada and its history, and is just starting its new season, which is on real estate.
Thank you! I've subscribed to Canadaland and bookmarked The Tyee. I'm looking forward to reading/listening to this stuff!
Welcome!
"The Morning After" by Chantal Hebert and Jean Lapierre about the 1995 referendum on separation in Quebec gives a good overview of the events while also providing a good story. It's not really a current issue but it's something that definitely still informs decisions at high levels.
Hebert is a strong columnist as well and often appears on CBC with Andrew Coyne who's also worth reading. Justin Ling is a freelancer who I've just started noticing as well.
Maclean's is a national magazine I don't think I've seen mentioned yet. And of course the Beaverton is the Canadian version of the Onion.
When reading Canadian political news it might be helpful to bear in mind some elements that can cause confusion with an American (I assume) context:
-Red and blue are swapped on political maps.
-The Prime Minister is significantly more powerful then the President relative to Parliament and cabinet (essentially the Speaker and President combined into one).
-The actual Speaker of the House is a mostly ceremonial role similar to the VP in the American Senate for practical purposes.
-The Canadian Senate is entirely different from the American Senate and is also mostly ceremonial (this has changed a little bit recently and occasionally makes news if they try to do something).
-Provinces are more powerful than states relative to the federal government. This might be debatable, but as an example several provinces have closed their borders to interprovincial travel during the Pandemic and I don't think states can do that.
-Provincial political parties have evolved differently within each province and are sometimes quite different than their counterparts in other provinces or the federal government. For example the BC Liberals are basically a coalition of Conservatives and right-leaning Liberals.
Thank you! I've ordered The Morning After.
The thing about the colour is so confusing! Every time I look at a political map I have to waste a few seconds remembering which colour is which.
Provinces are absolutely NOT more powerful than states. Canadian federalism is specifically and explicitly designed to have a federal government that is more powerful than the provinces. The American Civil War was a rather notable influence on Confederation.
The provinces have jurisidiction over particular matters. The feds have jurisdiction over certain other matters, and ANYTHING that the constitution doesn't mention. Notably, the feds in Canada control criminal justice (though the courts occasionally give the provinces some nasty inroads that they shouldn't). The provinces are responsible for enforcing it, but criminal law is exclusively federal. The feds also have control over all national public works, which a sneaky federal government could probably use to justify just about anything.
Canadian provinces are closing their borders because Canadians are generally more willing to undertake draconian social measures without people whining about their rights than Americans are. Interestingly, since Canadians have an explicit constitutional right to move around Canada and US citizens DON'T, it looks like constitutionally US states could do it more easily than Canadian provinces. But they won't.
The Canadian Senate isn't THAT different than the American one - it's supposed to ensure regional representation of the provinces. They started out in somewhat similar places. Where they've ended up, on the other hand, is wildly different.
There's a wonderful Canadian Substack called "The Line" I've recently started getting. I don't know if you're into Substack
You should update the page to reflect that you didn't know the meaning of "stand by" when writing the predictions post. It remains the most obviously false thing on this blog, and despite the significant number of commenters pointing out your error, you have neither admitted it nor tried to argue the point.
I read this earlier today and was pretty surprised by it as well. Definitely below the what I perceive as the blogs standards. Given that he seemed astounded that people found this statement to racist you would think he would have read about why people found it racist
What does stand by mean? Why did people find it racist?
I believe, in this instance, it implies something along the lines of “Stay vigilant and await further instructions.” It does not mean “Relax. Don’t do anything.”
Does this difference MATTER given that the statement is purely symbolic anyway? Is this anything more than people going out of their way to find something to be offended over?
Unlike antifa or BLM, Proud Boys didn't claim to be a "leaderless movement". It had leaders, it had chain-of-command. If Trump were secretly wanting the Proud Boys to do stuff on his behalf he wouldn't need to do so via coded messages constructed spontaneously in response to an unexpected debate question, he could just, you know, send them an email. Either he has actual power/control over them or he doesn't. If he doesn't, whatever he said in a debate is irrelevant because they don't listen to him; if he does, whatever he says in debate is misdirection (because he can contradict it via whatever backchannels are being used to exert said power). There doesn't seem to be any plausible world in which it would MATTER what he said in terms of the debate statement making an actual difference in what they do
In fact, the whole thing was an obvious "gotcha" question intended to rhetorically tie Trump to the Proud Boys no matter what answer he gave. If he doesn't say to stand down, this "obviously" proves he's in favor of them doing bad things because otherwise he'd tell them to stand down. If he does say to stand down, it "obviously" proves he's in control of them since they answer to his orders...which proves he's in favor of them having done bad things. If he flubs his words or tries to somehow split the baby people get to accuse him of BOTH bad things. So there is literally no good answer. No matter what he said he could have been criticized on essentially the same grounds, so what he said shouldn't matter to any actually-sensible people.
"I denounce the proud boys and all other white supremacists" would have done the trick, right?
WALLACE: Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups?
TRUMP: Sure
The first problem with your proposed statement is that the proud boys weren't white supremacist so it would be factually incorrect to call them such. A second problem is that he wasn't being asked to merely denounce, he was being asked to "tell them to stand down". It's specifically the "telling to stand down" part that has the "gotcha" aspect I mentioned so merely denouncing wouldn't have been responsive to the question. A third problem is that Trump HAD explicitly denounced "white supremacists" many many times before - you can find superclips of him doing it over a dozen times on youtube - and clearly it's never done the trick before or he wouldn't have been asked again this time, so it wouldn't have done the trick now.
But setting all that aside let's pretend he had *only* been asked to denounce and he gave the answer you give; the available options in response include:
(1) claim Trump "waited too long" to denounce and should have done it sooner (ignoring that he *had* done it sooner) which proves he's secretly on their side.
(2) claim he didn't denounce *strongly enough* - either the word choice or tone of voice proves he secretly supports them or he would have been more forceful.
(3) claim that waiting until somebody *asks* you to denounce is waiting too long; somebody who *truly* hated white supremacy would have denounced them without having been asked (ignoring the fact that he *had* done so, many times before).
...and so on. Or the media could just *ignore* that he answered the question perfectly this time and continue asking it again in the next interview as if he hadn't...just like they've been doing previously.
It's possible to interpret it that way. It is also possible to interpret it as Trump misstating "stand down" which he was asked to say 30 seconds earlier by the host. This was followed y several interjections by all three participants before Trump uttered, "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by." The way he said "stand back" (if you watch the video) sounds weird, as if he was trying to say something else, but that's what came out. Following that up with "stand back" could be interpreted as an attempt to say the correct phrase, "stand down," but failing again. I'm not saying this is the correct interpretation. I'm just saying that it's not an unreasonable one. I think Scott's conclusion is within the error bars.
If you search on Google for "stand by" definition, the first definition is:
>be present while something bad is happening but fail to take any action to stop it.
>"he was beaten to the ground as onlookers stood by"
The second definition is:
>be ready to deal or assist with something.
>"two battalions were on their way, and a third was standing by"
These definitions are from Oxford Languages, publishers of the renowned Oxford English Dictionary. So it appears to be Rand et al who don't know the meaning of the phrase.
Should we construe Trump's statement as racist? I think the dictionary definition is somewhat beside the point, because Trump doesn't know the official definitions of words and ad libs everything. It seems very improbable that this statement was premeditated.
*Maybe* you could argue that it's a verbal slip that goes to show how he sees the Proud Boys (a "pro-Western" group that engages in political violence and is lead by an Afro-Cuban) as a group that is his to command. But it doesn't seem reasonable to claim that's the only possible interpretation: it could be that Trump intended to use the first sense of the word, or that Trump was just stomping all over the English language with carefree abandon like he normally does when speaking. In any case it's suspicious that so many highlight this statement and ignore the stuff Trump said right before.
"you would think he would have read about why people found it racist"
In my experience, in these kind if situations, there is frequently little to no justification. People get conspicuously upset about something and furiously condemn everyone who isn't upset, without giving solid reasons to be upset. In this case, as I posted elsewhere in this thread, the first definition of "stand by" according to the OED is just: "be present while something bad is happening but fail to take any action to stop it." I'll be quite surprised if a single article written by a journalist who got conspicuously upset about "stand back and stand by" took note of this fact. They're preaching to the choir at best, riling up a misinformed mob at worst.
I agree this is Scott's largest uncorrected error.
I think the main problem is this:
It is most definitely not a condemnation. But it is telling the proud boys that he wants peace. The moderator asked for Trump to tell the proud boys to not add to the violence, so Trump did.
Scott focuses on this very point. The moderator asked for something very specific, and Trump delivered (albeit in a weaker form).
Ergo, according to Scott, it's not support. Which is true. Scott is technically correct.
Everyone else focusses on the substance of what Trump said. Trump told them to stop the violence temporarily but be ready to resume, and then made a call to action. Now, part of this is classic Trump: always attack, never defend. But it's important to know why that strategy works: because it unifies a diverse base (including the Proud Boys) against an enemy. When we focus on our differences, we splinter; when we focus on our common foe, we unite.
Trump's condemnation of Antifa is what a condemnation looks like. We see now the contrast: he tells the Proud Boys to be peaceful but be ready for more action later, and then declares Antifa an enemy.
That, Scott, is why everyone else is freaking out about this statement. He technically answers the moderator's second question. But in so doing, shows that he is specifically not answering the first one.
Now, there was a lot of crosstalk. We misspeak in debates. Trump may not have realised that his words could be interpreted as "make peace for now, but be ready for more violence." EXCEPT that's the way the Proud Boys took it. They claimed Trump as his own, and Trump did absolutely nothing to correct them of the notion.
If Trump misspoke and really wanted to condemn the Proud Boys, he would have when he realised they took it as support. He did not.
Trump said a very specific thing. There is no evidence that he did not mean that thing. Why, then, is it a perfect prediction?
Your interpretation is based on a bunch of assumptions, including whether Trump even believes that the Proud Boys use violence pro-actively more than incidentally, which is disputed among the right.
> Trump's condemnation of Antifa is what a condemnation looks like. We see now the contrast: he tells the Proud Boys to be peaceful but be ready for more action later, and then declares Antifa an enemy.
Antifa routinely seeks out and uses violence against right-wing demonstrators. The Proud Boys seem to largely work as a defense organization that mingles with protests or protests on their own and then gets into fights with Antifa who seek them out. Using violence against peaceful demonstrators is not the same as getting into fights with people like Antifa (and from my perspective, Proud Boys is a logical response to leftist acceptance of violence against the right).
> If Trump misspoke and really wanted to condemn the Proud Boys, he would have when he realised they took it as support. He did not.
You were talking about strategies, but you are ignoring the strategy that biased media uses all the time: create a reality by selectively highlighting certain events, applying double standards and then demanding that their political opponents respond to that 'reality.'
By doing this, you get to double-smear the opponent (as from research we know that denials tend to reinforce/increase belief in the accusation). The smart move is not to play along.
> he tells the Proud Boys to be peaceful but be ready for more action later, and then declares Antifa an enemy.
He simply wanted to pivot the debate to talk about left-wing violence and turn an attack into him, into an attack on Biden. It clearly was Trump strategy for much of the debate, which makes sense as the moderator was on Team Biden, so Trump could only talk about topics favorable to him by forcing the issue.
You are interpreting a basic "No u" in an extremely partisan way.
I agree with most of your analysis, but I think you are missing a very important point: Scott argued that this was a condemnation of the Proud Boys.
Trump responding "No u" was his strategy. And he did it there. You are correct.
Therefore, it is not a condemnation of the Proud Boys. It is a condemnation of leftist violence. As you said, it is a "No u."
Which is not support for the proud boys, of course. I do not disagree that the moderator sorted Biden more (whether this was justified because of Trump's disregard for the rules of debate is beyond the scope of this comment). Therefore, "no u" was a viable and effective strategy.
But I am not arguing that Trump explicitly supported the Proud Boys. I am arguing that it was not a condemnation.
And you agree: it is a "no u."
I agree that it was not a condemnation, but he was never asked to condemn them by the moderator (but he was by Biden).
I just think that it is supremely silly to read so much into this single event, especially since Trump may already have felt the effects of Covid. He certainly wasn't sharp during the debate.
That this is supposed to be key evidence is itself telling IMO.
"he was never asked to condemn them by the moderator"
The question by the moderator:
WALLACE: Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups?
The Proud boys are neither.
Trump answered that he was willing to do so, even though it it is a rather absurd question that conflates two very separate things. One part of the question is about ideology, while the other part is about organization/methods, even though you can have one without the other.
The National Guard is a militia, while Antifa and the Proud Boys are only a militia under a fairly broad definition of the word, at which point it may also includes groups that have very broad support, like citizens who patrol their neighborhoods.
Asking an opinion about two different things (that are vague even on their own) like this is a hugely dishonest 'gotcha' tactic. The question is very unclear and can be spun in very different ways, so the answer can be as well. You can just as easily criticize Trump for being willing to condemn the National Guard, which is a far stronger interpretation than the one that I commonly see, where 'sure' somehow is interpreted as "no."
Anyway, as a followup, the moderator asked Trump: "Are you prepared specifically to do it."
Trump then tried to pivot to left-wing violence, but then both Biden and the moderator asked Trump to specifically condemn, to which he very reasonably asked who he specifically should condemn. Then Biden and the moderator gave two different answers at the very same time:
Chris Wallace: (42:14)
White supremacist and right-wing militia.
Vice President Joe Biden: (42:14)
Proud Boys.
Trump then clearly addressed Biden's specific example, by making the famous statement. Note that Biden's statement was actually a specific example, unlikely the moderator's, who repeated his earlier generic and vague categories.
Immediately after, Trump said again that left-wing violence is the real issue, which is perfectly consistent with the belief that some of the right have: that the Proud Boys are a group that typically defends other right-wing protesters from attacks by violent left-wing extremists, while Antifa and the like will commonly attack peaceful protesters, so peaceful left-wing protesters don't have that much to fear, at least in comparison.
Of course, you may not consider this to be true, reasonable, etc; but the inability or unwillingness to interpret Trump's statements in good faith, based on what he may plausibly believe, is exactly the issue that Scott is addressing.
right. It may still be a scissor statement, and Scott could still argue as to if the statement had any deeper meaning or not... but those arguments just can not be 'stand by' == 'stand down'
You are just plain wrong in your interpretation. To me it seems obvious that it was a slip up and Trump could have just as easily said Stand-Down. Scott was completely right in his prediction, don't let your ego get in your way of your predictions. If your priors were wrong, they were in fact wrong and it is best to own upto it instead of still complaining that you are somehow right like a sore loser. How many times do you need Trump to condemn white supremacists before you believe that he has no problem doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGrHF-su9v8
This is ridiculous.
That's not the question at hand.
The question is about the meaning of the words "stand by". "Stand by" means to be ready to act, that's the standard usage. Maybe Trump screwed up; not the point here. The point is that the ball is in Scott's court to stay that this was a Trumpian verbal fart, not that there is nothing there.
Scott's reply was bogus, irrespective of whether Trump supports white supremacists.
I note that you're saying "to me it seems obvious that it was a slip up". *Scott* says "Trump said the Proud Boys should "stand back and stand by", which as far as I can tell is equivalent to "stand down", the specific thing Wallace kept trying to make him say even though he had already condemned everybody." That is "Trump said exactly what he was asked to say!" This is a mistake. You're acknowledging that it was a mistake. Scott should own it.
Imagine writing a post about people crying wolf, about interpreting all words as negatively as possible, about considering everything a potential dog whistle with zero regard for alternative explanations... and then seeing commenters doing just that, unironically and without any self-reflection.
Allow me to register my opinion that this is nothing but an attempt to backdoor a political topic into a non-political open thread, and should be treated accordingly.
^This. Or rather, whether or not it was an "attempt" (which sounds like a judgement about OP's *intent*), the fact remains that it *is* a very strongly political topic in a non-political open thread, and should be removed.
Agreed. Considering it's a post about bad faith that's pretty ironic.
I am by no means a Trump supporter but this is not very convincing. Also, this should be a nonpolitical thread.
I don't know why whether or not you're a Trump supporter pertains to the meaning of "stand by". This is not a new phrase, Scott should have known what it means (not "what Trump intended" but what it means as a command) and admitted his mistake when corrected.
And, as you and others have noted, this is a no-politics thread and people should avoid rehashing the previous debate here.
(That is, the political discussion of the Mantic Monday post.)
Oops, I tried to do an answer, commited a typo, attempted to fix that, deleted comment, forgot to save it. This is surprisingly stressful since I have things to do and I guess I am not going to be commenting here much until substack deigns to add an edit button.
Basically, "stand by" does not have single clear meaning, as is pretty normal for words (in deleted comment, I attempted to link to a dictionary inside a paragraph, but linking does not work very well here, see below). To determine whether it is fair to use Trump´s uttering this words as some grand proof that he is in a league with white supremacists (as many people did at that time (I am not an American and didn´t much care about presidential debates, but global internet was absolutely flooded with this phrase) , one needs to look at an overall context, which is exactly what Scott did in his post.
