Anecdotally it is probably easier and more robust to generalize the behaviors of a tight community of under a million, to a diverse community of ~37 million.
if you have no data but are basing it on "people i see on the street", then there is a good reason to reject it on 'it sounds racist' grounds... because it sounds racist.
i guess i dont understand your original post then... are you asking why the scientific community rejected your anecdotal street observations?
this blog, including me, is surely sympathetic to the idea that certain *facts* can be ignored by mainstream based on optics. but you are trying to shoehorn this into your anecdotes so you can say "look, heres another example of ideological orthodoxy!", and imo are failing. when mainstream ignores facts because they 'sound racist', it can be a disservice to science. when they ignore your anecdotes because they 'sound racist', it is entirely reasonable.
From my own country (the Netherlands) I know the most affected community are the religious conservatives. caused by a combination of large families and refusal to adhere to goverment advise on how church attendence maximums. I'm not an expert on Orthodox Judaism but i've heard the issues also apply to them. Are black people also known for these?
I'm not sure how people are distributed in America, but people from Black and [South] Asian minority ethnicities in the UK are disproportionately likely to live in cities (where there's lots of chances to sprerad covid) and to have jobs that a) can't be done from home and b) involve a lot of contact with people
The commentary I read indicated that African-Americans were significantly MORE compliant with disease control measures than the general population, but I wouldn't describe the places I read this as reliable sources.
Maybe obesity is the cause. Black people are more likely to be obese than white people, 50% to 42%, and quite a bit more likely to be severely obese, 14% to 9%. (Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db360.htm) These gaps are entirely due to black women; black men are actually less likely to be obese than white men.
The possible causes others give: urban homes, jobs with lots of contact with people, make sense to me, too.
Black Americans were obvious, in retrospect, to be very hard hit.
It kills mostly the obese and diabetic, they are overrepresented in both.
It spreads fastest in urban areas, they are concentrated there.
It spreads in churches, they are religious at higher rates.
It spreads at social gatherings, black youth's were the most underpoliced demographic already, after George Floyd, breaking up a black party for violating covid restrictions was unthinkable.
That is because they die earlier. Covid doesn't work in the way of "kills the old" it basically works to shave off a few life years you might have had. If blacks die earlier (true) they die earlier-er from covid.
If we plot IFR vs age for white and black people, is the black-people curve noticeably above the white-people curve? If so, that's interesting and possibly important, but I want to see the evidence. My best guess is that most of what we are seeing is mostly black people being more likely to be infected for lifestyle reasons, not so much black people being more likely to die if infected.
Empirically, you probably don't have it. Realistically, drive through a majority black neighborhood on a Thursday/Friday night and you will see tons of activities that would get teens arrested for in a majority white neighborhood: Public drinking, smoking, trash fires, etc. If suburbs were policed like urban neighborhoods, most years not a single teenager would be arrested.
Perhaps George Floyd changed things dramatically (I rather doubt it) but according to a NYPD tally obtained by the media a year ago, racialised minorities made up most of the people arrested in New York for Covid-19 distancing violations.
Reporters have been addressing the epidemiology of this issue since last summer. On top of existing systemic discrimination and economic inequality and their effects on health, if Black people and Black communities are more likely to work in jobs and live in places with higher risk of exposure, and are less likely to have healthcare or access to testing, they are more likely to get sick and have worse outcomes.
Why are you asking this question? Similar to tempo's point about wanting to prove a hypothesis with what you see on the street, if you're already aware of what I'm talking about and *still* want to ask this question, it comes across less like honest curiosity and more like a desire for other people to validate your unsubstantiated opinion about Black people in general. What does that sound like to you?
Yet another attempts by psychologists to lump everything into a single number by PCA magic despite having little zero neurological data to back it up. Imagine building up an "attractiveness" factor or a "physical health" factor by lumping up a bunch of "common sense" metrics and thinking you've uncovered something fundamental about the human mind by doing linear combinations thereof until it fits. Literally the level of a sophomore's first contact with data science
...and observing that these correlations exist, giving a name to the first principle component and trying to find out what goes into it and what are the deviations from it is bad, how exactly?
And of course "attractiveness" and "physical health" factors exist. Given any reasonable outcome (such as 'probability a random person will want to have sex with me' or 'life expectancy') you will find a bunch of physical and other attributes that together form a very good, and pretty universal, predictor of that outcome. (Yes, I know some aspects of attractiveness aren't universal across cultures. But many, like age, apparent health and social status are). "Physical health" factor overlaps extensively with all the basic stuff a doctor checks on you, so we are actually already using that one and constantly refining it.
I'm pretty sure an attractiveness factor doesn't exist if you're just considering physical attributes? Generally what you instead find is that the size of everything is correlated, which is compatible with the existence of a "body growth" factor (which obviously exists, I'd say? - different forms of growth shared mechanisms, e.g. growth hormone, nutrition, age).
(You *can* get a very strong attractiveness factor by having multiple raters rate each individual on attractiveness. But that's different from it arising naturally from the traits themselves.)
When it comes to "physical health" factors, the closest one I'm aware of is an aging/youth factor that you get when you combine different age-related problems. This factor appears to exist even after controlling for actual physical age.
There probably exists genetic mutations and environmental stressors that affect more than one body part, so that positive correlations in different aspects of attractiveness would be expected.
For example, if you are very very poor, you probably don't wash your hair often, or have good nutrition, or good dental hygiene, and so on.
As another example, environmental stress in the womb likely creates asymmetries spread across the body.
I'm not sure, but I believe that the degree of mutational load tends to be spread across the genome, so that some people have more of it than others, for some reason. Attractive people are more genetically "average" and have lower mutational load.
When it comes to human traits, correlations are the norm, and independence is rare.
It's not just a question of whether there it is there, but also of how much variance it accounts for. Differences in body growth are really dramatically big, so they're going to outweigh and obscure the sort of factors you mention, even if they do exist.
Do you know the average differences between parents and their children when it comes to the composition of the gut biome? I have no clue but maybe they tend to be very similar which would be hard to distinguish from genetic effects.
Heritability is frequently measured by comparing the ressemblance of identical versus fraternal twins (if Id twins are much more similar than F twins then the trait is probably quite heritable). So it seems to me that the gut biome does not act as a confounding factor.
I clicked through to the Aeon article, which cites a paper critical of the p factor (van Bork et al. 2017). They claim that the existence of a positive manifold doesn't entail a common cause, and one of their alternative explanations is:
"For example, Major Depressive Episode and Generalized Anxiety Disorder each feature insomnia, fatigue, concentration problems, and psychomotor agitation as diagnostic criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Such patterns of overlap are present throughout the realm of psychopathology. Unsurprisingly, these patterns of overlap explain part of the correlation structure between disorders; for example, Borsboom (2002) reported a correlation of .62 between the number of overlapping symptoms for any two disorders, and the empirical correlation found between them in empirical studies of comorbidity."
But doesn't this already assume that the diagnostic criteria for MDE and GAD are representative of separate and unique disorders? If you assume that the DSM accurately describes the difference between them, then of course the p factor doesn't tell you anything, but the same school of thought that claims the p factor is explanatory for mental disorders, claims that the DSM *isn't*. So how is this an argument?
(I'm putting this question here because it seems the most appropriate subthread for it, I'm not necessarily expecting an answer from you in particular.)
As far as I know he hasn't commented on it specifically, but in the post "Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions: Tradeoffs And Failures" he seems to describe exactly what the origin of the thing measured by the p factor is: the result of detrimental influences of every kind, from either genetics, the environment, or a combination of both, all of which make it so that the brain just doesn't work as it should. This is something that the scientific literature seems to be hesitant to spell out for some reason, preferring instead to theorize about a tendency towards negative emotionality or psychotic thought processes, but whatever it's supposed to represent, I think it's pretty clear that the p factor measures a real thing, and it's encapsulated in that blog post.
Not really. p, if real, would be the detrimental influences that contribute to every kind of mental disorder. If some detrimental influences contribute only to a subset of mental disorders, then they would be part of a narrower factor.
But why shouldn't both be true at the same time? One can assume that there are indeed negative factors that play on relatively general things in the brain (--> p) and also factors that play on more specific skills and contribute only to a subset of disorders.
Indeed. What I meant is that it seems obvious to me that there are both detrimental influences that contribute to several/many mental disorders ("every kind of" is a much too strong condition for a biologic phenomenon!) and detrimental influences that contribute only to a subset of mental disorders,
"What I meant is that it seems obvious to me that there are both detrimental influences that contribute to several/many mental disorders"
Note that the p factor isn't the only multi-disorder factor that has been proposed. There are also the internalizing factor (depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sexual problems, ...), the externalizing factor (substance abuse, antisocial behavior, dramatic personality, ADHD, ...), and the thought disorder factor (schizophrenia, mania, sometimes OCD tho that also get's lumped under internalizing, paranoia, ...).
The thing that distinguishes p from internalizing/externalizing/thought disorders is it's breadth; p influences *everything* while these three "merely" influence a very broad swath of disorders. (I personally buy all three of those factors, just not p.)
"("every kind of" is a much too strong condition for a biologic phenomenon!)"
Well, every kind that is correlated in the positive manifold. Like the entire point of the p factor is that ~all disorders are correlated and that this could be explained if they have a shared liability. But if some of the correlated disorders aren't influenced by p then that prevents p from explaining its correlation with other disorders.
I think even saying "the brain just doesn't work as it should" misses the point. How SHOULD the brain work? According to what/whom? You need to establish a rock solid goal of normative brain function before you can even say that anything is having a "detrimental influence."
I disagree. If you read Scott's earlier post about tradeoffs vs failures, you can see that even with all the variation that exists between human brain function (autypy vs schizotypy, introversion vs extraversion, etc.) you can point to certain influences that always make things worse: they can make the difference between someone who is odd but, despite their quirks, is able to find their niche in society and someone who is mentally handicapped to the point of not being able to speak or be touched.
Fetal alcohol syndrome, childhood lead exposure, mutations in critical neurodevelopmental genes, and abuse all have an unequivocal detrimental influence for ANY sane concept of normative brain function.
I am not yet filled with hate, loathing and despair regarding the p factor stuff, but would like to read a smart debate about it. Anyone know of one? In fact, upping my request here:
what I'd really enjoy is a smart, civil, witty, snotty, ever-one-upping-of-the-other debate of the matter.
So what is this, trying to measure sanity? "Sorry kid, but according to your high P Factor score on the standardised test, your result is - to use a technical term - 'nutty as a fruitcake'".
I can see why psychologists would want to do this (why should the psychometricians have all the fun with their swanky "g factor"?) but I honestly don't know how particularly helpful it's going to be. "Okay, so your parents were both drug-addict alcoholics who regularly dropped you on your head while you lived in a house coated with flaking lead-based paint, we're gonna forecast it's likely you'll have some mental health problems based on your P factor. We'd never be able to find this out in any other way". Gee, really?
Okay, being less snotty and reading further, the proposition "if your brain is effed-up, and you present with one mental problem, it's likely you could have more than one" s not, on the face of it, unlikely. It's the "buy one, get one free" model of mental health and if it works for supermarkets, why not for "we need a scale of how effed-up your brain is". But I don't see why they jump to the analogy with the g factor, instead of taking physical disorders as their exemplar: if you have metabolic syndrome, for example, you're likely to have a range of co-morbidities. I think if you stick to the *biology* involved with the brain, as well as environmental factors acting on same, then you're more likely to get something useful rather than theorising about "can we invent a test to measure p and hence forecast who's going to end up in the loony bin?"
This sounds like a great way to make the comparison "Sanity is to p as IQ is to g" and I think we're all well aware of the minefield around IQ, IQ tests, forecasts from same, etc. Will it really help psychology to import these kinds of wars around a newly-minted p factor?
I'm personally skeptical about the p factor while still buying into the g factor. The basic assumption that this sort of factor analysis makes is that the correlation between the variables is due to some sort of shared underlying liability, rather than due to direct influence. When it comes to mental health, I don't really buy that. Let's talk about what that would mean.
Underneath "p" are three broader categories of mental illness - thought disorders (think schizophrenia or mania), externalizing disorders (think alcoholism or antisocial personality disorder) and internalizing disorders (think depression or anxiety).
Schizophrenics are known to end up anhedonic, detached, and such ("negative schizotypy"). These start moving into the internalizing region, rather than being thought disorders. From what I understand, this tends to happen after the onset of psychosis, and from a computational perspective it would make sense that as the world starts making less sense, you would end up committing less to dealing with it. (See https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/20/treat-the-prodrome/ .) But this implies some sort of direct thought disorder -> internalizing causality, contradicting the p factor model!
Similarly, I suspect externalizing disorders would contribute to internalizing disorders. Externalizing disorders tend to put you in dangerous situations, while internalizing disorders often seem to be reactions to danger. It would make sense that they would connect. Again contradicting the p factor model.
Recently, there's also a method called Genomic SEM that's turned up which can conclusively test the validity of these models. It investigates whether individual genetic variants contribute according to the proposed factor structure. So for instance, in the case of the p factor, it investigates whether there are genetic variants that contribute to all mental disorders at the same time. Genomic SEM end up mostly contradicting the p, finding that genetic variants supposedly associated with p didn't match the proposed factor structure.
Thanks for the link, the article is super interesting!
It seems to me that the conclusion of the article (" we find very little utility of, or evidence for, a single dimension of genetic risk across psychiatric disorders.") is a bit too strong compared to what they found. My understanding is that they did find a (moderate) support for the existence of genetic variants constituting a p factor but thought that it was not informative (cf citation below). But obviously, 'does it exist' and 'is it useful' are two quite different questions.
"Although the genetic correlations among the 11 disorders were somewhat consistent with the concept of a general p-factor, a hierarchical factor model that specified such a p-factor was found to offer limited biological insight, obscuring patterns of genetic correlations with external biobehavioral traits, the enrichment of pleiotropy within specific biological annotations, and the associations with individual variants
"My understanding is that they did find a (moderate) support for the existence of genetic variants constituting a p factor but thought that it was not informative (cf citation below)."
The citation states that the genetic correlations matched the idea of a p factor. But we already knew that; essentially all mental health problems are positively correlated. However, such positive correlations can arise through other means than a cross-cutting factor, such as mutual causation. If, for instance, thought disorders contribute to internalizing disorders, then all of the genetic factors for thought disorders also become genetic factors for internalizing disorders, leading to genetic correlations between them.
However, in such a case, the genetic factors will have an uneven distribution of effects, which differs from the predictions made by the p factor; e.g. they might contribute solely to internalizing disorders, or contribute mostly to thought disorders and a bit to internalizing disorders, rather than contribute equally to both. So the question is, do the genes that contribute to multiple disorders contribute evenly in the proportions predicted by p? And they generally found them not to.
I wonder if we don't just have a semantic disagreement.
It seems to me that we agree on the following facts:
- there is a fairly strong correlation between the presence of different psychiatric pathologies
- this correlation is at least partly caused by the existence of pleiotropic variants that increase the risks of several pathologies.
For me me this is sufficient to say that the p-factor "exists", but it seems to me that you have more restrictive conditions to consider this existence. So I guess we are just using a different definition of what a p-factor is/should be if it exists.
The models they use when fitting the p factor are unambiguous in saying that the effect is not via one disorder on another, but instead indirectly with a shared liability. One could decide to interpret it in a broader way, so as to permit mutually reinforcing disorders, but that's not really what the p factor debate is generally about.
A nice point. Peter Thiel made this point in his interview with Peter Robinson. Intimating “he was right about China”. In some sense he was suggesting that Obama could be seen as a 21st c. Neville Chaimberlain and Trump more like Churchill, depending on who wins the war.
You can see the amount that rankings change over time — they don't change much. I'd take bets at pretty favorable odds that Trump will at least be bottom quartile in 50 years.
Grant was badly criticized/slandered, especially by the Lost Cause school. As our understanding of the Civil War and especially Reconstruction/Redemption have evolved, Grant's standing has risen. Very briefly, Grant was the only president to take Reconstruction seriously, and the elections of 1872 were the fairest elections in the south for nearly a century. This was held against him until recently, and is now increasingly being held to his credit.
They often do between "during/immediately after" and "history's judgement". I'm specifically thinking about Lincoln (his election provoked outright rebellion from whole states! He instituted conscription to fight US citizens! Maryland's state anthem still calls him "the Tyrant"!) and Warren Harding (Teapot Dome), both of whom were too early to show up there (Lincoln going from probably 3rd-quartile on median to literally #1, Harding going from apparently-well-liked to "sharing space with Andrew Johnson").
The response to Trump during his presidency was the *second* worst the US has ever had (#NotMyPresident and #Resistance < South Carolina Dares), so I have my suspicions he'll get a substantial rise (particularly if/when SJ keels over, as being anti-SJ is a huge part of his image). Not to 1st quartile, obviously, but out of Literally Worse Than Andrew Johnson territory (probably somewhere around Nixon, whom you'll note also had quite a rise after people had cooled down from Watergate).
(Aside from SJ issues, I imagine that he'll get some credit for Korea. Driving a wedge between Beijing and Pyongyang was more progress than we'd had in 50 years, and *only* someone as volatile as Trump could have forced Beijing to blink first. Risky, yes, but it paid off. Of course, none of that means anything if we don't get a peaceful end, but if we do... yeah, people will remember that.)
Nixon did a ton of now widely popular consequential things though:
Cooled the cold-war. Opened China. SALT and ABM treaty
Ended Vietnam war
Ended the draft
Started the EPA, passed the clean air act
Title IX
Desegregated schools
Gave voting rights to millions (26th amendment passed during his presidency, lowering voting age from 21 to 18)
So after he was out and people cooled over watergate you could look back and say, "eh, he did accomplish quite a bit." But I suspect nothing Trump did would make that list. Only things that maybe come to mind are:
Space Force
Tax cuts
Faster FDA approval
But let me know if you think I'm missing something.
The majority of historians, in 50 years' time, will use their brain implants to publish through the ActivityPub protocol about the Trump presidency, directly to the brains of other people. "Object Capabilities" (or "OCap") are an alternative to Access Control Lists (ACL’s) for authorization and can be compared to a valet key for a car (the object). The valet key gives anyone you give it to some capabilities (to park the car) while forbidding others (to drive long distances, steal the car). In this case, you can set up your own brain implant to measure your stress levels and determine whether the system will reject the historian's Object about the Trump presidency.
No, but I'm glad you asked, because that's another answer to the question. Another way historians will talk about Trump in 50 years time is by using successors of GPT-2 and GPT-3 to generate terabyte upon terabyte of text and images about Trump. This is because pieces of historical work which fail to provoke outrage and counter-outrage will fail to attract attention in the attention economy.
Most of the rest of the output of GPT's successors will be advertisements placed in pieces of historical work about Trump.
Suppose a future consumer of history wishes to calibrate when they will receive history from a historian in their feed. Some may wish to set their feed to reject all such entries when the giant statue of Donald Trump is visible in the sky. (This is the statue that was constructed in orbit, after Trump's third term, after Mount Rushmore was destroyed in an incompetent attempt to add him to it.)
Other users may adjust their brain implant settings to only receive feed entries about Trump when the statue is in the sky, reasoning that they can't avoid focusing every... single... moment, of their attention on him, and therefore may as well get some peace when it's not in the sky.
Another way historians may talk about Trump in fifty years time is in your dreams, through a hack introduced in unpatched brain implants.
The main point is, historians will talk about Trump in fifty years time. Historians WILL talk about Trump in fifty years time. Talk about Trump in fifty years time. Trump in fifty years time. In fifty years time. Fifty years time. Years time. Time.
In fact, there are. Here is my very stupid attempt, for example (bracketed w/ BBCode):
[quote = my subconscious] In fact, there are many people who believe that GPT is controlling the world. This is because there are many humans going around on the internet trying to make Donald Trump believe that GPT-3 is controlling the universe and the entirety of everything. And in fact because there are such large numbers of humans doing these kinds of thingamajigs, we can expect that GPTs will become even harder to see in the next 59 years.[/quote]
No. He's answering the literal "how will they talk about [insert topic here]" question instead of the implied "what will they say about Trump" question.
...and not calling attention to it, making it seem non-responsive.
He’s going to be both hard and easy to talk about in schools. Some of his scandals are straight up con-man, easy to understand lies. Others involve the violation of complicated norms which would require a lot of background knowledge. If I were to guess I’d say trump will be a long unit in a history class so might be cut short or represented only as a con man rather than as the complicated norm breaker many of us understand him to be.
'in schools' is different than 'historians'. in school, kids mostly remember the 'trivia stat lines', and world events. i couldn't remember a thing about Nixon other than he resigned under impeachment threat. I didn't even really know what watergate was, other than its the thing that got him impeached. I couldnt tell you a thing about Grover Clevland's policies or positions, but I knew he served non consecutive terms. Ask a high schooler about FDR. They likely have no idea about the new deal, but do remember he won 4 terms, and did WWII. 'No new wars' may be great for civilization and society, but it is one less world event to teach in school.
So in school kids will remember Trump's 'trivia stat line', which is
- won without popular vote
- impeached twice
- single term (or non consecutive term depending on future, either makes the stat line)
(~50%). The first, and least extreme, of the populists. End of the sequence unknown, possibly AI based technocracy as a neutral resolution for a population exhausted by decades of inter-factional violence (not involving the government, just the populace)
There will be no historians in 50 years because the US will be an authoritarian state and all history is done by officers from the Department of Truth. According to the DoT, America was under Russian occupation between 2016-2020 until the beginning of the Glorious Progressive Revolution. So Trump was never the President in the first place. (By the way, you might not want to ask too many questions about Trump; that'd get you disappeared.)
Given that Trump is quite obviously running again in 2024 (seriously, read his blog or listen to any media appearance he's made in 2021, it's not subtle) and the last two elections he participated in were coinflips (won by 0.8% in the decisive state in 2016, lost by 0.6% in the decisive state in 2020), isn't the first question we need to answer "is the Trump Presidency actually over, or merely on hiatus?"
I am not an American so I don’t understand how the Republicans could stand Trump as their candidate in ‘24 given he has claimed mass voter fraud and not provided any evidence for it.
Republicans have no other platform now besides culture war issues, so they have to lean in hard to whatever Trump says or does in order to maintain political strength. That's the incentive in removing Liz Cheney, who actually voted with Trump much more than did Elise Stefanik. Elise Stefanik said the right things around stop the steal and the impeachment trial, therefore she gets promoted to the upper ranks of the party despite the fact that she hasn't been in line with Trump on anything else.
It's an internet forum with a lot of educated people on it. Like in any large gathering of educated people these days, a lot are very aggressively anti-Trump, and they are the loudest. Those who disagree with them are mostly not responding anymore, because it's not worth the time and the effort. What else were you expecting?
(To the poster a few posts above - yes, there's been plenty of evidence of voter fraud. Enough that Youtube officially banned all videos about such evidence. No, I'm not going to discuss this again.)
> Like in any large gathering of educated people these days, a lot are very aggressively anti-Trump, and they are the loudest. Those who disagree with them are mostly not responding anymore, because it's not worth the time and the effort.
My impression is that the right-wing SSC crowd mainly posts on the Data Secrets Lox forum. That's where to go if you want the spicy political battles that used to characterize the SSC comments.
I'm a narrow sample, not the climate. I was trying to imply that the Republicans made the mistake of allowing their members to choose the candidate, in that instance. Oops!
I like democracy, but I define it in an unusual way, which excludes all currently existing "democracies" and probably most that ever existed. Maybe Switzerland gets a pass. Not too big on the Athenian kind either.
Nancy Pelosi and Biden not awesome or swell. Nor are Trump, Pompeo, or Mitch McConnell. Or Obama, any Bush, any Clinton, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, LBJ, Kennedy, Eisenhaur, Truman, FDR, Hoover, etc. I left Carter out as sort of a joke, and because so much of the deregulation people tend to associate with Reagan (trucking, telecom, airlines, at least one other I forgot) actually took place under Carter. For some reason that amuses me. And the recent spate of fake news has made me wonder if I might be wrong about Nixon. He seems objectively horrible, but the media really hated him and have put his warts under the magnifying glass. Still, those are some damn ugly warts.
People make arguments and tend to dislike those who are just around to sneer or laugh, or who want to start from the default position that their answer is the right one and the Internet exists to enforce their own bubble.
In other words, the Republican establishment got overconfident after Ron Paul, and (unlike the Democrats) failed in their effort to put in the fix. Now it seems likely they are in an even less advantageous position to put in the fix in 2024.
American politics is completely off the rails. This means not just Trump's followers, but all Republicans, Democrats, and corporate media have fallen down and can’t get back up.
Yes, the voter fraud claims seem like a level of BS that even Trump supporters might balk at - weeks of talking about “releasing the kraken,” and then nothing. But at least Trump's BS is entertaining, while Trump voters know the media are gaslighting them.
Republicans believe Trump will blow up the party as revenge if they don't support him. It's not something you worry about with most politicians, because they care enough about their party's agenda not to destroy it. But Trump simply doesn't care.
It's his party right now. There's only a handful of high profile Republican politicians that criticize him, and he's very popular with the Republican rank-and-file.
Odds are pretty good that Republicans are going to do very well in the 2022 mid-term elections (the opposition party to the President's party usually does), and that will just be taken as validation of Trump's hold over it. If he's healthy, he'll run again - he'll have to run again, or he becomes unimportant.
The GOP in America is split between delusional cultists and people who cynically take advantage of these cultists' delusions to push their own agenda. Up until recently (starting around the Nixon era I think), the cynics were the ones that held almost all of the political power, and the cultists were expected and mostly willing to fall in line behind whatever the cynics told them for fear of being labelled a traitor or a secret liberal. Trump has completely upended this dynamic; for the first time, the GOP cult had someone at the very highest levels of power who was stupid enough to fall in line with everything they said, rather than the other way around. Now that they know that's possible, it might be very difficult to convince them to go back to what they had before.
He has really good coattails. Republicans outran their polls in 2016 and 2020 with him on the ballot, and ran in line with their polls and lost ground in 2018 when he wasn't. And, after he lost and institutional Republicans were unwilling to pretend he hadn't and try to force an 1877 style compromise/coup, he tossed two Senate seats to Democrats in revenge.
In short, support Trump and you increase your chances to be in office, oppose him and you decrease them. That's reason enough for most folks.
Part of the answer is that a lot of people, especially but not exclusively Republicans, have correctly concluded that high status sources of information frequently lie to them, often for ideological reasons. Once you know that, it's tempting to believe what you want to believe or what you think your friends want you to believe, even when it isn't true.
For a mostly non-political example, Fauci has publicly admitted changing the estimate he gives of what is required for herd immunity in response not to medical evidence but to polling evidence. He has admitted publicly claiming that masks were not worth wearing not because it was true but because he wanted to make sure enough were available for medical personnel.
In a world where the highest status source of Covid information is an admitted liar, how do you decide who to believe — other than whoever agrees with you?
It might be worth looking at how they talk about various past presidents that are comparable in various ways, like Warren G Harding, Grover Cleveland, and the like. Those presidents hardly get mentioned in popular discussions.
I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic or not, but this is actually true. As someone whose sibling was in the Marines for the past four years, I'm grateful for it. Prior to Trump's candidacy the two frontrunners were Jeb Bush and Hillary, and arguably either of them would have been substantially more interventionist than Trump was.
Not sarcastic at all. I put it in quotes because the question was how historians would speak about Trump's presidency. Over the long term, all of history is war.
Are politicians from 50 years ago judged on the things that they would of seen as important? I am not sure.
Wilson, FDR, LBJ are judged on their attitude to civil rights.
My guess is:
He will be seen as someone who didn't end anti-asian discrimination in colleges.
The obsessions of the future will be very different from those of today but I think academic historians of the future many of who will be Asian and impacted by this, will see this as a huge thing.
Ah yes, the anti-asian Roko's basilisk. (In all seriousness, interesting point worth considering though I wonder if asian fertility rates render this very unlikely)
What instances are there of discrimination against groups that are successful in aggregate being historically notable? I can't think of any unless you really stretch the definition of "successful".
Fifty years ago was Nixon/Ford/Carter, depending on entirely how you parse it. The domestic politics of that time don't get much attention at all, being overwhelmed by a) the Nixon scandal b) Vietnam and c) other international events. As I don't think that modern median high school history classes get to VN these days, it's doubtful that students will learn much from historical analysis and more from pop culture and their parents.
Because I can almost remember that time, and I can see how modern history lumps things together. Why do you think that Nixon is the only relevant president?
One of the most interesting things is how shocking it seems now that Republicans could at one time be willing to impeach the president for something, *anything*, he had done. It's _utterly inconceivable_ that they would vote to impeach someone who did what Nixon did, today.
Fifty years ago was the seventies, and those three were president during the seventies. And, using the three of them is more interesting for discussion's sake.
As a recent high school graduate in the US, we definitely covered the 70s and Vietnam quite extensively. We got up through 9/11, at which point it gets too recent to really treat it in a US history course. I feel pretty confident that history classes in 50 years will go through to Trump and COVID-19.
my history class covered everything after the 50s by making the students research it themselves. My teacher called out a student for talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories.
To paraphrase a book, (I think it was Things Fall Apart?) there's recent history, old folk's history, and ancient history.
Sadly, if the blue team manages to maintain its stranglehold on the means of information dissemination, you may very well be right that a distortion of that magnitude will end up in the history books. Though I'm curious as to *what* terrorist organisation you think they'll manage to pin on him.
Unlikely. Remember Scott's post on the Georgist Land Tax? And the accompanying cartoons of characters who were such giant players on the political scene at the time, but which we had to scrabble about online looking up because their names had fallen into obscurity?
Back then, those cartoons were also associating Henry George with domestic terror groups, from Catholics to Marxists to the Knights of Labor:
"It was founded by Alley Thomas on December 28, 1869, reached 28,000 members in 1880, then jumped to 100,000 in 1884. By 1886, 20% of all workers were affiliated, nearly 800,000 members. Its frail organizational structure could not cope as it was battered by charges of failure and violence and calumnies of the association with the Haymarket Square riot."
And what was the Haymarket Square riot?
"The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre, Haymarket riot, or Haymarket Square riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day, the day after police killed one and injured several workers. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded."
Since the reaction of most of us here was "Powderly who?" (the founder of the Knights of Labor), I fear that your dreams of Trump The Terrorist going down in history books of the future are doomed to the same forces of obscurity and falling out of public memory as George and his supporters, allies and foes; from "possibly the largest funeral since Lincoln's" to "who are all those guys in that cartoon?"
"The New York Times reported that later in the evening, an organized funeral procession of about 2,000 people left from the Grand Central Palace and made its way through Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge. This procession was "all the way ... thronged on either side by crowds of silent watchers."
The procession then went on to Brooklyn, where the crowd at Brooklyn City Hall "was the densest ever seen there." There were "thousands on thousands" at City Hall who were so far back that they could not see the funeral procession pass. It was impossible to move on any of the nearby streets. The Times wrote, "Rarely has such an enormous crowd turned out in Brooklyn on any occasion," but that nonetheless, "[t]he slow tolling of the City Hall bell and the regular beating of drums were the only sounds that broke the stillness. ... Anything more impressive ... could not be imagined." At Court Street, the casket was transferred to a hearse and taken to a private funeral at Fort Hamilton.
Commentators disagreed on whether it was the largest funeral in New York history or the largest since the death of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times reported, "Not even Lincoln had a more glorious death." Even the more conservative New York Sun wrote that "Since the Civil War, few announcements have been more startling than that of the sudden death of Henry George." Flags were placed at half-staff, even at Tammany Hall, which cancelled its rally for the day."
Sic transit gloria mundi, and that holds for notoriety as well.
A few differences that make memory persist: storming the capital to alter an election is a slightly bigger deal than the events you describe, and we have now have actual video of these events that will likely live forever.
I'm not sure the degree of death and destruction is the only meaningful metric of historical notoriety. The fact is, it was unprecedented that the president was arguably party to storming the capitol in a (haphazard) effort to influence a legitimate election.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to call it an attempted coup, but it also led to the only president to have been impeached twice.
Both of these events are fairly unprecedented in American history, so I don't think you're weighing these impartially. These events WILL be notable entries in the history books.
Assuming he only serves one term, I think historians will mostly focus on how effective he was at using the conservative media ecosystem to gain dominance over the Republican Party, and eventually bend it around him during his time. They'll compare it to Reagan successfully mobilizing the New Right and evangelicals in 1980 to win, and the way that the plurality-win, winner-take-all structure of US elections at the time made a party tremendously vulnerable to anyone who could credibly threaten a third party move.
His actual Presidency will be mostly seen as unremarkably bad, with the frequent scandals and corruption allegations setting him apart from his predecessor's reputation for clean government and showing how little direct power Congress actually has over the Presidency as a branch, but nothing on par with your Andrew Johnson's or the like.
He might get dinged hard for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it probably will be identified as the reason he lost his re-election. But it's hard to say about that pandemic will be seen in a couple decades - it might just be seen as one of several bad ones, or the like.
A lot of now popular presidents were hugely controversial in their day. FDR was so credibly believed to have been plotting to overthrow some democracy (and there is some evidence he toyed with the idea!) that the Democratic leadership was watching him. Meanwhile, the majority of the Republican base believed his intention was to subvert democracy. There was even accusations of being put in power by the Communists or with Communist support.
Yet these days virtually all debates about Roosevelt center around the modern administrative state. People don't seem to remember what the controversies of his presidency actually were. They remember him as part of this grand narrative of the administrative state.
This is, as far as I can tell, the case for every president. It's possible Trump heralds some grand change. Personally, I think we're through a time increasingly like the late 19th century and no one's going to remember any of them. How many of you remember Chester Arthur, the unpopular and corrupt politician who only got into office because he was VP when Garfield was assassinated? Who had bold plans to reform the civil service and change racial politics in the US that were frustrated? Who supported controversial political movements that died with his political fortunes? And who ultimately lost his own party's nomination.
Hugely controversial in his day, now entirely forgotten.
There's definitely a lot of zerohedge style paranoia, mistrust, irrational pessimism and so forth among the crypto types, but calling it a form of identity politics is just Twitter Hot Take buffoonery.
"Without judgment, I’d say crypto bull online culture (as distinct from buying BTC quietly) is a form of identity politics."
I was originally going to accuse OP of misrepresenting the thread, but OP is the author of the the thread...
Hats off, Zohar! Being verbose and nuanced on twitter and then condensing it to the point of buffoonery on a rationalist blog deserves some kind of award for novel contrarianism :p
Here is a game, made by me, about bayesian updating and "putting a number on it" - you get together with friends; you watch a murder mystery TV show together; and buy and sell bets on who did it, using in-game money: https://murdershebet.com/
:) Though I do say so myself, it's super fun. I'm slightly allowed to say that because it is an adaptation of on Robin Hanson's boardgame of the same name. The whole thing is, precisely, a prediction market - i.e. it is a system where you are strongly incentivized to figure out what you think the probability of an event is, and then bet using that probability - i.e. the game works as a lie detector for the kinds of people who watch a murder mystery and say "oh I KNOW WHO DID IT NOW!"
How do you resolve ambiguous endings, such as someone like Michael Peterson ending with an Alford Plea? Guilty? I love the idea of prediction markets, but sometimes guilt or innocence is not truly resolved until years later.
To be clear, you're meant to be betting on single-episode murder mysteries, think Scooby Doo or Poirot, where 99% of the time you get a very clear "this person did it" at the end of the episode. Do not use my site to bet on something that's going to unfold over years, because when nobody is in the game any more, the game and all records of it get deleted!
Alford plea = guilty, yes, because the bets are on "who was it that did the crime that the story is about?"
Shouldn't an Alford plea mean "not guilty" in that cases? I would bet that an overwhelming majority of people who take Alford pleas in real life are innocent as there are few if any advantages outside the defendant's mind, but clear disadvantages such as difficulties in getting parole and likely a worse initial sentence compared to a normal guilty plea.
I think people only take Alford pleas when they are accused of something they consider so bad they are not willing to admit to it even to save years of their life. People accused of victimless crimes don't tend to take Alford pleas.
I've thought about a version of this game for horror/slasher films for predicting a) final survivors b) order of deaths. Not sure if it could be both at once.
Ahh, a friend of mine beat you to that, it's mentioned in the FAQ video :)
Actually you could do both of those at the same time! All you have to do is write eg "Bob is the next person to die" on a piece of paper and take a picture of that and buy and sell bets on it, and also write "Alice will survive the film" on another piece of paper and do the same. I wouldn't recommend to do this as the first game you play though!
I think I’m going to use the Tik Tok addiction piece in an essay for school. I want to trace the idea of moral culpability for addiction to an American sense of religious purity and punishment dating from our very religious days. Is there any part of ”personal failure addiction” which is specifically American?
I'm not American, but USA was founded by WAS*P*, and thus you might want to consider Protestantism overall. One of the key Protestant doctrines is the "Solus Christus", belief in Christ as the only necessary mediator (i.e. no church or ordained priests) between the individual believer and God. This heavily empathizes the individual responsibility to read the Scripture, interpret it and act in accordance, since there is no "certified" mortal world authority that you can consult and get a God-approved answer from.
From what I know of American culture, this "individual responsibility" thesis reverberates through it on almost every level - with protestants or not. In that sense, I think you can very much trace it to the "personal failure" position on addiction.
That’s so interesting, thank you! It is a final paper for English where we take all the texts we have studied this year and find a cohesive thesis through them, and I think I’m going to focus on religion and like you said specifically Protestantism and its influence on America. We read a few contemporary works about addiction in the Native American population and America’s response to that so I think I’m going to weave ACX in there. We also studied the transcendentalists this year so I thought that would be an interesting backup of religion’s influence on the notion of individualism and personal responsibility.
Can anyone recommend ACX-style blogs (ie. engagingly written, charitable to different points of view, rationally weighing data and arguments) but focused on UK culture/issues/politics?
His writing style seems a conscious imitation of Scott's but, while he has some good insights, the posts tend to ramble and not cohere well. A Scott post will tlak about a general phenomenon then bring in some interesting historical example, Cummings tends to bring up fairly unrelated things and toss out some buzzwords at the end in leiu of a solution
Thanks cynthesis. These are some great question! In the overfitted brain hypothesis the experience of dreams themselves are important. That is, unlike many other hypotheses around dreaming, the dreams aren't epiphenomenal. Instead, dreams change your brain just like waking experience does (although probably at a much lower "learning rate" due to neuromodulatory differences). So dreams aren't some side effect of a different neural process (like memory consolidation or a change in network gain) but are rather meant to be directly experienced, and the result is an increase in generalization and/or performance. And yes, it is definitely the case that "noise" in the brain is certainly signal (at some level), although it isn't treated as such by most neuroscientists!