Dictionary: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stand-by
Does anyone have a good outside-view guide on nutritional supplements or multivitamins? My impression is
- multivitamins only work if you're unusually deficient in some vitamin (but they might still be good in expectation because you might not be aware of being deficient in something?)
- creatine/protein shakes and the like are probably useful if you're a serious lifter (how would you know you work out enough to need them though?), but may cause liver problems long-term so probably not worth it for most people.
- mealsquares are good because they have chocolate chips (this one isn't a nutritional opinion, I just like their taste and convenience. But I assume they also kinda work like multivitamins in that they're a good way to catch something you're deficient in).
Examine.com
Seconded.
Protein powder and creatine are not going to cause liver or kidney problems, that's a myth. Some people think that creatine causes problems because creatine supplementation causes raised creatinine levels which can be an indicator of kidney malfunction but this is a misunderstanding. The creatine isn't hiring your kidneys it's just messing with the indicator. And protein powder definitely isn't going to cause any issues, it's literally just a type of food that's really high in protein. It's a good thing to incorporate in your diet if you're not getting as much protein as you'd like.
Right, taking creatine is like placing a candle under the thermostat, then having your doctor tell you that the room is very, very hot.
Creatine and protein supplementation are very, very well studied and the kidney thing is as close to ruled out as anything can be in nutritional studies.
Shaked - if you are interested in this topic, listen to the Stronger by Science podcast. One of the hosts really, really knows his stuff. But don't expect to have your socks blown off, most supplementation isn't terribly impactful. In fact, all the supplements in the world not called "Protein" would get blown out of the water my my new supplement "Eat three more salads a week."
For multivitamins, that's my understanding as well. I'd suggest as an alternative, look up the common nutritional deficiencies and see if you're at risk of any. Iron, D (if you don't get sun), B12 (if you don't eat meat), magnesium, omega-3s, etc.
To second Michael's comment, I think the risks of creatine and protein supplements are widely misunderstood. If you don't already have kidney/liver problems, there's minimal risk when taking these at normal dosages. Both these supplements are incredibly well-studied. Your uranalysis will look a little funny compared to "normal" people so be sure to disclose to your doctor your supplements.
To help answer when do you need them: if you are lifting hard enough that you feel it the next day (sore/stiff/weak etc), you should probably be following the .7-1g/lb/day protein guideline. If you don't lift that hard but still work out regularly, I've heard suggestions of .6g/lb/day. You don't necessarily need any protein supplements, but a lot of times, it's hard to get all that from food. Creatine is optional but a lot of people find it noticeably effective for their performance in the gym. There's some theory creatine is also good for the brain, but I haven't looked into that research much.
I'd like to learn more about investing in apartment buildings as a source of passive income, but nearly every "guide to real estate investing" trips my internal "this is a scam" alarm. Can anyone suggest a trustworthy source of information? I'm specifically looking to purchase/invest in and around the Bay Area.
I have no expertise but you should bear in mind that a lot of people concentrate in the hinterlands precisely because the investment atmosphere in a place like the Bay is already so optimized and full of sharks. Like, there's tons of players involved in Bay area real estate who do exactly what you're looking to do, some of which are large firms with far more resources than you. So the odds of you being able to find a property that's legitimately underpriced compared to the environment so you can maximize your investment is small. Whereas in a recovering market like Cincinnati there's just vastly less players and so more opportunity to find unique value. Again, I don't have any expertise but I think that's a general condition worth contemplating.
This is true-ish. There are neighborhoods in cities that won't be as hot and smaller cities or rural areas might be better. You're probably not going to find a lot of deals in Palo Alto. But you might in Union City or Granada. You also don't have to source the deals yourself, depending on your resources.
Seems like the best way to make money then is to buy shares in those existing companies
Meh – I don't think they perform on-average better than the rest of the 'investable' companies. (I'm not assuming that this hypothetical investor, or Craig the commenter, can only invest in 'publicly tradable' companies.)
Based on some personal experience, and reinforced by many many 'outside view' sources, most 'investment companies' seem more like a way for some people (investment company managers) to make a living doing something with other people's money (the investment company's investors).
Investors _can_ and do sometimes make better-than-average returns – just probably not better-than-average on average (i.e. over 'the long term').
There _are_ some non-financial advantages to real estate – you really do own actual physical buildings and thus can do stuff with them other than earn rents.
beware that many / most places in the bay area have rent control which freezes rent with some de minimus annual growth pegged to inflation - and makes it very very hard to part ways with a tenant. even if you sign, say a 12 month lease, after 12 months, you can't ask them to leave if they don't want to. Way more restrictive than NYC rent control!!!
Oooh – not sure whether San Fransisco, or 'Bay Area', rent control is more restrictive than NYC! I think it'd be close at least, and I'm pretty sure there are several 'dimensions' along which they differ dramatically.
Rent 'stabilization' in NYC is nowadays much more common than rent 'control' – but even stabilization is pretty restrictive.
And I'm not sure that the Bay Area as a whole has strong 'rent control' – especially compared to NYC (which is an actual individual city with one mayor).
But the more general point about real estate being a (potentially) arbitrarily difficult investment to manage is very true! One way, and maybe _the_ way, to mitigate that risk, especially when you're starting out, is to discriminate strongly against renters that you think might not pay their rent, or move out when their lease ends. (I think this is one of the saddest consequences of 'rent control' – allowing renters to defect against owners and trap themselves in a bad equilibria thereafter.)
I know a lot about real estate, including investment. A lot of the information isn't publicly available. It's either a pay to learn model or passed through informal networks. But I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.
Now that Lost Future responded at some length, do you agree with them?
I agree that truly passive income is something of a myth. But I think they overstate the amount of effort you necessarily need. And they definitely overstate how hard it is to make money. They worked in commercial property management which has undergone something of a massacre and is much higher variance than residential stuff. Like most businesses, you can substitute labor for capital so having a bit of money to spend on a good management company and lead sourcing and all that will make it a lot less ground work.
(Super pro-tenant states can be a problem though. I'd recommend seeing if you can get property in a more landlord friendly state if you're comfortable with remote instead of local. That's totally doable if you set it up right.)
There are, broadly, three ways to make money in real estate. Building it, renting it, or providing services (or money) to people doing one of those other two things. Since you're already set up in rental management, expanding there is probably the best way forward. I have thoughts but I'm not sure how much those'd be helpful. If you're just looking for an education I'd say read some books and show up to the local REIA. Plenty of people there will give advice or be coaches, though use your discretion before finding some new coach. That's more your level than the professional corporate events.
You can get rich from rentals but you need to make money on the buy and use that, combined with perhaps some minor repairs, get you really high returns. Buying on retail is almost always a terrible idea. I can talk about the formulae but ultimately it comes down to the fact that homeowners pay top dollar. You as a landlord are less picky: you just need a unit that will rent, not one that you personally love. For example, it's common to buy on the lower couple of floors since many tenants will compromise on a bit of rent rather than want the higher floor. But when people buy for themselves they love the penthouse. That's not a hard rule but it's the type of compromise I mean.
I worked for a commercial brokerage of apartment buildings & property management company- we sold & managed apartments, 'commercial' in this context just means like we weren't selling individual condos or single family homes. I only dealt with apartment buildings, no other class of real estate. I personally know and am familiar with the financial statements of dozens of wealthy apartment building owners.
I am sure you can make money renting apartments- I just think, if you're in the active wealth building phase of your life, you can get better returns out of equities. I am very confident that 99.9% of apartment building purchases don't exceed an S&P 500 index fund over 20-30 years, say, once you account for *all* of the expenses of owning a building in that time frame. These expenses include rare but very expensive maintenance like a new roof or new heating system- and, once a decade or so renovations to *stay at your current quality level*. If you're renting to middle class tenants now, you have to replace the kitchen, bath & everything else every 10-15 years just to stay at the same level! The building is, as the tax treatment suggests, constantly depreciating. Factor the true costs of *keeping your building at the same quality level* over 3 decades and then subtract that from your returns. It's like treading water- you can't stop!
Being a small landlord is the 'I'm entrepreneurial, I want to run my own retail business' of more well-off people
It is not and will never be 'passive income', this is an extremely common terrible framing. It is an active & highly regulated business (especially in California!), involving actual human beings. You are essentially buying a part-time job with no off hours- the heat could go out on Christmas Eve, say- and serious regulatory & downside risk. Your tenants can basically choose not to pay you and you have little recourse in a blue state. Having previously worked in commercial real estate, done property management, and gotten to know a lot of big investors in another blue state, I'm of the opinion that being a small landlord (like, less than 20 units) basically never makes sense as a wealth-building move. Anyone who 'got rich' in real estate did so via development, not via rentals.
But again- if you want to do it, you are buying yourself a part-time job. It is not 'passive' income. I agree that basically every 'guide to' is a scam. Paying a real estate attorney, accountant, and property manager for a walk-through as to how the business actually works on the ground would be a good intro. (Wait till you learn that you will automatically lose every fight in court with a tenant in California!)
This is good advice, but I should have clarified in my original post--my wife and I already own about 20 units, managed by a competent company. My wife has more experience than I do with the matter--I'm trying to find an efficient way to learn more to better participate and expand our holdings.
If I were you (well, if I were you I'd get the hell out of renting apartments). But if I were you, wanting to do this, I would hire a CPA firm that works with other landlords and run your building finances by them, get their perspective. I'd hire a real estate attorney that does lots of litigation and get an idea of the risks. Maybe run your books by another property management company and see where they say they'd improve things. Chat with an experienced broker and pretend to be more sophisticated than you are, get market info out of them while not being sold on anything- they're in the business of talking shop with folks like you. I did this dozens & dozens of wealthy investors in Tier 1 US City.
I'd say other landlords, but..... landlords are in general much crazier than the average population. (This was a running joke in the office when I worked at that commercial brokerage). Just a lot of whackos, many many foreigners too. There's also a ton of 'more money than sense' high-income folks who bought an apartment building because they're doctors, say, and everyone knows real estate is a great investment! They read this on Biggerpockets.com, after all. And now they lose money every month and don't understand why.
And lots of professional landlords may not match your financial profile or time horizon. Tons of them in a Tier 1 city like San Fran are uber-independently wealthy, and buy money-losing properties because they figure over a 30+ year span they'll eventually be profitable. They literally don't care about losing money now, and collect cool buildings the way other rich folks collect classic cars or sailboats or artwork! Or they're parking money from China or Russia, and again don't care about turning a profit, etc. So, they may not have useful advice for your particular situation.
Literally nothing online has any value whatsoever, and sites like Biggerpockets.com could be nuked from orbit as far as I'm concerned
To clarify- "I'd hire a real estate attorney that does lots of litigation and get an idea of the risks"- like, where do landlords typically lose in court? Over what issue? What are the top 10 things I should be doing now to minimize legal risk, Mr. Attorney? Etc.
It's entirely possible, of course, that I'm of the same mind as those foolish doctors and will waste my efforts on this, but that's why I'm looking for more information. On the other hand, they probably think they're also exceptions, and on we go in a circle forever. Oh well.
Toward your earlier note--if not apartment buildings, then what would you consider a more worthwhile investment category for anyone able to mobilize the relevant amount of funds?
Equities? Index funds? :) Sounds like you need a financial advisor. If you're really interested in real estate, you could try your hand at development like condo conversions say?
You can know if you're in the doctor category or not, by seeing if you turn a profit every month. Yes, many recent buyers in Tier 1 cities are actually losing money, in spite of the Greedy Landlord image you see popularized
> Yes, many recent buyers in Tier 1 cities are actually losing money, in spite of the Greedy Landlord image you see popularized
That's a weird general pattern I've seen too! Most "greedy landlords" are really whackos with more money than sense, they're probably mostly losing money on their real estate, might not even keep their books well enough to really know, and pretty regularly (statistically) do crazy things like move in to one of their rental properties (and often end up fighting the tenants) when some other stupid un-profitable business(es) of theirs take a big hit or fail outright.
Restaurants are another good example – it's a terrible business investment as a class or category!
And the funny thing then is that a lot of these 'businesses' ('investments') are – effectively – charities; generally really really terrible charities and mostly net-negative ones too, but still not _functionally_ profitable 'going concerns'.
Dang – this is great, and it matches what I gleaned working at an investment company that did real estate. Most of that company's investments were new developments but they got shamed into dabbling in their 'hometown' (a big city) and (almost?) always got hosed because of (stupid) tenant disputes and the like.
(And I strongly suspected all of that company's investors were a bunch of (mostly foreigner) "whackos".)
I actually really enjoyed 'discovering' that tiny slice of the weird world we live in tho! It was fascinating (and at least a little bit horrifying)!
Doesn’t this depend a lot on what you rent out and who you rent it to? I’ve rented out my previous residences for a few years and never had to so more than replace a washer/dryer. My rentals have always been new-ish (built >2008) and rented to white collar workers and it very much felt like passive income.
That's what's meant by it's not passive income. Picking a renter is a huge part of the job. Also, back in my 20s I had an apartment where the rent didn't go up for 10 years. The landlord accepted far below market rents because I was never a problem. Ever year the landlord had to ask themselves, "Do I increase the rent and risk him leaving? Or do I keep it the same and save myself a headache?"
To your point about white collar workers, my old landlord had a few terrible experiences because while they had great credit scores they were also very demanding and litigious.
I am trying to figure out dental stuff, and it turns out that I knew nothing. I thought that brushing your teeth was mainly about removing bits of food stuck in your teeth, but it seems that at least half of the story is about recoating ("remineralizing") your enamel with the flouride in the toothpaste, and rebalancing the pH in the mouth (acid pH = weak enamel, so erosion that leads to cavities).
First issue: I live in an area with little to no fluoride in water, in which water is not artificially fluoridated (but I grew up in an area with high fluoride in water). So it seems like it would be a nice idea to supplement fluoride in my diet, in addition to the one in toothpaste. I thought about fluoridated table salt, which is a mainstream idea in scientific studies apparently... and, of course, I couldn't find it to buy on the internet (unless I import it from Germany, which costs a fortune thanks to recent Brexit). So I need more fluoride than I currently get, but there doesn't seem to be a decent solution.
Further, it seems that xylitol has beneficial effects in repairing damaged enamel, but only in concentrations between 6-10g/day (it gives you diarrhea if you get >45g/day). Great, I thought! Since chewing sugarfree gum after meals is good for teeth anyway (more saliva = better pH), I thought I'd set up the following routine:
-Brush my teeth in the morning 30 minutes after breakfast (I work from home!)
-Chew gum after lunch
-Chew gum after dinner
-Brush my teeth before bedtime
(plus use mouthwash after snacks if I don't want more gum)
...but it turns out that it's really hard to find gums with decent xylitol content, and it's impossible to find toothpaste with ANY xylitol in it, at least where I live (the UK). It drives me quite mad: why?
It seems like there might be a market for a high-xylitol dental product, since the research on it is somewhat solid at this point. I don't want to chew 6 gums per day to slightly improve my teeth.
Has anyone already done the heavy lifting here, to point me to a supplier or a somewhat unconventional source of xylitol/fluoride that I could exploit?
As the son of a dentist, I would recommend talking to one (if you haven't already) before obsessing over stuff like fluoride and xylitol. Just like with other medical fields, Internet research isn't really a substitute for a professional who's not only directly keeping up with the latest science in their field, but also has practical experience from seeing people come in and observing directly what works and what doesn't. Your tooth care routine looks decent so far, but my second-hand advice would be instead of, or in addition to chewing gum, add mouthwash AND flossing to your toothbrushing.
Oh, yes, I do floss! When I brush my teeth before going to bed. I did see a dentist (which explained the fluoride coating stuff to me), I am just annoyed by the surge in cavities ever since I moved here, so I want to take a radical approach instead of doing the bare minimum as I used to do.
I second your recommendation not to fuss about the frills. When I adopted a regular habit of brushing and flossing my mouth stabilized and I haven't had dental issues in years. One thing that dentists don't teach us is that the softest brush available does the trick. Also, I use a rinse called Closys, which is a great disinfectant. I don't get a commission. It's the same stuff they irrigate your mouth with when you get oral surgery. It might also kill C19 germs.
Remember to also gargle with your mouthwash, as it helps to prevent infections.
For high-xylitol toothpaste, try Squigle. It's available on Amazon.
I just had a lot of dental work done at the local dental school. In the U.S., the Trident Vibes brand has Xylitol as the first ingredient. ACT is a brand that claims dental benefits; they have lozenges and gum. My dental resident prescribed fluoride toothpaste for me. The high concentrations are not available over the counter. You can sometimes get high-fluoride toothpaste from online Indian pharmacies if you really, really don't want to ask your dentis.
Oh, and look for products that claim to help dry mouth. Those often have xylitol.
You could get sodium fluoride from ebay and mix your own. Be careful though!
I use a fluoride mouthwash, usually last thing at night so it won't be washed off too soon. Probably available.
Second this, I was cavity-prone and it has helped.
My current mental model of fluoridation:
1. It definitely works,
2. But once you fluoridate your teeth at a certain time, they are fluoridated and adding more in the next few hours doesn't change anything.
3. But it's probably hard to overdose to the point where your teeth get *stained*.
4. But we don't really know much about possible widespread but minor problems with fluoride.
Fluoridating water supplies back before fluoride toothpaste was a big public health win, but it may not be needed any more.
I agree that fluoride is good for your teeth, but fluoride is toxic elsewhere. I think just brushing your teeth a lot should do the trick w.r.t. dental health.
Don't forget to consider your diet. For example, drinking a lot of coffee outside of meals, and without brushing afterward, can lead to a big surge in cavities.
If you have a dog, be extra careful. Xylitol is liquid death to them.
I don't, but yes I know this and I suspect it played a role in having not-widespread xylitol stuff.
I went down a dental health rabbit hole a year ago (so info may be out of date). My conclusions were
1. There's good evidence that electric toothbrushes are more effective than manual (evidence summary: https://www.nature.com/articles/6400196.pdf?origin=ppub).
2. Chewing Xylitol gum is also effective and well supported by evidence (evidence summary: https://www.nature.com/articles/6400626)
3. There's no good evidence that regular (prophylactic) flossing is helpful. In particular, if there's any beneficial effect, it's very weak (evidence summary: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=22161438).
In the US, there's high-levels of xylitol chewing gum specifically marketed for dental health. I'd be a bit surprised if the same thing didn't exist in the UK. E.g., https://www.amazon.com/Epic-Dental-Xylitol-Sweetened-Cinnamon/dp/B004EW99SO/
Thanks! I use an electric toothbrush whose head is changed every three months or so. I also use a water flosser, which is thought to be just as effective as regular flossing but it's so much more convenient to use. I like it so I don't mind flossing this way.
I noticed Epic but... it's 1g per chewing gum, it's still 6 gums per day to get the minimum amount shown to be effective. I don't want to chew 6 gums per day! I'll probably just buy that and get less xylitol, as the act of chewing gum per se has benefits. I only want to reduce/eliminate further cavities, I don't care about perfection (for once).
I always thought brushing teeth was also about getting rid of the bacteria who live on your teeth (dental plaque), is that wrong?
No, but apparently that's only part of the picture - there's a whole "fluoride shield mechanic that needs to be fortified" thing going on too.
The cause of cavities is dental plaque remaining on your teeth harboring bacteria.
So one thing that seems so obvious to me now, but I had not realized for a very long time, is that you can just check for plaque on your teeth by yourself.
It's not very easy to see directly, so take some suitably pointy object (I use a dull needle, but you can probably also get the thing a dentist would use) and scrape around close to your gums in various places. If you find a spot where you can scrape off lots of white stuff, you know you'll want to brush a bit more thoroughly there.
I do this once a week after brushing my teeth. This drastically improves the feedback loop of whether you are brushing effectively or not. Compared to it taking months until your next dentist appointment or cavity, the feedback is basically instant.
A second realization I had regarding flossing: while flossing you can check after each tooth gap whether you actually removed stuff vs not. And if something gets stuck on the floss, go in again until it stays clean. Doing that I realized that I had one gap that was particularly wide in which lots of food got stuck all the time. (Which, surprise, was adjacent to a tooth that liked to develop cavities...)
I am also using a toothpaste containing Stannous Fluoride (recommended by Rob Wiblin here: https://medium.com/@robertwiblin/things-i-recommend-you-buy-and-use-rob-edition-1d7b2ce27d68).
No cavities again so far after starting doing this two or three years ago.
The "stannous fluoride" thing is above and beyond the quality of tips I was hoping to get - thank you so much!
I wasn't aware that you don't have fluoridated salt in the UK. Why not? Indeed, in Germany it is ubiquitious. Salt with iodide and fluoride for 19 ct / 500g everywhere. With folic acid 69 ct, and a nice yellow colour.
I don't know. Next time I'm going to Germany I'll come back with 10kg of salt.
I have often commented in annoyance about the general (mis)understandings around the Great Library of Alexandria and Hypatia. And now there's a handy-sized two-part explanation of why what you might think you know on these subjects is probably wrong! History for Atheists tackles the topic with Part One here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRXwDHnixc0
Highly recommended (us Irish Catholics have to stick together, even if he's Australian of Irish descent and very definitely ex-Catholic) 😁
Can you briefly share a couple major misconceptions most people have?
Yes, particularly for the classicists among us who have an interest in this area.
He has a good review from 2009 on his old website about the movie "Agora" which starred Rachel Weisz as Hypatia. Now, I understand why the filmmaker made the choices he did - apart from his personal life, he wanted to make a particular story in a particular way, and a fairy tale about a young, beautiful woman battling the forces of the patriarchy and fanaticism and falling victim to them makes a great movie (and we can throw in a thoroughly non-historical romance sub-plot while we're at it).
But as history, it's bunk. And the problem, as O'Neill points out in his review, is that some people *were* taking it as history, as real true facts, and regurgitating it on their personal blogs and social media, and further perpetrating the myth.
O'Neill has some historical training ("I have a Bachelors Degree with Honours in English and History and a research Masters Degree from the University of Tasmania, with a specialisation in historicist analysis of medieval literature") and this is what annoys him: fake history getting sieved through pop culture and passed around as really true truth.
O'Neill's movie review:
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia-hollywood-strikes.html
"Now normally I'd be delighted that someone was making a film set in the Fifth Century (at least, one that wasn't another fantasy about "King Arthur" anyway). After all, it's not like there's a shortage of remarkable stories to tell from that turbulent and interesting time. And normally I'd be even more delighted that they are actually bothering to make it look like the Fifth Century, rather than assuming because it's set in the Roman Empire everyone needs to be wearing togas, forward combed haircuts and lorica segmentata. And I would be especially delighted that they are not only doing both these things but also casting Rachel Weisz in the lead role, since she's an excellent actress and, let's face it, pretty cute.
So why am I not delighted? Because Amenabar has chosen to write and direct a film about the philosopher Hypatia and perpetuate some hoary Enlightenment myths by turning it into a morality tale about science vs fundamentalism."
O'Neill's History for Atheists post on Hypatia herself:
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/07/the-great-myths-9-hypatia-of-alexandria/
Generally, that Hypatia was associated with the Library of Alexandria, that the Library of Alexandria was a publicly accessible source and a bastion for science capable of catalyzing significant technological advancement if it had only been preserved, and that an angry Christian mob stormed it and burned its scrolls in a fit of anti-intellectual religious hysteria.
I'm not sure how many people have these misconceptions. They were passed to me by a Greek uncle who wished to educate me by showing me a movie (Agora) with all of these misconceptions in it. The History for Atheists guy makes it sound like new atheists often deploy these claims in anti-Christian arguments.
Too bad that Carl Sagan perpetuated the myth. Good reminder to always stop and think twice when a scientist with an axe to grind speaks so far outside his field.
They certainly do not seem to be perpetuated in academia, as these all sound preposterous to me - certainly the unhistorical linkage with Hypatia, who lived after the Library had already ceased to exist.
I wish people would actually stick to their area of expertise, and be satisfied with that. Scientists commenting on history is like an art historian explaining marine biology.
Yeah, it doesn't make much sense the other way around.
Speaking as someone with a scientific background, I wonder if part of the cross-disciplinary problem is that scientists and historians exercise different kinds of discernment when it comes to the literature. Listening to the History for Atheists guy, I have the impression that historians assume their source material could be distorted, and they therefore look for multiple sources and corroborating evidence. To build confidence in their claims, they try to accrue various documents in agreement with each other. And I imagine that, when they read secondary literature, they look for evidence the author has done the same, or is referencing someone who has done the same.
Scientists, on the other hand, put a lot of trust in the experimental results of a single paper if the methods are sound and the data collected was sufficient. They might repeat an experiment to confirm the results, or they might look for more evidence when they are trying to support a complex argument. But when they make claims in the discussion section of a paper that are simple and unambiguous, they often cite a single primary source per reported fact. They check their sources by reading the methods and results, not by looking for six papers with the same conclusion (unless the study itself is ambiguous and the results have low statistical significance to begin with).
So perhaps Sagan had no idea how to sort through information and draw strong conclusions regarding history.
But it sounds like Sagan wasn't checking his sources either way. It sounds like he was just putting the cart before the horse.
That makes a lot of sense to me. Perhaps I was also being a bit harsh - I don't mean to imply that no one can develop generalized knowledge about many different things, or that a scientist/historian should never comment on topics pertaining to history/science. Sometimes the studies of one can compliment the other, such as with scientific analysis of archaeological finds or ecological history explaining current environmental conditions. It's only really an issue when someone assumes a position of authority one way or the other without having the qualifying background to support that.
From the historical side, there are indeed several factors to consider when evaluating an ancient source, and corroborating evidence is only one of them and not always entirely accurate itself - for example, multiple authors repeating a particular legend that has no basis in fact. A good historian would be able to point out to you not just the various sources on a given topic, but also which of those literary sources and bits of evidence are *more* reliable than the others. That's a judgment call that takes years of study.
I tend to give Sagan a lot of the benefit of the doubt (unlike the modern remake of Cosmos) because I don't think he had a particular axe to grind, he was - as the video points out - writing and making the show at the tail-end of the 70s when the Doomsday Clock was issuing dire warnings https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/1980%20Clock%20Statement.pdf and a few years later Reagan would make several speeches referencing the "Evil Empire". So he was very worried, as were a lot of people, about imminent Armageddon and trying to call for reason, calm, and "can't we just all sit down and talk it out?"
And Science versus Religion/Science versus The Darkness of Superstition was one of the great beliefs of liberals. The printing press! The Galileo Affair! Darwin versus Wilberforce! Penicillin and medicine and man on the moon and the undoubted, undeniable benefits of modernity and progress! The phrasing of the debate as the Enlightenment (or maybe as far back as the Renaissance) when great thinkers dared think for themselves and come out from under the tyranny of the Church imposing mindless faith in order to keep control over the masses, resulting in Science and Progress, was the great legend and myth that "everybody knows", the kind of popular history and popular culture floating around.
Why *should* Sagan doubt what "everybody knows" when it came to the great victory of Progress over Darkness? The very tool he was pinning his hopes on, that we would all overcome our differences of race, creed and country and come together as humans on fragile spaceship Earth? He wasn't inclined to sift out what Gibbon and Voltaire had added in as polemic from what was recorded as fact, that wasn't what he was doing or what he wanted to urgently talk about.
Yeah, the problem is that this is the pop culture understanding, not anything remotely academic. I'm sympathetic to Sagan - I was one of the kids watching the Cosmos show with my father when it was first broadcast, and it was really a great general science popularisation for the public show and Sagan was charismatic, intelligent and persuasive.
The remake with deGrasse Tyson made me laugh because it went straight for the jugular with the cartoon about the burning of Giordano Bruno, including the handsome Bruno http://nerdreactor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/cosmos-bruno-img.jpg versus the evil St. Robert Bellarmine who has really overdone the murder eyeshadow here https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/hubfs/7693347/Imported_Blog_Media/Kepler-JHA-Blog-1-1.jpg
Sagan wasn't a historian and was just repeating in good faith the pop culture notions he had learned. Science versus Religion is always a good story, especially if you feel that you are on the heroic, right side.
One thing (that thankfully I haven't seen passed around recently) is the infamous Chart https://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkdeee4gtd1qd4jgjo1_500.jpg and here's a kicking a critic gave to it https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/22uea0/the_person_behind_the_chart_tries_to_negate_all/?sort=confidence
Much of it is sort of trendy teenager wall posters, if you can understand what I'm getting at. Young adults on social media who like books and history in a general "I effin' LOVE Science!" way only for history rather than science like to put up posts about "still mad about the Great Library" and so on. But they don't seem to exhibit much understanding of the facts or what the history of the Library was, they just put up cool pictures of burning library and "ultrafacts" which could be complete legends.
This is an example of the kind of thing I mean: https://thewinddrifter.tumblr.com/post/158448142861/source-for-more-facts-follow-ultrafacts
The Hypatia stuff gets added in for a mix of feminism and even witchcraft/Wicca - the development of the legend of Hypatia was that she was a sorceress (this is back when Hypatia's character got a bad rap on the other extreme) and so there is a brand of person who takes that and runs with it in a "two fingers up to the patriarchy, yeah ancient feminine divine wisdom hell yeah!" way. But there is the modern extreme of taking her as a feminist genius martyr for Science, as exampled in this Smithsonian magazine article from 2010: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hypatia-ancient-alexandrias-great-female-scholar-10942888/ The article does try to give the facts and be even-handed, but it does incline to the "Hypatia great thinker and feminist martyr" side of the fence. Then again, a neat "science versus religion" story is always appealing to those on the science side who feel they are being threatened by the religious or that research is being stifled or in general "it's us as the last bastions of reason and common sense against the superstitious crazies".
Possibly the worst kinds of historical errors are made when people merge anachronistic sentiments into their interpretations about the motivations of others in the past.
It is interesting, and mildly alarming, that despite the more-or-less traditional tension between religion and science, the two subjects seem equally in favour of finding martyrs for their respective causes. The alarming bit is when one is willing to overlook 'details' so long as it makes for a good story.
Yeah, I can see how different groups have taken turns crafting their own version of Hypatia. The way the Smithsonian article is written, you'd think she was murdered for being a female mathematician and philosopher... until you read a bit further down and there's stuff about her connection to Orestes and politics.
I think she makes a good feminist hero for the simple fact that she thrived so well in a traditionally male field. That's not easy. I do get suspicious any time I hear stuff about "the only female mathematician of the time" or "the only female painter" etc. I mean, I see that Hypatia had a predecessor. And I've seen enough articles along the lines of "Surprise! Medieval women were decorating illuminated manuscripts!" that I'm always wondering how many women seemingly disappeared from majority-male fields because nobody bothered to write about them.
I'm feeling a little more sympathetic now toward Carl Sagan. I think his mistake is an easy one to make. Being a communicator of science to the general public, he was out to synthesize general ideas into narratives people could get behind. Maybe when he was young in the fifties, the Hypatia myth was the only accessible version, so he took it as fact. It seems like, the earlier you go back in the 20th century, the more the narrative would have been dominated by the Enlightenment version of Hypatia.
Indeed. We can say a fair bit about women's contributions in a given area on the basis of other indicators, like education or inheritances, but others are more obscure. It seems likely, on the one hand, that we are missing many writings from upper class women. Agrippina the Younger wrote a memoir of her family and its misfortunes which would have granted enormous insight into the lifestyle of Roman women had it survived. On the other hand, few of these survived precisely because the works considered important enough for preservation and distribution were writings in fields which were predominately masculine, like politics, philosophy, etc.
I have to say that I remain unsympathetic. It is definitely an understandable thing to latch onto a historical narrative that illustrates a general point, but it understandable in the way that someone with no knowledge of trigonometry might understandably try and fail to solve a physics equation. The scholarship surrounding the actual fate of the Alexandrian Library and Hypatia was available in his time, as were many of the more preposterous theories, such as those found in 'Women in Mathematics' by Lynn Osen (the existence of which, incidentally, proved that even MIT was capable of publishing dubious works every now and then).
The trouble with getting the history wrong is not so much that the history is itself damaged for it, since the sources and actual facts are still there for anyone who wants to know more. It does, however, mislead contemporary thought and narrative about the subject, which *can* have a damaging effect on the histories we write in the future. We're now seeing students coming into classrooms of higher education with not just misunderstandings of the past, but an unwillingness to let go of them when presented with contrary evidence. I believe this has to do with the strong emotional connections made with stories that resonate with people - regardless of whether those stories are true or not.
Thanks for correcting me on that. It must be frustrating to encounter misrepresentations of history so often, similar to how I'm frustrated every time someone tries to tell me about the geometric patters formed by water molecules. Do you teach history, then?
Some of the time, yes - as a TA in university. To tell you the truth, I enjoy a certain amount of fictionalized history for fun or entertainment's sake (especially when satirical, like the glorious Life of Brian).
I'm just waiting for the day when a student quotes a movie reviewer as a secondary source. Then film critics will be our historians, and I shall write plays.
Thanks for sharing. I had this myth passed to me by a relative in typical "here's another reason religion sucks" fashion. He does a good job of tackling auxiliary ideas stemming from the central myth. I like how he dismantles the notion that the great scholars of the time were practicing science as we know it, or that they were on their way toward big advancements in engineering or technology.
Mythos aside, the Mouseion at Alexandria sounds like it would have been a cool place to hang out.
Crazy thing I found out about recently: Leonid Ksanfomality's claims of detecting life on Venus's surface (in the pictures from the Venera landers).