Very cool! This reminds me of when I used to do neuroscience show and tells in local grade schools. After showing the brains and doing various demos we'd usually spend the last 10 minutes of the period in Q&A (good prep for oral quals). One stumper I still recall, 'what is a dream?' Think I mumbled something about brain waves and memory consolidation then fled the classroom
Anyway, I'm really quite pleased with how AI research has started influencing neuroscience and vice-versa. Nice work!
I’ve been thinking about this lately as my toddler recently started remembering her dreams. We’re not sure when this started but we do know she started having the occasional nightmare around the same time she hit a few other milestones in verbal ability and imaginative play, specifically telling original stories and asking “what if” questions. This kicked in a few months after she turned two, and it made us wonder which components of those mental abilities are key to what adults recognize as dreaming.
It helps that our kid is verbally precocious enough to tell us that she “was sleeping in the dinosaur park but the dinosaurs ate my bed and then they tried to eat me but Daddy saved me.” That’s the kind of thing that lets you say yeah, this kid’s brain is dishing up legit narrative dreams.
Yes! Very possibly. In fact one hypothesis we are testing is whether “artificial dreams” like VR experiences can act as substitutions for real ones to delay the effects of sleep deprivation.
It’s not implying that all, unless you somehow read that as “all effects” rather than “effects.” There are many effects of sleep derivation, this is a proposed stimulation focused solely on some of the cognitive effects of sleep loss.
I think reading "x the effects of y" to mean "all or most effects" is pretty standard, and you'd usually say "*some* effects" or "*a few* effects" if it weren't the case.
Not that it's a big deal, since you've clarified — I just had the exact same reaction as Laurence up there (and upon thinking about it, decided I was right in reading it the way we had; of course, I'm biased...)
"<I>Cure</I> potions lift the effects of diseases and poisons" — if you read this item description in an RPG and then discovered, after spending half your gold on them, that the potion only removes one or two effects of most ailments... well, you'd feel a bit gypped.
There's decent circumstantial evidence that dreams are a necessary process for the mammalian brain; cetaceans have their whole hemispheric sleep thing, *but* they still have a full-brain sleep every now and then which is REM.
So, if you assume evolution is a decent optimiser, probably not the *only* purpose (otherwise the hemispheric sleep wouldn't be useful), but *a* purpose (otherwise the full-brain REM sleep wouldn't be necessary).
We used to discuss this in a sleep lab I was in. The question is: *how* do you detect hemispheric REM? REM looks *a lot* like waking activity for most methods without, for instance, training a neural network to differentiate them. So it might even be that they have hemispheric dreaming and how would anyone know?
I'm actually of the opinion that lucid dreaming probably doesn't have the benefit of helping generalization, like regular dreams. Not that the occasional lucid dream is bad, but if you lucid dreamed all the time you wouldn't get the benefit of the stochasticity of normal dreams, which are like a noise injection to a neural network that keeps it from fitting to its biased daily sample too well.
There have been reports that covid RNA reverse-transcripts itself into DNA that then integrates into human cells. This is excessively banal, like 5-10% of human DNA is made from remnants of ancient viral DNA, and should be a surprise to no one but people who still believe "genes" and "the environment" can be separated at all, but in some cases this phenomenon is suspected to disrupt some genome regulation networks which is at the origin of certain types of cancer.
So this is absolutely not grounded in reality but one could make an interesting Ayn Rand type plot where, due to a lot of very rich and powerful people having had covid and fearing for their lives, "incentives" are magically aligned so that we find a cure for cancer in the next couple of decades. Free market fundamentalists rejoice! In any case the long-term followups to this unknown disease that struck millions of people are going to be interesting to watch.
I realize that's not particularly relevant to your COVID thought experiment, it's just one of my favorite weird biological facts I've squirreled away over the years
There are already a ton of actual oncoviruses. HPV is probably the most well-known among the general populace but there are many more besides.
Cancer research is also ludicrously well-funded through the contributions of grassroots donations and billionaire donors, huge biotech and pharma corporations, plus grants from the federal and every state government. My department literally just got a brand new light sheet microscope paid for entirely by Cycle for Survival (?) last week. The big roadblocks aren't monetary at this point IMO.
Incentives are perfectly aligned for 100% of reach people to solve aging, because they are pretty much guaranteed to die otherwise, and look how much money is flowing into anti-aging research (spoiler: not much at all). Same for regular non-covid-induced cancer and other diseases which everyone is very likely to get when they are old. The sad truth is, the very reach people are 1) not perfectly rational 2) not all-powerful wizards who can make anything happen on a whim.
Is there really? My impression was that there's a strong religious belief that it would be bad, and a mild cultural believe that it's it's sorta kinda not ok and can't be done anyway so whatever. But maybe just my social bubble. I'm pretty sure though it has nothing to do with bad leaders per se and those only get brought up as an excuse, because people who would sacrifice their life to get rid of a bad leader are exceedingly rare. Anyway, to my original point, without aging still there's a ton of unsolved medical problems that rich people suffer from just like anyone else and cancer is already one of them. Alas, if only The Rich were as all-powerful as some fantasize, we all could really benefit from being the same biological species with them.
TLDR: Scott wrote about Pride Parades as an aspect of civil religion. American society changed from police suppressing gay rights to marching for them. The latest step in that process is that NYC Pride is banning the police. Quite the reversal of positions in the 50 years since Stonewall.
Pretty shitty. I worked with a lot of LGBT cops many of whom had endured abuse in the profession decades ago when they joined. They did a lot to change the culture of policing and advance civil rights and this is the thanks they get.
Give it up for the NYPD's gay officers group: banned from a gay parade for being cops and a Irish parade for being gay in the same year—and it's only May!
Am I missing something? I’m fascinated about the response to the new CDC advise about masks. I’ve felt that since the beginning of the pandemic, that these organizations have been viewed as the mouth piece for the administration at times or the opposition depending on the time and situation. Never fully independent. Either a bunch of Democrats trying to stick it to the administration or republicans trying to tow the party line.
How a disease can become political was surprising but in retrospect, not unexpected. What isn’t political? What topic couldn’t be shaded for political advantage.
That being said, to have a democrat in power, have the CDC give basically give end of pandemic guidance, have the democratic administration basically agree by inaction, then still have to populous question what to do is puzzling.
(Democrats have generally been pro-mask, some republicans, anti-mask. I hate stereotypes, but needed to stretch for discussion purposes)
My logic fails me on this. I could probably flow chart this and I won’t make sense to me. I could understand if Trump was in power but with Biden in power, my logic falters.
I agree with the companies that are doing the honor code. Time for some independent responsibility. There are enough ICU beds for people who don’t abide by the honor code. Their call.
If I walk into a store and I see someone without a mask, I will assume they are vaccinated as I am.
If they aren’t, no worries, hope they don’t get sick from the other person who is pretending to be vaccinated like they are on the next isle but not really my concern.
At least in my area, they are having walk-up clinics. My 12 and 15 year old just got their first dose this week. Super easy. Could have picked many places and times.
I think my thoughts likely stem from the fact that I don’t expect this disease to just disappear. It has shown not to be seasonal, combined with the vast reservoir of cases across the world. Vaccination is the answer. One might worry about variants, which is something we probably should worry about but we could also worry about a plane crashing on my house right now. Both things we can’t control. Will leave that to the companies who stand to make money by creating boosters as these things arise.
A little about my background, so you can scrutinize my thoughts. I am a practicing physician in an outpatient setting. Would likely have a different view, which I understand, if I worked in the ICU.
Has the disease been shown not to be seasonal? I thought the consensus was that it *is* quite seasonal, as shown by the drastic difference in size between the summer peaks and winter peaks in the northern hemisphere (especially since the summer peaks, where they existed, came at a time with very little immunity and familiarity with disease control behaviors).
I almost didn’t put the seasonal, yes or no into the text because thought it would take away from the central topic. Really in the end who knows. The graphs initially looked like Europe was ahead and the US followed for much of last year. Though, I can’t see a typical pattern for most of the world. Look at Brazil. Even some European countries have had a April spike in 2020 and 2021. This doesn’t follow and summer or winter pattern.
Really my point was that this is unexpected to just disappear. Therefore we need to evaluate how to live with it. In the near term if not the long.
I’m a liberal Democrat by nature, socially at least, not necessarily financially. When I read the NYT, and the liberal news has lost their mind on the CDC guidance, just a little surprised.
There are studies putting this in numbers. There *are* seasonal effects, but they are minor order. Estimates vary a bit, but the effect to R-value seems to be 20-30% (between deep winter and hot summer in US/Europe climate). Roughly half of the effect comes from temperature, the other half from effects like UV radiation etc. So the effect of measures is much stronger than seasonal effects. The impression that it's seasonal comes mostly because people intuitively confuse "high numbers" with "increasing numbers". The numbers have increased strongly and consistently in most of Europe in June/July/August, but the starting point in April was so low that it needed months to become a threat.
It's plausible that the disease will become seasonal eventually. When large parts of the population have been infected or vaccined, and all measures have been abandoned, then the 20-30% change will be the dominant change. Then herd immunity effects are essentially a feedback system which bring the R-value close to one, and then it will be slightly above one in winter, and slightly below one in summer. For the flu, you see is an increase from October to February, and the "flu season" is at the end of winter in February, not throughout the whole winter. Probably the same will happen for Covid, but we are not yet there.
What about the effect due to 'It's summer let's have a picnic outdoors' vs 'it's winter let's gather in a poorly ventilated room with all the windows closed to keep the warmth in'? (the other way round in places where it's unbearably hot in summer)
Almost all work on the topic are correlational studies with observational data (how does increase rates correlate with temperature and with UV level?). So they take indirect effects like this automatically into account. Which also means that they can't tell apart *how* temperature affects spreading. We don't really know whether the effect is due to behaviour (indoor/outdoor) or the virus itself.
If you want to dive into the topic, I would disadvice you from reading random articles, since some are bad. Here is a systematic review of 517(!) articles on the topic. The conclusion is:
"Considering the existing scientific evidence, warm and wet climates seem to reduce the spread of COVID-19. However, these variables alone could not explain most of the variability in disease transmission. Therefore, the countries most affected by the disease should focus on health policies, even with climates less favorable to the virus. Although the certainty of the evidence generated was classified as low, there was homogeneity between the results reported by the included studies."
No, that's only true if you look for "high numbers" instead of "increasing numbers". Check yourself at https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases . Look at the number of newly confirmed cases. Important: select a log scale.
As I said, the numbers increased consistently and massively in almost all European countries in July and August. For example in Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Switzerland, ... Often by a factor of 10-100 within those two months.
Well July might be considered mid summer by modern meteorologists, but traditionally mid summer was considered to be when the day was longest, that is around June 21.
Therefore increases in July, August and September would correlate with drops in insolation. I know Ireland well, and Germany too, being of German and Irish extraction. I live in Ireland. Both countries had more or less removed all restrictions by early June last year, the original lockdown was never supposed to last more than a month. Irish pubs were closed but only if they didn't serve food, and most do. Hotels and shops were open until the second wave in late September.
What you get if you look at the cases in both countries and length of day from May when restrictions were lifted, or about to be, is a big drop to around June 21, small increases in July, and strong increases there after from a low base. The lowest number of cases seems to be exactly on or close to the solstice. You said this but you interpreted it differently as you seem to look at summer with regards to the heat, rather than the sun strength.
Ireland | 7 day average cases
May 21 | 81
June 21 | 11 ( the lowest in the year).
July 21 | 21
August 21 | 109
September | 271
Germany is similar. There is a very strong correlation there between length of day and cases. And August may be hot and summer but 21st august has about the same day length as April 21st.
At the equinox September 21st has 5 hours less sunlight in Ireland, and much less insolation as the sun is weaker. (in fact Ireland people used to be taught until very recently that May, June and July were summer. Which makes sense from a perspective of light, rather than heat. )
Germany shows the same trend. Drops to about its lowest 7 day average on the 20th, stays relatively flat in July, and increases quite strongly as the nights draw in.
Hm, I don't find this convincing. I would argue that you confuse absolute values with slope, so let me try to convince you. You argue for the following causal relation:
*decrease of insolation (less insolation today than yesterday)* -> *increase of infections*, which fits to the increase in July/August
or
*small absolute value of insolation* -> *small absolute value of infections*, which fits to the minimum infection numbers being at end of June.
But those presumed causal relations don't make sense. If insolation affects the virus, then it doesn't matter whether insolation is higher or smaller than yesterday. Instead, it matters whether we have strong insolation or weak insolation. So for July and August, it shouldn't matter that insolation is decreasing. It should matter that those are the months with very high insolation (second- and fourth highest months of the year).
So the pattern for seasonal diseases should be:
*low insolation* -> *increase of infections*
And that is indeed what we see for influenca. You can check the data here:
In countries like Germany, influenca generally has low levels throughout summer. The is no sign of increase in May, June, July, August, or early September. Which makes sense because those are the months with high insolation and high temperatures. Influenca cases start increasing around the end of September, and continue to grow throughout the winter until they max out, typically between late January and early March. So here we have
high insolation (May-August) -> no growth
low insolation (October-February) -> growth
So the pattern that you suggest for Covid (decline in April/May, minimum in June, strong growth in July/August) does not fit the pattern of a seasonal disease. If we analyze the data really carefully and adjust for all kind of things, a seasonal effect does exist. But it's not a strong one.
My guess is that pandemic response in general, and masks in particular, still has partisan subtext that people can't fully shake. People see it as a concession/betrayal to reverse positions even when it starts to make sense to do so.
Masks offer a sense of control, safety, and perhaps even virtue, in exchange for very little personal sacrifice. I think it makes sense that people cling to masks as long as they have nonzero appetite for those feelings. Whereas meaningful sacrifices like sitting quietly at home, or maintaining six feet from the friends you want to hug, require much more powerful motivations.
Because of the politicization of covid and masks in general some people will continue wearing masks entirely because they don't want to appear like a Trumper.
I feel the same way, but I've definitely met some people who feel differently - at the risk of being too self-congratulatory, I think this is a good divider between people who disliked Trump mostly based on his constant bad actions, and people who actually did kinda get TDS.
Everyone I've heard (in my very-left bubble) that is worried about the new CDC guidelines is explicitly saying that they're worried that it only applies to vaccinated individuals, but since there's no way to tell whose vaccinated, it'll effectively mean it applies to everyone. Even though were only sitting around ~50% vaccinated. When they walk into a store and see someone without a mask, they assume that person is not vaccinated (after all, they've been seeing non-masked people since before vaccines were available).
Personally I'd have liked them to have set out this guideline in advance and make it tied to the population level of vaccines: something like "once we hit 65% vaccinated, everyone vaccinated can take off their mask. Have you done your part yet, citizen?" Otherwise I'm very in favor of the new rules. Vaccines work really well and we need to reflect that in our policy.
For those that are concerned about the new guidelines, why are they worried about being near unvaccinated people if they are vaccinated? Or is this just a general worry about unvaccinated people hurting other unvaccinated people?
You don't know if you are one of the ~10% of people in whom the vaccines don't take, but if everyone you meet has been vaccinated you are pretty safe with herd immunity. The chances of two people in whom the vaccine didn't take are 10% * 10%.
Understood, but it is not so simple as “some % of people still get COVID.” The chances of symptomatic disease are greatly reduced, and severe disease nearly eliminated. People have a right to be irrationally scared, but if you are relatively young and don’t have a health issue, it’s pretty irrational.
Efficacy was defined in the trials as the reduction in risk, so 90% efficacy does not mean that “the vaccine doesn’t take“ in 10% of people. (That interpretation postulates that, without the vaccine, your risk of infection would have been 100%! Shit is contagious but not that contagious, plus it’s overdispersed, meaning 80% or 85% of sick people don’t transmit it to anyone at all. Your risk as a fully vaccinated person is estimable at somewhere between 0.2% and 0.0008%.
My Oh So Cynical prediction last fall was that, should the administration change, the New Improved Administration would make a lot of noise about "doing something" but change nothing. They would then declare victory at the end of Flu Season.
This seems to have happened.
TBF, with the Old Unimproved Administration, I ALSO expected them to change nothing, then declare victory at the end of Flu Season.
Widespread misinterpretation of 95% risk reduction as “5 in 100 vaccinated people will still get sick,” combined with hangover from deeply terrible past messaging based on the state of understanding at the time including, especially, “vaccinated people can still spread it” (itself the same kind of widespread misunderstanding of “we don’t have evidence yet“, I’m not sure if better messaging on this would have helped but what we had was a total shit show) and “masks don’t protect the wearer“ (this one was probably legit at the time and a lot of people never updated).
It’s awful. I’m blue as they come and I too am just like ....what.
So, economics question. Econ 101 describes price as a function of quantity, with a demand curve that slopes downward, a supply curve that slopes upward, and equilibrium at their intersection. Less demand at higher prices makes sense. What has confused me for quite some time is why the supply curve is treated as sloping upwards (increased price with increased quantity). It assumes a marginal cost of production that grows with production, in other words, a negative economy of scale; but this is pretty clearly the exception and not the rule. Logically, the supply curve should be flat, if anything sloping very slightly downward (even for an aggregate supply curve, you'd get scale effects from complements being bigger; and while in some cases you'd eventually run into finite resources, basic supply-and-demand is not modeling this).
What I've read online as a defense of a positive-sloping supply curve is that it applies to short-term equilibrium, when you can't expand production to meet demand. But "short-term equilibrium" is a nonsensical concept - if the decision-makers can predict the future, they'll be aware of that future (i.e. if demand for folders in high on weekdays and low on weekends, prices will still be stable). And yes, all models are wrong but some are useful; but there's not very many models that will stay useful when you flip a negative sign.
My best guess is that this is something that's only relevant for Econ 101 and nowhere else. But I'd still be interested in what actual economists think.
If you imagine a lot of different producers of the good, each with different costs and different maximum capacities, I think you get an upward-sloping supply curve just from that.
If you think in terms of a given producer with a given setup for producing the good, then I think you also get an upward sloping supply curve--his factory is set up to produce up to X/day, and if he wants to push it past that, he has to face some diminishing returns--maybe paying overtime, maybe putting off some maintenance to keep the machines running longer, whatever.
That's the "short-term equilibrium" explanation. Again, the problem is that you're assuming, in both cases, an absolute maximum, where it's impossible to build another factory (and building the second factory is ~always going to be easier than the first). So you have an absolute maximum, which can be maybe raised a little with overtime for a small section of increasing marginal cost - but below that maximum the curve will slope downward (running industry at 50% capacity takes up more than half the effort), and at the physical limit it stops entirely; but all of that only holds in the short term.
It’s not quite so neat. Yes, this is short-term, but it takes time to build another factory, so that matters.
And there is no absolute cut-off at “capacity” - if the price increases by one million percent, you might hire more people and start producing in the parking lot, but your productivity will not be good.
If we really want to talk about the long term, where every margin can be adjusted, there are still factors increasing cost at the margin because you’re competing for resources with the rest of the economy. To get more widgets in the long term, we have to get fewer blogets, and the inputs widgets and blogets share will rise in price, unless those factors have a perfectly flat supply curve.
But at that point, we should perhaps abandon partial equilibrium for general equilibrium, which is a headache.
There are lots of “ceteris paribus” assumptions underlying the use of any sort of curve in that space. In other words, it is a huge simplification. If you have a model that can disaggregate all the factors and make better predictions, let’s hear it. Of course, it might not be too hard to come up with better predictions using a ouija board.
Maybe the short answer is, if supply curves slope down, there are no stable equilibria. Supply has to be below demand at low output, or things never get off the ground. So long as it stays below demand, output will expand. Presumably some external constraint covered by ceteris paribus will prevent infinite output at n/infinity prices. Which means that in the local region, supply is below demand at lower outputs, above demand at higher. That could still be sloping down, so long as not more steeply than demand.
Yeah, you get an approximately flat supply curve as a function of quantity, with a ~constant price, which still allows equilibrium if demand slopes downward. The difference being that when demand (permanently) rises exogenously, quantity produced goes significantly up, but price goes slightly down. When demand drops exogenously, meanwhile, quantity produced goes down (as it would for the standard textbook model as well) but prices rise. And this seems fairly reasonable to me - i.e. trying to buy out-of-print anything.
I think you're looking at cost of supplying as a function of number supplied. But this curve is supposed to give number supplies as a function of market price. The theory is that suppliers will figure out more ways to supply widgets if their price is higher (either by selling widgets that they are currently sitting on, or starting up new widget factories, or whatever).
However, I think some of the points you mention make clear that this shouldn't be a *function*. If it's possible to make up to 10 widgets a day at $1 each, or at a fixed cost of $100 per day, to operate a factory that makes an unlimited number of widgets at marginal cost of $0.50 each, then a situation in which 10 widgets are demanded and supplied per day is stable for a $1 price, *and* a situation in which 210 widgets are demanded and supplied per day is stable for a $1 price.
But I think the Econ 101 graph is imagining what would happen to purchasers if you replaced all suppliers with a magical bottomless sack of widgets at $x each, and what would happen to suppliers if you replaced all purchasers with a buyer that buys unlimited widgets at $x each. In my example, at any price strictly above $0.50, the number of widgets supplied is infinite, and at $0.50 and any lower price, the number of widgets supplied is zero.
I keep mixing up 'flat' and 'vertical' on this, maybe because demand slopes downwards and textbook-supply upwards regardless of which is the independent variable.... Anyway, yes, agreed.
Not that it applies to everything, but I've often heard oil as a central example. If society didn't demand much, there'd be enough gushing out of the ground that oil production would be very inexpensive. The more demand there is, the more otherwise-barely-unprofitable supply might suddenly be profitable.
I think this works best for natural resources. The best ag land is very productive, the easiest water to extract is surface water, the first tree you cut down or ore you extract will be chosen because it's the easiest, etc.
To your point, venture from natural resources and things do get a bit more complicated, but a lot of the same principles apply elsewhere.
It's very much a sensible model of extractive resources, but weirdly the textbook example always seems to be a factory. I guess the dividing line is what Georgism (as per the recent book review) calls land versus capital.
If that's the case then the price of oil should increase with time, assuming demand doesn't drop. Instead, you have a volatile price that has little to do with demand, except that it tends to spike during recessions when demand should be lowest.
I'm pretty sure the only time the oil price rose with a recession is when the oil price caused the recession. In 2008-2009, oil price went from $170-$50 with the markets, and with the COVID induced whatever you want to call it, oil prices briefly went negative.
The reason the price of oil doesn't increase over time is because we develop new technology in almost exactly the right amount to cancel out the effects of worse and worse drilling locations.
The supply curve simply reflects the law of supply, which says that as price increases, the quantity that producers are willing and able to supply increases. EG: when wages rise, more workers are willing to supply their labor. When Uber prices rise during high demand periods, more drivers are willing to supply rides. When rents rise, , more people are willing to rent out spare bedrooms. As for long-term, the long-term equlillbrium changes when supply increases I.e, when the supply curve shifts right) , not when quantity supplied increases. The supply curve represents the relationship between price and quantity supplied, not price and supply. Supply is best thought of as the amount supplied at all prices (i.e, the entire supply curve). Quantity supplied is the amount supplied at a specific price (i.e., a point on the supply curve).
Here’s my basic understanding of it. I’m going to start with an example that’s a bit clearer where the “demand slopes down” breaks.
Let’s ask “how much would a consumer pay to add 1 mph to the top speed of their car.” If you went out, just collected data on car prices, and didn’t control for stuff (which is a sin), you’ll probably see spikes around 150 (sports car) and 350 (race car). This isn’t because people suddenly get vastly more enjoyment in those ranges of speeds, it’s because you start buying a different product (prestige and winning respectively).
Econ 101 is an intro course, so this kind of oversimplification (ignoring those bumps) is common. But in reality, most products when you buy enough or high enough quality of them turn from one thing into another (commonly the item into a prestige symbol).
So relating this back to your original question... Yes, you have these upward sloping supply curves shown to you. And yes, scale effects are real. The idea is that you’re modeling something that doesn’t change (say, the cost of hiring a cashier). In that example, you will burn through the labor pool and have to pay more in wages. The scale effects that cheapen it are a different product that the graph is kind of magicking away.
You are more or less correct that the upward sloping supply curve is an econ 101 construction. It's not useless elsewhere, but it's the simplest model that has any use at all so it's it gets the focus in 101 and other models come later.
In Intermediate Micro, you do indeed typically talk about a flat supply curve, where every firm is producing at their break even price, and an increase in demand only raises equilibrium price in the short term, and in the long run more firms enter the market and the equilibrium price goes back to the break even price(this model assumes that all firms have identical cost functions).
I wouldn't say it's relevant literally nowhere else. It's relevant anywhere that we supply might be constrained. As you say, this is in the short term. If there is a an unexpected surge in demand for a good, it takes time for suppliers to build more factories and such, so it makes sense to talk about the time before such additional supply can come online.
Also if you're looking at the supply of something with a fixed supply. Say, shares of a stock(yes companies can issue more, but ultimately there is only 100% of the company to be owned) or Gold on earth, the hours of labor you can supply, etc.
Thanks - this is closest to what I was looking for as a reply. I guess part of my question is whether economics actually builds more complex models by slapping things on top of supply/demand curves, or whether the models are something else entirely.
context: i have a bachelors in Econ and did a smidge of masters level coursework, but am not employed as any sort of practicing "economist"
but from my limited exposure to such people, my impression is that professional economists these days are mostly applied statisticians, doing "econometrics", within specific domains, and not really doing much general econ theory/model building
the idea/point behind all the "supply/demand" stuff in 101, is just to build an intuition for the broader idea that people respond to incentives. Exactly how they respond to incentives is extremely hard to predict. We have some basic stable ideas like, "an increase in price (usually) results in people buying less of a thing"(aka "law of demand"). But much beyond that predicting human behavior is hard and any decent/honest economist will tell you that economists are no better than anyone else at predicting when the next recession will be
the stats/econometrics come in in trying to figure out more specific and useful things. Like an environmental economist working in government might be sifting through the data to see exactly how much consumer/business behavior changed in response to a regulation that was passed. The problem is that a million other variables are all changing all the time too, so isolating variables is hard and you use various statistical methods to get the best answer you can. Econ models/theory can give you intuition/ideas about where to look and what to look for, but that's about it. And whatever conclusions you do find in the data are domain specific and you aren't really fed back into any sort of attempt at general/comprehensive econ theories/models
from what i remember of intermediate/advanced Micro, we covered several things that were augmentations/expansions/related to the classic supply/demand model, and also a handful of other models for other situations that had no direct relation. I was less into Macro... but from what I remember offhand, I think all the models covered in intermediate macro were their own thing, not in any way extensions on top of Supply/Demand
I don't know much about economics, but here goes how I see it. The "short term" would mean that you have enough time to hire more people, buy more materials, but not enough to build new factories and refactor everything to optimise for scale. I guess it might be the case that you can get lower prices for your raw materials if you buy more of them. But I guess the most common situation is that to get extra workers you have to pay marginally more for more crappy ones, and to squeeze extra production from your workers / factory / whatever, you also need to pay more.
Producers might anticipate that after some investment, they'll be able to produce more of the good at a lower price, but till that time comes, they wouldn't sell at a price that makes them run out.
My intuition: Not all supply curves are like that; it’s mostly a simplification. But to the extent it is an accurate model, think about diminishing marginal returns. If you hire 10 people, you hire the best 10 people you can find. The 11th person hire, all else equal, is worse (let’s call it less productive) than the previous 10, or else you would have hired them first. So you get less output for every additional input. Hence increasing marginal costs as output goes up. This goes for locations, you always build your first store in the best location you can find, subsequent stores will likely be in slightly worse locations. For prices of inputs—the first employee may be eager to work, the thousandth may take more pay and benefits. For time, you’re probably more productive on your first widget of the day than the one right before close. Your first bond issued at a low rate, the last one at much higher rates because lenders demand more return for the higher risk (more leverage). Etc
The usual supply curves I've seen graph price versus *aggregate* supply. The only way that curve could trend flat or down would be if the marginal cost of production were zero or negative, respectively. It sounds like you are interpreting the "supply" curve as the marginal cost of production versus number produced, which is not what I've usually seen called a "supply curve."
I guess that may have come out garbled. But for example, the aggregate supply of gasoline at $5/gallon is greater than that at $4/gallon, simply because it costs *something* to get one more gallon of gasoline out of the ground. So if you want 400 million gallons per day instead of 300 million, it will cost you whatever the extra cost of extracting 100 million more gallons is.
Ah, but it graphs *per-unit* price versus aggregate supply. So if the marginal cost of producing a new widget is (positive, but) less than the average cost of producing the previous ones, the supply curve will slope downwards, because the average cost of production is decreasing.
So, first of all, there are a lot of different models of supply, and how exactly each is used depends on what the researcher is studying in particular. Having said that, the simplest and probably most often used model of production does indeed have constant returns to scale. It also has a positive sloping supply curve. How can it have both? Well, these things have different definitions, and I think it can be a illuminating to explain the details.
This simple model is the Cobb-Douglass production function. Given an amount of capital, K, and labor-hours, L, total production is F(L,K) = A * K^a * L^(1-a), with a between zero and one, and A just some constant that reflects productivity. This form of production function has constant returns to scale, because if double the amount of capital and also double the amount of labor, you get exactly double the output. If you had instead, say, F(L,K) = K^0.75 * L^0.75, that would be an example of increasing returns to scale, since doubling the inputs results in about 2.8 times the output.
What about the supply curve? In this case, the supply curve is defined as the marginal cost of production, *maintaining the amount of capital fixed* at some given amount. Mathematically, the supply curve is equal to the derivative of F(L,K) with respect to L. The idea, like you said, is that this is a short-run model: a firm can adjust the hours worked pretty fast, but installing additional capacity (increasing K) takes more time. Why does supply it slope upwards in this case? Because you are throwing more and more labor at the problem, while capital is more and more scarce. Imagine trying to produce more widgets by squeezing more and more people in the same warehouse with no additional tools or anything. To think of it as an equilibrium concept, the terms you posed, suppose the decision maker predicted the demand would be such that they would minimize expected costs by having capital equal to K0. The more they underestimated demand, the more their marginal cost would be.
Now, is this a realistic model of how firms work? No, it is not. Like I said, this is basically the simplest thing you can possibly write that still has enough of the properties economists consider relevant, and very easy to work with. In serious research you would have to take a lot more into account, and that's not even abandoning the assumption of perfect competition. For a good example of that, check out this paper (with punny title as a bonus):
I wrote: "Mathematically, the supply curve is equal to the derivative of F(L,K) with respect to L." That is actually the marginal productivity of labor.
Actually, the supply curve is just marginal cost function, that is, just the derivative of the total cost of producing x units of output, with respect to x, while keeping K fixed.
The Econ-101 version of the demand curve does suffer for not having a time axis. But on any time scale shorter than "I can build a new factory and put it into production", and for any economic perturbation less predictably certain than "Building a new factory will surely be profitable", meeting increased demand will mean e.g. running double shifts in an existing factory. Doubling wear and tear on the machinery, which is roughly linear, but also either paying your workers time-and-a-half for overtime or hiring new workers - and the workers you've got were the best and cheapest you could find in the labor market, the marginal new worker will either be less productive or demand higher wages to leave his current job.
You'll also need more parts and materials, so either those suppliers have to run double shifts (see above), or you'll have to bid for parts and materials that were going to other customers yesterday. Customers who were willing to pay as much yesterday as you were, and some of whom would be willing to pay more to keep their supply.
In the longer term, it gets messy. A long-term demand increase might mean "I can build a bigger more efficient factory", but it can also mean "I have to get the extra copper from a mine that only has low-grade ore". And the next marginal skilled worker is probably still going to cost more than the last.
Very reassured about Apple's commitment to protecting my privacy from the NSA/FBI and advertising companies, given that apparently their employees are too delicate to work in the same office with a guy who once wrote some sexist stuff in a book talking about his girlfriend.
I wish it wasn't so normal to interpret any criticism of women as sexism. How do you know the author doesn't feel the same about men? The book made comments like "Bay Area women suck in the following ways, eastern European women like my girlfriend are better". Without any comments about Bay Area men, how are we to infer if this is sexism or not? "He chose to comment about women only" isn't a point I don't think, since the topic of women was presumably prompted by him wanting to talk about his girlfriend.
I agree with your first sentence but not your reasoning. You know he probably just meant the women. We are in an era where any (negative, or simplifying, profiting men) generalization about women is "sexist", whether true or not.
I think this is an abomination, and the truth, and even coarse models approximating the aggregate truth even if not perfect, cannot be "sexist" or not, it's just what is or what someone perceives.
And the thing is, people didn't like hearing his remarks (if it's the one I've seen quotes) about themselves so they punished him for daring to say something negative, even if it has truth to it; especially if it does.
I mean, the book is apparently also strongly anti-privacy, and his experience as an exec was with Facebook, so firing him probably *is* good for your privacy.
Firing him may be good for my privacy, but having a workforce too delicate to deal with him as a coworker because he once wrote something kinda sexist in a book seems very bad for expecting any good outcome at all.
I'm not aware of the incident you are referring to, but being willing to fire employees over writing a book containing some sexists stuff and caring about your customer's privacy seem kind of orthogonal to me. Could you elaborate on why you believe they aren't?
I would like to see this plotted against the religosity of the incoming class. I suspect that it is driven more by peer pressure than any actual coursework.
Interesting that pre-law was the lowest for decrease in religiousity. If critical self-reflection and careful thought is the biggest predictor of the change, isn't that exactly the kind of thinking skills that you would expect a pre-law program to encourage?
While I can see that perspective, my intuition is the opposite of yours. Law, at least at the attorney level, involves working within the given texts and precedents. Lawyers benefit strongly from a kind of deliberate uncriticality as a consequence. In this way it isn't meaningfully distinct from ecclesiastical argumentation, or Rabbinic law, or Islamic jurisprudence.
Or maybe the process of understanding the complexity of and figuring circumventions for human laws makes one see all the flaws in "divine" law. The lack of nuance kind of undermines the claim to "divinity". You'll inevitably just see it as obviously a set of human laws written for smaller, less sophisticated societies that had to manage fewer types of human interactions. I mean really, only 10 commandments?
Dividing academia into "inquiry-based" fields and "fields that apply knowledge" struck me as vague. Using the word "science" as an antonym for "inquiry" made the confusion seem deliberate.
Using a survey of undergraduates and getting a score of 8% from one category and 11% from the other as evidence of the categories "differences" struck me as exquisite satire
When I see something about an academic study finding that science and religion are less in conflict than commonly believed, my immediate paranoid response is "I bet the Templeton Foundation is involved somehow". The disturbing thing is how consistently this turns out to be true.
The work in question here was done by one John H Evans of UCSD. He and Elaine Eklund (a name that will be familiar to those who follow this sort of thing) "co-direct a $2.9M re-granting project, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, dedicated to research in this area" [https://johnhevans.ucsd.edu/research/sociology-of-religion-and-science/].
Of course, being funded by an organization that pours a lot of money into trying to convince the world that science and religion are happy bedmates doesn't make Evans's work bad or prove it's false. But the fact that it _only_ seems to be Templeton-funded research that ever points this way seems highly suspicious.
Further disclaimer: all these observations are also what we would expect in a world where (1) there is in fact no real conflict between science and religion and (2) for random path-dependent historical reasons the Templeton Foundation happens to be the only entity willing to find people researching the relations between science and religion. So to whatever extent #2 is true, my observations are not very good reason to be skeptical of Templeton-funded claims of #1.
Hm? I thought "inquiry-heavy fields are more likely to make people lose their religion" was a point against religion (with the smallness of this effect as a mitigating factor). It makes some sense to me that studying "science" often doesn't chip away at religiosity.
- partly because if you don't become a researcher you won't really do science (in a science class you're mostly supposed to memorize stuff, and I remember when we would do "experiments", we knew what the correct result was from the beginning),
- partly because (I imagine) skeptical inquiry is a relatively small and optional part of a researcher's job, and
- partly because people compartmentalize parts of their lives, so that in order for skeptical inquiry to spill over into their religious life, some additional factor is needed beyond ordinary academic training.
The Templeton Foundation's specific agenda (as it seems to me, anyway) is to knock down the traditional narrative that puts Science and Religion in a centuries-long conflict. (Rather than, e.g., to promote religion in every way possible.) That traditional narrative says that the Discoveries of Science conflict with the Dogmas of Religion, which might lead you to expect that studying science would turn people away from religion.
I should reiterate that I'm not claiming that that traditional narrative is actually correct, only that I find it a bit fishy that every single time I hear about something contrary to it being published it seems to be funded by the same people. And I should reiterate that one possible explanation is that they are the _only_ people funding _any_ research in this area :-).
Assuming for the sake of argument that Evans's findings are right, I don't think they're much of a point against religion, because what I would expect is that more inquiry-heavy fields will have more of a tendency to make people _change their minds_, whatever position they started out with.
I had a look at the actual Evans paper. (The full text is available at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1m45v2hg, I don't know how legally.) It doesn't seem super-impressive to me. (Not super-unimpressive either.) A few examples of things that seem a bit iffy: You'd think an obvious and easy next step given the reported results would be to look at a two-way classification: pure science, applied science, pure non-science, applied non-science, but he never does that. Some of the classifications seem a little dubious (e.g., nursing is considered an "applied science"; psychology is considered a "pure non-science"; these are both among the most commonly taken subjects; sociology and anthropology are both considered "pure non-sciences"). The main thing he does is a big regression, with science/non-science and pure/applied among the independent variables; but there are many many other independent variables in the regression, included as "controls", and while there's a lot to be said for this it does mean that when those things correlate strongly with the variables of interest (science/non-science and pure/applied) the results may mislead. I note, for instance, that one of those other independent variables is whether the student said that "making a theoretical contribution to science" is a goal they have; that one ends up with highly significant positive coefficients for the secularization outcomes. Another is grade point average in high school; this one ends up with a highly significant _negative_ coefficient (which, I should say, is a point _against_ the science-secularizes idea, because I suspect science students tend to have higher GPA). I'd have liked to see what happens if you do the regression with various subsets of the control variables; I'd trust the results more if they turn out to be robust against different choices there.