Now, this is a respected scientist who worked on the landers themselves. In the mid-2000s there was reanalysis of the images via computer, and Ksanfomality's group found changes over time that they attributed to motion of living creatures. My impression is of a large number of conclusions drawn from a small number of pixels, but it's still a claim published in a leading journal, not obviously wrong, about macroscopic life on another planet (I don't think it needs to be said how big a deal this would be), and weirdly it seems to be very little-known.
(Aside: Venus's surface obviously can't support terrestrial life, but life there is less absurd than might be thought, despite the 750K temperature. There's an analogy with the ocean bottom - supercritical CO2 taking the place of water - and you also have energy from above, with some sunlight getting through the clouds. It would have to be completely different chemistry than Earth, but it's not so hot as to make chemistry impossible.)
Your comment made me google to look for pictures. This is one of the first things that came up: https://www.livescience.com/18083-life-venus-russian-claim.html
I mean, there's *some* writing about it, but not as much as I'd expect. As to "proven false", the article you linked is not 'proof', it's an argument that the images are too low-resolution and that Ksanfomality is seeing things in the noise. Which, admittedly, is probably true, but lower-resolution "aliens" have gotten more press.
The article also says that he misidentified a camera lens cap ejected from the lander as a life form. Doesn’t make him seem very credible. Crank ‘scientists’ identify life forms in pictures from the Mars rovers all the time and get coverage only in the tabloid press.
On that part the article is, as best as I can tell, based on a misunderstanding. The original article wasn't talking about the lens cap, but about a number of rather more subtle shifts.
A better skeptical writeup is (https://www.planetary.org/articles/3338), which concludes that it's just noise and Ksanfomality went insane from staring at the same pictures of Venus for three decades, which I can certainly believe. For the original articles, there's a bunch of stuff at various levels of paywalls, the originals being in Russian, but one being (https://www.scirp.org/html/7-4500130_29456.htm?pagespeed=noscript).
To be clear on my own opinion: I do think this is evidence for life on Venus' surface, albeit extremely weak evidence that shouldn't move one's priors much. The thing is, it's also a strong argument that, if there *was* macroscopic life on Venus' surface, we wouldn't have noticed it, because we really only have the Venera images and they're low-resolution and few in number. I'd assumed, previously, that we had enough imagery to rule out anything macroscopic; I'm no longer confident of that.
That sceptical write up also seems extremely damning. He was doing image analysis using the “sharpen” tool in Microsoft Paint?? It really just seems like he was seeing patterns in noise.
Certainly you can’t completely rule out some kind of macroscopic life based on the images alone (it could be beneath the surface, limited to the poles, a flat “lichen” that just looks like rock from a distance etc).
It seems like the (possible and disputed) presence of phosphine in the atmosphere is way more interesting. It seemed like that was a mistake but now there is another analysis of probe data from the 70s that indicates phosphine and chemical disequilibrium:
https://www.planetary.org/articles/pioneer-venus-multiprobe-phosphine-detection
That is more of a “why is nobody talking about this” finding IMO. Life must have some kind of metabolism and it’s likely to involve changing the atmosphere in a detectable way, so this seems like a better line of inquiry than the images.
There is a very good, and fundamental reason, why life may not be possible except within the narrow band of temperatures where water is a liquid.
It arises from the fact that life is *not* just "chemistry" -- it's *precision* chemistry. It's chemical reactions that are extremely precisely controlled, both in terms of what reacts with what, and in terms of reaction rate. If you don't have this level of control over what happens on the femtosecond time scale, there's just no way you can have stable meaningful behaviour at the second time scale -- even the tiniest failure of precise control means over those 15 orders of magnitude chaos takes over and you don't get life, you just get some interesting regularity in your chemical reactions over a few microseconds.
The only way we know to have precision control over chemistry is mechanical: you have to basically pick out molecules very specifically and arrange them in very specific ways so only the reactions you want happen to the reactants you want. In all forms of known life, this is what protein enzymes do -- they control chemical reactions very precisely and reliably.
Now there's certainly no reason you couldn't build structures out of something *other* than amino acids to make enzymes. But there is a limitation: you need a situation where you have strong forces holding your enzyme together (so it keeps its shape, which is critical to its operations), and at the same time *moderately* strong forces that the enzyme can use to guide the substrate molecules into their correct positions and hold them there against the random buffeting of thermal noise.
That means you need a force, of some kind, which is significantly weaker than the covalent bonding forces that hold enzymes together (whatever they're made of) but also significantly stronger than the random thermal forces that arise at any T > 0. There is only one such force of which we know: hydrogen bonding. At the temperature of liquid water, H-bonding is much stronger than random thermal fluctuations, so it can be used to easily guide and manipulate the interaction between substrate and enzyme. But it's much weaker than covalent forces, so its actions won't break or bend your enzymes.
But if you go to much lower or higher temperatures, this is no longer true. At much higher temperatures, H-bonding forces are *no longer* strong enough to stand random thermal buffeting. At much lower temperatures, they are too strong, and it's you can't break them when you need to (to let go of a molecule).
The fact that *water* is the basis for life is sort of an accident, the key is the use of H-bonding and operating at the temperature where H-bonds are just about the right strength, neither too strong nor too weak. But of course the properties of water are dominated by H-bonding, and at that particular temperature water is a liquid. Since water is also the most common neutral molecule in the universe, it's not surprising it is the natural basis for life.
Water is not the most common neutral molecule; that's H2. I think it's #2, though.
I buy that you can't have biological life at over, let's say, 500 K because of these sorts of effects. Not so sure it's impossible at, say, 200 K; the important bit is the proportionality, not the rate itself.
Ha ha yeah sorry I meant most common neutral molecule *other than H2* which is kind of obvious. I appreciate the correction.
200K might work. You'd need some different chemistry, because that's not really enough to provide the activation energy for the organic reaction with which we're familiar, but -- who knows? It would be fascinating to find some bugs on Europa that had made it work.
I don't see why "everything is slowed down by a factor of 1000" is a dealbreaker. As long as you've got the proportionality, you've got the potential for life (though probably not the potential for *intelligent* life, star lifetimes being what they are).
I agree with the point you raised elsewhere in the thread i.e. nonpolar interactions don't have the specificity you need for life. That *is* a lower bound on temperature, because below ~175 K all the polar stuff gets locked up in ices (I think some mixtures with HF might be able to get lower, but high concentrations of HF seem implausible).
Asimov wrote about other chemical bases for life in "Not as We Know It": http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS09/cs09p05.htm
My fav other life story is Robert Forward's "Dragons Egg" and "Starquake"
Some nuclear chemistry at ~10^6 times the speed. It makes for a great story anyway.
Yeah but Asimov was a physical chemist, he didn't know much molecular biology, and for that matter the 1980s (when he wrote this) is for molecular biology kind of like the 1900s for physics -- so long ago the understanding has changed enormously since then. He's focused on the most trivial aspect, which is solution chemistry, but I think the really important question is chemical *control* -- how do you get exactly the reaction you want, when you want it, and nothing else? That is essentially the key to life -- very, very precise control of chemical reactions. So the ultimate question is: can we imagine some other way to do it than enzymes using H-bonding forces?
Ok, hydrogen bonding is just right at normal temperature and does not do the job at higher or lower temperatures. So water based life can exist at normal temperatures and cannot exist at higher or lower temperatures. But is there some other type of bonding that could work at higher or lower temperatures?
Asimov's "Not as We Know It" is about just that question.
Well no. That's the problem. At one end of the scale we've got covalent bonding forces, which have characteristic temperatures 1000-10000K, so we need to stay far away from that so we can build molecules that are stable. At the other end we have dispersion forces, which have characteristic temperatures of like 1-50K for small molecules, and we need to be well above *those* so our reactions actually proceed at a reasonable pace. The problem is: there's nothing in between except H-bonding.
The one exception I can imagine is that electrostatic forces can under the right circumstances, play this role. Indeed, enzymes often use charges in various ways to hold substrates and catalyze reactions. When charges are held at the right position and are in the right number density, then can fit the bill. Of course, in our biochemistry the charges most often used are those formed by acid/base reactions, so NH3+ or O- et cetera, and again we're back to the temperature regime where H+ pops on and off electronegtative atoms readily (which is not coincidentally the temperature range of liquid water).
But maybe that would work at a different temperature, if we imagine building around something else that could be pulled off and on atoms to generate charges. Maybe halogens and Period 3 elements?
AFAIK H-bonding is just a special case of dipole-dipole interaction, so I think this could possibly extend to other elements. Also:
- Aren't there Van der Waals forces? (They're fairly weak, but I think they are somewhat important.)
- Even taking this argument prima facie, the bounds for temperature and chemistry that it implies are fairly weak: the temperature has to be roughly above 50K and below 1000K (which is ~1 OOM) and the chemistry has to use H-bonding (which occurs in water, but also occurs in some other compounds involving nitrogen/oxygen/flouride/etc.)
Yes, H-bonding is frequently taught to freshman as a special case of dipole-dipole forces. Why that particular misleading error has become so widespread among basic instruction I do not know, but the quantum aspects of H-bonding are absolutely critical to its dynamics (which is what's important here).
Yes, there are van der Waals forces, in particular dispersion forces can be quite strong, depending on the size of the molecule, but for small molecules they are very small, and for large molecules they are so nondirectional that they are relatively useles in terms of promoting catalysis by stabilizing a transition state. (That's not to say they play no role at all.) Also bear in mind in order for your molecules to move around briskly, you need generally to be *above* the characteristic temperature of the dispersion forces affecting your substrates. Otherwise everything is just frozen in place.
I'm not sure why you see those limits. At 50K an H-bond is as unbreakable (by thermal activation) as a covalent bond, so you wouldn't be able to detach your substrate from your enzyme after the reaction. At 1000K an H-bond is as labile as dispersion forces, so your substrate wouldn't stick to your active site long enough to react.
Yes, H-bonding occurs with other electronegative atoms, but that doesn't change the range of temperature over which it is strong enough to provide stability for the duration of a catalyzed reaction but not so strong that it can't be disrupted by forces less than those that break covalent bonds. H-bonding to N is already extensively used in biochemical reactions.
Using H-bonding is itself dependent on temperature and imposes harsher limits. Below ~175 K (the lowest water-ammonia eutectic), protic compounds have all frozen solid and become inaccessible to biochemistry. Above ~600 K, H-bonding won't hold things together (and that's the hard limit, based on stuff like the critical point of water and the melting of aramids or melamine/cyanuric acid; more complex stuff is going to fall apart before that).
I hope not political... if so I'll delete. As seen on the dark horse podcast.
https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/
Would young people be 'better' not getting the vaccine?
I'm confused by GVB's argument on this point. The only thing I heard in that podcast that suggests vaccination could be bad for the recipient is the possibility that the vaccine could render the recipient's innate immune system powerless against the disease. This is fine so long as the acquired immune system is properly trained by the vaccine, but could be disastrous if a different strain came along that dodged that acquired immunity.
If this is true, why should the age of the recipient matter? Surely no matter what their age they'd be worse off without their innate immunity, no? Why would this only be a problem for the young?
Right that was my limited understanding, trained immunity 'may' not be as good as natural immunity. Honestly, I'm clueless about natural immunity. But if true then the young, who are much less at risk from dying, may benefit from natural immunity from a more traditional vaccine. If you're old, then getting the virus is a danger you want to avoid, so get whatever vaccine and 'not to worry' about long term danger... I may be dead by then. (I'm an old fart who has a vaccine, so it could be confirmation bias. :^)
If I'm following the argument correctly, that only works if there's a new strain that A) is different enough to dodge the vaccine, B) is more dangerous to young people than the current strains (or else getting natural immunity is no safer than risking the new strain) but C) is not different enough to dodge naturally acquired immunity. I'm not sure how plausible all that is but it seems fairly speculative compared to the known costs of getting COVID, even in non-fatal cases.
Also a significant factor is that the more people acquire natural immunity through becoming infected, the more chances there are for new strains to develop.
His counterargument to your first paragraph is that this is a known risk with SARS-1, so it's really not such a stretch to suggest it might be a risk with SARS-2. And to your second paragraph he replies that we have excellent data on the progress of the 1918 flu pandemic, and it didn't mutate at all over the course of time, so the crazy speed with which COVID is spitting out new strains isn't what we'd predict from just letting the virus run its course.
I'm not qualified to judge the quality of either of these counters, but he does provide them in the Dark Horse podcast.
"we have excellent data on the progress of the 1918 flu pandemic, and it didn't mutate at all over the course of time" - how exactly do we have that data? They reconstructed the 1918 flu virus based on a few samples including preserved lung tissue and a victim who was buried in permafrost: https://science.sciencemag.org.sci-hub.do/content/310/5745/77.full - with Covid they can fully sequence millions of samples, so it's not exactly surprising that we're aware of more variants, but it seems very unlikely that the 1918 flu didn't ever mutate by a single base.
I think part of Geert's idea, is that we will have viruses infecting people, who have recently been vaccinated (so not full immune response yet) getting infected with a different strain of the virus. And the virus will then be 'trained' (it will evolve) to get around the vaccine. It may be that this does not happen. But it's at least something to think about.
That's definitely part of his argument, but that's more of a tragedy of the commons thing - it doesn't suggest that the particular individual receiving the vaccine would have been better off without.
There was some talk I didn't understand about viruses getting coated with the 'wrong' stuff. But I have no idea.
If this's the case, wouldn't these bad effects already have been seen with other vaccines?
Have you listened to the podcast? GVBs argument is that these risks only apply to mass, non-sterilizing vaccinations given in the midst of a pandemic of an easily-mutating pathogen. This combination just hasn't ever happened before.
Is there a paper or article that describes his argument?
Couldn't tell ya - i'm going purely of his Dark Horse podcast appearance.
On his web site, link above, there is a letter to the WHO that has his ideas.
Is direct linking to content a lost art now? https://37b32f5a-6ed9-4d6d-b3e1-5ec648ad9ed9.filesusr.com/ugd/28d8fe_266039aeb27a4465988c37adec9cd1dc.pdf
is the letter. Comes across extremely cranky in tone.
Sorry, In his interview with Bret he came across as reasonable and worried.
My understanding is that the vaccine is sterilizing and the pathogen is not especially easily-mutating
The vaccine is definitely not sterilizing - it only immunizes people from the spike protein of the current dominant strain. Recall the hullabaloo about whether a vaccinated person could be a carrier of the virus, whether they'd still need to wear masks, etc. None of that would be in question if we had a fully sterilizing vaccine.
(Incidentally, GVB makes the claim in the podcast that only attenuated virus vaccines are fully sterilizing, and that therefore only very few modern vaccines are in this category - he cited polio as an example of such a vaccine. As elsewhere, I don't have the expertise to evaluate that claim, but interesting if true. )
It was my impression from the video, that we could be making a 'traditional' vaccine. But it takes a few years. I have no idea what that means, or if it's true.. and if the dang thing is mutating quickly, what's the point? Is there a virologist in the house?
"Recall the hullabaloo about whether a vaccinated person could be a carrier of the virus, whether they'd still need to wear masks, etc. None of that would be in question if we had a fully sterilizing vaccine."
My understanding is this was basically driven by clueless people and fear-mongering, with the argument that "we don't know FOR SURE that it will be sterilizing". But all evidence is that it is.
This article isn't great but it links to the CDC study it talks about.
https://www.krqe.com/health/cdc-evidence-suggests-fully-vaccinated-people-do-not-transmit-covid-19/
In short: yes, people who are vaccinated are not transmitters.
I didn't read CDC study. Your linked to article says vaccinated people are less likely to get sick, at 90% rate. So maybe ~1/2 got the two dose 95% vaccine and 1/2 the J&J at 77%? This is news?
I think you are reading that wrong. I believe it is saying that vaccinated people with symptomatic COVID are 90% less likely to infect someone else?
Not sure about sterilizing, but isn't whatever third wave is going on in places now, mostly from one or more mutated virus that has gotten better at spreading fast? There's an English strain, but the Brazilian one is 'better' ?
I got the J&J vaccine 77% effective. What does 77% mean? (Sorry the last is a rhetorical question, no need to answer.)
It shouldn't be rhetorical because it's a good question. My understanding is that it was estimated from the study that 77% (now estimated to be higher) were immune to the level of never getting any symptoms at all- which makes it virtually if not entirely impossible to transmit to anyone else (number of truly asymptomatic people (not pre-symptomatic) who were found to have transmitted have been found to be a rounding error). The remainder could get infected but not seriously and none required hospitalization. Is that right?
Yeah I think that is right. I can still get the virus but less likely and less likely to be severe. One also assumes that the severity of the infection relates to how infectious you are. So there should be less transmission.
Didn't click the link, but since no one else is mentioning it I'll remind that the variants have been hitting lower age groups than the original virus.
You can watch him on Bret Weinstein's dark horse podcast.