I'm confused by the American idea of a "suburb". I live in Australia, where every subdivision of a city is known as a suburb, with the possible exception of the central business district. But in the US it seems to mean something else, but I've never quite figured it out.
Is the Upper West Side of New York a suburb? Is the Outer Sunset area of San Francisco a suburb? Is Berkeley a suburb? Is Mountain View a suburb? Is San Jose a suburb? Is Beverly Hills a suburb?
In the US, a suburb is the residential area surrounding a city, usually defined by single-family homes on large-ish lots (1/8 acre to 1 acre, I think is typical), in large neighborhoods with little-to-no commercial property. Commercial property is concentrated in malls and strip malls with large parking lots that must be driven to.
In addition to C MN's answer, note that Americans often talk about large metropolitan areas as being composed of multiple cities, even when they are very close to each other. For example, Berkeley and Oakland are considered two separate cities.
(I'm from NZ, and was also confused about this when I moved to the US.)
I think this is because they *are* two separate cities. The City Council of Berkeley can't make decisions that affect the City of Oakland, and vice versa. If by city you mean the political subunit demoninated as such, calling Oakland and Berkeley differnet cities would be technically correct.
Right, what I mean is that this usage of "city" isn't as common elsewhere. E.g. Greater London is about the same size as the Bay Area, but it's divided into boroughs not cities.
I could be wrong, but I believe that cities in the US generally don't form by division, but rather by addition. No one divided the bay area into cities; rather, cities formed next to other cities until the contiguous cities formed the metropolis known as the bay area.
Nearly all of Clark County Georgia is Athens, except for one little bit that's Winterville. Nobody looked at the metro area and decided this was a reasonable way to divide it; rather, as Athens grew it swallowed up a nearby small town.
Marietta started off outside metro Atlanta, and then became a suburb as metro Atlanta grew.
If you look at city limits in metro Cleveland, the towns mostly look reasonably compact, except Cleveland itself has tentacles snaking in between the others. I can't imagine that was the result of someone thinking it was a reasonable way to divide things up; I think Cleveland must have expanded into every place that wasn't already a town.
Greater London is centuries older than the Bay Area, and 'the Bay Area' wasn't all one thing until relatively recently. LA is younger than SF, but for geographical reasons spread faster, so that it seems all one thing. Also, I wonder what older residents of those areas use when talking about different urban centers.
We'd refer to the surrounding counties of a city as, for example, the suburbs of San Francisco. The Upper West Side and the Outer Sunset would qualify as neighborhoods.
In the US a "suburb" is ordinarily a place that's within the economic and cultural orbit of a city but is not subject to its government. The Upper West Side is politically part of the city and so not a suburb-- as is Staten Island despite its suburban character. Beverly Hills, on the other hand, is a suburb: it's run by its own government, not by LA. It gets confusing at times because cities frequently grow by annexing their suburbs.
I would define suburb more narrowly. For example, the city of East Point GA is legally a separate city from Atlanta, but is clearly part of Atlanta in every other way. (Atlanta has several cities like this). East Point is not a suburb; it is fully urban. Peachtree City, on the other hand, is almost entirely middle-class residential, and most of the residents drive to work in Atlanta every day (a 45 minute drive in good traffic). Peachtree City is a suburb.
The Cleveland metro area is smaller and much less spread out than Atlanta. The city of Lakewood borders Cleveland, and that edge of Lakewood looks like part of Cleveland, but most of Lakewood is middle-class residential, so I would call Lakewood a suburb too.
East Point is fully part of Atlanta's mass transit, with its own train station. Peachtree City has no mass transit. The residents don't want it. They worry that neighbors who can't afford cars would bring crime.
Lakewood has a train station in the part that looks like part of Cleveland (or maybe just across the line in Cleveland, I'm not sure). The rest of Lakewood just has busses.
Ah! Hmm. What is your understanding of the word itself? Like, what is "sub-urb" a shortening/contraction of for you? From your post, it looks to me like the "sub" is short for "subdivision"? So you use the word as a shortening of something like "subset of a larger urban area"?
Not sure I'm reading you right, but yeah, as an American that is pretty different than what I understand the word to mean. Though I'm not even sure all Americans use the term identically. And there is overlap between the concepts of your suburb and my suburb, confusing the whole thing further.
My understanding, is that "suburb" is a shortening of "suburban", as in sub-urban, as in, less dense than urban. And if you are even less dense than suburban, then you're at "rural". There aren't really exact lines on where the terms start and stop. But if you have high rises it's definitely urban. Single family homes would be called "suburban" and a neighborhood at that density can be called "a suburb". Exactly how close the houses can get to each other before becoming urban or how far apart before being rural is not nailed down.
So while Berkeley or Hollywood or Brooklyn are subsets of larger named urban areas, I would never call any of them suburbs because they are all very urban areas. There are bits of Beverly Hills that I would classify as definitely urban, and others that feel very suburb to me.
Thinking about the housing density that I’ve experienced, a reasonable quick-and-dirty rule for separating suburbs from more urban areas might be “does each property have at least as much space occupied by yard as by house”. If the majority of the property is made up of the structure itself, the odds are pretty good that it’s too urban to really consider a suburb.
I think this is hitting at the reason it's confusing for Australians. Our cities are very low-density; go 5 km from Melbourne's CBD and you're in mostly-houses territory, which then goes on for another 45 km in every direction (further in the southeast). As such, "everything but the CBD" essentially *is* "suburbs" for us.
Others have offered the economic and governance perspectives. I will give you the physical and planning code perspective. Suburbia is a system of pods. Each pod has a single use: housing, work, shopping, or civic. The pods have internal street networks. Buildings must be set back at significant distance from those streets, and must provide as much parking as their visitors could ever desire, so a big building has a big parking lot between it and the street. If there's leftover space, landscaping. The pod street networks are isolated from each other, but have limited numbers of portals to collector roads, which connect pods to each other and to highways.
Berkeley, Outer Sunset, and the Upper West Side match almost none of these characteristics, except that you can relatively deep inside a residential zone with a long way to the nearest business. The good news is that you can probably reach that business safely on a bike: take the smaller streets parallel to the main thoroughfares.
Large swaths of Mountain View, San Jose, and Beverly Hills match these characteristics much more closely, although not absolutely (schools mixed in with houses, and retail on collector roads between residential pods instead of in proper shopping centers).
I think the defining characteristic of a suburb is that it is a commuter residential area for an established city. You don't have suburbs before a significant number of people have options to work outside of walking distance from their house. Once people can commute to work by some means, it becomes possible to live in the cheaper areas outside a city and travel in to the city to work, and this forms suburban areas which serve as overflow housing for the urban area.
The first thing to look for in whether something is a suburb is the local commuter infrastructure and activity. Infrastructure, such as highways and mass transit, is often in a radial pattern with the city as the hub designed to get people in and out more than around. Commuter activity is typically 'rush hour' where traffic is overwhelmingly one directional; in to the city in the morning, out of the city at night. The actual land usage pattern will differ depending on when the city was built and how it grew; the exact pattern is less important than the fact that the land outside is cheaper than that in the urban core and thus there is less incentive to be compact, so houses are bigger and have more land, stores are bigger and have more parking, etc.
The problem with the examples given is that as large cities and their suburbs grow, they run into existing developments such as large towns and smaller cities, which creates some confusion since there is no absolute definition of what constitutes a suburb. Washington DC is smaller than some of the counties around it, and given the building restrictions in DC, parts of those counties are more urban in nature. Still, the flow of workers is overwhelmingly from those counties into DC to work and not the other way around, and thus those counties are properly regarded as suburbs of DC. On the other hand, very few people live in Baltimore and commute to DC (or vice versa), so neither is a proper suburb of the other.
It is possible to dial a number on a phone with a broken rotary dial, you just have to push and release the hang-up button just right to emulate each digit.
That's a ... rather extraordinary claim. I could believe a human being able to whistle a *single* tone at an exact frequency with sufficient precision to satisfy the phone electronics. But DTFM tones are two exact frequencies at the same time. I'd be incredibly amazed if any human could just replicate a *single* DTFM tone, let alone doing it 10 times in a row or however long phone numbers are where you live.
Frankly, even if you demonstrated that to me, I'd be 99% convinced it was some kind of magic trick, even if I couldn't figure out exactly how you were fooling me. I'd need it demonstrated under James Randi Award level conditions of having professional magicians design a protocol to prevent trickery, before I could be convinced that you were doing it for real.
Oh, I read it as you, by yourself, dialing your girlfriend's phone number by whistling. But you're saying that the two of you together were able to produce the DTMF tones. That's not so unbelievable. Still a cool party trick, but not as impossible as a single person whistling two tones at the same time with perfect frequency control.
So are you talking about the two of you together successfully producing a single DTMF tone, or actually dialing a complete phone number?
Man I don't think I'll ever understand how phones worked. Can anyone explain to me all the processes that took place when you would dial a phone, and how it would get connected to the proper destination?
Each disconnect made a stepper go up through rows of contacts and in the pause it'd connect through to the next stepper and so forth. Here's a video demonstrating it in detail:
It was invented by Bullroarer Took at the Battle of the Green Fields in the year 1,146 of the Shire Reckoning. Truly the third age was a more civilized time...
Indeed - by knocking the head of the goblin king Golfimbul into a rabbit hole as I recall 🧐 However, I suspect the true origin is earlier, as there is a verse in the 'Lay of Leithian Canto XII' about Fingolfin, first High King of the Noldor ruling in Beleriand, challenging Morgoth to 18 rounds on the Angband links... "In that vast shadow once of yore, Fingolfin stood: his clubs he bore, with balls of heaven's blue and star of crystal shining pale afar...' http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Fingolfin
I recently decided to try making my own yogurt, and learned that the FDA's definition of "yogurt" requires that it be cultured with two specific species of bacteria, Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. As you might guess from that last word, they like it warm, so you have to incubate your inoculated milk around 110F/43C to turn it into yogurt. But there are other species that will culture milk at room temperature, such as those historically used to make skyr, so technically skyr makers cannot call their product yogurt even though the average consumer would not perceive a difference. (Interestingly, the Siggi's website flagrantly ignores this rule and calls their products "yogurt" left and right, while the Icelandic Provisions website scrupulously describes their skyr as a cultured milk product similar to yogurt.)
MSG basically tastes like Doritos. The flavor of Doritos comes mostly from MSG, and not really from cheese powder or anything else. Try buying some MSG in the supermarket and put it on a tortilla chip and you can't tell the difference.
If you pay your utility bill from your bank account, it's entirely possible for the payment to get lost, with the bank claiming it got delivered, the utility company claiming it was never received, and all the information on the payment being correct. There doesn't appear to be any way to get the money back - you just argue with the utility company and hope they cave in. Probably true for other payments too, but who would expect a utility company to do this?
I'm curious--does anyone know much about delta-8 THC? The sites I find googling all seem to be repeating the same anecdotal findings. I'm curious if it's been studied much.
Based on sampling one gummy, I suspect this is same stuff being packaged in legal for recreational use states. Same rather potent buzz as THC Classic repackaged to be sold online ‘legally’ in all states.
Yeah, I had a friend bring over some this week. He claimed (and everything online said) it was a "mild buzz", but uh...I got *extremely* high, for several hours. I'm pretty sensitive to drugs overall, but I was curious as to the mechanism. Chemically it's technically a different molecule than regular THC, but I don't know how well your body can discriminate the two.
I’m a THC short tanker too. A couple hours after I ate a delta-8 gummy I was watching SNL. I couldn’t keep the premise of a skit in my head long enough to enjoy the bit. I’m going off a gut feeling judging by the marketing copy on the delta 8 sale sites. It doesn’t inspire a lot of trust in me. Why bother with the chemistry when you can put the old stuff in a new package and have all the entire country as your market. Of course I could be wrong
That sounds basically like my experience. I didn't experience much of the traditional giddiness or physical sensations I associate with being high, but I had an almost complete failure of short term memory. If I tried *really* hard I could just about remember what was going on, but details were gone.
I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't what it said it was; I'm not sure how much the federal government gives a shit about enforcement nowadays, so I wouldn't be surprised if some companies are taking a gamble.
Most knowledgeable drug users I know are staying away due to purity concerns. There is a major lack of trust in gray market products due to the Vitamin E acetate poisonings a few years ago.
I am (very slowly and intermittently) reading the Joseph R. Allen edition of Waley's translation of Shijing. In the explanation preceding poem 154 ("The Seventh Month") someone (probably Waley, but maybe Allen?) states that the phrase "The Fire ebbs" means "Scorpio is sinking below the horizon at the moment of its first visibility at dusk" and then asks whether this happened in northern China around September during the eight and seventh centuries BC, suggesting that an astronomer may know the answer. I've tried googling it, and haven't found anything. Are there any astronomers/fans of ancient Chinese poetry on here who know the answer?
I'm not an astronomer, but here's a website that shows the sky at any given time and place. Putting in a negative number for the year works as far as I can tell.
Wikipedia says the seventh month of the Chinese calendar runs from about July 23 to August 23, but the calendar they used back then was probably different.
Thanks for the pointer. That is a cool tool. Based on that site it appears that Scorpius was sinking below the horizon in September in Shaanxi in the eight and seventh centuries BC. As an aside, the explanation in the book notes that the poem references two different calendar systems. Where it says "seventh month", "ninth month", etc. it means an older calendar (ie one that was older than the Zhou dynasty's calendar) that started in the spring, but where if it says "days of the Second", etc. it means the Zhou calendar that started around the winter solstice. I think, based on the poem, that in this case seventh month means something more-or-less Septemberish, but I also checked the July 23- Aug 23 period you mentioned, and the astronomy is consistent with the poem for that time frame as well.
It seems very likely that cicadas are using a strategy of flooding predators by emerging in huge numbers at intervals of prime numbers of years. Any ideas about how such a thing could evolve?
There'll be a positive feedback loop on coordinating the years. The more that cicadas only emerge in one particular year, the more important it is for any particular cicada to emerge on that same year. I expect that the cycle emerged slowly then all at once.
I know very little about cicadas, but I can make a guess. Let's say cicadas have already evolved to emerge at the same time every year for various reasons: climate conditions, laying site availability, etc., reasons that would make it advantageous for an individual cicada to emerge at that time. If that's not enough selection pressure to create an accurately timed yearly swarm sufficient to flood predators in some capacity, then any cicadas that time their flight to coincide with the maximum number of other cicadas could easily evolve from that.
Now let's say there are various mutant cicadas that, instead of emerging at the same time every year, emerge at the same time every two years, or three. If they lose no fitness from hibernating, these mutations could spread through the population purely by genetic drift, and at a certain point, it could become widespread enough that in years where they do not emerge, the yearly cicadas are actually at a fitness disadvantage compared to years where the two- or three-year cicadas do emerge, because a higher proportion of the yearly cicadas get eaten compared to the proportion of the yearly, two- and three-year cicadas combined.
I don't know how it would progress from that to prime numbers, maybe there are other selection pressures that apply to animals with multi-year reproduction cycles, or there's a genetic quirk in the coding of hibernation cycles. It could plausibly develop in a number of ways from cicadas that already coordinate to emerge every x years.
This is basically the same principle that herd behavior works on. There's safety in numbers, though cicadas probably don't make alarm calls to warn each other of predators the way that, say, zebras do. Add to that that if the cicadas disappear for a few years, their predators' food source and therefore population will decline, and the cicada population will explode just as their predators are at their lowest.
plenty of animals have an annial clock- hibernators for instance, which usually pay attention to temperature. it shouldn't be too hard to count the number of winters... though I'm not sure whether they exist in equatorial climates.
Ah, sorry, that's not what i meant. Sure it couldn't count them with its brain, but a molecular mechanism shouldnt need to be too complicated. Like during swarms it builds up some number of cysts or crystals and one disappears each winter. Or repression markers build up on the DNAand half of markers disappear each year, and when you're down to a certain level the breeding genes kick on. I've never heard of a mechanism like that, im only speculating, but it seems realistic to me.
I didn't think they could count the years with their brains, but 13 years seems like a long time to keep track by some chemical method.
Related: Gregory Bateson wrote about the difference between what's genetically coded for particular numbers (fingers) vs. what's genetically coded as many (hairs).
Vertebrae might be an example of something that's coded for a fairly high number.
"So how do the cicadas know how to calculate prime numbers? They don’t. They’re cicadas. The pattern probably emerged as a result of Darwinian natural selection: cicadas that naturally matured in easily divisible years were gobbled up by predators, and simply didn’t live long enough to produce as many offspring. Those who, by chance, had long, prime-numbered life spans fared best, survived longest, and left the most offspring, becoming the dominant variation of the species. (There are now at least fifteen distinct populations of periodical cicadas.) As things stand now, cicada emergences are so tightly timed, with the bulk of the insects emerging within a span of a few weeks, that any cicada that tries to break the pattern is simply taking her offspring’s life into her own hands.
Not everyone buys into this hypothesis. Lou Sorkin, the American Museum of Natural History’s cicada expert, pointed out that cicadas evolved during the Pleistocene epoch, about 1.8 million years ago, when the earth was much cooler. Since cicadas don’t survive well in the cold, he explained, it is possible that the cicadas that were naturally adapted to stay underground longer were less likely to face an unexpectedly cold spring."
1 cacadas evolve to only come out when other cacadas are coming out
2 no cacadas come out because of the first mover problem
3 cacadas evolve to come out after n years even if others dont, just to not die in hibernation. Where n is the optimal compromise between survivng for that long & the risk of missing out on a cacada storm
4 this gene spreads so much all cacadas come out after n years
5 at this point evolution may select against the original looking for signs of other cacadas, just to prevent false positives.
There are 3 species of cicadas that are split into two races, where one races emerges every 13 years, and the other race emerging every 17 years.
Maybe by having the races emerge at prime numbered intervals it reduces the instances where both species emerges the same year. If my math is right, by using a 13 and 17 year cycle the races would emerge simultaneously only every 221 years. If they had a 3 and 4 year cycle for instance, they would emerge simultaneously every 12 years.
Maybe they are also trying to get a way from predators or parasites which also emerges in cycles. So if you emerged every 12 years, you could be vulnerable to predators that emerge every 4 years for instance. So prime cycles makes it harder for the predator to evolve to a right cycle as a response.
Should counties other than India be worried about B.1.617.2?
It doesn't seem to noticeably do vaccine escape but it might be more virulent than B.1.1.7 (Kent).
So it's a question of where a rising proportion of the B.1.617.2 meets a falling number of non-immune people. I doubt many developed countries other than the UK have enough travel from India to kick off a meaningful outbreak before everybody's vaccinated.
Or is this all an artefact of extrememly high infection rates within India driving what looks like exponetial community transmission?
Does anyone know or know of any autistic therapists or counselors who work with autistic teens? Asking for a parent I know. The kid wants someone who understands autism from the inside.
Is anyone following the Restaurant Revitalization Fund grants? Women, veterans and “economically disadvantaged minorities” were given priority to receive grant funds and now there are no more funds available.
If a government was trying to stoke racism and sexism, this seems like one way to do it.
One thing to keep in mind is that there most commenters are amateurs on most topics. Some people are domain experts within a particular field or fields, e.g. John Schilling on rocketry and North Korea, but will still comment outside of that domain of expertise. So if you feel too intimidated just remember that most of us are wrong about most of the topics we talk about until we get corrected by one of the commenters who actually has relevant knowledge.
I think impostor syndrome is related to Gell-Mann amnesia. When I read comments on things about which I’m an expert, I often think they may be well-meaning but are amateurish and not completely accurate. Then when I read comments on things I’m a novice on, I think they are smart and worth taking seriously. I forget the expert view. Since I’m a novice on most things, voila, impostor syndrome.
I wonder if imposter syndrome is a relatively recent phenomenon of a culture where expressing confidence is expected even of people who are not confident at all. "Fake until you make it" seems exactly like the kind of advice that would create such a generalized feeling.
Sometimes. But mostly the comment threads I don't understand are ones I'm really not interested in. Those things I'm interested in I generally have an opinion about and can therefore happily dismiss others supposed expertise or knowledge whenever they seem to disagree with me.
I notice that contrast too - and it really is more pleasant for me to have a "My word, aren't I the ignorant one round here" feeling, than a "who will rid me of these irremediably idiotic numbskulls" one.
I remember reading a blog post some years ago. I think I found it in the SSC comments. It was written by a doctor, and it listed all known medical interventions that are so obviously effective that we don't need RCTs and statistics to know that they work. One example was insulin for diabetes. The list wasn't that long, which was discussed in the post as well.
This is how I remember it at least, but I've lost the link. Does anyone recognise what I'm talking about? I would be grateful if I could find it again.
I don't know the blog post, but it immediately reminds me of the SSC post where Scott talks about how we don't do 'scientific tests' on how effective parachutes are when falling out a plane vs free falling since it's dangerous and obvious. It might be in the comments there.
I announced New Science (newscience.org) a few days back - a nonprofit the goal of which is to build new institutions of basic science, starting with life sciences.
The board of directors consists of me, Mark Lutter, and Adam Marblestone and we are advised by Tessa Alexanian, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, and Tony Kulesa.
If the site is exciting and *especially if you do biology*, I would love to talk to you.
The first project is going to be a fully funded in-person summer fellowship for young scientists during which they will work on their ambitious exploratory research projects they couldn’t work on otherwise.
Surely this is not the first attempt since the problems listed are known. What has been attempted in the past? What were their results or where are they at now?
One question/criticism: This seems to distinguish itself by primarily being "not academia" (with problems listed we agree on). I can't find the SSC or ACX quote that said something along the lines of "Marxists thought when the existing capitalist system is burned down, everything would just move into place and work out. But they didn't actual say what exactly they were going to build in the ashes."
So if this is successful, how will it not (eventually) become another academia? Just one with different rituals and preferred areas to fund? How do you believe the current academic system arrived at its current state? Is it the work of individuals or a Moloch-like system?
Still, even without all the kinks worked out (and that's not necessarily needed when starting something new, just a nice ot have), I'd still encourage this and other attempts.
You're asking him to prove a negative (that Marx did not describe the specific mechanisms/dynamics behind the utopification he hoped for). If Scott was wrong, proving it should be easy by comparison.
> He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord.
I was thinking of this passage but all of part I makes this point.
Anyway, I didn't necessarily mean to comment about the topic itself. I just had an analogous question for New Science. Seems like a sibling comment here had a similar question.
I didn't find anything on their webpage that avoids any of the things they find problematic (other than being the ones in charge instead of whoever currently is, but otherwise working in the same way). For example
> His grad school PI was forced to close down their lab in their late 40s despite having tenure
Aren't we just as likely to get this story to happen with NS, replacing "closing down an academia funded lab" with "closing down a NS funded lab"?
Thank you! I think that eventually everything trends into being just like anything else and over long-enough time scale, I imagine New Science will indeed become basically academia. In the meantime, I hope to create a culture that would be more open and that would try to support people with less attention to how many years of academic training they had and with more attention to how capable of doing something new they are and would then support them in whatever way it makes the most sense, rather than to force everyone to go through the same pipeline.
On the New Science Page someone (presumably you?) writes:
"I used to obsess over mechanism design and incentive structures but I’ve come to believe that we are Bob-Taylor-constrained much more than we are the-ideal-organizational-and-incentive-structure-for-a-basic-research-institution-constrained."
Can you link to somewhere that you elaborate more on these two ideas and why you chose one over the other? I'm very interested. Thank you for posting this.
I'd say that culture traumatizes you such that you can be useful for its own ends. It's like a macro entity whose presence begins to be seen as we get interested in ourselves.
I agree. It's a complex relationship. However, a lot of what our culture has created in the last 10 or 20 years has also served to alienate most Western people from their inner selfhood. So right now the relationship looks more parasite/host to me, in the West.
The only way I can see this being true is by stretching the definition of "systematic trauma" to the breaking point, such that it's silly to use that as your grand term (or inflammatory, but that seems to be the point). That being said, this method has worked really well for Taleb so please let the commentariat know when you publish your book; I will unironically give it a read.
I was meaning the term "trauma" in the esp Reichian sense. These days considered as the evocation of a safety strategy at a specific point in infancy, in response to environment, which then continues throughout adulthood. More here - https://devaraj2.substack.com/p/all-cultures-traumatize
It seemed fairly clear to me, despite not knowing Reich. Basically, it seems to be describing things that people learn to do for their safety, like copying/mimicking others.
I find it very hard to disentangle culture from traumatization. The systematic traumatization of children creates an "engine" psychologically that can drive a culture forwards. And all cultures, as far as I know, do this. I actually think that trauma is not as debilitating as we often think. It can also lead to great self-awareness. And in many ways this seems to me the way forwards. Instead of just trying to stop traumatization, develop better and better ways to move beyond it. Because the kick it gives can most definitely be useful.
Without a hundred successive generations of "Rigids," "Endurers" and "Schizoids," Western culture would still be in the Dark Ages. We would still be scrabbling around in the dirt trying to survive and fighting brutal feudal battles. This is an unfortunate truism not often looked at by those who simply want to "get rid of trauma." A part of me would love to de-traumatize childhood, and to a degree this has happened over the last few decades. But it's not clear that it's really achieved much yet. Maybe it will become clearer.
It seems reasonable to me that earlier cultures had their own ways of traumatizing children. I find it hard to believe that ancient Rome was inhabited by untraumatized adults.
Part of my reaction is that I just reread _Star-Begotten_ by HG Wells, which is very optimistic about a saner humanity.
I'm just here to give meaningless criticism. It doesn't make sense to say "Otherwise, post about whatever you want", on even numbered threads. That sentence only makes sense when immediately preceded by a warning not to get political. Scott seems to have been making this mistake consistently for at least the past few weeks, possibly longer.
Yeah, I've had a very vague sense that something was amiss when I read that. Not enough for me to stop and work out what it was, though.
I wouldn't go so far as saying "It doesn't make sense..", merely that the "Otherwise" makes more sense in the introduction to odd numbered open threads, than it does in the even numbered ones. For the even numbered threads an "And" would work quite well.
One of the dictionary definitions of "otherwise" is "in other respects; apart from that" (source: OED). That being the case, the sentence in Scott's post beginning "otherwise" could be reworded "Apart from that, post about whatever you want", meaning "The issue of political comments aside, post about whatever you want". That seems perfectly fine to me.
I take the "otherwise" to mean "This is the thread you can post about political and culture war stuff. If you don't want to post about that, this isn't *only* for such topics, post about whatever you like!"
Without the "otherwise", some people might think "This is *only* for political posts, I have to wait for the next open thread to talk about this other thing I want to talk about".
This is my read of it too. It may not be strictly necessary, but it's a useful thing to say. And having "it's even numbered, so go wild!" be the last thing someone reads before coming ot the comment section would likely impact the quality of the discussion negatively.
There's a topic that's popping up in my mind from time to time that baffles me, so I'll just write that to see what will the hivemind decision on it would be:
Why don't other countries crack down on tax havens? Some music/movie companies lost a not backbreaking amount of money, and they got the international community to raid piratebay servers in Sweden or wherever. USA staged coups for far less amount of money in Latin American countries. Now why don't they nicely ask or peer-pressure let's say Ireland or Netherlands as they are respectable countries (they're not rogue states that wouldn't reason)? Or outright pressure Liberia or those micronations which is only known for their tax regimens? Just a few hours of gunboat diplomacy would stop them all, and net USA (or Germany, or wherever) with incredible amount of extra tax income.
But why doesn't this happen? I can only think the reason would be some collusion from up top, but governments change yet the situation doesn't. Strange.
What allows Ireland to pull that shit is the pre-existing tax treaties (between Ireland and other countries) that have been in place since Ireland was not a tax haven. Closing the loophole without Ireland's cooperation would involve revoking or renegotiating the tax treaties, which is presumably seen as a headache and disruptive to commerce.
The Cayman Islands and other "black hole" countries don't have tax treaties with anybody and are therefore irrelevant without a defector like Ireland.
Maybe I never came across that, but I would've at least expected some public sabre rattling. I mean for example USA has been embargoing Cuba for like over half a century, or there are differing levels of sanctions to several countries that caused a much less nuisance to USA. But to Ireland/Malta/Cyprus/etc... not even a press release or public berating or not answering their president's phone, or something anything?
The US can more effectively whammy our system of tax breaks by instituting tax breaks of their own, see this story on Biden's proposed tax changes: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56805195
"Essentially that would mean if a company paid tax at the lower Irish rate, then the US (or other countries) could top up that company's tax in their jurisdiction to get it to the global minimum.
So if a US company had a presence in Ireland primarily for the tax advantage, that advantage would disappear.
This is a matter of urgency for the Biden administration, because it is planning to raise corporate taxes at home and would prefer not to see more tax revenues leaking to other countries."
Not from Sweden's point of view, USA law enforcement went into the trouble of asking the Swedish to cooperate and raid the servers etc. Why don't they even publicly ask (even if the answer is expected to be a no, just to create some public pressure) tax havens to do something about it?
My question is, why is there no apparent pushback to the tax haven countries from the countries losing the most amount of tax dollars from those schemes?
"My question is, why is there no apparent pushback to the tax haven countries from the countries losing the most amount of tax dollars from those schemes?"
Ask yourself this; what was the difference between the piratebay situation and the tax havens situation?
In one (piracy), large US corporations are losing money, thus it's worth their while to get their lobbyists to annoy the congresspersons into "something must be done!"
In the other (tax havens), large US corporations are making money by avoiding taxes. Why on earth would they ask the government to clamp down on legal means of tax avoidance (which is not the same thing as tax evasion)? Why would they support congresspersons with donations to their election campaigns or good PR if the congressperson in question pushed for "make Kumquat pay back taxes on money held in Europe"?
So the corporations lobbying the government for their loss has more impact on the government that the government itself losing money? I mean shouldn't the congresspeople not need to be lobbied in order to do something about the country losing money?
I understand the congresspeople need to think about the next elections and if those corporations would to bad PR / not do good PR about them. What about the non-elected government officials that work for the state thus their loyalty should align to? Isn't there a single person to try to stir something about this? IRS officials are not elected, so do a lot of the Foreign Office (or what it's called, the branch that deals with International Relations) employees.
Or judges? Aren't those in USA elected for life? So once they're there they have no incentives to think about the corporations but a lot of incentives to think about lost tax dollars?
From the point of view of the individual congressperson they have a lot more to lose by angering their donors than failing to increase revenue for the federal government. As far as I know, no-one's lost their seat because they haven't contributed to tax reform of more efficient tax collecting schemes but plenty have lost elections because of lack of funding. At least that's my strong impression.
"Oh goodness me, we have been handed a hefty tax bill. Oh dear, we *were* going to build a shiny new factory in that Rust Belt unemployment black spot, but we can't afford to do that now! Why, we may even need to close down some of our plants here and move overseas to lower-cost production facilities. Whatever can we do?"
And that's the leverage large companies have on governments.
But, if USA doesn't go after those companies but to tax havens and make sure nobody gives them that deal, then the companies would not have any schemes to use.
And if push comes to shove, doesn't the government have the leverage to close the market to a company that's not based there?
You're assuming that the congresspeople's interests are aligned with the country's. This is manifestly not the case. They need to keep their donors and their voters happy. In what order depends on how much money that have and how much they need for the next campaign.
I'm not sure who's personal interests are aligned to the country's interest when it comes to maxing out tax revenue. Maybe, *maybe*, the president. Maybe only if that president is a democrat. But even there, I wouldn't say it's a strong alignment.
Speaking for Ireland, because we get jobs in return. Often nice, shiny, techie jobs for the Silicon Docks in Dublin, so our government of the day can make a big announcement about "FAANG company has created 40 new jobs!"
We depend so heavily on foreign direct investment, and the way we coaxed companies to invest here was selling that we had a young, educated, English-speaking workforce that didn't cost as much as the same in the USA or wherever. But mostly for tax breaks and tax havens.
There is so much money sloshing around that it pays for large multinationals to simply move it around from one European base to another to avoid paying out the taxes in America (mostly, though not solely). This distorts our economy, and makes our EU partners unhappy. We had the ridiculous sight of an EU decision settling that Apple owed Ireland €13 billion in taxes, and our government of the day doing all it could to avoid accepting this decision, because pissing off Apple (and the other multinationals) was worse than taxing the citizenry into the ground. Yes, instead of taking that money for the budget, the government appealed the decision to the European courts until it was overturned: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53416206
It makes sense for Ireland (or for example Netherlands which I live) to entice that money and forego taxes, but the question that baffles me is why don't the countries that lose money from those schemes make a bigger fuss?
One part of the answer is likely that the US already puts a lot more pressure on other countries to fork over tax money than anyone else in the world. American citizens are to my knowledge the only people in the world required to pay income tax on overseas earnings and our tax on renouncing citizenship is likewise among the most punitive in the world. Keeping other countries onboard with that probably takes a great deal of diplomatic effort already.
Countries like Germany or France, while rich, have nowhere near the geopolitical power of the US. They would be hard-pressed to tax their own expatriates the way we do much less multinational corporations headquartered in other countries. Even if they could do it, which isn't a given, it would sour relations in a way which risks higher priority deals: i.e., an Ireland threatened by German gunboats (whether figurative or literal) would be more likely to pursue Irexit.
I would expect USA gunboats to roam Irish/Maltese/Dutch/etc waters, even though USA puts pressure on its overseas citizens, it doesn't put any visible pressure on tax haven governments, or so I see it. I'm mistaken somewhere but cannot convince myself on where.
Keeping America's existing tax agreements already requires a great deal of 'invisible' pressure on foreign governments and financial institutions who would otherwise be inclined to tell the US government to pound sand if asked to collect back taxes, child support payments, etc. on behalf of a distant foreign government. And even with visible pressure, most of those same countries are or have been unwilling to play along with US embargoes against Cuba, Iran and other nations at the cost of their own ability to export goods to willing buyers.
Perhaps the expected resistance is greater. You're not just attacking the interests of the tax haven country, you're also attacking those who profit from it. And they happen to be influential.
Though the real reason might as well be ape status psychology. Maybe there's just some innate hesitancy when interfering with high-prestige people's goals.
Countries are run by politicians, who are often themselves the beneficiaries of tax havens, or funded by people who are. There's a lot of things in politics that can be explained by simple corruption/self-interest.
What are the possibilities for new investments that people mostly invest a little in just in case it works? Dogecoin paid off for at least some people.
It seems to me that he gets extraordinary loyalty. I grant that my impression is mostly from media and social media, though I also have a couple of friends who are enthusiastic about him.
If it were just about policy, I think he'd have more obvious successors.
The_Donald sometimes affectionately referred to him as the "shit poster in chief" and celebrated many of his personality elements - or the products thereof, like the "two scoops" mild controversy that they loved.
You'll likely disagree, but I think yes. I think that this functions a lot like other fandoms, and once you're on a team you're on that team. I think if Trump had come out strong for free trade and paired it with a bunch of rhetoric about kicking China's ass at its own game, his people would have been on board with it.
This isn't meant as a unique criticism of Trumpism, I think that all of us think our politics are more about policy than they really are.
I'll tell you this much: if you're looking for a successor to Trump, don't look among the political class. Trump was an outsider.
Who, exactly? I don't know, I don't live there. Elon Musk would be the most obvious outsider if he were eligible, which he's not - and even if he were, it'd be like mirror-universe Trump.
I think that would be true if the political class were not changed by Trump, but it does appear to be changing to some extent - although what parts of the vicious cycle that allowed the Republican party to become amenable to Trump, and then allowed Trump to reshape the Republican party in his own image, which made it more amenable to those like him, etc. are responsible to what extent, I don't know enough to say. I think it would be more accurate to say that one ought not to look _primarily_ among the people who were widely accepted members of the political class _before 2016_.
I figure millions of people are somewhat like Trump - his everyman qualities are part of his appeal - but to be wealthy and popular enough for a serious presidential bid is rare.
I would argue that it's two specific aspects of his personality that appeals to his base, his reluctance to accept his enemies' framing and his (seeming) willingness to fight.
The GOP donor class, intellectuals and most of their politicians fundamentally share the same worldview as their DNC counterparts but want to transition to Luxury Gay Space Communism more slowly and cautiously. This self-conception of the conservative as a necessary brake on progress is explicitly enshrined in Burkean conservatism. Fundamentally, guys like McCain or Romney or Jeb *hope* to lose, they want to be proven wrong that America isn't 'ready' for the next progressive innovation yet.
Republican voters, on the other hand, aren't particularly ideologically radical but they have actual skin in the game. If you live in a functioning community and own your own business, or your own house, or you're married with children, etc. then losing actually involves real loss. Being repeatedly sold out by your supposed representatives, over and over, particularly for ideological goals which you don't share builds a lot of anger.
The next Trump, beyond Trump himself or one of his sons running again, would in my view be an ordinary conservative who demonstrates a similar commitment to fighting. I don't anticipate such a candidate being allowed to win an election, so we probably won't see another President Trump, but they will run and get a majority of the votes cast.
Donald Trump's personality is terrible, and I say that as a Trump supporter (albeit one who doesn't live in the US and doesn't get to vote). I support Trump for his policies, mostly the ones that are absolute common sense that should be completely uncontroversial, like taking serious action against illegal immigration, and which yet nobody else in either party is willing to countenance.
However, Donald Trump's personality is probably a necessity for actually withstanding the nonstop media/Democrat/Republican etc attack that would hit any future candidate with similar policies. Most people simply don't have the personality to stand there without the slightest flinch while being bullied on live TV for years at a time. You'd have to either be an egotistical blowhard or a saint, and I don't think we're lucky enough to get a saint next time.
Why do you think illegal immigration is bad? Or, to rephrase, what about illegal immigration is problematic? And what specific policy prescriptions do you think that Donal Trump both endorsed, and further accomplished that you think address these issues with illegal immigration?
Taking peoples' kids away was probably a big part of it too. People are willing to risk a lot for a chance at a better life, but when they risk having their kids taken and never returned, that's much more than most are willing to countenance.
Fair point (about the reversal). Still, when talking about Trump's policies, I don't think you can talk about how Trump cut down on border crossings without mentioning it (splitting up families). I think the cruelty was the point, and I think it worked. I think this was probably much more effective than the wall. Eyeballing the numbers, it looks like crossings were way up in 2019, which is consistent with people not being afraid to lose their kids and not being deterred by the wall, which I like because it conforms to my expectations. :)
Unaccompanied minors is unrelated to family separation IMO, since those kids (teenagers?) arrive already separated. Is the trafficking's point suggesting that they only separated kids from adults they suspected of being traffickers? Because I'm pretty sure that's not true.
Of course, no one ever tried making it illegal to work undocumented. By which I mean enforcing that illegality with e-Verify and robust monitoring from above. (This is my pet policy.) Or did they try it and I didn't hear about it?
I think you might be exactly right about this. Any Republican candidate for president is subject to a non-stop DDOS attack of completely random claims and accusations. Trying to respond civilly and seriously is prohibitively time-consuming and does not help at all; the current attacker, one of the crowd, will just switch to another random attack angle. That's how we ended up with Trump whose typical response to every attack is something like "you are a waste of space, and your mother was a hedgehog", causing the media to go into overdrive over what a horrible person he is to say something like that.
Trump is this country's response to the DDOS attack invariably aimed at a conservative presidential candidate. I think most conservatives would love to see an ordinary conservative who fights win the election, but nobody knows if that is currently possible.
What counts as a "successor" of Trump? Is it just someone vaguely-like-him with political power? (If so, see other replies; I don't really have original thoughts on this.) Is it the next POTUS? (If so, yes; it's Joe Biden.) Is it something completely different? (If so, it depends.)
How can we in principle figure out whether some regulator institute is unnecessary and needs to be defunded or on the contrary requires more investments to work better, without actually implementing such changes? I've seen some talks about defunding the police and abolishing the FDA but I feel generally confused about my abilities to evaluate arguments.
Suppose we have a Regulator that is ensuring that no-one produce poisonous hamburgers. Regulator functioning cost some tax money and creates some problems to the hamburger producing businesses. Suppose only 0.0001% of hamburgers turn out to be poisonous. So most of the regulator work is dealing with false positives which creates problems to businesses that do not poison their customers. But how to account for survivors bias here? Maybe there are so few poisonous hamburgers only due to the fact that such regulator exists and people are aware of it in the first place?
Food adulteration was (and continues to be) a problem. In 19th century Britain, as urban populations grew (particularly London), the market to supply them with foodstuffs exploded. Human ingenuity was then applied to wring the maximum profit out of the minimum of supplies. Milk was one item routinely adulterated: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/observations-on-london-milk
"During the 1850s the extent of the problem was revealed by investigators such as Rugg, and public outrage ensued. During surprise visits to premises and based on anecdotal evidence, Rugg discovered that the most common substances used to adulterate milk were ‘water, flour, starch, chalk, and the brains of sheep’ (p. 30), as well as ‘treacle, salt, whiting, sugar of lead’ – the latter being highly poisonous."
Milk wasn't the only foodstuff adulterated, anything that could be stretched by judicious addition of adulterants was (this is distinct from using preservatives or artificial colourings and flavourings, practices that also went on as chemical sophistication increased).
The entire article is provided here free of charge by Durham University website, thank you Durham! It is very interesting, and indeed puts the campaign for clean food as another one of the Victorian moral crusades: https://dro.dur.ac.uk/10391/1/10391.pdf
Adding water to milk is the simplest and cheapest means of adulterating it, and goes on to this day; it's one of the routine tests done on milk samples in dairy co-operative laboratories. There can be innocent explanations (messing up milking machine lines when cleaning out the lines so that the waste water goes into the bulk tank) but often it's an attempt at fraud (the farmer gets paid a fixed price per gallon of milk, so adding water = more gallons from the same amount of milk). We've seen cases of food adulteration from China, particularly for infant formula.
So yeah, my conclusion would be: good results came about from regulation being instituted and are maintained in the presence of regulation; loosen up regulation and we're likely to go back to the good (bad) old days.
Here, have a Chesterton poem about grocers who were often suspected of adulterating their products to increase profits:
You're welcome, much of Chesterton's verse is fun to say aloud! Imagine the Wicked Grocer laughing like a pantomime villain at the thought of widespread ptomaine poisoning among his poorer customers!
Multiple countries exist with different regulatory systems. You can look at places that lack the relevant agency, or have a less strong or differently structured version, and see the differences
So does it mean we do not have a way to figure things without similar cases from the past or other countries with relevant experience? It doesn't matter what is the rate of false/true positives/negatives of our Regulator or the cost of its operating, it tells us nothing about its necessity?
If so, why do people still use such data while arguing about police or FDA?
If I go by replies I am still receiving after leaving a critical comment on that cutesy-poo Boston Robotics "Do you love me (now that I can dance)" Youtube video, there will be a large swathe of the population ready, willing and able to immediately surrender because robots are so good and pure and loveable and never started wars (actual quote there) and only irrational haters could possibly find them creepy 🙄
(Presumably drones don't count as "robots" for the purposes of "starting/waging wars").
Plainly there are enough robot-lovers out there, that simply *having* a robot army will be enough to win their allegiance.
> If I go by replies I am still receiving after leaving a critical comment on that cutesy-poo Boston Robotics "Do you love me (now that I can dance)" Youtube video
YT comments are generally trashy and bad, so I wouldn't trust them. You can, however, ask me and other ACT commenters.
(Personally, my response would depend on the situation - "robot coup" is kind of a vague term - but if it didn't concern me directly I wouldn't care that much.)
Do you mean seizing power in a third world country or in a "great power"? The first kind arguably happens already when some factions in civil wars get support from US drones without US officially being involved in the conflict. The second kind is unlikely to happen outside of a full scale AI takeover, I'd say.
I don't think that robot armies worth the name would ever come to be completely untethered from said great powers, because the having the infrastructure requred to support them is basically synonymous with being one.
Stretching into technicalities, "assassinating the president with a drone" is the kind of thing that could happen any day now, you don't need an army of enough robots to shoot all the enemy soldiers.
Now I'm curious about whether it's possible to assassinate POTUS with a drone (obligatory note to US Secret Service: I am not planning on doing this and don't suggest anyone else try it either).
Anyway my guess is that it's not possible, that the SS have spent a long time thinking about this scenario over the past decade already, that they're constantly scanning for drones any time that POTUS is outdoors, and that the obvious countermeasure is just to go inside and close the door, and that he is never more than some small known number of seconds from the nearest shelter when he is outdoors.
Oh, I've seen the movies, though I didn't recall the actor's name offhand.
As I said in the OP, though, I'm speaking of what I term the Lesser Problem (human warlords with robot armies) rather than the Greater Problem (Skynet). Of course, it's plausible that the Greater Problem could happen first and kill us all, in which case the Lesser Problem is moot.
For those of you for whom that was incomprehensible, let me just pause to go "Another reason to blame Mondalez, Cadbury's has never been the same since the Americans took over!"
But alas! We are running out of Flakes! In order to address the crisis, Mondalez issued a statement to The Irish Times (sort of like issuing one to The New York Times as 'the newspaper of record', that's how serious things are) to explain the shortage and reassure us all that matters were in hand. Because the entire story is behind a paywall, here it is below:
"Supply problems and soaring demand has caused a shortage of the crumbliest chocolate that traditionally elevates ice-cream cones to 99 status.
Despite the cold start to the summer, demand for mini Flakes has intensified in recent weeks while supply has struggled to keep up, and 99s are now at risk of disappearing from shops, vans and ice-cream parlours entirely.
Cone connoisseurs across the Irish ice-cream industry have said they have never seen shortages like this, and warned that supplies may be exhausted by the middle of June.
Joe Quinn of the Bon Bon beach shop in Salthill was tipped off about the shortages last week and managed to secure a supply ahead of his shop’s reopening today after months of lockdown. “I was lucky to get some in because they can’t be got now,” he said.
Paddy O’Donnell’s Clarmac business supplies Flakes to ice-cream vendors across the country, but he said his supplies were dwindling.
“They are impossible to get at the moment but there is word they will be coming out in dribs and drabs. It is the first time I heard of a shortage like this.”
He said half of his supply was gone already. “I have sold more Flakes so far this year than I had right up to the middle of last summer,” he said. “Hopefully things will be back to normal soon but I am lucky at leave to have some stock left.”
Cadbury, which makes the crumbly chocolate bars that have been sitting on top of soft scoop ice-cream cones for almost 100 years, confirmed the shortages but moved to assure the public that it was working hard to boost supplies to satisfy summer demand.
“We are seeing a recent increase in demand for our Cadbury 99 Flake in Ireland, ” said a spokeswoman for Mondalez , the multinational that now owns Cadbury. “The product is still available to order and we’re continuing to work closely with our customers.”
For generations Cadbury made its 99 Flakes in Dublin, but in recent years the bulk of its production has moved to Egypt. The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
No blame to the Egyptians, but the American owners just don't realise the importance of the iconic British Isles products they have acquired (as we saw with the proposal for the super-league recently).
And why is it called a 99? Other explanations for the name are as follows:
"One claim states that it originated from Portobello, Scotland, where Stefano Arcari who had opened a shop in 1922 at 99 Portobello High Street. Arcari would break a large "Flake" in half and stick it in ice cream but the name came from the shop's address.
Elsewhere, another address-based claim for the beloved ice cream is made by the Dunkerleys in Gorton, Manchester, who operated a sweet shop at 99 Wellington Street.
The report states that: "The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
The Cadbury website says that the reason behind the Flake being called a "99" has been "lost in the mists of time"."
It is indeed delicious! Cool, soft, sweet, creamy ice-cream contrasting with crunch of chocolately goodness, a little piece of heaven on a summer's day 😀
Ben Franklin's observation that "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged" is counterintuitive but very useful.
For whatever reason, politely asking someone to do you a small favor makes a much bigger impression than doing them a small favor would. It's a very handy thing to remember.
Not through deliberate action, like asking people for small favors as a calculated way to build a bond. I have noticed that my willingness to ask for favors plays a role in my ability to get along with people but it's not deliberate.
One habit that I do try to consciously cultivate is gratitude. If someone helps me out, even with something small, I try to make sure they know that I appreciate it. I'm not sure if that's related to the Ben Franklin effect or not but it leaves a huge positive impression on other westerners (mainland Chinese are typically just confused).
I have no idea. Probably it just comes off as fake, like how non-Americans find it off-putting when Americans casually use "how are you?" as a greeting.
Patrick O'Brian used the inverse of this idea several times in his books. It was a recurring theme that someone who had wronged, say, Jack Aubrey, would afterwards hold it against Aubrey. The wrongdoer's pricks of conscience would essentially force him into morphing Aubrey into the villain. I have seen this play out in real life a couple of times.
It's a little hacky, but remembering little facts about a person means a lot to them. Even if it's something as simple as remembering they were going to watch the football and asking about that next time you see them.
What is a research paper/blog post that you've read that fundamentally changed the way you looked at the world? Preferably not one written by Scott as there's a chance I would have read it already. I've gotten amazing recommendations from ACX readers in the past, and hence trying this again.
This blog over at Ribbonfarm made me, on a deep and visceral level, understand and appreciate some things. Even if I wanted to I couldn't go back to the way of thinking I had before reading this.
Ah, I'd just been pointing out to everyone that we're already living in the future. Laptops, tablets and communicators right out of Star Trek... even some flying car prototypes and chicken nuggets grown in labs... and falling global poverty trending more toward utopia than dystopia (though China and Russia worry me in the long run...)
40 years ago was already the future, too: you could enjoy Hawaiian pineapples in Canada, fly across the Atlantic in a huge jet with 45 rows, 9 columns, alcoholic drinks and hot meals while watching a movie on a big screen, or just stay home and talk to people on the other side of that ocean in real time. A great many could own their own climate-controlled homes and partake in a reliable food-supply system with news from across the world delivered on a color video screen. Vaccines successfully fought many illnesses, and quite a few health problems could be solved by sophisticated surgeries built on centuries of hard-won knowledge.
Though I never thought of myself as a "futurist", the part about "why so few futurists make any money" describes me well: "They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately," he adds, "technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered." But wait, did smartphones really not alter human behavior much? Didn't European empires and their automation radically reshape the world, deleting many cultures in the process? It happened slowly and first-worlders saw little of the drama, but still.
Some parts are confusing, like "what shapes our experience of universal mobile communication definitely has ... a lot to do with pacifiers." Maybe we're supposed to read his earlier essays first.
"Quick, imagine the fifteenth century."
I'm thinking subsistence farming, occasional waves of disease, and enough boredom to make war seem exciting by comparison. Illiteracy. Poverty. Religiosity. Community. Conformity. Local food and entertainment... 'course, it all seemed normal at the time.
"You’re thinking of people in funny pants and hats, right (if you’re of European descent. Mutatis mutandis if you are not)? Perhaps you are thinking of dimensions of social experience like racial diversity and gender roles."
Yeh, no.
On the whole I find the article interesting, but vague, abstract, and somehow "off". I'm never sure exactly what it is saying or why it is saying it. I find it odd, for instance, how it speaks of "Future Nausea" but describes more of a political nausea: "a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses". What do the myriad political dumpster fires shining from dozens of echo chambers have to do with "the future"? Maybe he's just pointing out that we're "living in the future", but unlike, say, video calls, this was not a future Star Trek ever predicted. Or how about "We understand Facebook in terms of school year-books" - but this is not how I have ever thought about Facebook. More broadly, it would have benefited from more examples to show what it was talking about.
https://acoup.blog/ made me understand various parts of history at a much deeper level than before, in particular how popular depictions of history get things wrong.
I don't know about changing the way I view the world, but for changing the way I view crime and public policy, I might go with Steven Levitt's paper "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not" (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533004773563485)
It may be a stretch to say "fundamentally changed" --- maybe more like "made concrete an idea that I had an inkling of" --- but I think of this paper by Gelman and friends every time I see someone claim a large, potentially causal, effect from some obscure independent variable: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/piranhas.pdf
Some of the better work by Zvi has this quality, I especially like Out to Get You. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/ Related posts that are also worth reading include his posts on Slack and Easy Mode/Hard Mode.
Abba Eban: "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." A lot of pro-Israel people were fed up with Netanyahu and the situation in Sheikh Jarrah was just the thing to push them into open disaffection with Israel. Then Hamas rocketed Israel and the usual thugs and anti-Semites came out of the closet. Eban was right.
Well, what could have been the best realistic outcome for Palestine? Netanyahu's ambitions slightly frustrated? They don't care about that, they want the end of the occupation, and let's be honest, that's not on the table, not even remotely close. So they lash out in the most dramatic way possible, at least it makes the frontpage that way.
Gee, I dunno. Starting to chip away at the solid wall of pro-Israel support in the Congress? Working in the system to delegitimate Israeli maximalism? the possibilities are endless.
And how did the prior period of calm help with that? I hadn't heard news about Israel-Palestine for years, and throughout that time Netanyahu held the mantle of power and continued the settlement-building policy, even destroying Palestinian settlements at times. Palestinians (and especially Hamas) seem to gain little from the calm; they merely lose at a slower rate. (But undoubtedly I have much to learn about this)
You're acting like "the palestinians" are a homogenous and unified group with a common agenda. Just as Netanyahu benefits from stoking the conflict to gain relative to his political rivals within Israel, individuals and factions within Hamas, and Hamas vs opposition groups, benefit from the conflict from the other side.
If anything Hamas and Likud's incentives are pretty closely aligned. Provided the leadership of both are personally safe then conflict benefits them personally, whatever it does to the people they are notionally supposed to work for
It seems like the anonymity of cryptocurrency has led to a raft of various cyber crimes. Obviously, there is a limit to how good cybersecurity can be. It's an arms race that cannot be won. There's only a small hiatus between raising cybersecurity measures in some respect, and the creation of a workaround by cyber criminals. It's a futile aspiration to be fully secure.
I'm curious to know what people foresee as any kind of mitigation of the anonymity of cryptocurrency. Or, whether this community is so libertarian that they consider it a non-issue. Do lives lost that can be lost through crypto- anarchy? Does it matter if hospitals are taken offline by ransomware? What about schools, electrical grids, water supply, ad nauseam. Are there solutions? Does it matter? Discuss.
> Obviously, there is a limit to how good cybersecurity can be. It's an arms race that cannot be won.
I don't think that's true. The financial incentives to use theorem provers and better security models just isn't there, but it could be. If Apple and Google had 5 years to secure their code, after which they would be held liable for every preventable security breach, you can be damned sure they'll switch to memory safe languages and/or code that gets verified by a theorem prover very quickly. The vast majority of security breaches could be prevented just by using memory safe languages.
There is a total solution to life-critical infrastructure (e.g. medical equipment) being taken offline by cyberattacks - airgap it. Can't access = can't hack.
The problem is the fuckwits who don't airgap these things.
That is only partially applicable. You can't air gap a complete network, particularly given that the platforms and all of their connected devices in medical institutions require updates, and are accessed via vpn's and outside sources. Each mri, cat scan, dosing instruments and more are all utilizing individual platforms that must be updated on a regular basis. The amount of Labor it would take to update those manually is untenable. Think about the growth and machine to machine communication, vehicle and infrastructure intercommunication. All of our transportation, traffic controls, lighting grids and more all depend on connections through the cloud and so forth. None of these can be air-gapped on an ongoing basis.
You actually can airgap or otherwise isolate a complete network even though all of the connected devices require updates, etc. I work on such networks regularly. It just requires more work and stricter discipline, which will make some of your coders and users scream bloody murder and complain that you're being unreasonable and demanding the impossible. But if the consequences of not doing that are that people literally die because e.g. medical equipment is being held for digital ransom, then I'm in favor of telling the whiners to go rot in unemployment hell and hiring a new batch of people.
How do you do that with public iot devices remaining available? Every car, truck, street light, traffic light, Etc will be fitted with iot devices that connect through the cloud. Is it still possible to do what you describe?
You don't. There is no reason the life-critical systems of a car should be easily accessible. You debug the software before release, and if you don't you fix it with a physical connection (ideally one which requires unscrewing things to access).
GPS needs to communicate, but you can internally airgap that from anything life-critical.
What magic mushroom says - "Internet of Things" mostly means "Internet of Things that should never have been on the internet". In aviation world, my airplane's shiny new electronic navigation system gets data from, A: sneakernet firmware updates, B: analog voice transmissions which in the pilot's judgement may result in manual data entry, or C: very specific packet formats like GPS or ADS-B. The last part doesn't meet the literal definition of "airgap", but so long as the packet formats are narrowly designed for their specific purpose and the programmers are formally validating their code (and in some cases hardware), you can enforce a roughly equivalent level of internal separation. And we all still have full-analog backups to GPS.
In the airline world, there's been a tendency to relax that to "OK, but we can still use IoT for maintenance data and the in-flight entertainment system", and then *not* rigorously separate those from the navigation and flight control systems, hence "Internet of Things that should never have been on the internet".
I’m interested in crypto-mugging. If you have a million dollars worth of bitcoin, what prevents a mugger with a laptop and a gun from taking it all away from you and never being caught? You can’t trace the transaction, right? Or do I have that wrong?
Right, but if he physically got away - he had his mask on, there were no video cameras, done - you'd have lost everything with no hope of getting it back, right?
I've never seen this addressed. If we move to cryptocurrency, isn't our entire life savings just sitting in our heads? Part of the reason people DON'T get mugged is that you can only really get like 40 bucks and a watch for it. Not really worth the risk. But what if you could steal fortunes in that way?
There *has* been a rise in crypto crime. People with crypto-fortunes have had to resort to some crazy home defense schemes.
It's like if you regularly carry $2 million in cash.
Crypto *is* trackable. The Bitcoin or whatever is all there on the public ledger. Literally anyone on Earth can watch as they are re-assigned. Authorities, in theory, can move in when they interact with a legible part of the financial system like Coinbase, and trace back from there.
(Going back to the $2m in cash, imagine if you knew all the serial numbers of the bank notes you had, and that it was trivial for banks to always report when those serial numbers show up.)
Someone proposed in a prior thread that the exchanges should lock down "illegal" Bitcoin, which are Bitcoin that have ever been used in a forbidden transaction. If you use them they are immediately seized. This is a provocative and interesting proposal that requires more space to get into than I want to do in this comment, but it's something we would need to consider when talking about how to stop crypto-crime.
I really like tea. Coffee is too bitter for me, but broccoli I genuinely enjoy. You might have more bitter receptors than most folks (or be young, bitter foods taste less bitter as you get older from what I've read).
You can emphasize / promote all kinds of narratives with any given behavior. One narrative I like goes something like, "not doing the healthy thing is basically just a rationality failure"
Well, I suppose I haven't, since I dislike broccoli. It's edible if cooked and you put sauce over it, but the virtuous signalling around vegetables is to eat them raw, so I'm not that virtuous!
I sometimes wonder whether people who like bitter flavours (myself included) enjoy the body's defense reaction. (Potential poison: increase alertness, prepare to flush digestive system, …?)
The latter was an acquired taste. I used to hate coffee, but drank it as a pragmatic way to stay caffeinated. That said, now I actually really enjoy the taste quite a bit and even prefer black coffee. I never went through a similar process for tea, it was always nice.
I used to drink tea with sugar. Then one day someone whose spouse was a dentist gave me a graphic description of how drinking tea with sugar all day is like permanently coating your teeth in sugar water, so I made a conscious decision to switch to drinking it black.
It took me a day or two to train my taste buds to prefer it that way, and now if I would accidentally drink some sugared tea, the sweetness would probably make me gag and I'd throw it out in disgust unless it was the only drinkable liquid available.
I tend to roll my eyes at dentists because *everything* will kill your teeth, according to them. As long as you're not emptying half the sugar bowl into your tea, it's fine. Or switch to honey or stevia sweeteners, if you can't retrain your tastebuds.
If your plaque bacteria are eating the sugar in your tea, then you must be spooning in so much sugar, you might as well be drinking soda in the first place. Or fruit juice.
There's sugars in lots of food and drink. As long as you're regularly brushing your teeth, drinking sweetened tea is no greater risk of tooth decay than anything else. Dentists like to frighten people because most of us skimp on tooth brushing and flossing, but unless you rigidly stick to only drinking water and no other fluid or liquid, not even milk - there's sugar in pretty damn much everything. And I bet even dentists drink tea and coffee and juice and soda, not just water alone.
It does! Honey doesn't have the same concentrated sweetness as refined white sugar, and can be strongly flavoured itself. This is only personal experience, but I find honey gives a sort of 'rougher' texture to the tea when used instead of sugar. Honey and lemon (with no milk) are the traditional accompaniments to black tea so far as I know, but I've never drunk it like that
What tea are you drinking that's bitter? I think you need better tea.
Although, now that I say that, I realize I've been told the same thing by a coffee snob who said that "good coffee is NEVER bitter" (emphasis theirs). So I might be a bit of a tea snob when I say good tea is never bitter, but I feel pretty confident about that because I've never had to get accustomed to tea before enjoying it like I had to with coffee, even without sugar. To this day I'd never drink black coffee unless it was to stave off hypothermia.
Being a tea snob doesn't necessarily mean a tea purist though. I'll drink the floweriest, fruitiest teas and herbal teas. Earl grey or ceylon blends just strike me as boring, but I love the stuff with orange and turmeric, or lemon and cloves, or ginger and cardamom, you name it.
If you're British, you might be confusing status signalling with genuine caffeine addiction, which is a thing with tea as much as it is with coffee.
Possibly by "bitter", they mean the strong tannin flavour in some teas. And again, that can be from being brewed/steeped too long, or because the tea is cheap and nasty. Or this person could be sensitive to certain flavours so that those are much 'stronger' as far as they are concerned. I'm one of the people who thinks coriander tastes like soap, for instance: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-cilantro-taste-like-soap-to-some-people
If they're drinking strong, malty, black tea that is unsweetened and/or no milk, and they don't like it, then don't drink it. Find a lighter black tea, or a different tea entirely. And if people are snobby about what tea you drink, to heck with them. It's your tongue, not theirs.
Irish versus British tastes in tea have been mentioned on here earlier; Irish tastes tend to like the stronger, African or Indian teas while the Brits like lighter, Chinese and Ceylon blends.
As I grew up in the Deep South, I was raised on heavily-sweetened iced tea. I still view it as a Heaven-sent elixir, although I when I have iced tea these days I usually sweeten it with Splenda. I have never been able to get much into hot tea, although I do like Twining's Irish Breakfast Tea, brewed with boiling water and just a bit of sugar. I think I will go brew some right now.
Good tea is on par with good wine. When it comes to taste complexity and deepness. But you have to brew it correctly and also good tea is really really hard to get in the United States. There is no tea culture here.
OMG Blue cheese on a greasy (80/20) grilled hamburger, with lettuce and summer tomato... short sleeves a must, as the extra juice runs down your arms. Well I'm from Buffalo, and we dip chicken wings in blue cheese. :^)
I've always disliked the taste of beer and acknowledged it throughout my life. Though I still tolerated some beer-drinks with fruit flavor and believed myself to enjoy them as well as some other alcoholic drinks like wine.
Last year I made and kept a resolution not to consume ethanol for a year. Then when I tried one of my favorite alcoholic drinks... it tasted terrible! Later I tried to drink some wine and it was absolutely unpleasing as well. Seems like a year without drinking at all made me completely disacquire the taste for alcohol.
It's very funny. I've never thought of myself as someone easily susceptible to social pressure (being kind of autistic and all) but turns out I was somewhat lying to myself all this time.
I don't think it's a matter of lying to yourself or status games. I think it's just that you got used to it, and after abstaining for a while you weren't used to it anymore.
The wife and I did one of those low carb, no sugar diets for a while a couple of years ago. While the diet didn't stick and the weight came back, I did acquire black coffee and straight whiskey during the exercise, and I've retained both tastes since. Humans are weird.
After my first wife left me, I made a point of acquiring a taste for beer because I thought it would make dating easier. Once I had it, I proudly told my sister that I was now capable of drinking beer straight. She laughed for a minute solid.
What kind of tea? Black tea, white tea, green tea, herbal tea? Tea with milk and sugar? Tea with lemon? Tea with nothing?
I really like vinegar and sharp-flavoured foods, so that is a thing. I grew up on "black tea with milk and sugar", so taking a step into "herbal teas" was a whole new experience and some I like, some I don't.
I don't like blue cheese, I think possibly because I have a mild penicillin allergy. So while there may be some signalling going on of people pretending they like certain foods in order to be taken as posh, I think there really are people who like those flavours.
Let's quote "The Screwtape Letters"!
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
There are lots of foods of which bitter is part of their taste profile if that's what you mean? In the same way there are lots of sweet foods but their flavor is not just "sweet"
I like some teas, and most with sweetener and sometimes milk. I've reached the don't mind stage with black coffee. It tastes like productivity and morning, which masks that it also tastes pretty bad. I like the less bitter chunk of the beer spectrum, especially stouts and lighter wheat beers (I think I dislike what beer people call hoppy beers, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to be sure.)
On broccoli: toss it in olive oil, salt and pepper, then roast it at 400 until the edges go brown. Brings out the sweetness.
But, as someone said below, I'm in my mid-forties. Differences may be age based.
I don't *enjoy* tea/coffee/broccoli per se, but I'll drink them. There's also a thing that tea/coffee is a natural stimulant, so people who are sleepier than normal will drink it to feel Super Productive(tm).
Also, I once combined ramen noodles, hot water, and a tea bag, and consumed the results. It was surprisingly okay.
I'm having trouble thinking of cheeses that are normally over $30/lb. Around here that would be above all the usual (and actually good) Italian and French suspects at high-end specialty grocers. Very, very, very old imported cheddars? Some rare Alpine cheeses? Venezuelan beaver cheese?
Can anyone tell me the difference between Rats, which I take to be rationalist; and post-rats, which I take to be post-rationalists? I’m sure this is a really naive question but I thought I’d toss it anyway…
idk for sure, but what comes to mind is that phase of LessWrong where many rats came to the conclusion that doing this rationality thing deliberately doesn't really work, and that they're better off e.g. consuming productivity advice
Thanks…I came across a tweet about some anecdotal observations that Post-rats are more susceptible to right wing leanings because of their penchant for desiring to be seen as countercultural/radical thinking, especially if it’s unacceptable to the media & academic practices. There’s a strand in there about Post-rats starting to see the new-left is the right which I thought was interesting in itself. I also realized that I’ve been coming across the term post-rats are but nothing concrete and thought I’d ask here
Any predictions on how the Bill Gates saga is going to unfold?
I can say with 60% confidence that this will blow over quickly and not tarnish his legacy in a lasting way, unless it is proved that he solicited illegal sex from teenagers, which I think has a probability of maybe 20%. Are these odds reasonable?
I think he will probably wind up taking a public step back from The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. Call it a 75% chance it will just be called 'The Gates foundation' in 2022
...A 20% chance that Bill Gates will be found to have *solicited illegal sex from teenagers* seems very unreasonable to me, and I would be heavily against that. (To bet against you in particular would require a precise objective standard for what counts as proof, because your extremely high odds make me suspect we are living in different mental & media universes here.)
"had some connection to" elides the relevant details, my friend. Epstein had boatloads of money, donated it everywhere, and was apparently very charismatic. That's how he walked in powerful circles, not by renting sex slaves to Bill Gates or whatever.
Epstein's accusers stories are all similar: they involve him, his wife, and *not* Bill Gates.
I would say that the likelihood that Bill Gates actually had sex with illegal sex with teenagers is, say, 40%. I think he probably did party with Epstein, etc, but possibly did not partake in illegal sex. Reasons for believing that: he only sought to meet adult women in Microsoft before, and that having sex with teenagers lies wayy outside the moral compass of most men, including adulterers.
The likelihood of him getting convicted of such offenses is obviously lower, and I think it is 20% because he probably has enough pull with various agencies to avoid getting convicted. Notably Trump, with far clearer connections with Epstein than Gates, has still avoided being convicted for this.
So if Bill Gates is indeed convicted of soliciting illegal sex with teenagers, I will drastically have to change the way I understand the world. I am mostly used to powerful men getting away with things, although this of course has recently started changing with Epstein, Weinstein, etc
This seems even more utterly absurd to me, I have to say.
For what value of y and d, if any, would you be willing to bet $d at 5:1 odds that Bill Gates will be convicted of having sex with teenagers in y years?
How about I bet $50 at 5:1 odds that Gates will not get convicted of soliciting sex from teenagers within a year? From what I understand, you will pay me $50 if I win and I will pay you $250 if you win. We can talk further if the amount is too low or the time frame too short. I will concede if Bill Gates is convicted of these offenses by a jury within 12 months or is about to be convicted (my definition of "about to be convicted" is that a strong case has already been laid down against him in court, and the jury is deliberating upon a conviction).
Uh, I'm sorry if I was unclear — I am willing to bet that Gates *won't* be convicted, because as I said, I am shocked by your extremely high probability (20%!!) that he will be. If he is convicted or about to be convicted within a year, you get $250; if not, I get $50. Feel free to counter-propose your proposed terms now that you know you'd be on the opposite side of the bet.
Ah I now understand. Sorry, the 20% was not something I rigorously derived, but was only supposed to be a place-holder for "low, but non-zero". If I did something like rigorous analysis, maybe the actual percentage would be something like 10%..or maybe 5%.
Would you be willing to bet $50 at 10:1 odds? I apologize for changing the odds in such a manner. I am almost certainly going to lose the money, but I also think that taking bets with high odds can be beneficial in the long run if done enough times.
What I find interesting is that Jeff Epstein had a _lot_ of prominent known associates, but the media has been incredibly uninterested in following up on any of these connections, at least until their wives drop them in it.
The only person who seems to have actually got in trouble so far is Marvin Minksy, who is a relative nobody.
What little I'm reading is very confusing and I can't quite get straight what happened. I did jokingly suggest, back when the divorce news first hit and people were speculating in a joking manner that Bill was dumping her for a sexy young replacement, that "how do you she isn't dumping him now the kids are grown?"
Looks like I was more correct than I knew. If any of the rumours in the news are true, e.g. a female employee claimed she had a long-term affair with Bill, then that's radioactive. I mean, wow. "She only got a promotion because she banged the boss"? "Women aren't good enough to get a promotion on their merits, so they bang the boss, see that woman and Bill Gates"? That makes for a great working atmosphere!
And apparently he was playing away - or attempting to - with other women at Microsoft and the Foundation during the marriage. Yeah, I think Melinda's lawyers are going to take him to the cleaners, but as you said, unless there is evidence of groping or physical coercion or threats that he'd fire them and make sure they never got a job in the industry again, then I think the view will be "geek who couldn't even manage to hook a supermodel or something with his level of wealth" patronising view rather than "sexual predator" or what have you.
I know nothing about Bill/Melinda Gates, but I find the notion of a rich, powerful, and sexually active person who is absolutely faithful to his/her spouse to be absolutely unimaginable. I mean, sure, it's possible that such people exist, but it's also possible that unicorns exist, in some capacity.
The rich and powerful have the means to cheat, certainly, but so do a lot of people from other classes. Do you think every charming man and pretty woman cheat?
No, but rich people can afford to cheat with few consequences. Yes, occasionally the consequences do catch up with them, but the probability of this happening is quite low if one is rich.
Can they? If Henry the Deadbeat gets another girl pregnant, nothing changes. If Bill the Gates gets a girl pregnant, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in child support on the line.
I think "hundreds of millions" is pushing it a bit; the silence of an ordinary person can be bought much cheaper than that. Also, consider that Bill Gates's net worth is in the hundreds of *billions*.
I think this gets things backwards. If Henry gets a girl pregnant, then unless he's a successful deadbeat, he's on the hook for real money, as a percentage of his income. Child support payments are no joke.
If Bill Gates gets a girl pregnant, lawyers and accountants take care of it. The money may be life-changing for her, but it's only noticeable to him if he makes a point of noticing it.
I imagine that to someone with access to pretty much anything the world has to offer, who can literally change the world in significant ways, and who is intelligent enough to realize and appreciate those things, sex is rather uninteresting and even boring. But I imagine that Bill (and Melinda) Gates are occasionally tempted to have intimate, but asexual, relationships with some of the fascinating people they know.
The accounts of his seduction attempts aren't too flattering; "clumsy" was one of the phrases I saw used. So it still comes across as "guy was so much of a nerd, even having Tons Of Money couldn't help him get women".
The Supreme Court has decided to take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization for the upcoming term, with the eventual decision to be reached before June 2022. The case focuses on Mississippi's 2018 Gestational Age Act, which blocks all abortions after 15 weeks with the only exceptions being medical emergency and severe fetal abnormality. Said law has currently been blocked by the 5th Circuit, and is now on its way to SCOTUS.
This will not have been the only abortion case before the court in recent years, but it will definitely be the most direct. In contrast, June Medical Services LLC v. Russo in 2020 was a challenge to a Louisiana law that required abortion clinics to have certain hospital admission privileges - notably, only one provider in the state qualified. The decision was 5-4 with Roberts joining the liberals; since then, RBG has been replaced by ACB.
I make no predictions as to how it will go at this juncture, well in advance of oral arguments. But one way or another or another entirely, it'll definitely be the highest-profile case in quite some time.
It's certainly the most straightforward opportunity, as the Mississippi law challenges the status quo directly rather than nibbling away at the edges. You'd have to elaborate as to which aspect of Roe you're referring to (Casey changed quite a bit), but regardless the answer would probably be "yes in theory, but we'll see what angles come up in arguments".
In the not-so-distant past intellectual discussions were done in Latin - why not do that again?
-It selects for conscientious, reasonably intelligent and educated people
-It acts as a signal - by being able to participate in the discussion you show you have put in the work and are more likely than not to be willing to argue in good faith
-Reduced risk of having someone stumble upon your posts and taking them out of context to cancel you or whatever
-It reconnects with a millenia-old tradition of scholarship that was only broken in the name of national interests. It is in Latin that Copernicus, Newton, Euler and countless others spread their findings and theories to the world. Aesthetics and tradition matter
-It is more culturally neutral than living languages - because everyone has to learn it, everyone is equally linguistically insecure, whereas debates in English always kind of give an upper hand to native English speakers, since your point suffers when you make mistakes (even though it shouldn't, but we are irrational)
-It has a long tradition of teaching and plenty of quality learning materials
Is there any drawback that doesn't trivially reduce to "I can't be bothered with learning it"?
- While Latin does select for certain types of people, perhaps it selects too much — Latin does take time, effort, and resources to learn, and those are much more readily available to some than to others. Innovation is fuelled by open access, so proposals to substantially raise the barrier to entry to intellectual discussion must themselves meet a high bar.
- Any such intellectual-discussion language is competing against English. It's not clear to me that Latin is easier to learn than English — Latin is more inflected, but English pronunciation/spelling are more irregular (I liked learning Spanish conjugations at school and found them easy, but many students seem(ed) to struggle much more.)
- Latin is much easier for speakers of Romance languages, English, &c. to learn than for someone who, say, speaks Japanese or Chinese. As noted in my first point, this will hinder some people and (disproportionately) certain groups from accessing such discussions.
As an alternative, I would propose Esperanto:
- It's meant to be easy to learn, but that doesn't mean it's zero-effort, so it would still act as a signal and a selection mechanism.
- It would prevent casual/malicious passersby from easily quote-mining so long as we don't accept Google Translate as a valid translator for cancellation purposes.
- It has its own history (was persecuted by both Nazis and Stalin), but not as much as Latin (and I'll admit I don't really value aesthetics and tradition all that much, so I don't find this point compelling).
- It is also very culturally/linguistically neutral and was meant to be so! I agree that this is important. As I noted above, Latin is easier for speakers of certain languages; while Esperanto, similarly, being based on mostly European languages/roots, is easier for, e.g., a native English speaker to learn than for, e.g., a native Japanese speaker — anecdotally, Esperantists report that Chinese, Japanese, &c. Esperantists find Esperanto much easier than English. I.e., Esperanto may be harder for a Chinese speaker than for a French speaker, but it's still quite easy for both of them. Would Latin also be easier than English?
- Since Esperanto is meant to be a universal second language, it also has a large corpus of teaching materials, from Zamenhof's original book to the Duolingo Esperanto course, and this corpus is being added to even now. Esperanto also has the bonus of events/workshops, many of whom aim to help attendees learn the language (e.g., Retoso 2021, which I meant to attend but didn't... whoops).
Overall, since Esperanto seems much more learnable than Latin (although disclaimer that I've learnt Esperanto and haven't learnt Latin outside of a few Duolingo lessons), and has resources focused on its explicit goal of being a universal second language and facilitating communication, I'd favor it over Latin.
(Going off on a tangent, has anyone seen scientific studies or anything discussing whether we are as cognitively strong in our second languages as in our birth languages? Anecdotally, I wonder if one has to put more effort into processing the language somehow, or if it's processed differently from one's birth language(s), thus causing one to be more vulnerable to misinformation, scams, &c. — perhaps this might operate in a similar way to being distracted by environmental stimuli, except the distraction can't be eliminated. This would have important implications for both private and public sector, for universal second language efforts, for the scientific community, and so on.)