Is this true?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/16/covid-more-young-people-hospitalized-as-more-contagious-variants-spread.html
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/covid-19-hospitalizations-up-among-younger-age-groups/2457221/
If you read the first one to the end, it seems to specifically deny what you suggest
It's not quite what I was recalling, i was thinking it was a bigger shift than "more infectious virus = more cases at all ages", but that's still important and relevant to the original topic of "should young folks get vaccinated?", in my mind.
He's a loonie. https://www.mimikama.at/aktuelles/geert-vanden-bossche-impfungen/
Wow. Thanks that's great! So this NK vaccine he was talking about is what he does research on. Maybe not a loonie, but I'm sorry I gave him a signal boost.
Math question:
A while back I came across an interesting problem in investing. When using the TDAmeritrade platform, buying Vanguard index funds incurs a fee of $25 per transaction, regardless of transaction size. I have an account which accrues money at certain amount per week - how frequently should I buy in in order to maximize my return?
Now, in practice the answer is "buy ETFs, which don't carry a commission", with a side order of "simulate it week by week in Excel". But I'd still like to know the answer in the general case: if investable money accrues at a rate of $A per year, investing that money incurs a commission of $B, and the investment account (continually compounding) has an APY of C%, what equation gives me the optimal time between investment buys?
I've tried everything I can think of, and the only thing that's worked is an infinite series which allows me to simulate the answer in Excel. But that's time consuming, as each combination of variables has to be simulated individually. Is there a simpler way?
Not sure, If your expected profit in a month (say) is more than $25, then no reason to hold the money in cash. If less then hold until the cost of holding.. in lost profits, exceeds $25.
I'm not sure what time frame to use... Plug (in numbers) and play may be needed?
https://investcalc.github.io/
See also the source (the maths is not super complex, but it does require some thinking)
https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/30734/frequency-of-investments-to-maximise-returns-and-minimise-fees/30774#30774
Marvelous
Trick question. You should just open a Vanguard account directly and do it for free.
The joys of my HSA do not allow such sensible solutions.
assuming a known expected return e(r) you should buy at the following frequency: roundup(($25/e(r))/accrual rate)
Accrual rate over what time frame?
Can I ask how you came up with that, please?
If you are forced to use TDA (instead of opening a free Vanguard account with no fees) then the answer is to buy the ETFs instead as you already know. There is no reason to pay fees that you do not need to pay no matter how you space it out or strategize it.
Yes, I said that in the OP. It's a math question, not a praxis question.
I don't think this has a closed-form solution, I'm afraid.
Suppose we invest money every T years or fraction thereof. So we invest one tranch of size (aT-b) at time T, a second at time 2T, and so on.
After time t, a chunk of invested money will have been multiplied be e^ct (where my c is related to yours by c_mine = log(1 + c_your/100)) .
So at time t our total invested money will be (aT-b)(e^c(t-T) + e^c(t-2T) +... )
The early terms will come to dominate, so
lim_{t -> inf} e^-ct M = (aT-b) (e^-cT + e^-2cT + ....)
= (aT-b)/(e^cT - 1)
We're therefor trying to choose T to maximise f(T) = (aT- b)/(e^cT- 1). Differentiating gives us
f'(T) = (a(e^cT-1) - (aT-b)c e^cT) /(e^cT-1)^2
Setting this to zero is a matter of solving
a(1-cT) +bc - a e^-cT = 0
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure there's no closed form for this - equations like this combining a polynomial and an exponential term usually don't have one. But you can approximate the solution numerically very easily with Newton-Raphson or interval bisection.
I’m quickly running out of Critical Role to listen to; could anybody recommend me a good non-fiction podcast instead? I’m an aspiring biomedical data scientist (currently at university), but I love good content from outside of my field, too.
…bonus points for another podcast, in ~B2 German. I’d like to work on my language skills.
I mostly enjoy the german podcast wrint (Holger Klein, wrint.de - pick a category you like, e.g. the one on history or on science. Holgi is both very good at normal conversation and difficult topics, e.g. talking to a person right after gender transition or someone terminally ill, so if this is interesting for you, I can dig up a few of those episodes)
Also, german public radio podcasts, if you prefer <1h ones. Have a look at what deutschlandfunk offers, also check out swr1 Leute.
My favorite German podcast is Raumzeit (https://raumzeit-podcast.de/). It's about spaceflight and technology related to it. Not so sure about B2, but if you are into that kind of topic give it a try.
I used to enjoy Peter Attia's. Tyler Cowen's podcast is great and always unique
Against the Rules (Michael Lewis), Behind the Bastards, Blindspot (road to 9/11), Bundyville (about the pacific northwest far-right), Darknet Diaries (hacker stories), Factually, It Could Happen Here (fiction, hopefully), It's Going Down (anarchist news), Popular Front (conflict journalism), Radiolab, Reveal (investigative journalism), Jordan Harbinger (interviews), Two Minutes Past Nine (Oklahoma city bombing).
Lex Fridman, or the master Dan Carlin. (Perhaps too obvious an answer.)
I'd be interested in what others think of the Huberman Lab Podcast. It seems like good, solid information on health and the human body. But my base knowledge is insufficient to judge Andrew Huberman's arguments/claims.
I like Martyrmade, for trying really hard to show both sides of an issue. Also, not strictly speaking a podcast, but a lot of universities put really interesting lectures up on YouTube.
History of Rome -> Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan. (You can skip the first bit of history of rome as he take a bit to find his stride)
History of China.
Stuff you should know podcast.
OmegaTau is my favorite podcast, it's a non-commercial podcast with no ads by a German programmer / glider pilot, who travels the world talking to scientists, engineers and other adjacent disciplines. He's talked to people at CERN about the Standard Model, ESA about software verification, Oak Ridge National Lab about supercomputing for COVID modeling, SOFIA about airborne infrared astronomy, ITER about fusion, etc. And he does episodes in German as well! Check it out: https://omegataupodcast.net/
The Academy Awards have moved from the Dolby Theatre, their home for the last 20 years, to Los Angeles Union Station. Obviously COVID protocols would prevent the usual packed house full of paid seat fillers, someplace more spread out would work better, but why a train station? Especially considering that the LA Metro insisted that the ceremony not interfere with its usual operations, so trains and buses will be running through and the food court will stay open.
They won't actually move. The station is basically just overflow, as they still use the theater.
The station seems to have just been restored and seems to offer a lot of glitz and glamour, which distracts from the small crowd: https://21vreg4f7o1g2r49c02rveod-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/UNION-STATION-INTERIOR-2-LA-1-1024x716.jpg
The relatively low roof also helps distract from how few people there will be.
Supposedly, the waiting room is insulated sufficiently from the noise (besides, they'll be wearing top-tier microphones anyway). I expect them to route passengers around the waiting room, through the north and south patio. The passage from the waiting room to the food court will probably be blocked off.
Judging by the website of the company who owns the property, who seems to want to turn it into a cultural destination and change its reputation for the better, I expect them to have gotten a great deal. I wouldn't be surprised if they can use it for free.
Trains are boring, so most every city's Union Station (they've all got one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Station) adds a bit of gratuitous architecture to stand out. High-profile train station are genuinely visually interesting places to spend a few hours.
As Aapje notes, the Los Angeles version is A: recently and expensively upgraded and B: deliberately styled after the glitz and glamour of Golden-Age Hollywood. Because Los Angeles. It's also deliberately laid out for lots of people to go about their business without getting in each other's way in either the physical or audible sense. So, not a bad place for a bunch of people to stand around while "socially distancing" but still projecting Hollywood Glamour for the cameras.
I mean, the station was itself built in 1937, as the last of the great Union Stations in the United States. So it comes by its Golden Age Hollywood look honestly. About ten blocks down Broadway from the station is where the dozen glitzy 1920s movie palaces were ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadway_Theater_District_(Los_Angeles) ) but by the time Union Station was built, the new glitzy theaters had moved west to Hollywood. In the past decade or so, various historic conservation societies have been trying to get the movie palaces to reopen for showings, and Union Station has also been revitalizing as the hub of the modern public transit system in LA, so there's a natural synergy of bringing back a couple classic periods of Los Angeles history.
Does anyone have a good way of figuring out how long it will be before the Fed raises interest rates? In a strange twist, I am considering not buying a house into interest rates rise/the housing market cools.
Who knows. You could check forward markets. Long-term treasury markets seem to be pricing in somewhat higher future rates. If we have substantial inflation, we should at least see a rise in nominal rates (though one would also expect a rise in nominal inflation). Using standard US monetary policy logic you would expect the fed to begin tightening once it is clear that we are past covid and the associated economic slowdown - so my wet thumb in the air would be q1 2022, but even then I would expect the rate hikes to be modest unless something spurs Powell to change his approach
Fed fund futures currently price the first Fed tightening in q4 2022. Tightening prior to mid 2022 is quite unlikely based on forward guidance which expects that tightening will not occur prior to the US reaching full employment and core pce inflation trend above 2%. Mortgage rates however are a term rate (whereas the Fed raises the overnight rate) and will, in general, rise well before actual Fed tightening. If you're waiting for housing market cooling, that could be a while though. It's regionally variable of course, but nationally home inventories for sale are shockingly low (i.e. the lowest in the history of the series) which suggests a very strong housing market for quite a while.
CME Fed watch is a popular tracker: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/interest-rates/countdown-to-fomc.html
Why the house buying decision? Is your logic that there are too many buyers right now and expect it (and prices) to drop if the interest rates rise?
If houses are priced by max affordable monthly payment, you’d expect house prices to fall when interest rates rise. Holding monthly payment constant you’d rather have a high interest rate and lower price because you can possibly refinance down in the future.
You should consider that the interest rate might not be the only thing driving the current craziness in the market. It's certainly a factor, but there's other stuff likely at play:
The millennials are now the largest living generation and are coming into peak house-buying age, while the baby boomers still own a lot of the existing houses. And COVID and an increase in "work at home" (the latter which may be sticking around) has generally increased demand for house-buying. And there just hasn't been as much new housing made in the last decade, due to the 2010s collapse.
The interest rate is certainly intensifying things, but a lot the other factors are longer-term so the market may not go back to normal even if the interest rate goes down.
Plus, even if the interest rate goes down, house prices can be a bit "sticky", so they might not drop to prior prices, anyway. It'll be easier to find a house if demand slackens, but it might not actually be much cheaper.
You know, I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do recall a realtor saying very similar things to me while showing me houses circa 2006-07. I just didn't buy it, and a year or two later I was looking at houses that had gone from $800k to $500k in a few months. Some of the stories of the people who were selling were horrifying, some were about to lose a quarter of a million in lifetime savings and just be relieved to walk away not owing anything or having their credit ruined.
As I said, I'm not saying you're wrong, but my experience of waiting through the 05-08 boom and buying right in the middle of the subsequent crash convinced me real estate is deeply unpredictable, at least in coastal areas. (I don't attribute my decision to brilliant insight or anything, also, it was mostly dumb luck.)
I wasn't actually making any concrete predictions. Yes, the market might crash again, and yes, I agree the real estate market is very hard to predict.
My point was that the OP's reasoning seemed to be based on the idea that the interest rate was the main (or perhaps only) factor contributing to the current market craziness, and that doesn't appear to be true.
I dunno that it's a strong argument per se. You're adducing long-term trends, and those are not usually the best explanation of short-term craziness. They may empower it in some underlying sense, but even when change is driven by long-term trends an abrupt manifestation of it is usually due to short-term events. That is, the trends you cite would be a good argument for a gradual steady rise in housing prices. But for example my house appreciated (so they say) by something like 15% since last spring. That's insane, that's not at all the result of long-term trends, that's a fluctuation driven by market disequilibrium -- which may indeed be caused by strenuous monetary and fiscal stimulus, including the absurd level of modern interest rates, or by a Boccaccio-like fleeing of the cities, a lack of faith in other inflation hedges and a fear of what $trillions in conjured Federal spending, and a fierce Democratic determination to crank up wages, will do in the next few years -- who knows?
> but even when change is driven by long-term trends an abrupt manifestation of it is usually due to short-term events.
Well, yeah, that's pretty much what I'm saying. Obviously the direct catalyst is COVID, but even the "low interest rate" is something of a longer-term cause as they've been on a fairly steady decline for the last 40 years.
And a lot of the COVID-induced changes might not be short-term anomalies, but an abrupt shifting to a new normal. I think the increased demand for homes due to more working-from-home, while abruptly brought on by COVID, is likely to be a "new normal".
Again, all I'm really saying is the idea that "if we wait for interest rates to go back to normal, house prices will go back to normal too" isn't necessarily a safe bet.
Anyone else ever spends time perusing the BLS detailed data on US occupations? Surprisingly granular, so there are lots of interesting little tidbits to be found - like, there are 50k people employed as floral designers??? and how about 100k phlebotomists? and there are still 50k Locomotive engineers and operators??
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm
Random thoughts: Childhood/ “Second Hand” Disability Insurance
As a working adult, you can buy disability insurance, which provides you with replacement income in case you experience an injury or disease that prevents you from earning a salary.
However, you cannot buy disability insurance for a child. Supposedly, children do not need disability insurance because they are not expected to work, so there is no lost income that must be replaced. Expenses directly related to the treatment of the disability fall under the domain of health insurance.
This logic doesn’t hold water, though. Any (non trivial) childhood disability will be expensive even excluding medical costs--it will require unpaid labor by the child’s guardians or caregivers that prevents them from working lucrative jobs. So, when you have a child, you run the risk of his disability requiring your outsize attention and resulting in a loss of income at your job. But there is no “second hand disability insurance” you can purchase to pay for childcare in case such a disability is diagnosed.
As someone who will very shortly be a parent, having a disabled child is one of my biggest fears. Isn’t the purpose of insurance to pay for ‘peace of mind’--to have the confidence that even if the worst happens (disease, death, natural disaster), you or your loved ones will have the resources to deal with it without too much sacrifice from other parts of life? Having a child with a severe disability would require enormous amounts of labor on my part, and/or expensive caretaking to allow me to participate in other parts of my adult life--work, vacation, alone time, etc. Why is there not an insurance market to offset some of these risks?
Probably because you have to fork out all at once, instead of over time the way you do for ordinary disability insurance. I found a Nature paper that asserts the probability of a lifetime disabling birth defect is about 2%. If each such child were to get a $1 million payout from a putative insurance policy, and the insurance co cut is 30%, then the premium works out to be about $30,000. That wouldn't be bad at all if spread out over 20-30 years, the way it is with ordinary disability insurance (you pay the premiums over many decades against the once-in-a-lifetime possibility of permanent disability). But you can't do that insuring against birth defects, you only have a window of 9 months to collect the premium, and $30,000 over 9 months is a lot of money.
I thought about that too, but it doesn't seem insurmountable. 2% prevalence could be cut down a lot by eliminating payouts for self-imposed disorders like FASD & the underwriting process could easily avoid payouts for chromosomal disorders by screening for them in-utero. Additionally, as with life insurance, those in the 'preferred' category would have much lower premiums than parents-to be who have genetic conditions themselves that would likely be passed down. A lump sum of ~$10,000 over 9 months seems very reasonable to me.
Well...if you can readily raise $10k in cash over that time period, you are probably sufficiently well off that the worst case outcome isn't going to completely ruin you financially. I mean, the burden of a several disabled child is not primarily financial, you know -- I think the emotional and social burden is much, much higher.
Plus you've got to factor in that people have very strong feelings about their children around their birth. Look at how agonized people get over a Down's diagnosis in utero: some people immediately abort, some people agonize, some people who thought they would change their mind. There are fierce legal debates about it, which I think are proxies for the strong feelings people have about newborns. It's just not an area where many people can muster up cool rationality. So that would definitely be a cramp on marketing.
That said, one thing that might work is to have people start paying insurance premiums from the moment they marry, or even earlier. They could be for such things as severe disability, of course, but could also be for whatever other large unexpected costs accrue to child-rearing -- a childhoold diagnosis of leukemia, for example, or a car accident requiring amputation and rehab, or God forbid TBI and rehab. There's are a lot of minefields there not all of which are covered by ordinary medical insurance, so one might just start selling newlyweds insurance coverage for any and all unexpected things that might happen to their future kids. That way you can spread the costs over more years. Also, since not everyone who pays premiums would even end up having kids, the premiums would be spread out over some fraction of nonparents, too (like taxes to pay for school) and be a little lower.
I think Robin Hanson has written about this. He notes that there's a lot of within-family inequality and that parents could try to correct for this by arranging for their children to redistribute income. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/11/who-wants-social-insurance.html
Interesting ideas, but not quite what I'm talking about.
"To get private long term insurance, we could let kids sign insurance contracts when young, or empower their parents or grandparents to agree on their behalf. Note that today parents could, but usually do not, implement partial poverty insurance by insisting that their richer kids transfer to their poorer kids."