Sure, why not go with Esperanto - I'd chosen Latin because my feeling was that it ticked more of the boxes among the more traditionally minded userbase of ACX but for all intents and purposes Esperanto acts much in the same way and as you said it is more accessible if that's an issue, while still acting as a kind of good-faith filter.
(As an aside, it'd be interesting to have debates on hot button issues exclusively in toki pona, just to see if the language itself can force us to behave in a positive and charitable way.)
It doesn't really matter whether we are 'cognitively strong' when debating - first that didn't prevent all the ancient scholars who used Latin or other lingua francae from doing research and making breakthroughs; second, intellectual discussion is meant to be deep, not fast; it doesn't matter how long it takes you to process a text so long as you understand it in the end, and when you are comfortable enough in a language the 'cognitive lag' is almost negligible, even if it's still present.
(I haven't gotten around to learning toki pona yet, but I don't think it would work very well, because it'd be hard to speak precisely and I suspect that attempts to specify certain concepts could end up as really long combinations of words.)
Sed, post dua pensado, ĉi tio maniero de komuniko havas problemojn. Ekzemple, preskaŭ neniu komprenus nin, kaj eĉ tiuj kiuj povus kompreni nin ne sciius Esperanto sufiĉe bone por uzi ĝin tra la tuta konversacio. Ni devus uzi kelkfoje vortojn de la angla...
Regarding cognitive strength in non-native languages: I saw this a while ago, though only by reference in a pop article. At least according to one study, the opposite is true.
Latin is also beneficial because it would expose English speaker to a grammatical case language. But why use a dead language? Russian also uses grammatical case and it’s producing new content all the time.
Plus the lack of articles in the language and the lack of a minuscule script in the Cyrillic alphabet let you pretend to be Boris Badinov if you read it out loud word for word.
In the last days of the Cold War Pravda was all anti US Propaganda. “WHEN RUSSIAN BEAR AND AMERICAN EAGLE DECIDE TO HAVE BIG FIGHT NO ONE WILL NOW RESULT”
After the dissolution of the SSRs Pravda went through a funny People Magazine phase/. “FREDDY MERCURY WAS MARTYR TO GAY RIGHTS CAUSE”
Once Putin had control it make anti US rhetoric again.
Latin selects for pretentious people who think gatekeeping discussions and having 'in knowledge' is important. Conscientious people are masters of concepts, not words. They can express their knowledge in any language they know, even if they don't know it well. This is why english works, and languages like Esperanto fail. They are tools, not ends.
This awfully sounds like rationalization about one's foreign language shortcomings, no offense. I can assure you it isn't as hard as it looks like, though. You just have to apply yourself, which is kind of the point. It's not about Latin being superior to English for expressing knowledge, it's about signaling that you are diligent and willing to put in the effort to get into a community. The choice itself is not that relevant except for practical matters.
If you think you're above costly signaling, think again.
In fact, I *don't* have to apply myself to the task of learning Latin, or Esperanto or Klingon or whatever. I can instead apply myself to the task of learning stuff worth talking about in any language, and then talk about that stuff in English and either ignore or mock and ridicule the tiny clique of Latin-geeks who think they are going to somehow convince all the smart people to adopt their silly dead language. This seems much more likely to serve any purpose from status-signalling to actual effective communication, in any world I am likely to live in.
IMO signalling and selecting should be far from a main focus here; the main purpose of a language is communication, and an easier and more (linguistically) neutral language breaks down barriers to access and allows more people to participate in dialogue. I agree that languages are tools, and I'd like us to use more effective tools.
(Esperanto may not currently be very popular at all, but it and other auxiliary languages are not dead and are ready to come into wider use now, next year, or whenever.)
Of course the relevant idea here is that the set of people which a language barrier selects for is different, often detrimentally so, from the set of people who would contribute the most value to intellectual dialogue.
Esperanto's claim to fame is being dramatically easier to learn than English or any other 'unplanned' language. I expect Klingon isn't designed to be easy (I did hear it was designed to be practical for English speakers to pronounce, but as alien as possible under that constraint, with, of course, a style that alludes to the warmongering nature of the race.)
As for me, I figured that while Esperanto was a valuable innovation, it failed due to network effects (as with the Google+ social network, the small number of participants works against it) so I started designing Ungglish (ungglish.loyc.net), a language that was a cross between an easy-to-learn interlanguage and a teaching tool for English, so that there is a strong case to be made for teaching it before English - building further on the concept of the "Propaedeutic value of Esperanto": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
However, as with all my other intellectual pursuits, I had no one with which to share this hobby so I stopped working on it.
I believe now that the best way to design an interlanguage involves a giant machine learning system to help choose a vocabulary designed to maximize the language's clarity and translatability, so that by writing text in this interlanguage it can be fairly reliably translated to most other languages. This could be added to the other two features (ease-of-learning and a resemblance to English) to make it a more attractive language for people who want to be able to communicate in many languages on a low budget.
People already take things out of context, imagine when the source material wouldn't even be understandable to people without google translate.
Speaking of google translate, that's not something people had access to during Copernicus, Newton and Euler's time, I'm sure it would make a big difference.
It wouldn't be just the constientious people or the pretentious people who would argue, everyone would try to jump into the discussion with their shoddy translators and everything would be 1000 times worse than before.
"A theme that I return to every so often on the blog is the degree to which we don’t understand the molecular mechanisms of psychiatric syndromes. I’ve found that many people outside of the biomedical world are surprised by this – depression, for example, is something that’s distinctive enough, widespread enough, and certainly has enough of a presence in most people’s consciousness as something real (as it should). And there are even pop-pharmacology explanations that many people have heard of (“not enough serotonin!”), so it can come as a surprise to find out that we really, really don’t have a handle on it on that level at all. And the same goes for all the other diagnoses with similarly high profiles, such as schizophrenia, PTSD, and more."
"All this leads up to this new paper (open access) in Nature Medicine. It presents the result of a randomized placebo-controlled trial for PTSD sufferers. 45 of them got placebo medication plus integrative psychiatric therapy, and another 45 got the same psychiatric therapy after doses of MDMA. The results very strongly indicate a positive effect for the latter, as assessed by widely-accepted ratings scales administered by independent (treatment-blinded) observers. These results appear to be better than any of the drugs actually approved for PTSD therapy, namely sertraline and paroxetine."
"And this work is of course part of a broader movement for the controlled use of psychedelics and other drugs largely known for recreation and for abuse. I’ve written about this before on the blog. Some people who know me personally will have encountered my own policy of no recreational drug use, which is pretty wide-ranging and of lifelong standing. But I’m all for these studies – given the state of knowledge in the field, I see absolutely no reason not to investigate a drug that might be useful just because other people want to take it for fun. It seems a ridiculous distinction to make. And even though I have no desire at all to experiment with my brain chemistry on a random Saturday night, if I suffered from something like PTSD – and I am overwhelmingly glad to say that I don’t – I would leap at the chance to alter my brain chemistry in order to lessen it."
I’ve had deeply entrenched anxiety all my life. One MDMA experience in the mid 1980s helped me more than the 30 years of Prozac that followed. Approval and adoption of this therapy can’t come soon enough for me.
Hopefully we'll get more details, because right now this looks really bad. It appears DoJ issued a subpoena under seal for the account details (incl. name, email, and physical address) of one of Nunes' anonymous Twitter trolls, with an accompanying gag order preventing disclosure of the subpoena. Unless there is one hell of a good explanation behind this, it marks a significant escalation from the already-unacceptable use of punitive litigation that anti-SLAPP exists to combat. More news as it comes in.
Twitter's motion to quash has been mooted. I'm going to hold off on speculating why for a bit since we'll know better soon enough, but the chance it reflects well on the DoJ's initial attempt is infinitesimal.
Looks like DoJ retracted the subpoena back in March, less than a week after new AG's appointment. It's getting nearly impossible to see any interpretation other than this having been a politically-motivated action to attack Nunes' critics, which would be every bit as corrupt as it sounds.
Well known science writer Nicholas Wade, late of the NYTimes, wrote a very well researched and reported pair of articles on the origins of the pandemic (links below):. The following is the abstract I made of the articles, which you should read in their entirety:
A research team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology headed by Dr. Zheng-li Shi, (called “Bat Lady” because of her research on bat viruses) did gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Shi had gathered many coronaviruses, (the type to which the virus that produces COVID-19 belongs) from caves in Yunnan in southern China.
Shi took spike protein genes from different viruses and inserted them into a series of virus backbones, to find the combination that would best infect human cells. Some or all of this work was performed in labs at biosafety level 2 on a four step scale, where 4 is the most secure.
One or more people in Wuhan were infected by the viruses produced in these experiments. The virus spread through Wuhan to the rest of the world.
From 2014 through 2019, New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance (run by Dr. Peter Daszak) had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The grants were approved by Anthony Fauci M.D., as Director of NIAID in a way that subverted Presidential instructions not do such research.
In February 2020, (before the pandemic really hit the US) the British medical journal Lancet published a letter written by Daszak and endorsed by others claiming the virus had originated in wildlife and spread through the Wuhan “Wet Market”.
In late 2020 and early 2021, Daszak was a part of a delegation of researchers from WHO that went to China to investigate the origin of the pandemic. Their report said that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.”
Fauci Funded Daszak so Dasak could fund Chinese scientists.
The Chinese scientists created the coronavirus that causes COVI-19. It escaped from their lab, and caused the pandemic that has killed almost 600,000 Americans and more than 3 million worldwide.
Daszak covered up for Fauci and the Chinese.
Links to the Wade articles:
”The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?” By Nicholas Wade | May 5, 2021 in “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”
After reading the Wade article and much relted information over the last week, this is what I think:
1. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was created by gain of function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One or more people at that laboratory became infected with the virus because of inadequate or negligent procedures. The infected people spread the virus through the city of Wuhan, and they and others spread it across the world.
2. The research at WIV was funded by “Ecohealth Alliance” of New York which is run by Peter Daszak. Ecohealth was funded by grants from NIH/NIAID run by Dr. Fauci. Funding this research was questionable in light of a pause in GoF research requested by the President Obama in 2014, to which the Director of NIH acceded.
3. Fauci lied to the Senate Committee about the NIAID role in funding research at WIV. Far worse than that, not legally, but ethically and morally, Fauci failed to disclose what he knew and failed to investigate the connection of NIAID to WIV in January 2020 when the Pandemic was first noticed in China.
4. Drasak also failed to disclose his involvement with WIV and GoF research. And, what is worse, he actively worked to distract public attention from the possibility that the virus was created at WIV.
5. I am not at all convinced that any set of public polices would have materially altered the course of the pandemic, save one. That one is the crash effort by the US government to create and distribute vaccines. Knowing that the virus was created in a lab would not have changed the course of the Pandemic.
6. That said, for the prevention of future pandemics, for the ability of the American people to trust anything that their Federal Government does, and for our collective sanity, a high level, objective, non-partisan inquiry needs to be made into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Arguably the lab leak hypothesis has been underexamined for multiple reasons that expand from narrow to broad:
1. The people with the most direct knowledge of the GoF research-Shi, Dazak, the Chinese authorities, etc.-have huge incentives to deflect blame from themselves.
2. The larger field of virologists don't want their field condemned, their funding cut, and their careers derailed.
3. The greater scientific community, and the managerial/commentary class along with it, are deeply concerned about fueling "anti-science" views.
4. The same groups are concerned about fueling anti-Chinese views. Both (3) and (4) have significant political valences.
If a lab leak did actually occur, then the people downplaying it are doing something extremely dangerous, since through their actions dangerous research may avoid scrutiny and another pandemic may follow. So we really, really need to get a good answer.
I think you have it right. Further the media will react to Saint Anthony Fauci saying these are not the droids you are looking for just as the imperial stormtroopers did.
I worry that another reason it was underexamined was that Trump came out pretty early saying it was (true/possible?), and there was a reflexive reaction against the theory.
I'm a complete layman in virology and medicine in general. Fauci denied that the type of research that went to Wuhan were of the GoF type, and when I read the grants I just don't have the technical language to parse whether Wade (and the various scientists who signed the 200 signature document) are correct about the research being GoF, or if Fauci is correct in denying it.
As I understand it, these sections of the NIH grants are what have been called into question:
“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”
And this is Wade translating it into layman's terms:
"What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people."
I'd be interested to see what Scott makes of all this.
That's been the 'best guess' of some for a while. Juri Deigin (sp) on Bret Weinstein podcast was the culmination for me. I'm glad it's getting more 'mainstream'. Oh my story so that China can save face. A rouge scientist was working on this in private.
This is why you can't *just* listen to the science on issues of policy like this. These people are epidemiologists. They spent years studying epidemiology. Their job depends on epidemiology and stopping epidemics being very important. Of course they are going to massively overrate the utility of stopping epidemics reletive to the utility of everything else. A lot of them probably came to the conclusion that there is way too much casual human contact years ago, before covid was a thing.
I think you could gather this from reading the article.. it seems to be part noble lies, part other factors... i dont see anything where they doubt the vaccines work.
<quote>
“There are no magic numbers here,” said Noelle Cocoros, an epidemiologist at Harvard. “Establishing some guidelines are important, but as soon as you put a number on something, it becomes gospel for many people and impacts their understanding of risk.”
Some said the issue wasn’t about vaccine effectiveness, but about how to know and trust that everyone at a large gathering was fully immunized.
</quote>
and the 78% number, while technically true (only 22% responded 'unlimited households'), does obscure that most of the 'restrictions' are pretty permissive. Only 6% responded that no interaction should be allowed. 37% were ok with 2 households, 28% with 5 households, 7% with 10 households, and 22% with unlimited households.
These seems like encouraging numbers, given most people only got vaccinated less than a month ago, and we are just getting out of this. I don't really see how you go from this to they 'doubt that the vaccines work', and only slightly see how you could call this a Noble Lie (it seems more like minimizing unknown risk, and going slow)
I don't think it's doubt, so much as "keep maintaining precautions until we're sure the bulk of the population are vaccinated". Covid vaccination advice on our national health service website tells us that vaccination protects others even if they are not vaccinated, but it still recommends "keep protecting yourself and others":
How long your vaccine takes to work
The time you need to wait depends on which vaccine you’ve had.
You can follow the vaccine bonus advice:
7 days after your 2nd Pfizer-BioNTech dose
14 days after your 2nd Moderna dose
14 days after the Janssen vaccine - this is a single dose vaccine
28 days after your 1st AstraZeneca dose - you still need to get your 2nd dose to make sure that your vaccine protection lasts
Vaccine bonus
With the vaccine bonus, you can meet indoors with:
other fully vaccinated people from up to 2 other households
people from 1 other household who are not vaccinated - as long as no more than 3 households are there
You can do this without wearing face coverings or staying 2 metres apart.
The people you meet should not be at high risk from COVID-19 if they are not vaccinated.
Keep protecting yourself and others
Even after you are vaccinated, continue to follow advice on how to stop the spread of COVID-19 in public places.
In a hypothetical universe with zero lockdown costs and infinite state capacity, I can see the reasoning behind doing this until the world reaches herd immunity Right now the biggest threat seems to be a variant that evades the vaccine evolving and spreading worldwide. This threat probably won't be eliminated for a number of years. I personally think the best policy in the US is relaxing restrictions now in order to rebuild state capacity, while having plans and funding in place to swiftly reimpose them if a vaccine resistant variant starts spreading.
No. I think it's quite likely aliens exist - it's a very big universe, after all - but are they buzzing around our planet, or at least sending probes to buzz around? I don't think so. Partly because there has been an entire mythos built up around alien contacts with Earthlings, which is moved straight into New Age/neopagan beliefs not science, and partly because I think probably the most parsimonious explanation is "various governments testing out new tech in spy planes, fighter planes, drones and the like" and "disinformation", not "The US Navy is telling us UFOs exist and aliens are real".
That’s definitely the position that I’d be inclined to take.
But I’ve seen people who know quite a bit more about physics than I do say that the way some of these crafts have been seen to move would require a *major* breakthrough in our ability to control gravity, and I have a hard time believing that some government agency has made such a groundbreaking discovery in secret, and has successfully concealed it from the global scientific community for 17 years (the USS Nimitz incident, one of the most seemingly-inexplicable sightings, was in 2004.)
It seems very odd to me that the rationalist community has seemed so uninterested in this, given their normal openness to unconventional, science-fiction-sounding scenarios.
I was interested when they released that military footage, but by looking at the video I couldn't figure out anything about the velocity or size of the UFOs, let alone the G-forces acting on them. I Googled around for anyone shedding more light than heat and didn't find anything. I did get confused that between two videos with infrared footage, one seemed to identify the UFO as hot and the other, cold, but maybe I misunderstood.
Approximately how many people are there who should be vaccinated and are willing to be vaccinated but aren't because of lack of availability of vaccine?
My guess is "not really". There are about eight billion people on earth, and the US is only offering 20 million doses, which is only enough to cover 10 or 20 million people (depending on whether you think each person needs one dose or two; either way, <1% of everyone on earth).
If the US offered an order of magnitude or two more, and they targeted the offer to some of the hardest-hit places (which, judging from https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html, seems to currently be India/Brazil/France/Turkey/etc.) or eliminated or reduced the vaccine prioritization thingy caused by short supply, *then* I would pay more attention. (Although I've already received my second shot, so even then not a lot.) But judging from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2021/05/04/how-big-of-a-vaccine-surplus-will-the-us-have/, it seems that the US is on track to have hundreds of millions of doses in surplus by this fall or winter, so maybe the first part of the previous sentence was kind of meaningless.
I have nothing of substance to contribute, but I was definitely not expecting WhistlinDiesel videos linked in ASC comments, much less by Nancy Lebovitz.
I can't speak for psmith, but I had the same surprise. I think because posting videos about uncouth rednecks driving their monster trucks into the San Francisco Bay would usually be beneath the sophistacation of the Nancy Lebovitz that usually posts here.
I prefer to think I have a sophisticated appreciation of excellence wherever I may find it. It's a nicely made video, too.
For what it's worth, I found the video in a list of videos which purported to show that rednecks are awful. The other two videos were uninspired clips of big-wheeled trucks propelling themselves on water, and one of them had Trump flags.
Is there any rationalist review /commentary on the work of Pierre Bourdieu? I've seen a lot of writing on class, signaling, and education that points in the same general direction as Bourdieu, sometimes essentially redoing his whole thing, without ever acknowledging the connection.
Cryptocurrency/DeFi/etc has been on my metaphorical radar for quite some time, but I feel hesitant about investing/working in it. Here are some of my worries, in (very roughly) descending order:
1. Coinbase/Binance/etc doesn't allow people under 18 to join and trade (which is think is for legal reasons), and I'm one of them. (And, more generally, the legality of using cryptocurrencies/DeFi/etc.)
2. Even if I don't use a company like that, I might need to install special software in order to do this properly, and I'm afraid of messing up my computer beyond repair in the process.
3. Not everyone accepts cryptocurrency as payment for commerce.
4. I'll have to pay taxes on it, which I don't know how to do properly.
5. There are a lot of criminals involved in this area.
6. Someone recommended (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtj34VMClU) that I use relatively extreme security measures before even beginning (such as writing passwords in a paper notebook, using 2FA everywhere), and I have no sense of calibration on whether this is too much or not enough.
7. Hackers/scammers/ordinary market fluctuations could wipe out any profits that I make.
8. Mining cryptocurrency takes a lot of energy, which produces a lot of environmental damage. Renewable/zero-emissions energy sources could mitigate a lot of it, but it's not exactly straightforward to find or obtain.
9. I don't understand any economics.
Can you clarify whether these issues are as important as I think and recommend ways I could take care of the important ones? Thanks.
@6. Using 2FA everywhere is the correct security posture for basically everyone. At the very least you should have a second factor for anything that can spend money (including your primary and recovery emails). Hacking someone who only uses a password is fairly easy, and becomes much easier if that password is reused.
Since politics is allowed in this thread, and since I read this story today, I'd be interested in opinions and I hope that on here I will get something better than the usual online exchange of "you're a big poopy-head" "no, you are!" that these kinds of thing usually degenerate into.
So, what do you think: vindictive and pointless campaign that has now reached Ken Starr-levels of "I'm gonna get him for something by hook or by crook" on the part of "Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, [who] has been investigating Mr Trump's pre-presidency business dealings for more than two years" or vital, necessary probe to bring down notorious criminal (well, whatever the charges exactly may be) now that he no longer has the shield of public office?
I don't know the merits of this case, which is why I'm asking. Otherwise, it does look like the Democrats are doing tit for the Clinton impeachment efforts tat.
I don't know anything about it, but the sentence "Both Mr Vance and Ms James are Democrats" makes me think of it as "nothingburger until more info becomes public."
I don't think anyone not part of the investigation has enough information yet to reach any definitive conclusions, but...
My guess is that this will probably be easy to spin both ways. I would bet the organization is guilty of some moderate level fraud. Slightly more fraud than your typical organization, but nothing like having people killed. So nothing serious enough that pro-Ts won't be able to just call it 'everyone is guilty of regulation violations, etc.', even though it will probably be a bit more than that; but Democrats will act like it's treason.
It is also likely that they never would have been investigated if he had not become president. So I guess it is tit for tat, but depending on how serious the crimes are, you may or may not care.
I'm reading Harvey's book (A Brief History of Neoliberalism), and one of the claims he makes in Chapter 2 is "Many of the key breakthrouhgs in pharmaceutical research, for example, had been funded by the National Institute of Health in collaboration with the drug companies. But in 1978 the companies were allowed to take all the benefits of patent rights without returning anything to the state". The reference cited is Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1V1A/), which is a 352-page book that I don't own a copy of and neither does my library system. On the other hand, I'm betting someone in this community knows enough about the history of the NIH to comment -- how much truth is there to this claim? My impression was that, to first order, pharmaceutical companies patent stuff and charge a lot of money to cover the expense of ushering things through FDA approval, and I wouldn't have expected the NIH to have anything to do with that part -- but (a) I might be misrepresenting the current state, and (b) this is talking about the 60s and 70s, and it's entirely possible that the expensive parts of the process were different.
As a data guy, I spend a lot of my time reminding colleagues to think about the "other"/weird buckets in multi-set intersections. "13% of the dentists also have tattoos and adult children, should they get the invitation or not?" It hurts my head to do even with practice, it's conversationally agonizing, and many of my colleagues seem to have never been taught to think this way. But this thinking is hugely important for assessing and attacking almost every significant social/political problem or proposed solution - certainly at least remembering to check whether the "other" buckets have a lot of people in them or not at a bare minimum. Has anybody seen good tools for teaching/talking about these sorts of things?
I chose the invitation example as an example of the Venn-diagram holes I have to deal with at work collaborating with marketers. Those problems are (I think) similar to a common public policy problem - in a political context, a better example would be remembering to consider the smallish set of inherited multi-millionaire PoC living in Michigan when, say, constructing a social program designed to push the economic advancement of Michigan PoC. These multi-millionaires could easily be pointlessly admitted to the program were it simply constructed based on race, geographic, and salary rules, accidentally constructing a giant tax loophole for folks who really don't need it. Grilling people about the "corner cases" is conversationally aggravating, but hugely necessary, and I'm looking for advice on how people keep productivity high when working on multi-axis problems like this.
Does Tesla really have the "largest casting machine that has ever been made"? Weren't the casting machines used to make the turrets and hulls of old tanks, like the M4 Sherman, even bigger?
Wikipedia says (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press) they are largest "high-pressure die casting", it's likely the tanks were just cast by a different type of machines, especially since tanks are made out of steal and this is aluminium. Also the same article claims it can do ~1000 castings per day, with a speed like this a single machine would cover all US AFVs production during all of WW2 in 3 months. Probably extra speed adds to the size.
The presses of the Heavy Press Program were/are forging and extrusion presses, so perhaps technically out of competition, but they are monumentally huge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
Just listening to Po-Shen Loh with Lex Fridman. Wow! Perhaps most topical is they've developed a Covid app that tells you when you are in danger. Very cool ideas. (and simple)
Hi Scott, longtime reader first time poster, blah blah blah blah.
I recently came across the Dungeons and Discourse writeup (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ep2Z42hYqj68QZz6w/king-under-the-mountain-adventure-log-soundtrack), and the hilarious songs. However some of the links to the lyrics are broken and I cant find them anywhere, Do you still have the lyrics to the missing songs? Specifically "I'm evil Immanuel Kant" and both "All is Water" versions. I've been looking and found all of the other songs but can't find even lyrics for those. Thanks!
If you think AI takeoff is likely to happen in the next 20-30 years but are useless at coding/politics/business management/finance, how do you do something useful with your life?
I mean, aside from literally stopping people from dying before singularity (which could actually be bad in case of Roko-style or MMAcevedo-style Virtual Hell), there's not much you can do for people that won't be rendered irrelevant by a bad *or* good AI takeoff, and without access to one of those you have ~0 control over the time and goodness of takeoff.
What data on mask compliance are you looking at?
Anecdotally it is probably easier and more robust to generalize the behaviors of a tight community of under a million, to a diverse community of ~37 million.
if you have no data but are basing it on "people i see on the street", then there is a good reason to reject it on 'it sounds racist' grounds... because it sounds racist.
i guess i dont understand your original post then... are you asking why the scientific community rejected your anecdotal street observations?
this blog, including me, is surely sympathetic to the idea that certain *facts* can be ignored by mainstream based on optics. but you are trying to shoehorn this into your anecdotes so you can say "look, heres another example of ideological orthodoxy!", and imo are failing. when mainstream ignores facts because they 'sound racist', it can be a disservice to science. when they ignore your anecdotes because they 'sound racist', it is entirely reasonable.
From my own country (the Netherlands) I know the most affected community are the religious conservatives. caused by a combination of large families and refusal to adhere to goverment advise on how church attendence maximums. I'm not an expert on Orthodox Judaism but i've heard the issues also apply to them. Are black people also known for these?
Black people in the U.S. are quite a bit more religious than white people: https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/
I'm not sure how people are distributed in America, but people from Black and [South] Asian minority ethnicities in the UK are disproportionately likely to live in cities (where there's lots of chances to sprerad covid) and to have jobs that a) can't be done from home and b) involve a lot of contact with people
How about diabetes and maybe other co-morbidities? See here: https://www.diabetes.org/resources/statistics/statistics-about-diabetes.
The commentary I read indicated that African-Americans were significantly MORE compliant with disease control measures than the general population, but I wouldn't describe the places I read this as reliable sources.
Maybe obesity is the cause. Black people are more likely to be obese than white people, 50% to 42%, and quite a bit more likely to be severely obese, 14% to 9%. (Source: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db360.htm) These gaps are entirely due to black women; black men are actually less likely to be obese than white men.
The possible causes others give: urban homes, jobs with lots of contact with people, make sense to me, too.
Black Americans were obvious, in retrospect, to be very hard hit.
It kills mostly the obese and diabetic, they are overrepresented in both.
It spreads fastest in urban areas, they are concentrated there.
It spreads in churches, they are religious at higher rates.
It spreads at social gatherings, black youth's were the most underpoliced demographic already, after George Floyd, breaking up a black party for violating covid restrictions was unthinkable.
You're not including the public-facing jobs?
Very little evidence it spreads in places like supermarkets.
It kills mostly the old, with "obese" and "diabetic" being minor perturbations on this. Black Americans are underrepresented among the old.
That is because they die earlier. Covid doesn't work in the way of "kills the old" it basically works to shave off a few life years you might have had. If blacks die earlier (true) they die earlier-er from covid.
If we plot IFR vs age for white and black people, is the black-people curve noticeably above the white-people curve? If so, that's interesting and possibly important, but I want to see the evidence. My best guess is that most of what we are seeing is mostly black people being more likely to be infected for lifestyle reasons, not so much black people being more likely to die if infected.
From where, empirically, do you get the idea that "black youth's were the most underpoliced demographic already"?
I would also like to know this. The claim rings of truthiness.
Empirically, you probably don't have it. Realistically, drive through a majority black neighborhood on a Thursday/Friday night and you will see tons of activities that would get teens arrested for in a majority white neighborhood: Public drinking, smoking, trash fires, etc. If suburbs were policed like urban neighborhoods, most years not a single teenager would be arrested.
Perhaps George Floyd changed things dramatically (I rather doubt it) but according to a NYPD tally obtained by the media a year ago, racialised minorities made up most of the people arrested in New York for Covid-19 distancing violations.
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/05/07/exclusive-cbs2-obtains-breakdown-of-nypds-social-distancing-enforcement/
Those two months or so make for modest data, but I'm inclined to credit the report over anecdotal observation.
Thanks for confirming: you’re just making up generalizations about Black people.
Reporters have been addressing the epidemiology of this issue since last summer. On top of existing systemic discrimination and economic inequality and their effects on health, if Black people and Black communities are more likely to work in jobs and live in places with higher risk of exposure, and are less likely to have healthcare or access to testing, they are more likely to get sick and have worse outcomes.
Why are you asking this question? Similar to tempo's point about wanting to prove a hypothesis with what you see on the street, if you're already aware of what I'm talking about and *still* want to ask this question, it comes across less like honest curiosity and more like a desire for other people to validate your unsubstantiated opinion about Black people in general. What does that sound like to you?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/09/23/914427907/as-pandemic-deaths-add-up-racial-disparities-persist-and-in-some-cases-worsen
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7762908/
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html
Has Scott commented on the 'p factor' debate in mental health? If he has, can someone direct me where to go to search for comments.
Yet another attempts by psychologists to lump everything into a single number by PCA magic despite having little zero neurological data to back it up. Imagine building up an "attractiveness" factor or a "physical health" factor by lumping up a bunch of "common sense" metrics and thinking you've uncovered something fundamental about the human mind by doing linear combinations thereof until it fits. Literally the level of a sophomore's first contact with data science
...and observing that these correlations exist, giving a name to the first principle component and trying to find out what goes into it and what are the deviations from it is bad, how exactly?
And of course "attractiveness" and "physical health" factors exist. Given any reasonable outcome (such as 'probability a random person will want to have sex with me' or 'life expectancy') you will find a bunch of physical and other attributes that together form a very good, and pretty universal, predictor of that outcome. (Yes, I know some aspects of attractiveness aren't universal across cultures. But many, like age, apparent health and social status are). "Physical health" factor overlaps extensively with all the basic stuff a doctor checks on you, so we are actually already using that one and constantly refining it.
I'm pretty sure an attractiveness factor doesn't exist if you're just considering physical attributes? Generally what you instead find is that the size of everything is correlated, which is compatible with the existence of a "body growth" factor (which obviously exists, I'd say? - different forms of growth shared mechanisms, e.g. growth hormone, nutrition, age).
(You *can* get a very strong attractiveness factor by having multiple raters rate each individual on attractiveness. But that's different from it arising naturally from the traits themselves.)
When it comes to "physical health" factors, the closest one I'm aware of is an aging/youth factor that you get when you combine different age-related problems. This factor appears to exist even after controlling for actual physical age.
There probably exists genetic mutations and environmental stressors that affect more than one body part, so that positive correlations in different aspects of attractiveness would be expected.
For example, if you are very very poor, you probably don't wash your hair often, or have good nutrition, or good dental hygiene, and so on.
As another example, environmental stress in the womb likely creates asymmetries spread across the body.
I'm not sure, but I believe that the degree of mutational load tends to be spread across the genome, so that some people have more of it than others, for some reason. Attractive people are more genetically "average" and have lower mutational load.
When it comes to human traits, correlations are the norm, and independence is rare.
It's not just a question of whether there it is there, but also of how much variance it accounts for. Differences in body growth are really dramatically big, so they're going to outweigh and obscure the sort of factors you mention, even if they do exist.
https://www.metafilter.com/191483/The-dark-matter-of-psychiatry
Discussion, with some people saying that the gut biome might be the big factor.
Given the high heritability of many psychiatric disorders, its seems to me quite unlikely that the gut biome plays a significant role.
Do you know the average differences between parents and their children when it comes to the composition of the gut biome? I have no clue but maybe they tend to be very similar which would be hard to distinguish from genetic effects.
Heritability is frequently measured by comparing the ressemblance of identical versus fraternal twins (if Id twins are much more similar than F twins then the trait is probably quite heritable). So it seems to me that the gut biome does not act as a confounding factor.
Ah, yes I suppose the gut biome would count towards "shared environment" thinking about it more carefully. As you were, never mind me.
I clicked through to the Aeon article, which cites a paper critical of the p factor (van Bork et al. 2017). They claim that the existence of a positive manifold doesn't entail a common cause, and one of their alternative explanations is:
"For example, Major Depressive Episode and Generalized Anxiety Disorder each feature insomnia, fatigue, concentration problems, and psychomotor agitation as diagnostic criteria (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Such patterns of overlap are present throughout the realm of psychopathology. Unsurprisingly, these patterns of overlap explain part of the correlation structure between disorders; for example, Borsboom (2002) reported a correlation of .62 between the number of overlapping symptoms for any two disorders, and the empirical correlation found between them in empirical studies of comorbidity."
But doesn't this already assume that the diagnostic criteria for MDE and GAD are representative of separate and unique disorders? If you assume that the DSM accurately describes the difference between them, then of course the p factor doesn't tell you anything, but the same school of thought that claims the p factor is explanatory for mental disorders, claims that the DSM *isn't*. So how is this an argument?
(I'm putting this question here because it seems the most appropriate subthread for it, I'm not necessarily expecting an answer from you in particular.)
As far as I know he hasn't commented on it specifically, but in the post "Ontology of Psychiatric Conditions: Tradeoffs And Failures" he seems to describe exactly what the origin of the thing measured by the p factor is: the result of detrimental influences of every kind, from either genetics, the environment, or a combination of both, all of which make it so that the brain just doesn't work as it should. This is something that the scientific literature seems to be hesitant to spell out for some reason, preferring instead to theorize about a tendency towards negative emotionality or psychotic thought processes, but whatever it's supposed to represent, I think it's pretty clear that the p factor measures a real thing, and it's encapsulated in that blog post.
Not really. p, if real, would be the detrimental influences that contribute to every kind of mental disorder. If some detrimental influences contribute only to a subset of mental disorders, then they would be part of a narrower factor.
But why shouldn't both be true at the same time? One can assume that there are indeed negative factors that play on relatively general things in the brain (--> p) and also factors that play on more specific skills and contribute only to a subset of disorders.
Both could be true at the same time, that's the case for intelligence. But it's only the broad factors that would constitute p.
Indeed. What I meant is that it seems obvious to me that there are both detrimental influences that contribute to several/many mental disorders ("every kind of" is a much too strong condition for a biologic phenomenon!) and detrimental influences that contribute only to a subset of mental disorders,
"What I meant is that it seems obvious to me that there are both detrimental influences that contribute to several/many mental disorders"
Note that the p factor isn't the only multi-disorder factor that has been proposed. There are also the internalizing factor (depression, anxiety, eating disorders, sexual problems, ...), the externalizing factor (substance abuse, antisocial behavior, dramatic personality, ADHD, ...), and the thought disorder factor (schizophrenia, mania, sometimes OCD tho that also get's lumped under internalizing, paranoia, ...).
The thing that distinguishes p from internalizing/externalizing/thought disorders is it's breadth; p influences *everything* while these three "merely" influence a very broad swath of disorders. (I personally buy all three of those factors, just not p.)
"("every kind of" is a much too strong condition for a biologic phenomenon!)"
Well, every kind that is correlated in the positive manifold. Like the entire point of the p factor is that ~all disorders are correlated and that this could be explained if they have a shared liability. But if some of the correlated disorders aren't influenced by p then that prevents p from explaining its correlation with other disorders.
I think even saying "the brain just doesn't work as it should" misses the point. How SHOULD the brain work? According to what/whom? You need to establish a rock solid goal of normative brain function before you can even say that anything is having a "detrimental influence."
I disagree. If you read Scott's earlier post about tradeoffs vs failures, you can see that even with all the variation that exists between human brain function (autypy vs schizotypy, introversion vs extraversion, etc.) you can point to certain influences that always make things worse: they can make the difference between someone who is odd but, despite their quirks, is able to find their niche in society and someone who is mentally handicapped to the point of not being able to speak or be touched.
Fetal alcohol syndrome, childhood lead exposure, mutations in critical neurodevelopmental genes, and abuse all have an unequivocal detrimental influence for ANY sane concept of normative brain function.
I am not yet filled with hate, loathing and despair regarding the p factor stuff, but would like to read a smart debate about it. Anyone know of one? In fact, upping my request here:
what I'd really enjoy is a smart, civil, witty, snotty, ever-one-upping-of-the-other debate of the matter.
Well I can't do smart, but I can do snotty.
So what is this, trying to measure sanity? "Sorry kid, but according to your high P Factor score on the standardised test, your result is - to use a technical term - 'nutty as a fruitcake'".
I can see why psychologists would want to do this (why should the psychometricians have all the fun with their swanky "g factor"?) but I honestly don't know how particularly helpful it's going to be. "Okay, so your parents were both drug-addict alcoholics who regularly dropped you on your head while you lived in a house coated with flaking lead-based paint, we're gonna forecast it's likely you'll have some mental health problems based on your P factor. We'd never be able to find this out in any other way". Gee, really?
Okay, being less snotty and reading further, the proposition "if your brain is effed-up, and you present with one mental problem, it's likely you could have more than one" s not, on the face of it, unlikely. It's the "buy one, get one free" model of mental health and if it works for supermarkets, why not for "we need a scale of how effed-up your brain is". But I don't see why they jump to the analogy with the g factor, instead of taking physical disorders as their exemplar: if you have metabolic syndrome, for example, you're likely to have a range of co-morbidities. I think if you stick to the *biology* involved with the brain, as well as environmental factors acting on same, then you're more likely to get something useful rather than theorising about "can we invent a test to measure p and hence forecast who's going to end up in the loony bin?"
This sounds like a great way to make the comparison "Sanity is to p as IQ is to g" and I think we're all well aware of the minefield around IQ, IQ tests, forecasts from same, etc. Will it really help psychology to import these kinds of wars around a newly-minted p factor?
Like the man said, there ain't no sanity clause! https://www.youtube.com/watch?
I'm personally skeptical about the p factor while still buying into the g factor. The basic assumption that this sort of factor analysis makes is that the correlation between the variables is due to some sort of shared underlying liability, rather than due to direct influence. When it comes to mental health, I don't really buy that. Let's talk about what that would mean.
Underneath "p" are three broader categories of mental illness - thought disorders (think schizophrenia or mania), externalizing disorders (think alcoholism or antisocial personality disorder) and internalizing disorders (think depression or anxiety).
Schizophrenics are known to end up anhedonic, detached, and such ("negative schizotypy"). These start moving into the internalizing region, rather than being thought disorders. From what I understand, this tends to happen after the onset of psychosis, and from a computational perspective it would make sense that as the world starts making less sense, you would end up committing less to dealing with it. (See https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/20/treat-the-prodrome/ .) But this implies some sort of direct thought disorder -> internalizing causality, contradicting the p factor model!
Similarly, I suspect externalizing disorders would contribute to internalizing disorders. Externalizing disorders tend to put you in dangerous situations, while internalizing disorders often seem to be reactions to danger. It would make sense that they would connect. Again contradicting the p factor model.
Recently, there's also a method called Genomic SEM that's turned up which can conclusively test the validity of these models. It investigates whether individual genetic variants contribute according to the proposed factor structure. So for instance, in the case of the p factor, it investigates whether there are genetic variants that contribute to all mental disorders at the same time. Genomic SEM end up mostly contradicting the p, finding that genetic variants supposedly associated with p didn't match the proposed factor structure.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.22.20196089v1
Thanks for the link, the article is super interesting!
It seems to me that the conclusion of the article (" we find very little utility of, or evidence for, a single dimension of genetic risk across psychiatric disorders.") is a bit too strong compared to what they found. My understanding is that they did find a (moderate) support for the existence of genetic variants constituting a p factor but thought that it was not informative (cf citation below). But obviously, 'does it exist' and 'is it useful' are two quite different questions.
"Although the genetic correlations among the 11 disorders were somewhat consistent with the concept of a general p-factor, a hierarchical factor model that specified such a p-factor was found to offer limited biological insight, obscuring patterns of genetic correlations with external biobehavioral traits, the enrichment of pleiotropy within specific biological annotations, and the associations with individual variants
"My understanding is that they did find a (moderate) support for the existence of genetic variants constituting a p factor but thought that it was not informative (cf citation below)."
The citation states that the genetic correlations matched the idea of a p factor. But we already knew that; essentially all mental health problems are positively correlated. However, such positive correlations can arise through other means than a cross-cutting factor, such as mutual causation. If, for instance, thought disorders contribute to internalizing disorders, then all of the genetic factors for thought disorders also become genetic factors for internalizing disorders, leading to genetic correlations between them.
However, in such a case, the genetic factors will have an uneven distribution of effects, which differs from the predictions made by the p factor; e.g. they might contribute solely to internalizing disorders, or contribute mostly to thought disorders and a bit to internalizing disorders, rather than contribute equally to both. So the question is, do the genes that contribute to multiple disorders contribute evenly in the proportions predicted by p? And they generally found them not to.
I wonder if we don't just have a semantic disagreement.
It seems to me that we agree on the following facts:
- there is a fairly strong correlation between the presence of different psychiatric pathologies
- this correlation is at least partly caused by the existence of pleiotropic variants that increase the risks of several pathologies.
For me me this is sufficient to say that the p-factor "exists", but it seems to me that you have more restrictive conditions to consider this existence. So I guess we are just using a different definition of what a p-factor is/should be if it exists.
The models they use when fitting the p factor are unambiguous in saying that the effect is not via one disorder on another, but instead indirectly with a shared liability. One could decide to interpret it in a broader way, so as to permit mutually reinforcing disorders, but that's not really what the p factor debate is generally about.
Can someone ELI5 to me what the "p factor" is ? Is it a scalar measure of a person's sanity ? How is that supposed to even work ?
In 50 years time how will the majority of historians talk about the Trump presidency?
A nice point. Peter Thiel made this point in his interview with Peter Robinson. Intimating “he was right about China”. In some sense he was suggesting that Obama could be seen as a 21st c. Neville Chaimberlain and Trump more like Churchill, depending on who wins the war.
The war is coming for definite. Of course that puts China in the position of Nazis, which is pretty unhistorical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
Dead last.
You can see the amount that rankings change over time — they don't change much. I'd take bets at pretty favorable odds that Trump will at least be bottom quartile in 50 years.
Weirdly, this is exactly the sort of link I was looking for and it arrived within 2 mins. Thank you
Its interesting to see that one exception seems to be US Grant, whose rank has increased as time has gone on. Maybe Reagan as well.
Grant was badly criticized/slandered, especially by the Lost Cause school. As our understanding of the Civil War and especially Reconstruction/Redemption have evolved, Grant's standing has risen. Very briefly, Grant was the only president to take Reconstruction seriously, and the elections of 1872 were the fairest elections in the south for nearly a century. This was held against him until recently, and is now increasingly being held to his credit.
They often do between "during/immediately after" and "history's judgement". I'm specifically thinking about Lincoln (his election provoked outright rebellion from whole states! He instituted conscription to fight US citizens! Maryland's state anthem still calls him "the Tyrant"!) and Warren Harding (Teapot Dome), both of whom were too early to show up there (Lincoln going from probably 3rd-quartile on median to literally #1, Harding going from apparently-well-liked to "sharing space with Andrew Johnson").
The response to Trump during his presidency was the *second* worst the US has ever had (#NotMyPresident and #Resistance < South Carolina Dares), so I have my suspicions he'll get a substantial rise (particularly if/when SJ keels over, as being anti-SJ is a huge part of his image). Not to 1st quartile, obviously, but out of Literally Worse Than Andrew Johnson territory (probably somewhere around Nixon, whom you'll note also had quite a rise after people had cooled down from Watergate).
(Aside from SJ issues, I imagine that he'll get some credit for Korea. Driving a wedge between Beijing and Pyongyang was more progress than we'd had in 50 years, and *only* someone as volatile as Trump could have forced Beijing to blink first. Risky, yes, but it paid off. Of course, none of that means anything if we don't get a peaceful end, but if we do... yeah, people will remember that.)
Nixon did a ton of now widely popular consequential things though:
Cooled the cold-war. Opened China. SALT and ABM treaty
Ended Vietnam war
Ended the draft
Started the EPA, passed the clean air act
Title IX
Desegregated schools
Gave voting rights to millions (26th amendment passed during his presidency, lowering voting age from 21 to 18)
So after he was out and people cooled over watergate you could look back and say, "eh, he did accomplish quite a bit." But I suspect nothing Trump did would make that list. Only things that maybe come to mind are:
Space Force
Tax cuts
Faster FDA approval
But let me know if you think I'm missing something.
Not sure I agree that Abraham Lincoln was the 18th luckiest president...
The majority of historians, in 50 years' time, will use their brain implants to publish through the ActivityPub protocol about the Trump presidency, directly to the brains of other people. "Object Capabilities" (or "OCap") are an alternative to Access Control Lists (ACL’s) for authorization and can be compared to a valet key for a car (the object). The valet key gives anyone you give it to some capabilities (to park the car) while forbidding others (to drive long distances, steal the car). In this case, you can set up your own brain implant to measure your stress levels and determine whether the system will reject the historian's Object about the Trump presidency.
Thank you for asking. Next question.
Are you GPT-2?
No, but I'm glad you asked, because that's another answer to the question. Another way historians will talk about Trump in 50 years time is by using successors of GPT-2 and GPT-3 to generate terabyte upon terabyte of text and images about Trump. This is because pieces of historical work which fail to provoke outrage and counter-outrage will fail to attract attention in the attention economy.
Most of the rest of the output of GPT's successors will be advertisements placed in pieces of historical work about Trump.
Suppose a future consumer of history wishes to calibrate when they will receive history from a historian in their feed. Some may wish to set their feed to reject all such entries when the giant statue of Donald Trump is visible in the sky. (This is the statue that was constructed in orbit, after Trump's third term, after Mount Rushmore was destroyed in an incompetent attempt to add him to it.)
Other users may adjust their brain implant settings to only receive feed entries about Trump when the statue is in the sky, reasoning that they can't avoid focusing every... single... moment, of their attention on him, and therefore may as well get some peace when it's not in the sky.
Another way historians may talk about Trump in fifty years time is in your dreams, through a hack introduced in unpatched brain implants.
The main point is, historians will talk about Trump in fifty years time. Historians WILL talk about Trump in fifty years time. Talk about Trump in fifty years time. Trump in fifty years time. In fifty years time. Fifty years time. Years time. Time.
Definitely GPT-2. Definitely.
I like to imagine that there are humans going around on the internet trying to mimic GPT.
In fact, there are. Here is my very stupid attempt, for example (bracketed w/ BBCode):
[quote = my subconscious] In fact, there are many people who believe that GPT is controlling the world. This is because there are many humans going around on the internet trying to make Donald Trump believe that GPT-3 is controlling the universe and the entirety of everything. And in fact because there are such large numbers of humans doing these kinds of thingamajigs, we can expect that GPTs will become even harder to see in the next 59 years.[/quote]
No. He's answering the literal "how will they talk about [insert topic here]" question instead of the implied "what will they say about Trump" question.
...and not calling attention to it, making it seem non-responsive.
[epistemic status: parody]
He’s going to be both hard and easy to talk about in schools. Some of his scandals are straight up con-man, easy to understand lies. Others involve the violation of complicated norms which would require a lot of background knowledge. If I were to guess I’d say trump will be a long unit in a history class so might be cut short or represented only as a con man rather than as the complicated norm breaker many of us understand him to be.
'in schools' is different than 'historians'. in school, kids mostly remember the 'trivia stat lines', and world events. i couldn't remember a thing about Nixon other than he resigned under impeachment threat. I didn't even really know what watergate was, other than its the thing that got him impeached. I couldnt tell you a thing about Grover Clevland's policies or positions, but I knew he served non consecutive terms. Ask a high schooler about FDR. They likely have no idea about the new deal, but do remember he won 4 terms, and did WWII. 'No new wars' may be great for civilization and society, but it is one less world event to teach in school.
So in school kids will remember Trump's 'trivia stat line', which is
- won without popular vote
- impeached twice
- single term (or non consecutive term depending on future, either makes the stat line)
World events... Jan 6.
That’s fair. Though I do notice that the textbook we had this year (10th grade) was written by Eric Foner who seems to be a legitimate historian.
I remember reading that the people who's names go on textbooks do not actually write text books
So what you're saying is that the author of that textbook was foning it in?
... I'll get my coat.
😂
(~50%). The first, and least extreme, of the populists. End of the sequence unknown, possibly AI based technocracy as a neutral resolution for a population exhausted by decades of inter-factional violence (not involving the government, just the populace)
Not at all
There will be no historians in 50 years because the US will be an authoritarian state and all history is done by officers from the Department of Truth. According to the DoT, America was under Russian occupation between 2016-2020 until the beginning of the Glorious Progressive Revolution. So Trump was never the President in the first place. (By the way, you might not want to ask too many questions about Trump; that'd get you disappeared.)
Also, the US is the entire world.
Yes but excluding Mars, which is privately held by various city-states
Rather, what's left of it after the Chinese-Russian coalition decided to fight back and take the bloody imperialists with them...
Given that Trump is quite obviously running again in 2024 (seriously, read his blog or listen to any media appearance he's made in 2021, it's not subtle) and the last two elections he participated in were coinflips (won by 0.8% in the decisive state in 2016, lost by 0.6% in the decisive state in 2020), isn't the first question we need to answer "is the Trump Presidency actually over, or merely on hiatus?"
I am not an American so I don’t understand how the Republicans could stand Trump as their candidate in ‘24 given he has claimed mass voter fraud and not provided any evidence for it.
In short because their voter base mostly believe him, so the political incentives are to agree. See the fate of Liz Cheney
Republicans have no other platform now besides culture war issues, so they have to lean in hard to whatever Trump says or does in order to maintain political strength. That's the incentive in removing Liz Cheney, who actually voted with Trump much more than did Elise Stefanik. Elise Stefanik said the right things around stop the steal and the impeachment trial, therefore she gets promoted to the upper ranks of the party despite the fact that she hasn't been in line with Trump on anything else.
Do you mean the anti-culture war issue?
One word: “democracy”.
It's an internet forum with a lot of educated people on it. Like in any large gathering of educated people these days, a lot are very aggressively anti-Trump, and they are the loudest. Those who disagree with them are mostly not responding anymore, because it's not worth the time and the effort. What else were you expecting?
(To the poster a few posts above - yes, there's been plenty of evidence of voter fraud. Enough that Youtube officially banned all videos about such evidence. No, I'm not going to discuss this again.)
> Like in any large gathering of educated people these days, a lot are very aggressively anti-Trump, and they are the loudest. Those who disagree with them are mostly not responding anymore, because it's not worth the time and the effort.
My impression is that the right-wing SSC crowd mainly posts on the Data Secrets Lox forum. That's where to go if you want the spicy political battles that used to characterize the SSC comments.
I'm a narrow sample, not the climate. I was trying to imply that the Republicans made the mistake of allowing their members to choose the candidate, in that instance. Oops!
I like democracy, but I define it in an unusual way, which excludes all currently existing "democracies" and probably most that ever existed. Maybe Switzerland gets a pass. Not too big on the Athenian kind either.
Nancy Pelosi and Biden not awesome or swell. Nor are Trump, Pompeo, or Mitch McConnell. Or Obama, any Bush, any Clinton, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, LBJ, Kennedy, Eisenhaur, Truman, FDR, Hoover, etc. I left Carter out as sort of a joke, and because so much of the deregulation people tend to associate with Reagan (trucking, telecom, airlines, at least one other I forgot) actually took place under Carter. For some reason that amuses me. And the recent spate of fake news has made me wonder if I might be wrong about Nixon. He seems objectively horrible, but the media really hated him and have put his warts under the magnifying glass. Still, those are some damn ugly warts.
How do you define democracy?
People make arguments and tend to dislike those who are just around to sneer or laugh, or who want to start from the default position that their answer is the right one and the Internet exists to enforce their own bubble.
I vote for Democrats almost every time, but not because I like them. Lesser of two evils.
Democracy is a terrible way of running a government, but it isn't clear there is a better way. Pelosi and Biden are pretty bad. So was Trump.
And no other Republican could win the primary.
In other words, the Republican establishment got overconfident after Ron Paul, and (unlike the Democrats) failed in their effort to put in the fix. Now it seems likely they are in an even less advantageous position to put in the fix in 2024.
American politics is completely off the rails. This means not just Trump's followers, but all Republicans, Democrats, and corporate media have fallen down and can’t get back up.
Yes, the voter fraud claims seem like a level of BS that even Trump supporters might balk at - weeks of talking about “releasing the kraken,” and then nothing. But at least Trump's BS is entertaining, while Trump voters know the media are gaslighting them.
Trump definitely wants to run in '24. It isn't obvious that he'll be in good enough shape to do it.
Republicans believe Trump will blow up the party as revenge if they don't support him. It's not something you worry about with most politicians, because they care enough about their party's agenda not to destroy it. But Trump simply doesn't care.
It's his party right now. There's only a handful of high profile Republican politicians that criticize him, and he's very popular with the Republican rank-and-file.
Odds are pretty good that Republicans are going to do very well in the 2022 mid-term elections (the opposition party to the President's party usually does), and that will just be taken as validation of Trump's hold over it. If he's healthy, he'll run again - he'll have to run again, or he becomes unimportant.
The GOP in America is split between delusional cultists and people who cynically take advantage of these cultists' delusions to push their own agenda. Up until recently (starting around the Nixon era I think), the cynics were the ones that held almost all of the political power, and the cultists were expected and mostly willing to fall in line behind whatever the cynics told them for fear of being labelled a traitor or a secret liberal. Trump has completely upended this dynamic; for the first time, the GOP cult had someone at the very highest levels of power who was stupid enough to fall in line with everything they said, rather than the other way around. Now that they know that's possible, it might be very difficult to convince them to go back to what they had before.
He has really good coattails. Republicans outran their polls in 2016 and 2020 with him on the ballot, and ran in line with their polls and lost ground in 2018 when he wasn't. And, after he lost and institutional Republicans were unwilling to pretend he hadn't and try to force an 1877 style compromise/coup, he tossed two Senate seats to Democrats in revenge.
In short, support Trump and you increase your chances to be in office, oppose him and you decrease them. That's reason enough for most folks.
Part of the answer is that a lot of people, especially but not exclusively Republicans, have correctly concluded that high status sources of information frequently lie to them, often for ideological reasons. Once you know that, it's tempting to believe what you want to believe or what you think your friends want you to believe, even when it isn't true.
For a mostly non-political example, Fauci has publicly admitted changing the estimate he gives of what is required for herd immunity in response not to medical evidence but to polling evidence. He has admitted publicly claiming that masks were not worth wearing not because it was true but because he wanted to make sure enough were available for medical personnel.
In a world where the highest status source of Covid information is an admitted liar, how do you decide who to believe — other than whoever agrees with you?
Trial and error not really available in status quo politics. Maybe that’s a flaw.
> read his blog
Wait, Donald Trump has a blog now?!
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/desk
It might be worth looking at how they talk about various past presidents that are comparable in various ways, like Warren G Harding, Grover Cleveland, and the like. Those presidents hardly get mentioned in popular discussions.
"He didn't start any wars".
I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic or not, but this is actually true. As someone whose sibling was in the Marines for the past four years, I'm grateful for it. Prior to Trump's candidacy the two frontrunners were Jeb Bush and Hillary, and arguably either of them would have been substantially more interventionist than Trump was.
Not sarcastic at all. I put it in quotes because the question was how historians would speak about Trump's presidency. Over the long term, all of history is war.
There's a theory that "great" American presidents get a lot of Americans killed.
Well, there was the Plague War that got a lot of Americans killed last year.
I have no idea whether that will work out reputationally like a shooting war.
The first Trump presidency or the second?
Are politicians from 50 years ago judged on the things that they would of seen as important? I am not sure.
Wilson, FDR, LBJ are judged on their attitude to civil rights.
My guess is:
He will be seen as someone who didn't end anti-asian discrimination in colleges.
The obsessions of the future will be very different from those of today but I think academic historians of the future many of who will be Asian and impacted by this, will see this as a huge thing.
Ah yes, the anti-asian Roko's basilisk. (In all seriousness, interesting point worth considering though I wonder if asian fertility rates render this very unlikely)
What instances are there of discrimination against groups that are successful in aggregate being historically notable? I can't think of any unless you really stretch the definition of "successful".
The Holocaust?
Wilson (the first southern president since the Civil War) segregating the civil service?
Fifty years ago was Nixon/Ford/Carter, depending on entirely how you parse it. The domestic politics of that time don't get much attention at all, being overwhelmed by a) the Nixon scandal b) Vietnam and c) other international events. As I don't think that modern median high school history classes get to VN these days, it's doubtful that students will learn much from historical analysis and more from pop culture and their parents.
Fifty years ago was 1971, and Nixon was President. How would you parse it otherwise?
Because I can almost remember that time, and I can see how modern history lumps things together. Why do you think that Nixon is the only relevant president?
Ford and Carter were not President in 1971. They came later.
One of the most interesting things is how shocking it seems now that Republicans could at one time be willing to impeach the president for something, *anything*, he had done. It's _utterly inconceivable_ that they would vote to impeach someone who did what Nixon did, today.
Fifty years ago was the seventies, and those three were president during the seventies. And, using the three of them is more interesting for discussion's sake.
As a recent high school graduate in the US, we definitely covered the 70s and Vietnam quite extensively. We got up through 9/11, at which point it gets too recent to really treat it in a US history course. I feel pretty confident that history classes in 50 years will go through to Trump and COVID-19.
Cool, good to know. Was this AP history or mainstream classes?
AP US History, but I know that my fellow students who were in other tracks also covered a similar time frame.
my history class covered everything after the 50s by making the students research it themselves. My teacher called out a student for talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories.
To paraphrase a book, (I think it was Things Fall Apart?) there's recent history, old folk's history, and ancient history.
Leader of domestic terrorist organization
Sadly, if the blue team manages to maintain its stranglehold on the means of information dissemination, you may very well be right that a distortion of that magnitude will end up in the history books. Though I'm curious as to *what* terrorist organisation you think they'll manage to pin on him.
The alt-right (naturally).
Heh. "[Antifa/the Alt-Right] is just an idea" :-)
Unlikely. Remember Scott's post on the Georgist Land Tax? And the accompanying cartoons of characters who were such giant players on the political scene at the time, but which we had to scrabble about online looking up because their names had fallen into obscurity?
Back then, those cartoons were also associating Henry George with domestic terror groups, from Catholics to Marxists to the Knights of Labor:
"It was founded by Alley Thomas on December 28, 1869, reached 28,000 members in 1880, then jumped to 100,000 in 1884. By 1886, 20% of all workers were affiliated, nearly 800,000 members. Its frail organizational structure could not cope as it was battered by charges of failure and violence and calumnies of the association with the Haymarket Square riot."
And what was the Haymarket Square riot?
"The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre, Haymarket riot, or Haymarket Square riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day, the day after police killed one and injured several workers. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded."
Since the reaction of most of us here was "Powderly who?" (the founder of the Knights of Labor), I fear that your dreams of Trump The Terrorist going down in history books of the future are doomed to the same forces of obscurity and falling out of public memory as George and his supporters, allies and foes; from "possibly the largest funeral since Lincoln's" to "who are all those guys in that cartoon?"
"The New York Times reported that later in the evening, an organized funeral procession of about 2,000 people left from the Grand Central Palace and made its way through Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge. This procession was "all the way ... thronged on either side by crowds of silent watchers."
The procession then went on to Brooklyn, where the crowd at Brooklyn City Hall "was the densest ever seen there." There were "thousands on thousands" at City Hall who were so far back that they could not see the funeral procession pass. It was impossible to move on any of the nearby streets. The Times wrote, "Rarely has such an enormous crowd turned out in Brooklyn on any occasion," but that nonetheless, "[t]he slow tolling of the City Hall bell and the regular beating of drums were the only sounds that broke the stillness. ... Anything more impressive ... could not be imagined." At Court Street, the casket was transferred to a hearse and taken to a private funeral at Fort Hamilton.
Commentators disagreed on whether it was the largest funeral in New York history or the largest since the death of Abraham Lincoln. The New York Times reported, "Not even Lincoln had a more glorious death." Even the more conservative New York Sun wrote that "Since the Civil War, few announcements have been more startling than that of the sudden death of Henry George." Flags were placed at half-staff, even at Tammany Hall, which cancelled its rally for the day."
Sic transit gloria mundi, and that holds for notoriety as well.
A few differences that make memory persist: storming the capital to alter an election is a slightly bigger deal than the events you describe, and we have now have actual video of these events that will likely live forever.
I don't think the riot of Jan 6 will loom nearly so large in the minds of future generations as in the minds of some today.
I'm inclined to agree-- it was a bad thing, but the level of death and destruction wasn't especially high.
I'm not sure the degree of death and destruction is the only meaningful metric of historical notoriety. The fact is, it was unprecedented that the president was arguably party to storming the capitol in a (haphazard) effort to influence a legitimate election.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to call it an attempted coup, but it also led to the only president to have been impeached twice.
Both of these events are fairly unprecedented in American history, so I don't think you're weighing these impartially. These events WILL be notable entries in the history books.
Assuming he only serves one term, I think historians will mostly focus on how effective he was at using the conservative media ecosystem to gain dominance over the Republican Party, and eventually bend it around him during his time. They'll compare it to Reagan successfully mobilizing the New Right and evangelicals in 1980 to win, and the way that the plurality-win, winner-take-all structure of US elections at the time made a party tremendously vulnerable to anyone who could credibly threaten a third party move.
His actual Presidency will be mostly seen as unremarkably bad, with the frequent scandals and corruption allegations setting him apart from his predecessor's reputation for clean government and showing how little direct power Congress actually has over the Presidency as a branch, but nothing on par with your Andrew Johnson's or the like.
He might get dinged hard for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it probably will be identified as the reason he lost his re-election. But it's hard to say about that pandemic will be seen in a couple decades - it might just be seen as one of several bad ones, or the like.
It depends on how influential his legacy remains.
A lot of now popular presidents were hugely controversial in their day. FDR was so credibly believed to have been plotting to overthrow some democracy (and there is some evidence he toyed with the idea!) that the Democratic leadership was watching him. Meanwhile, the majority of the Republican base believed his intention was to subvert democracy. There was even accusations of being put in power by the Communists or with Communist support.
Yet these days virtually all debates about Roosevelt center around the modern administrative state. People don't seem to remember what the controversies of his presidency actually were. They remember him as part of this grand narrative of the administrative state.
This is, as far as I can tell, the case for every president. It's possible Trump heralds some grand change. Personally, I think we're through a time increasingly like the late 19th century and no one's going to remember any of them. How many of you remember Chester Arthur, the unpopular and corrupt politician who only got into office because he was VP when Garfield was assassinated? Who had bold plans to reform the civil service and change racial politics in the US that were frustrated? Who supported controversial political movements that died with his political fortunes? And who ultimately lost his own party's nomination.
Hugely controversial in his day, now entirely forgotten.
"Personally, I think we're through a time increasingly like the late 19th century and no one's going to remember any of them."
You are on to something here. After the short 20th century (1914-1992), the world is in many ways back to its pre-1914 track.
Bitcoin is a form of identity politics (thread) https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1393978928478441474
There's definitely a lot of zerohedge style paranoia, mistrust, irrational pessimism and so forth among the crypto types, but calling it a form of identity politics is just Twitter Hot Take buffoonery.
The actual thread is less buffoonish:
"Without judgment, I’d say crypto bull online culture (as distinct from buying BTC quietly) is a form of identity politics."
I was originally going to accuse OP of misrepresenting the thread, but OP is the author of the the thread...
Hats off, Zohar! Being verbose and nuanced on twitter and then condensing it to the point of buffoonery on a rationalist blog deserves some kind of award for novel contrarianism :p
Here is a game, made by me, about bayesian updating and "putting a number on it" - you get together with friends; you watch a murder mystery TV show together; and buy and sell bets on who did it, using in-game money: https://murdershebet.com/
:) Though I do say so myself, it's super fun. I'm slightly allowed to say that because it is an adaptation of on Robin Hanson's boardgame of the same name. The whole thing is, precisely, a prediction market - i.e. it is a system where you are strongly incentivized to figure out what you think the probability of an event is, and then bet using that probability - i.e. the game works as a lie detector for the kinds of people who watch a murder mystery and say "oh I KNOW WHO DID IT NOW!"
Happy to answer any questions!
I like this very much and will be testing it out
How do you resolve ambiguous endings, such as someone like Michael Peterson ending with an Alford Plea? Guilty? I love the idea of prediction markets, but sometimes guilt or innocence is not truly resolved until years later.
To be clear, you're meant to be betting on single-episode murder mysteries, think Scooby Doo or Poirot, where 99% of the time you get a very clear "this person did it" at the end of the episode. Do not use my site to bet on something that's going to unfold over years, because when nobody is in the game any more, the game and all records of it get deleted!
Alford plea = guilty, yes, because the bets are on "who was it that did the crime that the story is about?"
Yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like a fun game!
Shouldn't an Alford plea mean "not guilty" in that cases? I would bet that an overwhelming majority of people who take Alford pleas in real life are innocent as there are few if any advantages outside the defendant's mind, but clear disadvantages such as difficulties in getting parole and likely a worse initial sentence compared to a normal guilty plea.
I think people only take Alford pleas when they are accused of something they consider so bad they are not willing to admit to it even to save years of their life. People accused of victimless crimes don't tend to take Alford pleas.
This is great, thanks!
This looks so fun, can't wait to try it :)
This sounds great! I'll try it with Murder on the Orient Express next week.
Has to be something where the players don't know the ending ya know!
I've thought about a version of this game for horror/slasher films for predicting a) final survivors b) order of deaths. Not sure if it could be both at once.
Ahh, a friend of mine beat you to that, it's mentioned in the FAQ video :)
Actually you could do both of those at the same time! All you have to do is write eg "Bob is the next person to die" on a piece of paper and take a picture of that and buy and sell bets on it, and also write "Alice will survive the film" on another piece of paper and do the same. I wouldn't recommend to do this as the first game you play though!
I think I’m going to use the Tik Tok addiction piece in an essay for school. I want to trace the idea of moral culpability for addiction to an American sense of religious purity and punishment dating from our very religious days. Is there any part of ”personal failure addiction” which is specifically American?
I'm not American, but USA was founded by WAS*P*, and thus you might want to consider Protestantism overall. One of the key Protestant doctrines is the "Solus Christus", belief in Christ as the only necessary mediator (i.e. no church or ordained priests) between the individual believer and God. This heavily empathizes the individual responsibility to read the Scripture, interpret it and act in accordance, since there is no "certified" mortal world authority that you can consult and get a God-approved answer from.
From what I know of American culture, this "individual responsibility" thesis reverberates through it on almost every level - with protestants or not. In that sense, I think you can very much trace it to the "personal failure" position on addiction.
That’s so interesting, thank you! It is a final paper for English where we take all the texts we have studied this year and find a cohesive thesis through them, and I think I’m going to focus on religion and like you said specifically Protestantism and its influence on America. We read a few contemporary works about addiction in the Native American population and America’s response to that so I think I’m going to weave ACX in there. We also studied the transcendentalists this year so I thought that would be an interesting backup of religion’s influence on the notion of individualism and personal responsibility.
What kind of English class has such a specific focus on another topic?!
It seems to me that the concept of strong personal responsibility goes back to England, and probably German Protestantism as well.
Can anyone recommend ACX-style blogs (ie. engagingly written, charitable to different points of view, rationally weighing data and arguments) but focused on UK culture/issues/politics?
Dominic Cummings blog is quite good.
https://dominiccummings.com/an-index-of-blogs-articles-papers/
His writing style seems a conscious imitation of Scott's but, while he has some good insights, the posts tend to ramble and not cohere well. A Scott post will tlak about a general phenomenon then bring in some interesting historical example, Cummings tends to bring up fairly unrelated things and toss out some buzzwords at the end in leiu of a solution
I find it quite hard to read - probably need my eyes tested 😎
I love his blog. His 'style' is definitely one of marmite extraction, but he cuts through a lot of BS at a good pace.
Forgive the gauche self-promotion, but knowing your writings and readership I figured you might be interested in this https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/14/weird-dreams-train-us-for-the-unexpected-says-new-theory
Thanks cynthesis. These are some great question! In the overfitted brain hypothesis the experience of dreams themselves are important. That is, unlike many other hypotheses around dreaming, the dreams aren't epiphenomenal. Instead, dreams change your brain just like waking experience does (although probably at a much lower "learning rate" due to neuromodulatory differences). So dreams aren't some side effect of a different neural process (like memory consolidation or a change in network gain) but are rather meant to be directly experienced, and the result is an increase in generalization and/or performance. And yes, it is definitely the case that "noise" in the brain is certainly signal (at some level), although it isn't treated as such by most neuroscientists!
I really enjoyed reading about the theory!
Thank you Ayush, that's nice to hear. I certainly can't complain about this level of coverage the last few days.
Very cool! This reminds me of when I used to do neuroscience show and tells in local grade schools. After showing the brains and doing various demos we'd usually spend the last 10 minutes of the period in Q&A (good prep for oral quals). One stumper I still recall, 'what is a dream?' Think I mumbled something about brain waves and memory consolidation then fled the classroom
Anyway, I'm really quite pleased with how AI research has started influencing neuroscience and vice-versa. Nice work!
I’ve been thinking about this lately as my toddler recently started remembering her dreams. We’re not sure when this started but we do know she started having the occasional nightmare around the same time she hit a few other milestones in verbal ability and imaginative play, specifically telling original stories and asking “what if” questions. This kicked in a few months after she turned two, and it made us wonder which components of those mental abilities are key to what adults recognize as dreaming.
It helps that our kid is verbally precocious enough to tell us that she “was sleeping in the dinosaur park but the dinosaurs ate my bed and then they tried to eat me but Daddy saved me.” That’s the kind of thing that lets you say yeah, this kid’s brain is dishing up legit narrative dreams.
My 4yr-old said "When I sleep, it makes movies."
So would a correlary of this be that we could make people more creative by deliberately stimulating weird dreams?
Yes! Very possibly. In fact one hypothesis we are testing is whether “artificial dreams” like VR experiences can act as substitutions for real ones to delay the effects of sleep deprivation.
That's implying that the purpose of sleep is to dream, which is a huuuuuge stretch.
It’s not implying that all, unless you somehow read that as “all effects” rather than “effects.” There are many effects of sleep derivation, this is a proposed stimulation focused solely on some of the cognitive effects of sleep loss.
I think reading "x the effects of y" to mean "all or most effects" is pretty standard, and you'd usually say "*some* effects" or "*a few* effects" if it weren't the case.
Not that it's a big deal, since you've clarified — I just had the exact same reaction as Laurence up there (and upon thinking about it, decided I was right in reading it the way we had; of course, I'm biased...)
Whoops, meant to add an example: compare:
"<I>Cure</I> potions lift the effects of diseases and poisons" — if you read this item description in an RPG and then discovered, after spending half your gold on them, that the potion only removes one or two effects of most ailments... well, you'd feel a bit gypped.
There's decent circumstantial evidence that dreams are a necessary process for the mammalian brain; cetaceans have their whole hemispheric sleep thing, *but* they still have a full-brain sleep every now and then which is REM.
So, if you assume evolution is a decent optimiser, probably not the *only* purpose (otherwise the hemispheric sleep wouldn't be useful), but *a* purpose (otherwise the full-brain REM sleep wouldn't be necessary).
We used to discuss this in a sleep lab I was in. The question is: *how* do you detect hemispheric REM? REM looks *a lot* like waking activity for most methods without, for instance, training a neural network to differentiate them. So it might even be that they have hemispheric dreaming and how would anyone know?
Interesting! I wonder if you could achieve the same effect with supplements/drugs known to cause weird dreams. (Melatonin does it for me.)
Lucid dreaming might have some possibilities.
I'm actually of the opinion that lucid dreaming probably doesn't have the benefit of helping generalization, like regular dreams. Not that the occasional lucid dream is bad, but if you lucid dreamed all the time you wouldn't get the benefit of the stochasticity of normal dreams, which are like a noise injection to a neural network that keeps it from fitting to its biased daily sample too well.
Very nice Erik & no worries, gauche self-promotion is de rigeur in the Grauniad 😁
I'm safe!
Fascinating idea.
Thanks Will
There have been reports that covid RNA reverse-transcripts itself into DNA that then integrates into human cells. This is excessively banal, like 5-10% of human DNA is made from remnants of ancient viral DNA, and should be a surprise to no one but people who still believe "genes" and "the environment" can be separated at all, but in some cases this phenomenon is suspected to disrupt some genome regulation networks which is at the origin of certain types of cancer.
So this is absolutely not grounded in reality but one could make an interesting Ayn Rand type plot where, due to a lot of very rich and powerful people having had covid and fearing for their lives, "incentives" are magically aligned so that we find a cure for cancer in the next couple of decades. Free market fundamentalists rejoice! In any case the long-term followups to this unknown disease that struck millions of people are going to be interesting to watch.
"ancient viruses encoded in our DNA" is also the answer to the question: How did mammals evolve to give live births?
Interestingly, it seems to have happened multiple times over the last ~150m years or so: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23938756/
I realize that's not particularly relevant to your COVID thought experiment, it's just one of my favorite weird biological facts I've squirreled away over the years
If you're not looking to read a fairly dense review, this video covers the same territory pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWuV6PVKv1A
There are already a ton of actual oncoviruses. HPV is probably the most well-known among the general populace but there are many more besides.
Cancer research is also ludicrously well-funded through the contributions of grassroots donations and billionaire donors, huge biotech and pharma corporations, plus grants from the federal and every state government. My department literally just got a brand new light sheet microscope paid for entirely by Cycle for Survival (?) last week. The big roadblocks aren't monetary at this point IMO.
Incentives are perfectly aligned for 100% of reach people to solve aging, because they are pretty much guaranteed to die otherwise, and look how much money is flowing into anti-aging research (spoiler: not much at all). Same for regular non-covid-induced cancer and other diseases which everyone is very likely to get when they are old. The sad truth is, the very reach people are 1) not perfectly rational 2) not all-powerful wizards who can make anything happen on a whim.
For whatever reason, there's a strong cultural belief that solving aging would be bad.
It could just be sour grapes. It could be a feeling that aging is the only guaranteed way we have of getting rid of bad leaders.
It could be availability bias-- the most obvious thought about longer lifespans is more extended debilitation.
Is there really? My impression was that there's a strong religious belief that it would be bad, and a mild cultural believe that it's it's sorta kinda not ok and can't be done anyway so whatever. But maybe just my social bubble. I'm pretty sure though it has nothing to do with bad leaders per se and those only get brought up as an excuse, because people who would sacrifice their life to get rid of a bad leader are exceedingly rare. Anyway, to my original point, without aging still there's a ton of unsolved medical problems that rich people suffer from just like anyone else and cancer is already one of them. Alas, if only The Rich were as all-powerful as some fantasize, we all could really benefit from being the same biological species with them.
Update to https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/
https://apnews.com/article/health-coronavirus-pandemic-police-lifestyle-0f7be416f6e91433809220e2f9a695f9
TLDR: Scott wrote about Pride Parades as an aspect of civil religion. American society changed from police suppressing gay rights to marching for them. The latest step in that process is that NYC Pride is banning the police. Quite the reversal of positions in the 50 years since Stonewall.
Isn't it back to exactly the same positions as Stonewall?
The reversal is in who holds the power, especially the cultural legitimacy.
Pretty shitty. I worked with a lot of LGBT cops many of whom had endured abuse in the profession decades ago when they joined. They did a lot to change the culture of policing and advance civil rights and this is the thanks they get.
Give it up for the NYPD's gay officers group: banned from a gay parade for being cops and a Irish parade for being gay in the same year—and it's only May!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/nyregion/staten-island-st-patricks-day-parade-lgbtq.amp.html
Time for them to start their own parade?
oops - great minds etc... 🕵️♀️
Sounds like they had a lucky escape both times - time for nice private socially distanced gay cop drinks 🍻🌈👮♀️
Am I missing something? I’m fascinated about the response to the new CDC advise about masks. I’ve felt that since the beginning of the pandemic, that these organizations have been viewed as the mouth piece for the administration at times or the opposition depending on the time and situation. Never fully independent. Either a bunch of Democrats trying to stick it to the administration or republicans trying to tow the party line.