Not what I'm going for. I would hope none of my children would sign a contract like this. It could only be signed by those 18+ to be legally enforceable, and by that point both parties would have a pretty good idea who's going to be earning more. The higher earning party has nothing to gain from this (he can always give his siblings money cause he wants to) and everything to lose (e.g. I would have been forced to sponsor a family member's drug addiction). I think it's much better to instill cultural values of "take care of your family members but also don't indulge their bad behaviors"--some financial gifts should be conditional.
How do people as adults navigate their relationship with their parents? In particular the knowledge of their mortality
Most elderly parents are open to talking about this. In my experience is usually the adult children who try to avoid the topic.
I imagine there’s a big cultural component here, compounding whatever personality traits your parents have as individuals.
One thing I would say is talk about end-of-life stuff early. Demand to know their preferences and write them down. My mom was always fairly pragmatic about death but we never got into specifics. When she became terminally ill, it suddenly became almost impossible to talk about her final wishes at all. The sicker she got, the less able we were to discuss those topics. When she passed, I had to make about 1000 expensive decisions in three days. I’ve seen this play out similarly for friends since then. I could kiss my in-laws for providing their sons with a packet containing their wills and all sorts of in-advance arrangements they made for themselves long before it became crucial. Tell your parents what a gift that is to give their kids.
One of the nicest things my mother did for us was to plan her own funeral. She picked the music, the food, everything. We just had to show up and it was a lot easier to manage.
+1000
When my dad got really sick, all of his (5) kids gathered to be with him. There were questions about what sort of care to provide and we didn't have someone whose decision this was. There were the stirrings of an argument. "Dad wouldn't want this." "Yes, he would. What he wouldn't want is this . . . "
One of my sisters suggested that we check his papers, and it turned out he had a living will and that it was specific. What he wanted, what he didn't. It was a generous document and it spared us the burden of deciding how and when he would die. It let us do the death watch without half of us being pissed at the other half for either withholding or insisting upon this or that measure.
The mortality part is easier if you've been eased into it. My parents talked very frankly about their preferred end-of-life care, funeral arrangements, etc. when I was growing up so it's not a frightening or forbidden topic now. Obviously I'm not looking forward to their deaths but it's going to happen regardless so it's better to focus on the aspects that I can control.
The hard part for me is keeping in touch. I never developed the habit of calling regularly, and it causes a lot of headaches compared to my girlfriend who keeps in closer contact with her family. If you weren't raised in a culture that values parental relationships it's a habit that you have to deliberately cultivate and work into your schedule.
Re: keeping in touch. I might be just rephrasing what you already said, but I've found that actually scheduling regular phone or video calls completely solved this problem for me. No more hurt feelings over the amount of contact and no more resigned sighs at being interrupted by an unexpected phone call I feel bad rejecting because it's been a while since we talked.
I'm reading "The Scout Mindset" by Julia Galef and just wanted to note that Scott's name comes up a few times in her anecdotes. I wasn't expecting that.
She's considered part of the rationality movement, so she's a (afaik) lower-tier celebrity in the same community as Scott.
When my son and I jump on the trampoline, we build up a static charge with each other or with ground.
I'm interested, for pedagogical reasons, in *measuring* our charge. Can we do this with an analog multimeter? Are we actually at different voltage levels?
Related question, during the winter, when humidity is low, I get a static shock at work several times per day. Where does all that energy go when it's humid? Does the moisture constantly drain potential energy from me, or is the energy being generated as heat instead?
Based on memory from a long-ago physics class, I think both of those are correct. I think any voltage differentials you accumulate will create small currents through the ambient moisture, equalizing the voltage, preventing charge buildup. These small currents would in turn generate small amounts of heat
The capacitance of your body is too low; a conventional multimeter is measuring voltage across a known resistance, and that resistance is typically low enough to bleed a static charge off before it can get a measurement.
The actual measuring tools for this are somewhat expensive, but you can make home-made devices that can demonstrate the existence of a static charge easily enough.
(This might be a duplicate.) That's right. The human body has a capacitance of ~100pF. (Assuming a spherical human of 1m radius, C= 4*pi*epsilon_0*Radius,) Typcial input impedances are 10 Meg Ohm, for an R*C time constant of about 1 millisecond. If you have an oscilloscope, you can discharge yourself through the x10 'scope probe. The RC time constant will be a measure of your capacitance. And the height of the pulse will be a measure of your charge. But I don't know how to calibrate it.
> Assuming a spherical human
Semi-relevant Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
Oh I'm a physics nerd, expect physics humor, which is mostly on the same level as puns.
An atom stumbles into a bar, "Hey, I think I lost an electron"
"Are you sure" asks the bartender,
Atom replies, "I'm positive."
You can take qualitative measurements fairly easily with a gold leaf electroscope (you can use aluminium foil instead of gold). It's a standard high school physics experiment and can be DIY'ed with a jam jar, a wire and some foil.
it might be possible to use two small polystyrene balls hanging from a piece of floss in place of the foil leaves. Measure the angle to which the electrostatic force pushes the balls apart (the angle between the two lengths of floss). If you know the weight of the balls, you can calculate the amount of force needed to push them to that angle. Measure the distance between the two balls (or derive it using trig) and pretend they are point charges. Use Coulomb's law to estimate the charges needed to exert that electrostatic force between the balls.
Yeah, good ideas. Electro-static measurements are difficult 'cause there is often some unseen charge leakage path. Not quite the same, but I've always wanted to make an Electric Field Mill. http://a-tech.net/ElectricFieldMill/
You can make a nice electroscope from an aluminum pie pan, styrofoam cup and Al foil. (I don't remember all the details.) I can't find a good link with pictures. Down on this page a way, I searched for pie pan electrometer.
https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/estatics/Lesson-2/Charging-by-Induction
I really enjoy the speculation about the future found in Nick Bostrom’s talk of ending aging, Robin Hanson’s description of “Age of Em”, and the like. Does anyone have any good sci-fi recommendations that combine great writing and deep characters with explorations of interesting possible futures?
Try Accelerando, by Charles Stross, or maybe Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, by Neal Stephenson (the second is a single book, just with a weird title/subtitle combination).
Greg Egan
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Look at when he wrote it and compare to the present.
Thanks for all the recommendations!
17776
Are any IQ tests worth taking? If so, which ones and what can you learn about yourself by taking them (looking especially for claims backed up by empirical literature).
Every online IQ test is fake, and their claims about being endorsed by... whoever... are also fake.
Raven's progressive matrices are good to learn your IQ. If you want to learn something other than IQ, take a personality test instead.
Other serious IQ tests, and serious tests including IQ... well, I obviously don't know them all, but in my experience, they often disappoint in the IQ area by giving you a very vague answer like "you IQ is somewhere above 115", which you probably already knew.
I assumed the online tests were garbage. What about the IQ tests used in empirical research? (The ones that talk about the relationship between IQ and outcomes, for instance?)
Did you take the college SAT's? You can probably match that to IQ.
https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/satiq.aspx
IQ tests are only accurate if you take them in a controlled environment. That means that online IQ tests, even serious tests like the one on the Norwegian Mensa site, will often underestimate your IQ because you can become distracted easily, or because you don't commit to the test 100%.
The easiest way to take an IQ in person is probably through your local Mensa organization. In most countries those tests are optimized to discriminate most accurately between individuals with an IQ greater or lower than 130, so if you score far away from that, the test is not very accurate. In my opinion, Mensa itself is a weird organization that attracts many annoying people, but the IQ test is very much legit.
Nutrition question: I want to eat this whole bag of jellybeans. I'm happy to skip a meal and/or skate a marathon or whatever tomorrow to ensure I don't gain weight from such behavior. What's the argument to still forgo the jellybeans? (It will have to be pretty good because I really like jellybeans.)
I think the possible answers are on a continuum.
One extreme is: Health at any size! Sugar is basically poison, regardless of whether it makes you overweight. All that matters is eating real food and exercising.
The other extreme is: Excess body fat kills. As long as you eat some vegetables occasionally (or take multivitamins), calories are calories. All that matters is maintaining a healthy weight and exercising.
I imagine neither extreme is correct but is one of them more correct? If you had to pick a number from 0 (health at any size) to 10 (if you can eat it and stay thin, go for it), what would you pick?
I was thinking that in terms of short-term quality of life, buffer the jelly beans (before or after) with some high fat, high protein food. This probably means I don't have one of those golden metabolisms.
High fat doesn't buffer sugar?
My belief was based on experience, not biochemistry. On the other hand, I haven't experimented with low fat protein.
I find that a little hard to believe, for a molecule as small as sucrose. Maybe for polysaccharides, or even oligosaccharides. Do you have some empirical study to which you could point me that supports this understanding? TIY
I feel as if my position doesn't actually match anywhere on this continuum, because I disagree with your premises?
Sugar is not poison. I'm not experienced enough to know whether, if you were burning a sufficient number of calories, having all the calories above-and-beyond the ones you're using to get useful nutrition be sugar would be a problem. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't; there's various stuff about sugar consumption and diabetes that I really don't understand enough. But poison is way too strong. I'm not convinced a small amount of sugar per day will do you any harm if you're exercising enough and don't have diabetes (I'm less sure about the entire bag of jellybeans).
At the same time, if you take multivitamins and do nothing else, you will get a deficiency. Multivitamins are probably a nice precaution but relying on them for all your vitamins is unwise-to-put-it-mildly. You need to exercise *some*, and you need to get a sufficient amount of a very long list of nutrients, and the amount you need is calculated in "nutrient actually absorbed" not "nutrient consumed", so anything that affects absorption matters - which I *think* is where the pill-vs-food thing comes in though it might also be the food having nutrients we haven't identified yet (or haven't confirmed are needed yet) or possibly to some extent stuff like fiber/protein that we know about but mostly don't put in pills. Oh, and we don't actually know what the amount is; we have estimates but they're not 100% reliable. And of course, I'm using the word "need", but actually it's "doing more of this produces benefits up to a point, you can min-max it or you can do a minimal level and call it good or wherever in between the sensible tradeoff falls for you." It's less "you must do X" and more "not doing X has a cost, how high depending on how little X you do."
So um... to summarize, my position is basically: To maximize health, get all the nutrients you need and some minimal exercise. My guess is you can trade off more exercise vs. more sugar above that but there may be levels at which it doesn't work, through some combination of exercise injuries, more exercise requiring more protein, and "no, a whole bag of jellybeans in an hour really is different from an eighth of the bag every day for eight days in a qualitative not quantitative way, giant sugar shock something something mess up your system something something". You should talk to someone who knows more than I do for that one; I think it's plausible but I don't know enough to say it's definitely true for everyone always. I am super not a nutritionist.
tl;dr: If you can eat it and stay thin/in good health/not tired all the time/no deficiencies/no feeling weird from sugar highs/etc., go for it. Body fat is a relevant variable but not the be-all and end-all.
PS: I am not an expert, have no qualifications, and am going on a mix of what I've read and personal experience, please take this with a heaping tablespoon of salt.
I'm not familiar with the "health at any size" slogan- that sounds like an anti-fatshaming thing? But excess body fat does kill. Most people who choose to stay fat do so not because fat is healthy, but because dieting is difficult and tiresome to do right and dangerous to do wrong. Nonetheless, core body fat will spike your likelihood of dying from all causes (fat in arms and legs is much less dangerous, possibly even good). That's not the same as "calories are calories", though, not for sugar. Almost all commercially available sugars are sucrose and fructose, which produces fat in your liver, which does not handle fat well. Too much can cause liver disease.
And the correct strategy is to eat real food, exercise, AND maintain a healthy weight. Maintaining decent muscle mass is especially important, so don't neglect cardio or weights.
"Health at any size" is a fat-acceptance thing. The idea is to cultivate health as much as possible (good food, sensible exercise) without trying to change one's fat %.
Assuming you aren't like diabetic or have another medical issue, its fine. A "bag" looks to have about 2,000. That's roughly 2/3.5 of a lb of body fat, by the back of the envelope metric that says 3,500 calories per pound gained/lost. Or a Chipotle burrito, guac and chips, and non-diet coke. Not ideal for most people, but not the end of the world.
Here are some potential hiccups:
--No micronutrients. If the rest of your diet includes lots of veggies and fruit, you are fine. If its all non-whole-grains and processed carbs, well, you need (for best health) to change that anyway.
--No fiber. And in fact, jelly beans are really sticky. Eat a large salad or plate of broccoli for dinner and you are good. Maybe get a bottle of Miralax and keep it in the pantry just in case. (this is good advice for any time, its a wonder drug)
--Drop the moral value of food, and think of it in terms of fuel. You are loading your body up with a giant pile of quick acting carbs aka readily available energy that will spike and either get used for make you feel bad. Don't eat this then expect to sit at your desk for 6 hours pushing buttons on the keyboard. Your life will improve if you instead do this on a day when you need to go do a bunch of landscaping, or taking a nature hike, or clean the garage, or something active.
(PS - Excess body fat kills, but its not a healthy weight you want to maintain, its a healthy level of fat and lean tissue, which for most people would be an *increase* in net weight.)
If you eat a bunch of sugar it can make you crave more sugar later. Or so I'm told.
Or it'll adjust your metabolism in some way which has longer term effects.
Those would be arguments against eating pure sugar.
Now excuse me, I'm going to go eat 300g of sugar and 170g of butter baked into a cake.
(Split with my SO and over two days)
<quote> I'm happy to skip a meal and/or skate a marathon or whatever tomorrow </quote>
Just to be safe, you should do this the day *before* you eat the jelly beans
> I want to eat this whole bag of jellybeans.
Why do you want to eat a particular entire bag of jellybeans in the first place? If it's for a dare or something I'm fine if you skip a meal or two. If it's just because you happen to have a bag of jellybeans in your home I would be more reticent about advising you to eat it and would probably advise you to not buy jellybeans or something (depending on the context), but I don't know of course.
I don't remember if the last survey asked this (and could therefore be a resource), but since we've learned that ~15% of people don't have an internal monologue, are there statistically significant differences in occupation (etc) that may this leads to?
Also wondering about correlations along those lines. IM looks like a social optimization feature to me. IM = talking practice
Apparently lacking internal monologue does correlate with the autism spectrum.
Have we "learned" this? This seems like a difficult thing to verify, because it seems to me that I would answer the question in a variety of different ways, depending on exactly how it's posed and when you ask. Are there people who report *never* imagining verbal vocalizations, even when carefully and slowly reading something? Are there people who report *always* having verbal monologue, even when doing extended exercise?
I am often fascinated by these discussions about an internal monologue, since I consider myself as not having one, and apparently I am in the minority. But isn´t it confounded by different descriptions of equivalent experiences?
Single discernible difference that I picked up in some random discussion is that people without an internal monologue tend to be fast readers, but who knows whether this would hold under scrutiny.
Has anyone used a reel lawn mower (and unpowered lawn mower, no gas or electricity)? I'm having another bout of hippie-dom ad thinking of getting one. This would not be my sole mower (I'd keep a gas one for emergencies). But is it something that actually works, or will I regret it because it doesn't do the job?
I used one for several years as a kid back in the 80s and 90s. Based on that single data point:
- It is basically unbreakable. You hit a rock, it's just going to go "clonk!" (and possibly give you or the nearest car a bump, unless today's mowers are better shielded).
- It has a small number of simple parts, so it should be repairable.
- You have to move it at a certain speed to cut effectively. This means you can't easily cut small areas where you can't push for at least ~50 cm before hitting what you're trying to cut. Not enough momentum means nothing gets cut.
- It will not cut as big things as a powered mower. If all you have to cut is lawn grass, that's fine, but tufts, straw, roots and the like will likely stop it in its tracks.
- In my experience it doesn't cut quite as close to edges as a powered lawn mower, because the cutting action happens under the middle of the reel, which is about 20 cm from the front and back and ~10 cm from each side.
- It is more work, since you're responsible for the cutting as well as the moving.
I used them growing up and my wife still cuts our lawn with one. You have to remember to mow the grass before it exceeds 7 or 8" height because above that the tips of the grass blades stand too high for the reel to catch them. Tall weeds like dandelions sometimes get left uncut. A power mower has a fan effect that lifts taller grass & weeds upright so handles those better. The reel mower is not good for a first pass on neglected weed patches
Just as for saws and axes, sharpening makes a big difference. Very little effort to cut grass when the reel is sharp, gets gradually harder over the season till the next sharpening. It can be hard to find a shop that still sharpens reel mowers. There are special grinding jigs for this -- I happened to find and buy a used one on craigslist and sharpen ours once or twice a year but otherwise the nearest professional shop I know of is 150 miles away.
Much more effort if the lawn is not level.
I bought one when I bought my house about 15 years ago, mostly because of the low cost. They do work. However, I found that how well they work depends upon the type of grass. Some of my grass was more likely to be knocked flat and not spring up into the cutting mechanism. Long-term, this left me with long blades of grass matted down.
I ultimately replaced it with a battery-powered electric mower which is far more environmentally-friendly and quieter than a gas mower. I've been incredibly happy with it and would recommend that instead.
I'm environmentally conscious, but I use maybe 1 or 2 gallons of gas a year in the mower.
Yeah, but it might be the case that the gas mower doesn't have a very efficient engine and could be sending the gas out unburned or incompletely combusted. You want a 4 stroke engine, not a 2 stroke.
I have a city house and a tiny yard. We have one of these. It's . . . fine. A powered one will be faster and do a better job, but it works. I clean up tough spots after I'm done with a weed wacker.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in other replies is that they are pretty difficult to push. It's not like pushing free rotating wheels. It's comparable to when you try to start pushing the pedals of a bike using a low gear, the push actually takes effort, and that effort does add up over an entire lawn.
On the contrary, I once used a self-propelling lawnmower, and it was *absolutely terrifying* (because I was always scared that I would let it go too far and damage something). I would much rather push a lawnmower myself than use a self-propelled one. I'm fine with using power to mow, just not to push.
I had one at my previous house, where I had a very small small (c. 1000 ft^2) grassy front yard. It worked pretty well. The main advantage besides the obvious is that it's much, much quieter than powered mowers, which is nice both because I heartily dislike engine noise and because I can mow any time of day or night without the noise disturbing my neighbors.
The main disadvantages were that it's enough effort to push that I wouldn't recommend it for a significantly larger lawn, it tends to jam on the grass if you go too long between mowings, and it becomes harder to push and more jam-prone over the years as the blades get dull (they can be sharpened, but I never got around to learning how).
Yeah, if you run over something you might not want to step in.. look out! It's coming right where you are walking/ pushing. I love mowing my lawn/ trails with my old tractor. Ferguson TO-20. Maybe 10-20 gallons a year. Less than my car or heating the house so I don't worry about it too much.
Any thoughts about potassium supplementation? Lately (probably starting a year or so ago), I've been getting muscle cramps in my legs and/or feet when I wake up.
Potassium citrate (200 mg) daily solves the problem, but any thoughts about what's going on? Best low-carb sources of potassium if I want to get some of it from food?
For what it's worth, calcium, potassium, and sodium ions are all participants in muscle contraction, and a deficit in any one of them can lead to muscle dysfunction (e.g. cramps).
Yeah. In particular potassium and sodium need to be fairly balanced, so maybe you've started taking in a lot of sodium lately?
That isn't it. I don't seem to like salt as much as most people do.
On the other hand, I've been using pork rinds as something of a staple food, so maybe that's it.
I'm not a physician, but my understanding is that screwy electrolytes are more often the result of inappropriate excretion than any dietary lack, at least in the West. The canonical case is very strenuous exercise in hot weather, where a large output of sweat can push down sodium levels a bit. Malfunctioning kidneys, even slightly malfunctioning, can excrete too much potassium. Changes in water consumption may have an effect, because that influences the rate of urine production and excretion (which is where most of these electrolytes go, although Ca+2 is excreted in the bowel too I believe).
I find magnesium supplements help with night-time muscle cramps in my legs, but if potassium works for you, great!
Bananas are a recommended source but they're high-carb. Looking it up, one recommendation for low-carb and high-potassium foods are: avocados, edamame beans, beef, salmon, mushrooms, nuts, leafy greens especially spinach, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, pork chops, coconut water and aubergines/eggplant. The keto diet people have a lot of recommendations on this.
Personally speaking, I think coconut water tastes like sweat but that is probably because of the electrolytes in it and the balance of them, so if you can stand it, drink a cup in the morning?
There are also "lite" salts which are partially or entirely potassium based. I use those.
I was told to eat banana's for leg cramps. Which I do, but I have no idea if it helps.
Does anyone have advice about buying cryptocurrency for an American citizen living abroad. From what I can tell American companies don't like working with non-residents, and non-American companies don't like working with American citizens (nor does the US government like it either). (Note, I am a complete beginner in this area, so a multistep process needing deep technical knowledge won't work for me)
You could use BISQ + money order or BISQ + zelle, though there's a premium associated with circumventing KYC in this way.
thanks I will look at that, I don't have an in principled problem with KYC (should I?). As far as you know, no American companies accept US passport + American bank account as sufficient for non-residents?
it is hilariously ironic that this is an issue for *cryptocurrency*
Right. It's an under discussed issue that the process of purchasing the libertarian currency of the future currently resembles a minor bureaucratic nightmare.
Just to highjack this briefly, what's the best service to use as an Australian? While you can buy with Coinbase, you can't sell, which seems to be a significant downside.
First, have you tried Coinbase Pro? You should be able to access it by just going to pro.coinbase.com after you’ve logged in, although things might be different for Australians.
If that doesn’t work, some others to try are Binance, FTX, and Blockfolio. I don’t know for sure if they work for Australians but I would guess yes.
What happened when you tried to sign up with Coinbase? They rejected you?
Don’t tell them you’re abroad. Give an American address during KYC and use a VPN if necessary. The odds that eg KuCoin (an exchange in Japan) is going to somehow try to mail you something or do a real thorough job of checking your address is not high. If you’re still worried about something going wrong after you open an account, just move your funds into your own wallet instead of leaving them in the exchange.
Oh I totally glossed over the issue of funding it. Yeah I second the question about what went wrong with Coinbase. As far as I know you should be good to sign up with just a US passport.
I'd like to get people's take on something.
We've been talking about class a lot lately, and what the different classes are, and what their interests/behavior/markers are. But I'm stuck on something more basic: what _is_ class?
How can we look at a society as aliens coming from Mars and declare: this society is class-less, this other one is very class-ful (stratified?)? Even without the society outright saying there are class restrictions, and even before arguing about what the classes are exactly.
A few hypotheses:
1. Class is that which you are born into, marry within and socialize within. In a class-ful society, we expect to find different groups which (mostly) marry within group, socialize within group, and have children who belong to the same group. In a class-less society you can't predict at birth who will be a child's friends/spouses. -> But what if they're different religions (Catholics & Mormons), or geographic areas (East & West) - separate but equal? Do these count as classes? Do classes have to be stratified - with some at the top and some at the bottom?
2. Class limits your opportunities. If we can predict at birth that someone would not be able to access various opportunities (e.g. be a member of the House of Lords, be a national politician), that means there is a class restriction. -> But how can we distinguish this from heritability of certain positive traits?
There is no fixed definition of social class or a fixed set of classes, because class is about how people perceive others and what they care about. In societies where land-ownership is important, that can be an important part of what makes you lower or higher class. In another society, education level may be key. In yet another society, wealth matters hugely. In yet another society, it is all about behavior. Etc.
However, social class seems to typically involve a bunch of different things. So you have and/or do a sufficient number of them to be seen as being of a certain class and you can even become classless: rejected by all classes because you fit in none.
The way people respond to class also differs. However, there is commonly a hierarchy, although that doesn't mean that those lower on the hierarchy can't and won't discriminate against those higher up.
> But what if they're different religions (Catholics & Mormons) or geographic areas (East & West) - separate but equal
They can be part of the same class, or be part of similar class structures that don't recognize each other. Or the class structures can be very different.
> But how can we distinguish this from heritability of certain positive traits?
Social class is entirely cultural, so if the exact same person gets treated differently due to certain cultural trait, then that is a restriction or opportunity due to that trait.
So what is the difference between a society where class is very important and one where it's not important at all?
The features you described were probably present in Victorian Britain and in contemporary UK/USA, and in some futuristic very egalitarian society. How can we quantify the fact that class is more important in one than in the other? Is it how extreme people's perceptions are of the different classes? The power balance between them? Something else?
There are people who like Buffy and people who like Star Trek, and they are seen as belonging to different groups. But we wouldn't say they're different classes, if that's all the difference between those groups, right? So what makes two groups be separate classes, and not just two (disjoint) groups? Shouldn't there be an element of being born into it, or having it restrict your opportunities in some way? If all people, irrespective of ancestry, randomly and independently acquire some taste and habits, which influences how they are treated and perceived - is this class, or is this just a society where not everyone is identical? I feel like there's a missing piece here, but can't put my finger on it.
In some class systems, it really matters whether you were born into it and/or whether your entire family line is pure. But in others, a story about starting life in a manger, born to a carpenter, but ending up with a much higher status can actually boost your status.
I think that the desire to quantify or objectify too much is something you need to resist, actually, because it just tends to lead you to search for your keys under the lamp post.
It is fuzzy and if you try to pin it down, you'll just come across different societies, sub-societies, parts of history, or have society change on you, that no longer fits the model, but still is perceived as class.
> There are people who like Buffy and people who like Star Trek, and they are seen as belonging to different groups. But we wouldn't say they're different classes, if that's all the difference between those groups, right?
Yet liking Shakespeare vs romance novels is very much a class signifier. In general, there are a lot of preferences that are stronger or weaker class signifiers.
Ultimately, this is a fuzzy social process. At one point, MMA and WWE can be only for the underclass and the next moment, it can be an upper middle class activity (although not necessarily by mixing it up with lower class fans/practitioners).
There is even a fashion element to it, especially since people also jockey for status within classes and being ahead of the curve itself gives status (while being behind detracts status, unless you are so far behind that you are ahead again...like in fashion).
And some things are just very neutral or weak class signifiers, that don't matter that much.
> If all people, irrespective of ancestry, randomly and independently acquire some taste and habits
That has nothing to do with actual human beings though. They mimic those around them, seek to behave in ways that make their life better (but are limited by their natural gifts and the means provided to them by their family & community), etc.
> So what makes two groups be separate classes, and not just two (disjoint) groups?
Perhaps these things matter:
- A common basis that makes people even consider the other as a part of the same whole.
- A (mutual) dependency, where they can't just ignore each other, but have to interact in a way where the differences matter.
- An (often unconscious) sense of group values and benefits. A lower class community can admire their self-reliance, willingness to help each other out without asking money, etc; and look down on higher classes that don't have these values as much. Lower class people don't necessarily want to leave their class.
Or perhaps this is just nonsense.
Again, it's probably to fuzzy to make confident statements.
There are innumerable books and articles on the subject. Class is a dominant theme in sociology, and has been so since this discipline got off the ground approx. a hundred years ago.
Two dominant "recent" approaches is that of John Goldthorpe (who emphasise economic positions) and Pierre Bourdieu (who emphasise cultural positions). There are decent wiki entries on them and their theories.
However, I would primarily recommend a classic: Max Weber's famous essay Class, Status, Parties from 1922. It is more nuanced and analytically stringent than similar texts by Marx.
Weber's take on the concept, including his analytical distinction between class and status, has been extremely influential; he is still the standard go-to classical reference in sociology as well as political science. Highly recommended. Link to the wiki entry here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-component_theory_of_stratification
...and link to the full text of the essay here:
file:///C:/Users/einaro/OneDrive%20-%20OsloMet/pdf/Weber-Class-Status-Party.pdf
Very lucidly written. Weber had a knack for making clear analytical distinctions. I would go so far as to say his approach is still a better starting point for empirical analysis than more recent writers, including Goldthorpe and Bourdieu.
Your last link goes to your C-drive, which others fortunately do not have access to.
:-) ....you'll find the essay by using google, though. Courtesy Middlebury College. (There are also a couple of other versions out there.)
One time I tried to reason through the definition of class by using a metaphor with high school (like Scott kind of did in the Nixon post). Here's how it went:
In a class-ful high school:
(i) not everyone is always invited to the parties, there are separate "clusters" of students that exclusively socialize with each other, and
(ii) membership in "clusters" have a ranking such that if someone in cluster N throws a party, most members of clusters k < N will WANT to attend, but may not always be invited, but members of clusters m > N may NOT WANT to attend, but are always invited.
I think this runs into trouble when trying to generalize to outside a school setting.
For your characterization of class, it seems to me like there should be a distinction between a caste system (a caste is a group you are born into and marry within) and a true class system. Whereas a caste system is defined by some set of rules and traditions, a class system emerges spontaneously out of social networks and normal human behavior within those networks.
I like this analogy. So let's try to generalize to a country, allowing some errors in translation and replacing "being invited" with "having opportunities".
1) Segregation. There are different groups which interact mostly within each one.
2) Stratification. There is a ranking of the groups, where the higher ones have more opportunities than the lower ones. People generally (reasonably) prefer to be in the higher ones.
I think (1) + (2) are still not quite sufficient outside of a setting such as a school. So I want to add:
3) Ancestry. I take your point that class isn't as determined at birth as caste. But if it's independent of birth, is that really class? Suppose your class is completely independent of your parents' and early environment. Isn't that some people succeeding and others not, with a touch of assortative socializing (where people socialize with their rough "equals")? Isn't that perfect equality of opportunity and a class-less society? If the kids with good grades in college, each from a different background, hang out with each other, and can get into honors classes that others can't - is that social class?
The importance of a class in a society can be measured by the strength of each of the 3 criteria - if segregation is very tight, and higher classes have many more opportunities, and being born into the right family determines your class absolutely, then class is very important in that society.
Thoughts?
Hmm, I think one way to argue in favor of dropping (3) would be to talk about something like this:
The early-life environment and your family actually DOES influence which class you (later in life) will belong to, but this could also be thought of as just an empirical question which is useful for predicting which class you will belong to later in life. So your ancestry, (3), is useful for PREDICTING your class, but looking at society from an alien's perspective, we must ask whether it helps the alien categorize (classify?) human society as class-ful.
You mention the idea of a society satisfying (1) + (2) but not (3). I will try to argue that this is not necessarily perfect equality of opportunity. As my counter-example, consider a society with a rigid, formal system such that rank membership (I will later try to argue that the "ranks" can be identified as classes) is assigned at birth with a lottery and kids are sent to different schools based on their ranks. In order to satisfy (2) the higher ranked schools will have more opportunities: even poor students will be able to get some kind of cushy civil service job after graduating, but the highest-performing students will become scientists, political leaders, etc.
The society described above clearly satisfies (2), and it satisfies (1) as a consequence of kids growing up and forming friendships within different schools. Due to the lottery system, (3) does not matter for the ranks. Now, why is it that I call this "rank system" a particular case of a class system? I would say that the aliens looking at this society would say "yes, this society has tight segregation and higher classes have many more opportunities - it is a class society". They would also note that family is not a good predictor of class, but family conditions would only come up as an empirical question.
On the other hand, the opposite case would be that I have defined something weaker, more general than a class system. If we want to go down that road, we should argue whether the word "class" should point to "society satisfying (1) + (2)" or "society satisfying (1) + (2) + (3)". I have no good answer for this.
For 2, distinguishing them should be straightforward if the trait is quantifiable. If class membership is limiting, you should still expect to see an effect from class even after controlling for whatever heritable positive trait correlates with it. Thus, if class membership isn't predictive when looking at two people with comparable levels of heritable positive traits you can reasonably conclude that class isn't limiting in that case.
In my view, class is mostly about your network: similar to your 1 but a little more practical. The advantage of a high-class education or church isn't the quality of the institution itself but simply being connected with other well-connected people. That means knowing about job or investment opportunities before they become public knowledge, having an easier time with references and otherwise getting people to trust you, etc. Basically the ability to avoid the faceless bureaucracy and deal with decision-makers on a human level where they're more accommodating and forgiving.
In Marxist theory class is defined by your relation to the means of production. This is a useful starting point.
Interesting. Help me out a bit. What would that mean in a standard contemporary capitalist country? Is it stratified, or is there no ranking? Are the self-employed a different class? Or only business owners? Only large business owners? How about high-payed CEOs, or influential political figures - where do they fit in?
Small business owners are petite bourgeoisie. You can start with simple works by Marx and Engels to get an idea how class works in contemporary society:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm
I feel sad because you ignore all my posts asking for your accounting of the oppression that has occurred in communist countries.
One measure of oppression is how much people try to get away from a place, both the number of people leaving and the risks they are willing to take to get away.
Thank you, this is very enlightening! It's an interesting thought experiment to consider the US as as oppressive in it's own way as a communist state. I think my instinctive response is that getting locked up for whatever crime, thought or material, is a problem if there is no due process. From what I've read of memoirs of former gulag prisoners there was absolutely no due process and that was one of the most oppressive things they experienced. But due process didn't affect Jim Crow!
The Marxist analysis of class is correct and useful even if you don't agree with every little thing that has occurred in places that have had their revolutions.
Thank you for responding! I'm genuinely delighted! I think therein lies my problem with Marxism and why I'm hesitant to, let's say, convert. I don't view mass murder and imprisonment and slavery as little things. I have an instinct that the poor and oppressed are special, not more morally worthy, but more beloved by God, maybe, is a better way to put it. But I feel like Marxism simply flips the pyramid and those who were oppressed start to oppress. Maybe Marx's diagnosis, his analysis of class, was correct, but his solution seems to be "do the same thing as the bad guys but it's ok because you are good guys." Am I wrong? Is Marx saying something else that I'm misunderstanding? Basically I guess at heart I feel like capitalism oppresses and communism oppresses so why do you think communism is better than capitalism?