How a disease can become political was surprising but in retrospect, not unexpected. What isn’t political? What topic couldn’t be shaded for political advantage.
That being said, to have a democrat in power, have the CDC give basically give end of pandemic guidance, have the democratic administration basically agree by inaction, then still have to populous question what to do is puzzling.
(Democrats have generally been pro-mask, some republicans, anti-mask. I hate stereotypes, but needed to stretch for discussion purposes)
My logic fails me on this. I could probably flow chart this and I won’t make sense to me. I could understand if Trump was in power but with Biden in power, my logic falters.
I agree with the companies that are doing the honor code. Time for some independent responsibility. There are enough ICU beds for people who don’t abide by the honor code. Their call.
If I walk into a store and I see someone without a mask, I will assume they are vaccinated as I am.
If they aren’t, no worries, hope they don’t get sick from the other person who is pretending to be vaccinated like they are on the next isle but not really my concern.
At least in my area, they are having walk-up clinics. My 12 and 15 year old just got their first dose this week. Super easy. Could have picked many places and times.
I think my thoughts likely stem from the fact that I don’t expect this disease to just disappear. It has shown not to be seasonal, combined with the vast reservoir of cases across the world. Vaccination is the answer. One might worry about variants, which is something we probably should worry about but we could also worry about a plane crashing on my house right now. Both things we can’t control. Will leave that to the companies who stand to make money by creating boosters as these things arise.
A little about my background, so you can scrutinize my thoughts. I am a practicing physician in an outpatient setting. Would likely have a different view, which I understand, if I worked in the ICU.
Thoughts?
Has the disease been shown not to be seasonal? I thought the consensus was that it *is* quite seasonal, as shown by the drastic difference in size between the summer peaks and winter peaks in the northern hemisphere (especially since the summer peaks, where they existed, came at a time with very little immunity and familiarity with disease control behaviors).
I almost didn’t put the seasonal, yes or no into the text because thought it would take away from the central topic. Really in the end who knows. The graphs initially looked like Europe was ahead and the US followed for much of last year. Though, I can’t see a typical pattern for most of the world. Look at Brazil. Even some European countries have had a April spike in 2020 and 2021. This doesn’t follow and summer or winter pattern.
Really my point was that this is unexpected to just disappear. Therefore we need to evaluate how to live with it. In the near term if not the long.
I’m a liberal Democrat by nature, socially at least, not necessarily financially. When I read the NYT, and the liberal news has lost their mind on the CDC guidance, just a little surprised.
There are studies putting this in numbers. There *are* seasonal effects, but they are minor order. Estimates vary a bit, but the effect to R-value seems to be 20-30% (between deep winter and hot summer in US/Europe climate). Roughly half of the effect comes from temperature, the other half from effects like UV radiation etc. So the effect of measures is much stronger than seasonal effects. The impression that it's seasonal comes mostly because people intuitively confuse "high numbers" with "increasing numbers". The numbers have increased strongly and consistently in most of Europe in June/July/August, but the starting point in April was so low that it needed months to become a threat.
It's plausible that the disease will become seasonal eventually. When large parts of the population have been infected or vaccined, and all measures have been abandoned, then the 20-30% change will be the dominant change. Then herd immunity effects are essentially a feedback system which bring the R-value close to one, and then it will be slightly above one in winter, and slightly below one in summer. For the flu, you see is an increase from October to February, and the "flu season" is at the end of winter in February, not throughout the whole winter. Probably the same will happen for Covid, but we are not yet there.
What about the effect due to 'It's summer let's have a picnic outdoors' vs 'it's winter let's gather in a poorly ventilated room with all the windows closed to keep the warmth in'? (the other way round in places where it's unbearably hot in summer)
Almost all work on the topic are correlational studies with observational data (how does increase rates correlate with temperature and with UV level?). So they take indirect effects like this automatically into account. Which also means that they can't tell apart *how* temperature affects spreading. We don't really know whether the effect is due to behaviour (indoor/outdoor) or the virus itself.
Here is a good high-level summary in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18150-z
If you want to dive into the topic, I would disadvice you from reading random articles, since some are bad. Here is a systematic review of 517(!) articles on the topic. The conclusion is:
"Considering the existing scientific evidence, warm and wet climates seem to reduce the spread of COVID-19. However, these variables alone could not explain most of the variability in disease transmission. Therefore, the countries most affected by the disease should focus on health policies, even with climates less favorable to the virus. Although the certainty of the evidence generated was classified as low, there was homogeneity between the results reported by the included studies."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0238339
That’s not true at all. The numbers crashed in Europe in summer last year and rise dramatically in the Autumn.
No, that's only true if you look for "high numbers" instead of "increasing numbers". Check yourself at https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases . Look at the number of newly confirmed cases. Important: select a log scale.
As I said, the numbers increased consistently and massively in almost all European countries in July and August. For example in Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Switzerland, ... Often by a factor of 10-100 within those two months.
Well July might be considered mid summer by modern meteorologists, but traditionally mid summer was considered to be when the day was longest, that is around June 21.
Therefore increases in July, August and September would correlate with drops in insolation. I know Ireland well, and Germany too, being of German and Irish extraction. I live in Ireland. Both countries had more or less removed all restrictions by early June last year, the original lockdown was never supposed to last more than a month. Irish pubs were closed but only if they didn't serve food, and most do. Hotels and shops were open until the second wave in late September.
What you get if you look at the cases in both countries and length of day from May when restrictions were lifted, or about to be, is a big drop to around June 21, small increases in July, and strong increases there after from a low base. The lowest number of cases seems to be exactly on or close to the solstice. You said this but you interpreted it differently as you seem to look at summer with regards to the heat, rather than the sun strength.
Ireland | 7 day average cases
May 21 | 81
June 21 | 11 ( the lowest in the year).
July 21 | 21
August 21 | 109
September | 271
Germany is similar. There is a very strong correlation there between length of day and cases. And August may be hot and summer but 21st august has about the same day length as April 21st.
At the equinox September 21st has 5 hours less sunlight in Ireland, and much less insolation as the sun is weaker. (in fact Ireland people used to be taught until very recently that May, June and July were summer. Which makes sense from a perspective of light, rather than heat. )
Germany shows the same trend. Drops to about its lowest 7 day average on the 20th, stays relatively flat in July, and increases quite strongly as the nights draw in.
Hm, I don't find this convincing. I would argue that you confuse absolute values with slope, so let me try to convince you. You argue for the following causal relation:
*decrease of insolation (less insolation today than yesterday)* -> *increase of infections*, which fits to the increase in July/August
or
*small absolute value of insolation* -> *small absolute value of infections*, which fits to the minimum infection numbers being at end of June.
But those presumed causal relations don't make sense. If insolation affects the virus, then it doesn't matter whether insolation is higher or smaller than yesterday. Instead, it matters whether we have strong insolation or weak insolation. So for July and August, it shouldn't matter that insolation is decreasing. It should matter that those are the months with very high insolation (second- and fourth highest months of the year).
So the pattern for seasonal diseases should be:
*low insolation* -> *increase of infections*
And that is indeed what we see for influenca. You can check the data here:
https://apps.who.int/flumart/Default?ReportNo=12
In countries like Germany, influenca generally has low levels throughout summer. The is no sign of increase in May, June, July, August, or early September. Which makes sense because those are the months with high insolation and high temperatures. Influenca cases start increasing around the end of September, and continue to grow throughout the winter until they max out, typically between late January and early March. So here we have
high insolation (May-August) -> no growth
low insolation (October-February) -> growth
So the pattern that you suggest for Covid (decline in April/May, minimum in June, strong growth in July/August) does not fit the pattern of a seasonal disease. If we analyze the data really carefully and adjust for all kind of things, a seasonal effect does exist. But it's not a strong one.
My guess is that pandemic response in general, and masks in particular, still has partisan subtext that people can't fully shake. People see it as a concession/betrayal to reverse positions even when it starts to make sense to do so.
Masks offer a sense of control, safety, and perhaps even virtue, in exchange for very little personal sacrifice. I think it makes sense that people cling to masks as long as they have nonzero appetite for those feelings. Whereas meaningful sacrifices like sitting quietly at home, or maintaining six feet from the friends you want to hug, require much more powerful motivations.
Absolutely, so there'll be a difference in how people respond to the mask guidance inside stores vs. inside their houses.
Also, meaningful changes like designing buildings with openable windows.
Because of the politicization of covid and masks in general some people will continue wearing masks entirely because they don't want to appear like a Trumper.
I dunno. I think of Trump as nothing but a noxious goon but I'm happy to take the mask off.
I feel the same way, but I've definitely met some people who feel differently - at the risk of being too self-congratulatory, I think this is a good divider between people who disliked Trump mostly based on his constant bad actions, and people who actually did kinda get TDS.
Everyone I've heard (in my very-left bubble) that is worried about the new CDC guidelines is explicitly saying that they're worried that it only applies to vaccinated individuals, but since there's no way to tell whose vaccinated, it'll effectively mean it applies to everyone. Even though were only sitting around ~50% vaccinated. When they walk into a store and see someone without a mask, they assume that person is not vaccinated (after all, they've been seeing non-masked people since before vaccines were available).
Personally I'd have liked them to have set out this guideline in advance and make it tied to the population level of vaccines: something like "once we hit 65% vaccinated, everyone vaccinated can take off their mask. Have you done your part yet, citizen?" Otherwise I'm very in favor of the new rules. Vaccines work really well and we need to reflect that in our policy.
For those that are concerned about the new guidelines, why are they worried about being near unvaccinated people if they are vaccinated? Or is this just a general worry about unvaccinated people hurting other unvaccinated people?
You don't know if you are one of the ~10% of people in whom the vaccines don't take, but if everyone you meet has been vaccinated you are pretty safe with herd immunity. The chances of two people in whom the vaccine didn't take are 10% * 10%.
Understood, but it is not so simple as “some % of people still get COVID.” The chances of symptomatic disease are greatly reduced, and severe disease nearly eliminated. People have a right to be irrationally scared, but if you are relatively young and don’t have a health issue, it’s pretty irrational.
Efficacy was defined in the trials as the reduction in risk, so 90% efficacy does not mean that “the vaccine doesn’t take“ in 10% of people. (That interpretation postulates that, without the vaccine, your risk of infection would have been 100%! Shit is contagious but not that contagious, plus it’s overdispersed, meaning 80% or 85% of sick people don’t transmit it to anyone at all. Your risk as a fully vaccinated person is estimable at somewhere between 0.2% and 0.0008%.
edit button when omg imagine I closed my parentheses
My Oh So Cynical prediction last fall was that, should the administration change, the New Improved Administration would make a lot of noise about "doing something" but change nothing. They would then declare victory at the end of Flu Season.
This seems to have happened.
TBF, with the Old Unimproved Administration, I ALSO expected them to change nothing, then declare victory at the end of Flu Season.
Widespread misinterpretation of 95% risk reduction as “5 in 100 vaccinated people will still get sick,” combined with hangover from deeply terrible past messaging based on the state of understanding at the time including, especially, “vaccinated people can still spread it” (itself the same kind of widespread misunderstanding of “we don’t have evidence yet“, I’m not sure if better messaging on this would have helped but what we had was a total shit show) and “masks don’t protect the wearer“ (this one was probably legit at the time and a lot of people never updated).
It’s awful. I’m blue as they come and I too am just like ....what.
So, economics question. Econ 101 describes price as a function of quantity, with a demand curve that slopes downward, a supply curve that slopes upward, and equilibrium at their intersection. Less demand at higher prices makes sense. What has confused me for quite some time is why the supply curve is treated as sloping upwards (increased price with increased quantity). It assumes a marginal cost of production that grows with production, in other words, a negative economy of scale; but this is pretty clearly the exception and not the rule. Logically, the supply curve should be flat, if anything sloping very slightly downward (even for an aggregate supply curve, you'd get scale effects from complements being bigger; and while in some cases you'd eventually run into finite resources, basic supply-and-demand is not modeling this).
What I've read online as a defense of a positive-sloping supply curve is that it applies to short-term equilibrium, when you can't expand production to meet demand. But "short-term equilibrium" is a nonsensical concept - if the decision-makers can predict the future, they'll be aware of that future (i.e. if demand for folders in high on weekdays and low on weekends, prices will still be stable). And yes, all models are wrong but some are useful; but there's not very many models that will stay useful when you flip a negative sign.
My best guess is that this is something that's only relevant for Econ 101 and nowhere else. But I'd still be interested in what actual economists think.
If you imagine a lot of different producers of the good, each with different costs and different maximum capacities, I think you get an upward-sloping supply curve just from that.
If you think in terms of a given producer with a given setup for producing the good, then I think you also get an upward sloping supply curve--his factory is set up to produce up to X/day, and if he wants to push it past that, he has to face some diminishing returns--maybe paying overtime, maybe putting off some maintenance to keep the machines running longer, whatever.
That's the "short-term equilibrium" explanation. Again, the problem is that you're assuming, in both cases, an absolute maximum, where it's impossible to build another factory (and building the second factory is ~always going to be easier than the first). So you have an absolute maximum, which can be maybe raised a little with overtime for a small section of increasing marginal cost - but below that maximum the curve will slope downward (running industry at 50% capacity takes up more than half the effort), and at the physical limit it stops entirely; but all of that only holds in the short term.
It’s not quite so neat. Yes, this is short-term, but it takes time to build another factory, so that matters.
And there is no absolute cut-off at “capacity” - if the price increases by one million percent, you might hire more people and start producing in the parking lot, but your productivity will not be good.
If we really want to talk about the long term, where every margin can be adjusted, there are still factors increasing cost at the margin because you’re competing for resources with the rest of the economy. To get more widgets in the long term, we have to get fewer blogets, and the inputs widgets and blogets share will rise in price, unless those factors have a perfectly flat supply curve.
But at that point, we should perhaps abandon partial equilibrium for general equilibrium, which is a headache.
There are lots of “ceteris paribus” assumptions underlying the use of any sort of curve in that space. In other words, it is a huge simplification. If you have a model that can disaggregate all the factors and make better predictions, let’s hear it. Of course, it might not be too hard to come up with better predictions using a ouija board.
Maybe the short answer is, if supply curves slope down, there are no stable equilibria. Supply has to be below demand at low output, or things never get off the ground. So long as it stays below demand, output will expand. Presumably some external constraint covered by ceteris paribus will prevent infinite output at n/infinity prices. Which means that in the local region, supply is below demand at lower outputs, above demand at higher. That could still be sloping down, so long as not more steeply than demand.
Yeah, you get an approximately flat supply curve as a function of quantity, with a ~constant price, which still allows equilibrium if demand slopes downward. The difference being that when demand (permanently) rises exogenously, quantity produced goes significantly up, but price goes slightly down. When demand drops exogenously, meanwhile, quantity produced goes down (as it would for the standard textbook model as well) but prices rise. And this seems fairly reasonable to me - i.e. trying to buy out-of-print anything.
I think you're looking at cost of supplying as a function of number supplied. But this curve is supposed to give number supplies as a function of market price. The theory is that suppliers will figure out more ways to supply widgets if their price is higher (either by selling widgets that they are currently sitting on, or starting up new widget factories, or whatever).
However, I think some of the points you mention make clear that this shouldn't be a *function*. If it's possible to make up to 10 widgets a day at $1 each, or at a fixed cost of $100 per day, to operate a factory that makes an unlimited number of widgets at marginal cost of $0.50 each, then a situation in which 10 widgets are demanded and supplied per day is stable for a $1 price, *and* a situation in which 210 widgets are demanded and supplied per day is stable for a $1 price.
But I think the Econ 101 graph is imagining what would happen to purchasers if you replaced all suppliers with a magical bottomless sack of widgets at $x each, and what would happen to suppliers if you replaced all purchasers with a buyer that buys unlimited widgets at $x each. In my example, at any price strictly above $0.50, the number of widgets supplied is infinite, and at $0.50 and any lower price, the number of widgets supplied is zero.
I keep mixing up 'flat' and 'vertical' on this, maybe because demand slopes downwards and textbook-supply upwards regardless of which is the independent variable.... Anyway, yes, agreed.
Not that it applies to everything, but I've often heard oil as a central example. If society didn't demand much, there'd be enough gushing out of the ground that oil production would be very inexpensive. The more demand there is, the more otherwise-barely-unprofitable supply might suddenly be profitable.
I think this works best for natural resources. The best ag land is very productive, the easiest water to extract is surface water, the first tree you cut down or ore you extract will be chosen because it's the easiest, etc.
To your point, venture from natural resources and things do get a bit more complicated, but a lot of the same principles apply elsewhere.
It's very much a sensible model of extractive resources, but weirdly the textbook example always seems to be a factory. I guess the dividing line is what Georgism (as per the recent book review) calls land versus capital.
If that's the case then the price of oil should increase with time, assuming demand doesn't drop. Instead, you have a volatile price that has little to do with demand, except that it tends to spike during recessions when demand should be lowest.
I'm pretty sure the only time the oil price rose with a recession is when the oil price caused the recession. In 2008-2009, oil price went from $170-$50 with the markets, and with the COVID induced whatever you want to call it, oil prices briefly went negative.
The reason the price of oil doesn't increase over time is because we develop new technology in almost exactly the right amount to cancel out the effects of worse and worse drilling locations.
The supply curve simply reflects the law of supply, which says that as price increases, the quantity that producers are willing and able to supply increases. EG: when wages rise, more workers are willing to supply their labor. When Uber prices rise during high demand periods, more drivers are willing to supply rides. When rents rise, , more people are willing to rent out spare bedrooms. As for long-term, the long-term equlillbrium changes when supply increases I.e, when the supply curve shifts right) , not when quantity supplied increases. The supply curve represents the relationship between price and quantity supplied, not price and supply. Supply is best thought of as the amount supplied at all prices (i.e, the entire supply curve). Quantity supplied is the amount supplied at a specific price (i.e., a point on the supply curve).
Here’s my basic understanding of it. I’m going to start with an example that’s a bit clearer where the “demand slopes down” breaks.
Let’s ask “how much would a consumer pay to add 1 mph to the top speed of their car.” If you went out, just collected data on car prices, and didn’t control for stuff (which is a sin), you’ll probably see spikes around 150 (sports car) and 350 (race car). This isn’t because people suddenly get vastly more enjoyment in those ranges of speeds, it’s because you start buying a different product (prestige and winning respectively).
Econ 101 is an intro course, so this kind of oversimplification (ignoring those bumps) is common. But in reality, most products when you buy enough or high enough quality of them turn from one thing into another (commonly the item into a prestige symbol).
So relating this back to your original question... Yes, you have these upward sloping supply curves shown to you. And yes, scale effects are real. The idea is that you’re modeling something that doesn’t change (say, the cost of hiring a cashier). In that example, you will burn through the labor pool and have to pay more in wages. The scale effects that cheapen it are a different product that the graph is kind of magicking away.
You are more or less correct that the upward sloping supply curve is an econ 101 construction. It's not useless elsewhere, but it's the simplest model that has any use at all so it's it gets the focus in 101 and other models come later.
In Intermediate Micro, you do indeed typically talk about a flat supply curve, where every firm is producing at their break even price, and an increase in demand only raises equilibrium price in the short term, and in the long run more firms enter the market and the equilibrium price goes back to the break even price(this model assumes that all firms have identical cost functions).
I wouldn't say it's relevant literally nowhere else. It's relevant anywhere that we supply might be constrained. As you say, this is in the short term. If there is a an unexpected surge in demand for a good, it takes time for suppliers to build more factories and such, so it makes sense to talk about the time before such additional supply can come online.
Also if you're looking at the supply of something with a fixed supply. Say, shares of a stock(yes companies can issue more, but ultimately there is only 100% of the company to be owned) or Gold on earth, the hours of labor you can supply, etc.
Thanks - this is closest to what I was looking for as a reply. I guess part of my question is whether economics actually builds more complex models by slapping things on top of supply/demand curves, or whether the models are something else entirely.
context: i have a bachelors in Econ and did a smidge of masters level coursework, but am not employed as any sort of practicing "economist"
but from my limited exposure to such people, my impression is that professional economists these days are mostly applied statisticians, doing "econometrics", within specific domains, and not really doing much general econ theory/model building
the idea/point behind all the "supply/demand" stuff in 101, is just to build an intuition for the broader idea that people respond to incentives. Exactly how they respond to incentives is extremely hard to predict. We have some basic stable ideas like, "an increase in price (usually) results in people buying less of a thing"(aka "law of demand"). But much beyond that predicting human behavior is hard and any decent/honest economist will tell you that economists are no better than anyone else at predicting when the next recession will be
the stats/econometrics come in in trying to figure out more specific and useful things. Like an environmental economist working in government might be sifting through the data to see exactly how much consumer/business behavior changed in response to a regulation that was passed. The problem is that a million other variables are all changing all the time too, so isolating variables is hard and you use various statistical methods to get the best answer you can. Econ models/theory can give you intuition/ideas about where to look and what to look for, but that's about it. And whatever conclusions you do find in the data are domain specific and you aren't really fed back into any sort of attempt at general/comprehensive econ theories/models
from what i remember of intermediate/advanced Micro, we covered several things that were augmentations/expansions/related to the classic supply/demand model, and also a handful of other models for other situations that had no direct relation. I was less into Macro... but from what I remember offhand, I think all the models covered in intermediate macro were their own thing, not in any way extensions on top of Supply/Demand
I don't know much about economics, but here goes how I see it. The "short term" would mean that you have enough time to hire more people, buy more materials, but not enough to build new factories and refactor everything to optimise for scale. I guess it might be the case that you can get lower prices for your raw materials if you buy more of them. But I guess the most common situation is that to get extra workers you have to pay marginally more for more crappy ones, and to squeeze extra production from your workers / factory / whatever, you also need to pay more.
Producers might anticipate that after some investment, they'll be able to produce more of the good at a lower price, but till that time comes, they wouldn't sell at a price that makes them run out.
My intuition: Not all supply curves are like that; it’s mostly a simplification. But to the extent it is an accurate model, think about diminishing marginal returns. If you hire 10 people, you hire the best 10 people you can find. The 11th person hire, all else equal, is worse (let’s call it less productive) than the previous 10, or else you would have hired them first. So you get less output for every additional input. Hence increasing marginal costs as output goes up. This goes for locations, you always build your first store in the best location you can find, subsequent stores will likely be in slightly worse locations. For prices of inputs—the first employee may be eager to work, the thousandth may take more pay and benefits. For time, you’re probably more productive on your first widget of the day than the one right before close. Your first bond issued at a low rate, the last one at much higher rates because lenders demand more return for the higher risk (more leverage). Etc
The usual supply curves I've seen graph price versus *aggregate* supply. The only way that curve could trend flat or down would be if the marginal cost of production were zero or negative, respectively. It sounds like you are interpreting the "supply" curve as the marginal cost of production versus number produced, which is not what I've usually seen called a "supply curve."
I guess that may have come out garbled. But for example, the aggregate supply of gasoline at $5/gallon is greater than that at $4/gallon, simply because it costs *something* to get one more gallon of gasoline out of the ground. So if you want 400 million gallons per day instead of 300 million, it will cost you whatever the extra cost of extracting 100 million more gallons is.
Ah, but it graphs *per-unit* price versus aggregate supply. So if the marginal cost of producing a new widget is (positive, but) less than the average cost of producing the previous ones, the supply curve will slope downwards, because the average cost of production is decreasing.
in the spirit of making positive externalities more visible: glad you started this discussion, I was also confused by this
So, first of all, there are a lot of different models of supply, and how exactly each is used depends on what the researcher is studying in particular. Having said that, the simplest and probably most often used model of production does indeed have constant returns to scale. It also has a positive sloping supply curve. How can it have both? Well, these things have different definitions, and I think it can be a illuminating to explain the details.
This simple model is the Cobb-Douglass production function. Given an amount of capital, K, and labor-hours, L, total production is F(L,K) = A * K^a * L^(1-a), with a between zero and one, and A just some constant that reflects productivity. This form of production function has constant returns to scale, because if double the amount of capital and also double the amount of labor, you get exactly double the output. If you had instead, say, F(L,K) = K^0.75 * L^0.75, that would be an example of increasing returns to scale, since doubling the inputs results in about 2.8 times the output.
What about the supply curve? In this case, the supply curve is defined as the marginal cost of production, *maintaining the amount of capital fixed* at some given amount. Mathematically, the supply curve is equal to the derivative of F(L,K) with respect to L. The idea, like you said, is that this is a short-run model: a firm can adjust the hours worked pretty fast, but installing additional capacity (increasing K) takes more time. Why does supply it slope upwards in this case? Because you are throwing more and more labor at the problem, while capital is more and more scarce. Imagine trying to produce more widgets by squeezing more and more people in the same warehouse with no additional tools or anything. To think of it as an equilibrium concept, the terms you posed, suppose the decision maker predicted the demand would be such that they would minimize expected costs by having capital equal to K0. The more they underestimated demand, the more their marginal cost would be.
Now, is this a realistic model of how firms work? No, it is not. Like I said, this is basically the simplest thing you can possibly write that still has enough of the properties economists consider relevant, and very easy to work with. In serious research you would have to take a lot more into account, and that's not even abandoning the assumption of perfect competition. For a good example of that, check out this paper (with punny title as a bonus):
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13085/w13085.pdf
Correction:
I wrote: "Mathematically, the supply curve is equal to the derivative of F(L,K) with respect to L." That is actually the marginal productivity of labor.
Actually, the supply curve is just marginal cost function, that is, just the derivative of the total cost of producing x units of output, with respect to x, while keeping K fixed.
The Econ-101 version of the demand curve does suffer for not having a time axis. But on any time scale shorter than "I can build a new factory and put it into production", and for any economic perturbation less predictably certain than "Building a new factory will surely be profitable", meeting increased demand will mean e.g. running double shifts in an existing factory. Doubling wear and tear on the machinery, which is roughly linear, but also either paying your workers time-and-a-half for overtime or hiring new workers - and the workers you've got were the best and cheapest you could find in the labor market, the marginal new worker will either be less productive or demand higher wages to leave his current job.
You'll also need more parts and materials, so either those suppliers have to run double shifts (see above), or you'll have to bid for parts and materials that were going to other customers yesterday. Customers who were willing to pay as much yesterday as you were, and some of whom would be willing to pay more to keep their supply.
In the longer term, it gets messy. A long-term demand increase might mean "I can build a bigger more efficient factory", but it can also mean "I have to get the extra copper from a mine that only has low-grade ore". And the next marginal skilled worker is probably still going to cost more than the last.
Very reassured about Apple's commitment to protecting my privacy from the NSA/FBI and advertising companies, given that apparently their employees are too delicate to work in the same office with a guy who once wrote some sexist stuff in a book talking about his girlfriend.
I wish it wasn't so normal to interpret any criticism of women as sexism. How do you know the author doesn't feel the same about men? The book made comments like "Bay Area women suck in the following ways, eastern European women like my girlfriend are better". Without any comments about Bay Area men, how are we to infer if this is sexism or not? "He chose to comment about women only" isn't a point I don't think, since the topic of women was presumably prompted by him wanting to talk about his girlfriend.
I agree with your first sentence but not your reasoning. You know he probably just meant the women. We are in an era where any (negative, or simplifying, profiting men) generalization about women is "sexist", whether true or not.
I think this is an abomination, and the truth, and even coarse models approximating the aggregate truth even if not perfect, cannot be "sexist" or not, it's just what is or what someone perceives.
And the thing is, people didn't like hearing his remarks (if it's the one I've seen quotes) about themselves so they punished him for daring to say something negative, even if it has truth to it; especially if it does.
(I know this from myself!)
I mean, the book is apparently also strongly anti-privacy, and his experience as an exec was with Facebook, so firing him probably *is* good for your privacy.
Firing him may be good for my privacy, but having a workforce too delicate to deal with him as a coworker because he once wrote something kinda sexist in a book seems very bad for expecting any good outcome at all.
I'm not aware of the incident you are referring to, but being willing to fire employees over writing a book containing some sexists stuff and caring about your customer's privacy seem kind of orthogonal to me. Could you elaborate on why you believe they aren't?
https://academictimes.com/studying-science-isnt-what-makes-students-less-religious/
Made me think of Scott's post about new atheism as a failed harmology. The relationship between religion and science is not as clear as we think
I would like to see this plotted against the religosity of the incoming class. I suspect that it is driven more by peer pressure than any actual coursework.
Should be fairly easy to do as the study is done by taking a survey of each class at the beginning and end of their studies
The source journal article is here:
https://academic.oup.com/socrel/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/socrel/srab005/6258789
Inquiry, Not Science, as the Source of Secularization in Higher Education
John H Evans
Sociology of Religion, srab005,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/socrel/srab005
Published: 29 April 2021
Interesting that pre-law was the lowest for decrease in religiousity. If critical self-reflection and careful thought is the biggest predictor of the change, isn't that exactly the kind of thinking skills that you would expect a pre-law program to encourage?
While I can see that perspective, my intuition is the opposite of yours. Law, at least at the attorney level, involves working within the given texts and precedents. Lawyers benefit strongly from a kind of deliberate uncriticality as a consequence. In this way it isn't meaningfully distinct from ecclesiastical argumentation, or Rabbinic law, or Islamic jurisprudence.
Or maybe the process of understanding the complexity of and figuring circumventions for human laws makes one see all the flaws in "divine" law. The lack of nuance kind of undermines the claim to "divinity". You'll inevitably just see it as obviously a set of human laws written for smaller, less sophisticated societies that had to manage fewer types of human interactions. I mean really, only 10 commandments?
Dividing academia into "inquiry-based" fields and "fields that apply knowledge" struck me as vague. Using the word "science" as an antonym for "inquiry" made the confusion seem deliberate.
Using a survey of undergraduates and getting a score of 8% from one category and 11% from the other as evidence of the categories "differences" struck me as exquisite satire
I agree, the difference is small.
I also wonder whether religious groups have a feeling for what majors are more likely to lead to secularization and direct their kids away from them.
When I see something about an academic study finding that science and religion are less in conflict than commonly believed, my immediate paranoid response is "I bet the Templeton Foundation is involved somehow". The disturbing thing is how consistently this turns out to be true.
The work in question here was done by one John H Evans of UCSD. He and Elaine Eklund (a name that will be familiar to those who follow this sort of thing) "co-direct a $2.9M re-granting project, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, dedicated to research in this area" [https://johnhevans.ucsd.edu/research/sociology-of-religion-and-science/].
Of course, being funded by an organization that pours a lot of money into trying to convince the world that science and religion are happy bedmates doesn't make Evans's work bad or prove it's false. But the fact that it _only_ seems to be Templeton-funded research that ever points this way seems highly suspicious.
(I should clarify that "this area" means "sociology of religion and science" rather than anything specific to this particular study.)
Further disclaimer: all these observations are also what we would expect in a world where (1) there is in fact no real conflict between science and religion and (2) for random path-dependent historical reasons the Templeton Foundation happens to be the only entity willing to find people researching the relations between science and religion. So to whatever extent #2 is true, my observations are not very good reason to be skeptical of Templeton-funded claims of #1.
Hm? I thought "inquiry-heavy fields are more likely to make people lose their religion" was a point against religion (with the smallness of this effect as a mitigating factor). It makes some sense to me that studying "science" often doesn't chip away at religiosity.
- partly because if you don't become a researcher you won't really do science (in a science class you're mostly supposed to memorize stuff, and I remember when we would do "experiments", we knew what the correct result was from the beginning),
- partly because (I imagine) skeptical inquiry is a relatively small and optional part of a researcher's job, and
- partly because people compartmentalize parts of their lives, so that in order for skeptical inquiry to spill over into their religious life, some additional factor is needed beyond ordinary academic training.
The Templeton Foundation's specific agenda (as it seems to me, anyway) is to knock down the traditional narrative that puts Science and Religion in a centuries-long conflict. (Rather than, e.g., to promote religion in every way possible.) That traditional narrative says that the Discoveries of Science conflict with the Dogmas of Religion, which might lead you to expect that studying science would turn people away from religion.
I should reiterate that I'm not claiming that that traditional narrative is actually correct, only that I find it a bit fishy that every single time I hear about something contrary to it being published it seems to be funded by the same people. And I should reiterate that one possible explanation is that they are the _only_ people funding _any_ research in this area :-).
Assuming for the sake of argument that Evans's findings are right, I don't think they're much of a point against religion, because what I would expect is that more inquiry-heavy fields will have more of a tendency to make people _change their minds_, whatever position they started out with.
I had a look at the actual Evans paper. (The full text is available at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1m45v2hg, I don't know how legally.) It doesn't seem super-impressive to me. (Not super-unimpressive either.) A few examples of things that seem a bit iffy: You'd think an obvious and easy next step given the reported results would be to look at a two-way classification: pure science, applied science, pure non-science, applied non-science, but he never does that. Some of the classifications seem a little dubious (e.g., nursing is considered an "applied science"; psychology is considered a "pure non-science"; these are both among the most commonly taken subjects; sociology and anthropology are both considered "pure non-sciences"). The main thing he does is a big regression, with science/non-science and pure/applied among the independent variables; but there are many many other independent variables in the regression, included as "controls", and while there's a lot to be said for this it does mean that when those things correlate strongly with the variables of interest (science/non-science and pure/applied) the results may mislead. I note, for instance, that one of those other independent variables is whether the student said that "making a theoretical contribution to science" is a goal they have; that one ends up with highly significant positive coefficients for the secularization outcomes. Another is grade point average in high school; this one ends up with a highly significant _negative_ coefficient (which, I should say, is a point _against_ the science-secularizes idea, because I suspect science students tend to have higher GPA). I'd have liked to see what happens if you do the regression with various subsets of the control variables; I'd trust the results more if they turn out to be robust against different choices there.
I'm confused by the American idea of a "suburb". I live in Australia, where every subdivision of a city is known as a suburb, with the possible exception of the central business district. But in the US it seems to mean something else, but I've never quite figured it out.
Is the Upper West Side of New York a suburb? Is the Outer Sunset area of San Francisco a suburb? Is Berkeley a suburb? Is Mountain View a suburb? Is San Jose a suburb? Is Beverly Hills a suburb?
In the US, a suburb is the residential area surrounding a city, usually defined by single-family homes on large-ish lots (1/8 acre to 1 acre, I think is typical), in large neighborhoods with little-to-no commercial property. Commercial property is concentrated in malls and strip malls with large parking lots that must be driven to.
So Beverly Hills is a suburb?
I think so? I've never been and I'm not too familiar with it, but from photos yes
Yes: a wealthy one, but it still fits the idea.
In addition to C MN's answer, note that Americans often talk about large metropolitan areas as being composed of multiple cities, even when they are very close to each other. For example, Berkeley and Oakland are considered two separate cities.
(I'm from NZ, and was also confused about this when I moved to the US.)
I think this is because they *are* two separate cities. The City Council of Berkeley can't make decisions that affect the City of Oakland, and vice versa. If by city you mean the political subunit demoninated as such, calling Oakland and Berkeley differnet cities would be technically correct.
Right, what I mean is that this usage of "city" isn't as common elsewhere. E.g. Greater London is about the same size as the Bay Area, but it's divided into boroughs not cities.
I could be wrong, but I believe that cities in the US generally don't form by division, but rather by addition. No one divided the bay area into cities; rather, cities formed next to other cities until the contiguous cities formed the metropolis known as the bay area.
I think you're right.
Nearly all of Clark County Georgia is Athens, except for one little bit that's Winterville. Nobody looked at the metro area and decided this was a reasonable way to divide it; rather, as Athens grew it swallowed up a nearby small town.
Marietta started off outside metro Atlanta, and then became a suburb as metro Atlanta grew.
If you look at city limits in metro Cleveland, the towns mostly look reasonably compact, except Cleveland itself has tentacles snaking in between the others. I can't imagine that was the result of someone thinking it was a reasonable way to divide things up; I think Cleveland must have expanded into every place that wasn't already a town.
I agree, but the same happened in London. But in its case those small cities where absorbed legally as well as physically by the city at some point.
Greater London is centuries older than the Bay Area, and 'the Bay Area' wasn't all one thing until relatively recently. LA is younger than SF, but for geographical reasons spread faster, so that it seems all one thing. Also, I wonder what older residents of those areas use when talking about different urban centers.
True about centuries. Enough of them, though, that you could also say millennia..
Greater London wasn't all one thing either in 1021. Even Westminster and the City were separated from each other by rural land.
We'd refer to the surrounding counties of a city as, for example, the suburbs of San Francisco. The Upper West Side and the Outer Sunset would qualify as neighborhoods.
In the US a "suburb" is ordinarily a place that's within the economic and cultural orbit of a city but is not subject to its government. The Upper West Side is politically part of the city and so not a suburb-- as is Staten Island despite its suburban character. Beverly Hills, on the other hand, is a suburb: it's run by its own government, not by LA. It gets confusing at times because cities frequently grow by annexing their suburbs.
I would define suburb more narrowly. For example, the city of East Point GA is legally a separate city from Atlanta, but is clearly part of Atlanta in every other way. (Atlanta has several cities like this). East Point is not a suburb; it is fully urban. Peachtree City, on the other hand, is almost entirely middle-class residential, and most of the residents drive to work in Atlanta every day (a 45 minute drive in good traffic). Peachtree City is a suburb.
The Cleveland metro area is smaller and much less spread out than Atlanta. The city of Lakewood borders Cleveland, and that edge of Lakewood looks like part of Cleveland, but most of Lakewood is middle-class residential, so I would call Lakewood a suburb too.
Regarding public transit:
East Point is fully part of Atlanta's mass transit, with its own train station. Peachtree City has no mass transit. The residents don't want it. They worry that neighbors who can't afford cars would bring crime.
Lakewood has a train station in the part that looks like part of Cleveland (or maybe just across the line in Cleveland, I'm not sure). The rest of Lakewood just has busses.
Ah! Hmm. What is your understanding of the word itself? Like, what is "sub-urb" a shortening/contraction of for you? From your post, it looks to me like the "sub" is short for "subdivision"? So you use the word as a shortening of something like "subset of a larger urban area"?
Not sure I'm reading you right, but yeah, as an American that is pretty different than what I understand the word to mean. Though I'm not even sure all Americans use the term identically. And there is overlap between the concepts of your suburb and my suburb, confusing the whole thing further.