# Update on the Dutch scandal
Short recap: Dutch PM was accused of trying to get rid of a Representative, Omtzigt, best known for demanding that the government acts differently and for his work on another scandal: bureaucrats falsely prosecuting people for childcare allowance fraud, resulting in financial ruin for many.
Dutch news now claims that the cabinet decided to withhold information from the Representatives about the childcare allowance fraud. Allegedly, one minister complained about the information being withheld, pointing to the constitution. Depending on what justification the people present used to withhold this information, they may get in trouble with the House. Amusingly, the leader of Omtzigt's party allegedly said in that meeting that they attempted to teach Omtzigt to have more sensibility, but that they failed.
In an unprecedented move, the cabinet agreed to publish the minutes of the meeting, later today (in the Dutch evening). The minutes are secret and are typically only published after decades have passed. The PM noted that the contents would be 'explosive.'
Intriguing - keep us posted!
This is fairly unambiguously politics. Please take this to an even-numbered open thread.
Can I make a plea for commenters to not make the lack of book review authors perfect anonymity even worse? It annoys me that just because it is possible in some cases to find out the identity of some of the authors, commenters seem to think it helpful to shout it from the rooftops, explain how the anonymity can be broken, and then complain about the fact that anonymity isn't utterly bulletproof.
There's some painful irony in that it reminds me of the supposed reasoning of people who said Scott's real name was identifiable with a small amount of research and therefore he couldn't claim to be anonymous, couldn't be doxxed, and, by the way, THIS IS HOW I FOUND OUT HIS NAME.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. I prefer to have a norm that says even if you can find out the identity of any of the book review authors, you don't start talking about it, because it rather obviously makes the problem worse. Just keep schtum!
Maybe a better approach would be to treat it like any other kind of security exploit?
I'm under the impression that if you find a vulnerability in some computer system, the correct thing to do isn't to pretend you never found it but to reach out to the person or organization privately and give them a chance to fix things before publishing the vulnerability so that people can avoid it in the future. By analogy, the way to deal with poor anonymity here would be to reach out to Scott and the author so that they could edit the post before revealing the means that you used to find the author's identity. It's not perfect, since someone could always go to an archived copy, but frankly it's still better in my mind than just pretending that their anonymity is intact.
Especially given the sophistication of potential attackers here, as evidenced by the American newspaper of record doxxing Scott, relying on security through obscurity seems like a bad idea.
I think that misunderstands what the anonymity is about. I don't think it's a big deal and therefore isn't an absolute either/or. Scott said he started off reading the reviews not knowing who the authors were, lost that at some point, but carried on as best he could. I think we should do the same.
If absolute anonymity was important, Scott would have made some efforts to remove all the clues from the reviews - he didn't, and I guess that's because if a few people know the identity of a few of the authors (or at least the names under which they comment here) then so what? Not a big deal.
Or at least it wouldn't be if commenters didn't feel the need to publicise the means of finding out authors names!
I don't think it has anything to do with 'potential attackers'. It's just a way of reducing the influence of an authors 'knownness', either as a public figure or a familiar commenter here. As soon as the votes have been cast, the authors will be revealed anyway.
Concerning that story about the copied personality from the last link post (MMacevedo):
What's your take on brain simulation with silicon hardware. If we use a current super computer to simulate a brain, is there really an entity feeling all that, that the transistors simulate?
See my own top-level comment. My current answer is "I don't know", because I don't know.
Some of the harmful/wrong things psychiatrists (including Scott) are taught:
- antipsychotics instead of benzos
- DID is rare and possibly fake
- borderline is an early adulthood disorder
Feel free to argue or to add to the list.
1. Depends what you're using them for. Antipsychotics are legit better than benzos for psychosis. They're not as good for anxiety, but nobody actually teaches you to use them for anxiety, they just say really loudly not to use them, then say even louder not to use benzos, and you've got to use something, so some people use the antipsychotics. My impression is that about 50% of people do okay on scheduled benzos, 50% of people do very not okay, and both groups think it's outrageous that anyone claims that the other group exists.
2. Depends what you mean by DID and "fake". My guess is that mild versions of it are heavily a culture-bound syndrome, but real enough if someone gets suggestible-d into it. I think the current strategy of minimizing it by not suggestible-ing more people into it is going pretty well.
3. If this is false, I guess I've fallen for it (well, teen and early adulthood) - what do you think it is, and what's your evidence?
First, my views are heavily colored by talking to those who survived severe childhood trauma.
> Antipsychotics are legit better than benzos for psychosis.
Indeed.
> say even louder not to use benzos, and you've got to use something, so some people use the antipsychotics
yes, that's the issue. Those with CPTSD-borne flashbacks and insomnia seem do much better when they get breaks from the constant hypervigilance and anxiety they tend to live in, and benzos/z-drugs for sleep, without the debilitating long-term side effects of antipsychotics.
> Depends what you mean by DID and "fake". My guess is that mild versions of it are heavily a culture-bound syndrome, but real enough if someone gets suggestible-d into it.
Traumagenic DID is a covert disorder. Most sufferers often doubt they have it themselves, because they really really really hate being a system, and they do not volunteer anything about it to anyone in the position of authority, like a psychiatrist. "you are in psychosis", "you are faking", "you must be borderline" and so on are the usual reactions. I suspect that you have a huge blind spot in that area, Scott. Consider joining an online group such as https://www.facebook.com/groups/144606832699719/ and just reading the posts there to get a better picture.
> If this is false, I guess I've fallen for it (well, teen and early adulthood) - what do you think it is, and what's your evidence?
They certainly present that way. And DBT plus meds tends to help them deal with life better, at least in some cases and for a time. But if you dig deeper, it's almost always the result of a childhood trauma severe enough to leave the person unable to deal with their emotions later in life. Pete Walker (I assume you've heard of him) in, say, http://pete-walker.com/fourFs_TraumaTypologyComplexPTSD.htm mentions how narcissism and codependence is often a fight/fawn response to trauma. According to the twin studies described in https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081216114100.htm borderline is roughly half-genetic, half-environmental, but it's common to slap the borderline label on (mostly female) patients without figuring out whether the real affliction is CPTSD. Hope this makes some sense, not sure if any of this is new to you.
Can anyone give me suggestions for interesting Twitter accounts to follow? For my part, I recommend Rolf Degen, Frank Luntz, ProMED-mail, and History through Pictures.
Rather niche question: Does anybody know what embassy security was generally like in interbellum-era Europe, or does anybody know where I could look to find this information? Nowadays, of course, embassies are normally quite heavily guarded -- armed guards, body scanners, sometimes bomb-proof walls, etc. -- but I was wondering whether this was always the case (mutatis mutandis for technological differences, of course), or whether it's a more recent development.
I ask because I'm currently writing a story set in the 1920s which is partly set in an embassy, and I wanted to know what sort of things my characters could expect to deal with as they go in.
Perhaps George F. Kennan's volume of memoirs covering 1925---1950 would discuss embassy/consulate security somewhere.
Is there a good general (moderate preference for scholarly) history of post-Soviet Russia that you'd recommend? I'm not looking for one of those Peril: Putin's Perfidious Plot to Poison Political Pluralism books, just a sober overview of the major political, economic, social, etc. developments in Russia post-1991. (And thanks to everyone who recommended books the last time I asked a similar question; I've started reading, and am quite enjoying, Lenin's Tomb and can't wait to read The Commanding Heights.)
Have you tried reading the Wikipedia articles on this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia#Russian_Federation_(1991–present), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Russia_(1991–present))?
I'd love to learn whether MDMA has any medium to long term negative effects on the brain. Anyone have any good articles, posts, or other resources to recommend?
I'm sure this question has been asked 10 million times, but does anyone have advice on dating re finding people (women specifically in my case) with a 'rationalist' temperament? Is there a good site for such people? Or some code words I don't know about to look for in someone's profile? Is Myers-Briggs type actually a good approximation of this? One might think meetups would be a good place to meet people, but I've always felt it was kind of weird to even have that in the back of my mind while going to meetup, as if it's an ulterior motive.
When you say "rationalist temperament" do you mean someone who's generally more stoic and analytical or are you looking for someone who likes the Culture novels and has a policy with Alcor?
The Rationalist subculture is disproportionately male and trans*, so if you're looking for a woman who fits that niche you're almost certainly going to have to make compromises on other factors. Including potentially monogamy and trans status, which are typically deal breakers.
Women with a calmer more analytical personality on the other hand aren't nearly as uncommon but may be harder to find in online or app-based dating. Meeting people face-to-face is difficult right now but it might be worth checking your extended friend group to see if they know anyone who's single and low-maintenance.
Someone more analytical and stoical is more what I have in mind (I guess in the context of a relationship, someone who favors direct articulation of emotions, wants, etc. as opposed to greater expectations of/reliance on implicit social cues and such).
The thing is... I don't really have an extended friend group; partly because I moved to where I live not long ago (a few months before the pandemic) and also I guess for the same reasons I struggle at dating. I suppose you might say 'step 1 is make friends.' Which for me since college has generally meant trying meetups).
Yeah, sorry that's a pretty rough situation. I don't know what you can really do until things fully re-open beyond taking this time to expand your friend group generally.
I asked my girlfriend what she thought last night, since your question had kind of stuck in my craw and she's probably the most emotionally mature / rational person I know. Her suggestion was to focus on meeting women in their mid twenties currently in professional or graduate school (implicitly referring to STEM programs) since even the more dramatic people will have had to get their shit together. There's a certain logic to it since we met in grad school and the gender ratio is generally favorable for men, but I'm not sure how broadly applicable it is.
Sorry if that's not particularly helpful.
Yeah, I think that makes sense, it's the kind of cohort I'm most inclined to look for in online dating since I'm a scientist. Thanks for the advice.
How do we feel about vaccination rollouts being triaged by race? In Hamilton, Ontario, under pressure from community activist groups consisting of academics and critical race theorists, the municipal health agency is now admitting registration for anyone 18+ in hotspot neighborhoods who identify as Black or racialized. White people have to be aged 40+ to be eligible for vaccination.
On the ground, the response to this is generally negative. There are a few supporters who repeat the correlative fact that Hamilton's makeup is only 19% POC yet POC comprise 51% of COVID cases... but race, obviously, isn't the causal factor.
To me, prioritizing a healthy 20-year-old Black man over, say, an obese schizophrenic 39-year-old smoker who's white and happens to live in the same postal code seems irrational and gravely mistaken. It seems that this policy, motivated by political pressure from rent-seeking activist groups, will cost lives. Clearly, race isn't the causal factor - it's geographical location, job, family size, comorbidities, etc. So why not triage by those factors?
Am I missing something in this debate?
Links:
https://www.hamilton.ca/government-information/news-centre/news-releases/hamiltons-covid-19-vaccination-program-prioritizes
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/hamilton-bipoc-vaccine-priority-1.5989119
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/bipoc-committee-public-health-1.5772731
My first instinct is that this seems fine, but I'm fairly woke.
Questions: What is "racialized"? Why is race clearly not the causal factor? You mentioned this twice in three paragraphs but didn't say why. Race is causal in at least one disease (sickle cell anemia), so it's at least plausible that it's causal here. My impression is that the 'rona is too new for us to have a great handle on it.
Well this is very interesting to me - you are the first self-identified ‘woke’ person I have met who implies that disproportionalities in Covid outcomes by race are due to HBD rather than the usual systemic racism argument.
Well, what I'm trying to imply is that I don't think we know, or can know, yet. I'd prefer to avoid the moniker HBD, as what's meant by that is rarely the difference in prevalence of some diseases among various ethnicities. But my views of wokeness and HBD are definitely culture war, and so not a good fit for this thread.
In my county (Santa Clara County, CA), African Americans have a percentage of cases slightly lower than their percent of the population, which suggests that the cause is not a greater racial vulnerability. Latinos have a fraction of cases about twice their fraction of the population. For deaths, Latinos are only a little above average, as are African Americans.
My guess at what is going on is that Latinos are a younger population and taking fewer precautions.
Incidentally, deaths (but not cases) are substantially higher for males than for females. Should males get priority in vaccination?
Interesting. I think we should prioritize by risk generally, so I would be ok with that, but I can't imagine that that policy would be palatable. If we're really going to have trouble with 40% of people deciding not to vaccinate, I think an important factor is avoiding pissing people off.
Is male actually the difference maker there? Or are males more likely to have the cluster of characteristics that make covid dangerous? Probably another thing we don't know yet.
Men naturally tend to have weaker immune systems than women, and are generally more susceptible to infectious diseases, so the sex difference is indeed probably due to largely to sex itself rather than just confounders (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7271824/#:~:text=Generally%2C%20females%20are%20more%20resistant,men%20as%20compared%20to%20women.).
Something I'm still confused about: Why are vaccination rollouts being triaged at all, rather than vaccines just freely given to everyone? I heard it's a supply thing, but I'm still not sure.
Wait is this politics? If it is then please ignore this comment; I'll repost this again in OT168 or OT170.
In Canada, I believe distribution is still sharply supply limited.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Geesh we seem to have an abundance here in the US, we should ship you some.
Let me guess, you don't live in a big city. Please ship some to big cities first.
I only became eligible for the vaccine on April 18th. The first open slot I could book was on April 25th, and that seems only because I was on the waiting list early.
Apropos of nothing but a weird dream I had recently: In my dream, I was reading some Substack comment asking whether AIs could be conscious in principle, and I wrote in response something like that my experience consists of two different things (feelings/sensations or intelligence, and a "thing looking at things"), and that, although AIs would necessary have the former, they would lack the latter and thereby not be conscious. After I woke up, I thought that this was possibly related to the idea of a "tripartite soul" (which possibly recurs in Greek/Egyptian/Christian/etc mythology according to certain people).
So, ACT commenters: Can AIs be conscious? And does this dream shed any insight on this topic?
(For context: In the rest of my dream, I asked dream!dad about this, who responded that he also lacked the "thing looking at things" - which, I realized outside of the dream, effectively made him a philosophical zombie. Later, we went on a long raised platform that people, including me and dream!dad, ritually walked back and forth on, supposedly to commemorate some kind of genocide or something. I fell off the edge of the platform and went sliding down on an absurdly slippery slope of colorful sand, which I had to claw my way back up from. Also, before I read the dream!Substack comment, I had entered a small, plain building, where I socialized with the other dream!people but unfortunately got into tensions with one - but after learning that this was a *North Korean* person and somewhat in authority in the context of this building, I hurriedly left.)
this is the first dream i heard of that is actually interesting!
Thanks I suppose (although you shouldn't credit conscious!me, but rather subconscious!me). I've routinely had dreams this weird and complicated since ~2016, but very few that raise discussion questions at all, let alone this clearly.
on the AI question though, what the heck is a "thing looking at things" and what properties of computers preclude them from having it? They have senses (webcam, mouse, keyboard) as well as a brain (CPU). Functionally they could operate as slighly more metallic humans without any trouble. Once we develop AGI we legitemately need to consider its sapience imho.
Sorry, dream!me wasn't very clear; I think his* response reflects my opinion that intelligence/sapience and consciousness/sentience are generally orthogonal. By a "thing looking at things", dream!I meant the thing that is doing the experiencing of qualia.
*I'm male, for the record. I'm using third-person pronouns
oops i wrote sapience when i meant sentience. anyway i dont think the I in AGI makes it sentience. more G in AGI. general intelegence means AGI can be aware of itself
*because I don't identify with dream!me.
(Sorry that comment was incomplete.)
Why are these two charts of average rent so different for 2006-2021? One says rent went up 50%, one says it went up 100%
https://mobile.twitter.com/atanzi/status/1387056101187678209
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SEHA
Looks like one is average and one is median?
Ha, whoops. I would think median would be a more representative figure since it wouldn't be pulled up by extreme luxury apartments -- does this chart surprise anyone else? Rent doubling as average wages increase like 50% seems very concerning
I mean, isn't expenses going up faster than wages and thus squeezing the middle class more or less the story of the last fifty years?
Definitely the popular narrative but in my experience at SSC there were a lot of skeptics of that, so I suppose I was looking for a Nybbler type to say things are not what they seem from that chart.
Ah. Try DSL. Most of that group hasn't made the trip over here.
The external links in the PDFs of the book reviews appear to be broken. They are formatted as links (blue & underlined) but don't actually link to other URLs. (The links in the tables of contents still work.)
Stumbled across a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSG0p-uflA) where Michael Vassar claims that "only about 4% [of the native-english-speaking non-mentally-retarded U.S. population] can give the price to carpet a room, consisting entirely of rectangles with integer-length sides, when the price per square meter of carpet is given." (timestamp for the quote is about 23:50)
Four percent seems implausibly low to me. I've done seem googling to try and find the source of this statistic, but haven't had any luck. Does anyone here know the source, or any studies with similar/dissimilar results?
Does anyone know where I can find a recording of “The Song of the Voluntary Army"?
http://www.shanghaidiaries.com/archives/2004/10/13/an_aggressive_american_wolf_in_dandong/