My understanding, is that "suburb" is a shortening of "suburban", as in sub-urban, as in, less dense than urban. And if you are even less dense than suburban, then you're at "rural". There aren't really exact lines on where the terms start and stop. But if you have high rises it's definitely urban. Single family homes would be called "suburban" and a neighborhood at that density can be called "a suburb". Exactly how close the houses can get to each other before becoming urban or how far apart before being rural is not nailed down.
So while Berkeley or Hollywood or Brooklyn are subsets of larger named urban areas, I would never call any of them suburbs because they are all very urban areas. There are bits of Beverly Hills that I would classify as definitely urban, and others that feel very suburb to me.
This seems right to me. Also, you are more likely to be in a suburb the larger the parking lots are.
Right, definitely a factor.
The more walkable/mass transit served an area is, the more I consider it "urban".
Whereas shopping centers/neighborhoods where car driving is assumed/necessary are "suburban".
Thinking about the housing density that I’ve experienced, a reasonable quick-and-dirty rule for separating suburbs from more urban areas might be “does each property have at least as much space occupied by yard as by house”. If the majority of the property is made up of the structure itself, the odds are pretty good that it’s too urban to really consider a suburb.
I think this is hitting at the reason it's confusing for Australians. Our cities are very low-density; go 5 km from Melbourne's CBD and you're in mostly-houses territory, which then goes on for another 45 km in every direction (further in the southeast). As such, "everything but the CBD" essentially *is* "suburbs" for us.
I think people from the Melbourne suburbs would feel at home in Southern California. The default residential zoning is single-family.
>My understanding, is that "suburb" is a shortening of "suburban", as in sub-urban, as in, less dense than urban.
Actually, "suburban" is the derived word.
Latin *urbs* = "city", *sub-* = "under", so *suburbs* is a classical Latin word for the "undercity".
Others have offered the economic and governance perspectives. I will give you the physical and planning code perspective. Suburbia is a system of pods. Each pod has a single use: housing, work, shopping, or civic. The pods have internal street networks. Buildings must be set back at significant distance from those streets, and must provide as much parking as their visitors could ever desire, so a big building has a big parking lot between it and the street. If there's leftover space, landscaping. The pod street networks are isolated from each other, but have limited numbers of portals to collector roads, which connect pods to each other and to highways.
Berkeley, Outer Sunset, and the Upper West Side match almost none of these characteristics, except that you can relatively deep inside a residential zone with a long way to the nearest business. The good news is that you can probably reach that business safely on a bike: take the smaller streets parallel to the main thoroughfares.
Large swaths of Mountain View, San Jose, and Beverly Hills match these characteristics much more closely, although not absolutely (schools mixed in with houses, and retail on collector roads between residential pods instead of in proper shopping centers).
I think the defining characteristic of a suburb is that it is a commuter residential area for an established city. You don't have suburbs before a significant number of people have options to work outside of walking distance from their house. Once people can commute to work by some means, it becomes possible to live in the cheaper areas outside a city and travel in to the city to work, and this forms suburban areas which serve as overflow housing for the urban area.
The first thing to look for in whether something is a suburb is the local commuter infrastructure and activity. Infrastructure, such as highways and mass transit, is often in a radial pattern with the city as the hub designed to get people in and out more than around. Commuter activity is typically 'rush hour' where traffic is overwhelmingly one directional; in to the city in the morning, out of the city at night. The actual land usage pattern will differ depending on when the city was built and how it grew; the exact pattern is less important than the fact that the land outside is cheaper than that in the urban core and thus there is less incentive to be compact, so houses are bigger and have more land, stores are bigger and have more parking, etc.
The problem with the examples given is that as large cities and their suburbs grow, they run into existing developments such as large towns and smaller cities, which creates some confusion since there is no absolute definition of what constitutes a suburb. Washington DC is smaller than some of the counties around it, and given the building restrictions in DC, parts of those counties are more urban in nature. Still, the flow of workers is overwhelmingly from those counties into DC to work and not the other way around, and thus those counties are properly regarded as suburbs of DC. On the other hand, very few people live in Baltimore and commute to DC (or vice versa), so neither is a proper suburb of the other.
What have you learned recently that has surprised you?
TIL that the pulses in older phones that dial by pulses are actual disconnects.
It is possible to dial a number on a phone with a broken rotary dial, you just have to push and release the hang-up button just right to emulate each digit.
I once dialled correctly with my gf by whistling the DTMF tones, after many failed attempts.
That's a ... rather extraordinary claim. I could believe a human being able to whistle a *single* tone at an exact frequency with sufficient precision to satisfy the phone electronics. But DTFM tones are two exact frequencies at the same time. I'd be incredibly amazed if any human could just replicate a *single* DTFM tone, let alone doing it 10 times in a row or however long phone numbers are where you live.
Frankly, even if you demonstrated that to me, I'd be 99% convinced it was some kind of magic trick, even if I couldn't figure out exactly how you were fooling me. I'd need it demonstrated under James Randi Award level conditions of having professional magicians design a protocol to prevent trickery, before I could be convinced that you were doing it for real.
Btw, did you understand that I did it on my own? "with my gf"
Oh, I read it as you, by yourself, dialing your girlfriend's phone number by whistling. But you're saying that the two of you together were able to produce the DTMF tones. That's not so unbelievable. Still a cool party trick, but not as impossible as a single person whistling two tones at the same time with perfect frequency control.
So are you talking about the two of you together successfully producing a single DTMF tone, or actually dialing a complete phone number?
Man I don't think I'll ever understand how phones worked. Can anyone explain to me all the processes that took place when you would dial a phone, and how it would get connected to the proper destination?
Each disconnect made a stepper go up through rows of contacts and in the pause it'd connect through to the next stepper and so forth. Here's a video demonstrating it in detail:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QOTQic5231w
How old golf is.
How old is it?
It was invented by Bullroarer Took at the Battle of the Green Fields in the year 1,146 of the Shire Reckoning. Truly the third age was a more civilized time...
Indeed - by knocking the head of the goblin king Golfimbul into a rabbit hole as I recall 🧐 However, I suspect the true origin is earlier, as there is a verse in the 'Lay of Leithian Canto XII' about Fingolfin, first High King of the Noldor ruling in Beleriand, challenging Morgoth to 18 rounds on the Angband links... "In that vast shadow once of yore, Fingolfin stood: his clubs he bore, with balls of heaven's blue and star of crystal shining pale afar...' http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Fingolfin
The Lay of Leithian was fabricated by the Sobieski Fëanors, who were actually just Men of Arnor. You can't use that as a source.
My American brain thought probably like early 1900s, but apparently they've been playing golf at St. Andrews since 1552.
I recently decided to try making my own yogurt, and learned that the FDA's definition of "yogurt" requires that it be cultured with two specific species of bacteria, Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus. As you might guess from that last word, they like it warm, so you have to incubate your inoculated milk around 110F/43C to turn it into yogurt. But there are other species that will culture milk at room temperature, such as those historically used to make skyr, so technically skyr makers cannot call their product yogurt even though the average consumer would not perceive a difference. (Interestingly, the Siggi's website flagrantly ignores this rule and calls their products "yogurt" left and right, while the Icelandic Provisions website scrupulously describes their skyr as a cultured milk product similar to yogurt.)
MSG basically tastes like Doritos. The flavor of Doritos comes mostly from MSG, and not really from cheese powder or anything else. Try buying some MSG in the supermarket and put it on a tortilla chip and you can't tell the difference.
That some garbage trucks have extra, usually inactive axles that are lowered to the ground when the truck is carrying too much weight.
If you pay your utility bill from your bank account, it's entirely possible for the payment to get lost, with the bank claiming it got delivered, the utility company claiming it was never received, and all the information on the payment being correct. There doesn't appear to be any way to get the money back - you just argue with the utility company and hope they cave in. Probably true for other payments too, but who would expect a utility company to do this?
I'm curious--does anyone know much about delta-8 THC? The sites I find googling all seem to be repeating the same anecdotal findings. I'm curious if it's been studied much.
Based on sampling one gummy, I suspect this is same stuff being packaged in legal for recreational use states. Same rather potent buzz as THC Classic repackaged to be sold online ‘legally’ in all states.
At least it will save me a drive to South Dakota
Yeah, I had a friend bring over some this week. He claimed (and everything online said) it was a "mild buzz", but uh...I got *extremely* high, for several hours. I'm pretty sensitive to drugs overall, but I was curious as to the mechanism. Chemically it's technically a different molecule than regular THC, but I don't know how well your body can discriminate the two.
I’m a THC short tanker too. A couple hours after I ate a delta-8 gummy I was watching SNL. I couldn’t keep the premise of a skit in my head long enough to enjoy the bit. I’m going off a gut feeling judging by the marketing copy on the delta 8 sale sites. It doesn’t inspire a lot of trust in me. Why bother with the chemistry when you can put the old stuff in a new package and have all the entire country as your market. Of course I could be wrong
I don’t mean to suggest you’ll find inaccuracies on the Internet or anything. ;)
That sounds basically like my experience. I didn't experience much of the traditional giddiness or physical sensations I associate with being high, but I had an almost complete failure of short term memory. If I tried *really* hard I could just about remember what was going on, but details were gone.
I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't what it said it was; I'm not sure how much the federal government gives a shit about enforcement nowadays, so I wouldn't be surprised if some companies are taking a gamble.
Most knowledgeable drug users I know are staying away due to purity concerns. There is a major lack of trust in gray market products due to the Vitamin E acetate poisonings a few years ago.
I am (very slowly and intermittently) reading the Joseph R. Allen edition of Waley's translation of Shijing. In the explanation preceding poem 154 ("The Seventh Month") someone (probably Waley, but maybe Allen?) states that the phrase "The Fire ebbs" means "Scorpio is sinking below the horizon at the moment of its first visibility at dusk" and then asks whether this happened in northern China around September during the eight and seventh centuries BC, suggesting that an astronomer may know the answer. I've tried googling it, and haven't found anything. Are there any astronomers/fans of ancient Chinese poetry on here who know the answer?
I'm not an astronomer, but here's a website that shows the sky at any given time and place. Putting in a negative number for the year works as far as I can tell.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Yoursky
Wikipedia says the seventh month of the Chinese calendar runs from about July 23 to August 23, but the calendar they used back then was probably different.
Thanks for the pointer. That is a cool tool. Based on that site it appears that Scorpius was sinking below the horizon in September in Shaanxi in the eight and seventh centuries BC. As an aside, the explanation in the book notes that the poem references two different calendar systems. Where it says "seventh month", "ninth month", etc. it means an older calendar (ie one that was older than the Zhou dynasty's calendar) that started in the spring, but where if it says "days of the Second", etc. it means the Zhou calendar that started around the winter solstice. I think, based on the poem, that in this case seventh month means something more-or-less Septemberish, but I also checked the July 23- Aug 23 period you mentioned, and the astronomy is consistent with the poem for that time frame as well.
It seems very likely that cicadas are using a strategy of flooding predators by emerging in huge numbers at intervals of prime numbers of years. Any ideas about how such a thing could evolve?
There'll be a positive feedback loop on coordinating the years. The more that cicadas only emerge in one particular year, the more important it is for any particular cicada to emerge on that same year. I expect that the cycle emerged slowly then all at once.
I know very little about cicadas, but I can make a guess. Let's say cicadas have already evolved to emerge at the same time every year for various reasons: climate conditions, laying site availability, etc., reasons that would make it advantageous for an individual cicada to emerge at that time. If that's not enough selection pressure to create an accurately timed yearly swarm sufficient to flood predators in some capacity, then any cicadas that time their flight to coincide with the maximum number of other cicadas could easily evolve from that.
Now let's say there are various mutant cicadas that, instead of emerging at the same time every year, emerge at the same time every two years, or three. If they lose no fitness from hibernating, these mutations could spread through the population purely by genetic drift, and at a certain point, it could become widespread enough that in years where they do not emerge, the yearly cicadas are actually at a fitness disadvantage compared to years where the two- or three-year cicadas do emerge, because a higher proportion of the yearly cicadas get eaten compared to the proportion of the yearly, two- and three-year cicadas combined.
I don't know how it would progress from that to prime numbers, maybe there are other selection pressures that apply to animals with multi-year reproduction cycles, or there's a genetic quirk in the coding of hibernation cycles. It could plausibly develop in a number of ways from cicadas that already coordinate to emerge every x years.
i dont know the full story, but prime number cycles will minimize emerging the same year as (and thus competing with) other groups.
This is basically the same principle that herd behavior works on. There's safety in numbers, though cicadas probably don't make alarm calls to warn each other of predators the way that, say, zebras do. Add to that that if the cicadas disappear for a few years, their predators' food source and therefore population will decline, and the cicada population will explode just as their predators are at their lowest.
As a minor part of the question, how do cicadas keep count of the years?
plenty of animals have an annial clock- hibernators for instance, which usually pay attention to temperature. it shouldn't be too hard to count the number of winters... though I'm not sure whether they exist in equatorial climates.
Counting to thirteen seems kind of high for an insect.
Six legs. Just count each leg twice, and after that it's go time.
Yep - that's the way we do it 🐜
Ah, sorry, that's not what i meant. Sure it couldn't count them with its brain, but a molecular mechanism shouldnt need to be too complicated. Like during swarms it builds up some number of cysts or crystals and one disappears each winter. Or repression markers build up on the DNAand half of markers disappear each year, and when you're down to a certain level the breeding genes kick on. I've never heard of a mechanism like that, im only speculating, but it seems realistic to me.
I didn't think they could count the years with their brains, but 13 years seems like a long time to keep track by some chemical method.
Related: Gregory Bateson wrote about the difference between what's genetically coded for particular numbers (fingers) vs. what's genetically coded as many (hairs).
Vertebrae might be an example of something that's coded for a fairly high number.
Same way your body knows when to start growing pubic hair. Except with moth greater precision because unlike pubic hair being of by a year is deadly.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-cicadas-love-affair-with-prime-numbers
"So how do the cicadas know how to calculate prime numbers? They don’t. They’re cicadas. The pattern probably emerged as a result of Darwinian natural selection: cicadas that naturally matured in easily divisible years were gobbled up by predators, and simply didn’t live long enough to produce as many offspring. Those who, by chance, had long, prime-numbered life spans fared best, survived longest, and left the most offspring, becoming the dominant variation of the species. (There are now at least fifteen distinct populations of periodical cicadas.) As things stand now, cicada emergences are so tightly timed, with the bulk of the insects emerging within a span of a few weeks, that any cicada that tries to break the pattern is simply taking her offspring’s life into her own hands.
Not everyone buys into this hypothesis. Lou Sorkin, the American Museum of Natural History’s cicada expert, pointed out that cicadas evolved during the Pleistocene epoch, about 1.8 million years ago, when the earth was much cooler. Since cicadas don’t survive well in the cold, he explained, it is possible that the cicadas that were naturally adapted to stay underground longer were less likely to face an unexpectedly cold spring."
The order of events (probably)
1 cacadas evolve to only come out when other cacadas are coming out
2 no cacadas come out because of the first mover problem
3 cacadas evolve to come out after n years even if others dont, just to not die in hibernation. Where n is the optimal compromise between survivng for that long & the risk of missing out on a cacada storm
4 this gene spreads so much all cacadas come out after n years
5 at this point evolution may select against the original looking for signs of other cacadas, just to prevent false positives.
no, i don't know why n is prime
There are 3 species of cicadas that are split into two races, where one races emerges every 13 years, and the other race emerging every 17 years.
Maybe by having the races emerge at prime numbered intervals it reduces the instances where both species emerges the same year. If my math is right, by using a 13 and 17 year cycle the races would emerge simultaneously only every 221 years. If they had a 3 and 4 year cycle for instance, they would emerge simultaneously every 12 years.
Maybe they are also trying to get a way from predators or parasites which also emerges in cycles. So if you emerged every 12 years, you could be vulnerable to predators that emerge every 4 years for instance. So prime cycles makes it harder for the predator to evolve to a right cycle as a response.
Should counties other than India be worried about B.1.617.2?
It doesn't seem to noticeably do vaccine escape but it might be more virulent than B.1.1.7 (Kent).
So it's a question of where a rising proportion of the B.1.617.2 meets a falling number of non-immune people. I doubt many developed countries other than the UK have enough travel from India to kick off a meaningful outbreak before everybody's vaccinated.
Or is this all an artefact of extrememly high infection rates within India driving what looks like exponetial community transmission?
SAGE minutes, largely about the Indian variant:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/986564/S1236_Eighty-nineth_SAGE_meeting.pdf
Weekly VOC data:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/986380/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_11_England.pdf
Does anyone know or know of any autistic therapists or counselors who work with autistic teens? Asking for a parent I know. The kid wants someone who understands autism from the inside.
Where do you live? Most therapists and counselors aren't tele-, and even the ones who are can only see someone in their own state.
Ah. Either MA or NY (kid in question spends time in both places).
FWIW I've found several tele-therapists here in MA, don't know of any autistic specialists though. Have you checked this directory? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/massachusetts
Is anyone following the Restaurant Revitalization Fund grants? Women, veterans and “economically disadvantaged minorities” were given priority to receive grant funds and now there are no more funds available.
If a government was trying to stoke racism and sexism, this seems like one way to do it.
and also veteran hate i guess
Does anyone else feel really stupid while reading comments on here?
One thing to keep in mind is that there most commenters are amateurs on most topics. Some people are domain experts within a particular field or fields, e.g. John Schilling on rocketry and North Korea, but will still comment outside of that domain of expertise. So if you feel too intimidated just remember that most of us are wrong about most of the topics we talk about until we get corrected by one of the commenters who actually has relevant knowledge.
This is wrong.
Agreed, I find https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DT3bBM_VwAEVlRx?format=jpg&name=small a helpful way to think about this.
I think impostor syndrome is related to Gell-Mann amnesia. When I read comments on things about which I’m an expert, I often think they may be well-meaning but are amateurish and not completely accurate. Then when I read comments on things I’m a novice on, I think they are smart and worth taking seriously. I forget the expert view. Since I’m a novice on most things, voila, impostor syndrome.
I wonder if imposter syndrome is a relatively recent phenomenon of a culture where expressing confidence is expected even of people who are not confident at all. "Fake until you make it" seems exactly like the kind of advice that would create such a generalized feeling.
I think most people are imposters.
If you think you're a fraud, you probably are.
Sometimes. But mostly the comment threads I don't understand are ones I'm really not interested in. Those things I'm interested in I generally have an opinion about and can therefore happily dismiss others supposed expertise or knowledge whenever they seem to disagree with me.
a reliable source of happiness 😁
Yes, but it's a really pleasant change from the surrounded-by-idiots feeling I get in most other places.
I notice that contrast too - and it really is more pleasant for me to have a "My word, aren't I the ignorant one round here" feeling, than a "who will rid me of these irremediably idiotic numbskulls" one.
That's the reason I spend my days here.
Who will rid me of these irremediably idiotic high-functioning economists, programmers and drug-users? 😉
I'm not an expert on comments or stupidity, but no 😉
For the sentimental cartography files: https://www.halcyonmaps.com/map-of-the-internet-2021/
Very detailed! Though I find the complexity of the color scheme a bit difficult to read
Re-posting this for visibility:
I remember reading a blog post some years ago. I think I found it in the SSC comments. It was written by a doctor, and it listed all known medical interventions that are so obviously effective that we don't need RCTs and statistics to know that they work. One example was insulin for diabetes. The list wasn't that long, which was discussed in the post as well.
This is how I remember it at least, but I've lost the link. Does anyone recognise what I'm talking about? I would be grateful if I could find it again.
seconding the interest
I don't know the blog post, but it immediately reminds me of the SSC post where Scott talks about how we don't do 'scientific tests' on how effective parachutes are when falling out a plane vs free falling since it's dangerous and obvious. It might be in the comments there.
I announced New Science (newscience.org) a few days back - a nonprofit the goal of which is to build new institutions of basic science, starting with life sciences.
The board of directors consists of me, Mark Lutter, and Adam Marblestone and we are advised by Tessa Alexanian, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, and Tony Kulesa.
If the site is exciting and *especially if you do biology*, I would love to talk to you.
The first project is going to be a fully funded in-person summer fellowship for young scientists during which they will work on their ambitious exploratory research projects they couldn’t work on otherwise.
alexey@newscience.org
This looks really cool!
Thank you!
how does it differ from old science?
It will be highly aggressive and Internet-focused. :)
Please check out the site!
Great endeavour and I really hope this takes off!
Surely this is not the first attempt since the problems listed are known. What has been attempted in the past? What were their results or where are they at now?
One question/criticism: This seems to distinguish itself by primarily being "not academia" (with problems listed we agree on). I can't find the SSC or ACX quote that said something along the lines of "Marxists thought when the existing capitalist system is burned down, everything would just move into place and work out. But they didn't actual say what exactly they were going to build in the ashes."
So if this is successful, how will it not (eventually) become another academia? Just one with different rituals and preferred areas to fund? How do you believe the current academic system arrived at its current state? Is it the work of individuals or a Moloch-like system?
Still, even without all the kinks worked out (and that's not necessarily needed when starting something new, just a nice ot have), I'd still encourage this and other attempts.
You're asking him to prove a negative (that Marx did not describe the specific mechanisms/dynamics behind the utopification he hoped for). If Scott was wrong, proving it should be easy by comparison.
You're looking for this? https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/13/book-review-singer-on-marx/
Yes, that's the one!
> He believed it was a scientific law, analogous to the laws of physics, that once capitalism was removed, a perfect communist government would form of its own accord.
I was thinking of this passage but all of part I makes this point.
Anyway, I didn't necessarily mean to comment about the topic itself. I just had an analogous question for New Science. Seems like a sibling comment here had a similar question.
I didn't find anything on their webpage that avoids any of the things they find problematic (other than being the ones in charge instead of whoever currently is, but otherwise working in the same way). For example
> His grad school PI was forced to close down their lab in their late 40s despite having tenure
Aren't we just as likely to get this story to happen with NS, replacing "closing down an academia funded lab" with "closing down a NS funded lab"?
Thank you! I think that eventually everything trends into being just like anything else and over long-enough time scale, I imagine New Science will indeed become basically academia. In the meantime, I hope to create a culture that would be more open and that would try to support people with less attention to how many years of academic training they had and with more attention to how capable of doing something new they are and would then support them in whatever way it makes the most sense, rather than to force everyone to go through the same pipeline.
On the New Science Page someone (presumably you?) writes:
"I used to obsess over mechanism design and incentive structures but I’ve come to believe that we are Bob-Taylor-constrained much more than we are the-ideal-organizational-and-incentive-structure-for-a-basic-research-institution-constrained."
Can you link to somewhere that you elaborate more on these two ideas and why you chose one over the other? I'm very interested. Thank you for posting this.
It looks as if currently, you're seeking donations mainly from philanthropists with deep pockets. Have you considered also running a Patreon?
Systematic traumatization of the young is the primary mechanism through which civilization has been forged.
Great "endurer" response!
I'd say that culture traumatizes you such that you can be useful for its own ends. It's like a macro entity whose presence begins to be seen as we get interested in ourselves.
I agree. It's a complex relationship. However, a lot of what our culture has created in the last 10 or 20 years has also served to alienate most Western people from their inner selfhood. So right now the relationship looks more parasite/host to me, in the West.
I like it that you're talking about your own experience, as opposed to how "someone" might find it.
For sure, who knows. Maybe the end justify the means. Maybe not. Maybe the next emergent paradigm negates the whole concept of trauma, who knows?
Not wrong or right, just how things are.
The only way I can see this being true is by stretching the definition of "systematic trauma" to the breaking point, such that it's silly to use that as your grand term (or inflammatory, but that seems to be the point). That being said, this method has worked really well for Taleb so please let the commentariat know when you publish your book; I will unironically give it a read.
I was meaning the term "trauma" in the esp Reichian sense. These days considered as the evocation of a safety strategy at a specific point in infancy, in response to environment, which then continues throughout adulthood. More here - https://devaraj2.substack.com/p/all-cultures-traumatize
Maybe.
It seemed fairly clear to me, despite not knowing Reich. Basically, it seems to be describing things that people learn to do for their safety, like copying/mimicking others.
Some examples would be good.
Do you have ideas about how children can be raised to adulthood without traumatizing them? What a non-traumatized society would be like?
I find it very hard to disentangle culture from traumatization. The systematic traumatization of children creates an "engine" psychologically that can drive a culture forwards. And all cultures, as far as I know, do this. I actually think that trauma is not as debilitating as we often think. It can also lead to great self-awareness. And in many ways this seems to me the way forwards. Instead of just trying to stop traumatization, develop better and better ways to move beyond it. Because the kick it gives can most definitely be useful.
Without a hundred successive generations of "Rigids," "Endurers" and "Schizoids," Western culture would still be in the Dark Ages. We would still be scrabbling around in the dirt trying to survive and fighting brutal feudal battles. This is an unfortunate truism not often looked at by those who simply want to "get rid of trauma." A part of me would love to de-traumatize childhood, and to a degree this has happened over the last few decades. But it's not clear that it's really achieved much yet. Maybe it will become clearer.
It seems reasonable to me that earlier cultures had their own ways of traumatizing children. I find it hard to believe that ancient Rome was inhabited by untraumatized adults.
Part of my reaction is that I just reread _Star-Begotten_ by HG Wells, which is very optimistic about a saner humanity.
Yes, I agree
What's your point?
That civilization was forged through systematic universal traumatization, and that you can't disentangle culture from trauma.
I'm just here to give meaningless criticism. It doesn't make sense to say "Otherwise, post about whatever you want", on even numbered threads. That sentence only makes sense when immediately preceded by a warning not to get political. Scott seems to have been making this mistake consistently for at least the past few weeks, possibly longer.
For some reason this has been bothering me as well, even though it makes no difference to anything whatsoever. I am glad to know I am not alone.
Yeah, I've had a very vague sense that something was amiss when I read that. Not enough for me to stop and work out what it was, though.
I wouldn't go so far as saying "It doesn't make sense..", merely that the "Otherwise" makes more sense in the introduction to odd numbered open threads, than it does in the even numbered ones. For the even numbered threads an "And" would work quite well.
One of the dictionary definitions of "otherwise" is "in other respects; apart from that" (source: OED). That being the case, the sentence in Scott's post beginning "otherwise" could be reworded "Apart from that, post about whatever you want", meaning "The issue of political comments aside, post about whatever you want". That seems perfectly fine to me.
I take the "otherwise" to mean "This is the thread you can post about political and culture war stuff. If you don't want to post about that, this isn't *only* for such topics, post about whatever you like!"
Without the "otherwise", some people might think "This is *only* for political posts, I have to wait for the next open thread to talk about this other thing I want to talk about".
This is my read of it too. It may not be strictly necessary, but it's a useful thing to say. And having "it's even numbered, so go wild!" be the last thing someone reads before coming ot the comment section would likely impact the quality of the discussion negatively.
*to
"I'm just here to give meaningless criticism" - we all need a hobby, otherwise... 😉
Okay, fine, I've changed the template.
There's a topic that's popping up in my mind from time to time that baffles me, so I'll just write that to see what will the hivemind decision on it would be:
Why don't other countries crack down on tax havens? Some music/movie companies lost a not backbreaking amount of money, and they got the international community to raid piratebay servers in Sweden or wherever. USA staged coups for far less amount of money in Latin American countries. Now why don't they nicely ask or peer-pressure let's say Ireland or Netherlands as they are respectable countries (they're not rogue states that wouldn't reason)? Or outright pressure Liberia or those micronations which is only known for their tax regimens? Just a few hours of gunboat diplomacy would stop them all, and net USA (or Germany, or wherever) with incredible amount of extra tax income.
But why doesn't this happen? I can only think the reason would be some collusion from up top, but governments change yet the situation doesn't. Strange.
What allows Ireland to pull that shit is the pre-existing tax treaties (between Ireland and other countries) that have been in place since Ireland was not a tax haven. Closing the loophole without Ireland's cooperation would involve revoking or renegotiating the tax treaties, which is presumably seen as a headache and disruptive to commerce.
The Cayman Islands and other "black hole" countries don't have tax treaties with anybody and are therefore irrelevant without a defector like Ireland.
Maybe I never came across that, but I would've at least expected some public sabre rattling. I mean for example USA has been embargoing Cuba for like over half a century, or there are differing levels of sanctions to several countries that caused a much less nuisance to USA. But to Ireland/Malta/Cyprus/etc... not even a press release or public berating or not answering their president's phone, or something anything?
The US can more effectively whammy our system of tax breaks by instituting tax breaks of their own, see this story on Biden's proposed tax changes: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56805195
"Essentially that would mean if a company paid tax at the lower Irish rate, then the US (or other countries) could top up that company's tax in their jurisdiction to get it to the global minimum.
So if a US company had a presence in Ireland primarily for the tax advantage, that advantage would disappear.
This is a matter of urgency for the Biden administration, because it is planning to raise corporate taxes at home and would prefer not to see more tax revenues leaking to other countries."
Now this makes sense.
Sweden doesn't lose much by raiding piratebay servers. Malta would lose billions of dollars by closing down all its offshores.
Not from Sweden's point of view, USA law enforcement went into the trouble of asking the Swedish to cooperate and raid the servers etc. Why don't they even publicly ask (even if the answer is expected to be a no, just to create some public pressure) tax havens to do something about it?
My question is, why is there no apparent pushback to the tax haven countries from the countries losing the most amount of tax dollars from those schemes?
"My question is, why is there no apparent pushback to the tax haven countries from the countries losing the most amount of tax dollars from those schemes?"
Ask yourself this; what was the difference between the piratebay situation and the tax havens situation?
In one (piracy), large US corporations are losing money, thus it's worth their while to get their lobbyists to annoy the congresspersons into "something must be done!"
In the other (tax havens), large US corporations are making money by avoiding taxes. Why on earth would they ask the government to clamp down on legal means of tax avoidance (which is not the same thing as tax evasion)? Why would they support congresspersons with donations to their election campaigns or good PR if the congressperson in question pushed for "make Kumquat pay back taxes on money held in Europe"?
So the corporations lobbying the government for their loss has more impact on the government that the government itself losing money? I mean shouldn't the congresspeople not need to be lobbied in order to do something about the country losing money?
I understand the congresspeople need to think about the next elections and if those corporations would to bad PR / not do good PR about them. What about the non-elected government officials that work for the state thus their loyalty should align to? Isn't there a single person to try to stir something about this? IRS officials are not elected, so do a lot of the Foreign Office (or what it's called, the branch that deals with International Relations) employees.
Or judges? Aren't those in USA elected for life? So once they're there they have no incentives to think about the corporations but a lot of incentives to think about lost tax dollars?
I still can't wrap my mind around this.
From the point of view of the individual congressperson they have a lot more to lose by angering their donors than failing to increase revenue for the federal government. As far as I know, no-one's lost their seat because they haven't contributed to tax reform of more efficient tax collecting schemes but plenty have lost elections because of lack of funding. At least that's my strong impression.
*OR more efficient tax…*
"Oh goodness me, we have been handed a hefty tax bill. Oh dear, we *were* going to build a shiny new factory in that Rust Belt unemployment black spot, but we can't afford to do that now! Why, we may even need to close down some of our plants here and move overseas to lower-cost production facilities. Whatever can we do?"
And that's the leverage large companies have on governments.
But, if USA doesn't go after those companies but to tax havens and make sure nobody gives them that deal, then the companies would not have any schemes to use.
And if push comes to shove, doesn't the government have the leverage to close the market to a company that's not based there?
You're assuming that the congresspeople's interests are aligned with the country's. This is manifestly not the case. They need to keep their donors and their voters happy. In what order depends on how much money that have and how much they need for the next campaign.
I'm not sure who's personal interests are aligned to the country's interest when it comes to maxing out tax revenue. Maybe, *maybe*, the president. Maybe only if that president is a democrat. But even there, I wouldn't say it's a strong alignment.
But what about non-elected government officials or somebody from judiciary maybe?
If this is the main reason why tax havens are tolerated, that's one other big minus to the current election system.
Speaking for Ireland, because we get jobs in return. Often nice, shiny, techie jobs for the Silicon Docks in Dublin, so our government of the day can make a big announcement about "FAANG company has created 40 new jobs!"
We depend so heavily on foreign direct investment, and the way we coaxed companies to invest here was selling that we had a young, educated, English-speaking workforce that didn't cost as much as the same in the USA or wherever. But mostly for tax breaks and tax havens.
There is so much money sloshing around that it pays for large multinationals to simply move it around from one European base to another to avoid paying out the taxes in America (mostly, though not solely). This distorts our economy, and makes our EU partners unhappy. We had the ridiculous sight of an EU decision settling that Apple owed Ireland €13 billion in taxes, and our government of the day doing all it could to avoid accepting this decision, because pissing off Apple (and the other multinationals) was worse than taxing the citizenry into the ground. Yes, instead of taking that money for the budget, the government appealed the decision to the European courts until it was overturned: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53416206
It makes sense for Ireland (or for example Netherlands which I live) to entice that money and forego taxes, but the question that baffles me is why don't the countries that lose money from those schemes make a bigger fuss?
One part of the answer is likely that the US already puts a lot more pressure on other countries to fork over tax money than anyone else in the world. American citizens are to my knowledge the only people in the world required to pay income tax on overseas earnings and our tax on renouncing citizenship is likewise among the most punitive in the world. Keeping other countries onboard with that probably takes a great deal of diplomatic effort already.
Countries like Germany or France, while rich, have nowhere near the geopolitical power of the US. They would be hard-pressed to tax their own expatriates the way we do much less multinational corporations headquartered in other countries. Even if they could do it, which isn't a given, it would sour relations in a way which risks higher priority deals: i.e., an Ireland threatened by German gunboats (whether figurative or literal) would be more likely to pursue Irexit.
I would expect USA gunboats to roam Irish/Maltese/Dutch/etc waters, even though USA puts pressure on its overseas citizens, it doesn't put any visible pressure on tax haven governments, or so I see it. I'm mistaken somewhere but cannot convince myself on where.
The key word there is probably visible.
Keeping America's existing tax agreements already requires a great deal of 'invisible' pressure on foreign governments and financial institutions who would otherwise be inclined to tell the US government to pound sand if asked to collect back taxes, child support payments, etc. on behalf of a distant foreign government. And even with visible pressure, most of those same countries are or have been unwilling to play along with US embargoes against Cuba, Iran and other nations at the cost of their own ability to export goods to willing buyers.
Perhaps the expected resistance is greater. You're not just attacking the interests of the tax haven country, you're also attacking those who profit from it. And they happen to be influential.
Though the real reason might as well be ape status psychology. Maybe there's just some innate hesitancy when interfering with high-prestige people's goals.
Countries are run by politicians, who are often themselves the beneficiaries of tax havens, or funded by people who are. There's a lot of things in politics that can be explained by simple corruption/self-interest.
What are the possibilities for new investments that people mostly invest a little in just in case it works? Dogecoin paid off for at least some people.
Normal people: lottery tickets
Internet nerds: a crypto portfolio
Wealthy internet nerds: seed (or even pre-seed) investments to startups
Preppers: doomsday bunkers
And if you just want to dip your toe in the prepper waters, baked beans and a swiss army knife?
Yes, exactly. That's better since it's actually a small investment, unlike a whole prepper shelter.
First water, then pantry goods
Is Trump likely to have a successor? My impression is that his followers want his personality, and it's quite a rare personality.
It seems to me that he gets extraordinary loyalty. I grant that my impression is mostly from media and social media, though I also have a couple of friends who are enthusiastic about him.
If it were just about policy, I think he'd have more obvious successors.
The_Donald sometimes affectionately referred to him as the "shit poster in chief" and celebrated many of his personality elements - or the products thereof, like the "two scoops" mild controversy that they loved.
You'll likely disagree, but I think yes. I think that this functions a lot like other fandoms, and once you're on a team you're on that team. I think if Trump had come out strong for free trade and paired it with a bunch of rhetoric about kicking China's ass at its own game, his people would have been on board with it.
This isn't meant as a unique criticism of Trumpism, I think that all of us think our politics are more about policy than they really are.
"no new wars,"
Is a conservative principle? Since when?
It's not rare, there are just filters against those sorts of people rising through the ranks of a party.
Who do you suggest has a Trump-type personality?
Tucker Carlson has, some people have called for his nomineeship before. but he has no reason no leave his current job for the presidency.
I'll tell you this much: if you're looking for a successor to Trump, don't look among the political class. Trump was an outsider.
Who, exactly? I don't know, I don't live there. Elon Musk would be the most obvious outsider if he were eligible, which he's not - and even if he were, it'd be like mirror-universe Trump.
I think that would be true if the political class were not changed by Trump, but it does appear to be changing to some extent - although what parts of the vicious cycle that allowed the Republican party to become amenable to Trump, and then allowed Trump to reshape the Republican party in his own image, which made it more amenable to those like him, etc. are responsible to what extent, I don't know enough to say. I think it would be more accurate to say that one ought not to look _primarily_ among the people who were widely accepted members of the political class _before 2016_.
A used-car salesmen?
I figure millions of people are somewhat like Trump - his everyman qualities are part of his appeal - but to be wealthy and popular enough for a serious presidential bid is rare.
I would argue that it's two specific aspects of his personality that appeals to his base, his reluctance to accept his enemies' framing and his (seeming) willingness to fight.
The GOP donor class, intellectuals and most of their politicians fundamentally share the same worldview as their DNC counterparts but want to transition to Luxury Gay Space Communism more slowly and cautiously. This self-conception of the conservative as a necessary brake on progress is explicitly enshrined in Burkean conservatism. Fundamentally, guys like McCain or Romney or Jeb *hope* to lose, they want to be proven wrong that America isn't 'ready' for the next progressive innovation yet.
Republican voters, on the other hand, aren't particularly ideologically radical but they have actual skin in the game. If you live in a functioning community and own your own business, or your own house, or you're married with children, etc. then losing actually involves real loss. Being repeatedly sold out by your supposed representatives, over and over, particularly for ideological goals which you don't share builds a lot of anger.
The next Trump, beyond Trump himself or one of his sons running again, would in my view be an ordinary conservative who demonstrates a similar commitment to fighting. I don't anticipate such a candidate being allowed to win an election, so we probably won't see another President Trump, but they will run and get a majority of the votes cast.
Donald Trump's personality is terrible, and I say that as a Trump supporter (albeit one who doesn't live in the US and doesn't get to vote). I support Trump for his policies, mostly the ones that are absolute common sense that should be completely uncontroversial, like taking serious action against illegal immigration, and which yet nobody else in either party is willing to countenance.
However, Donald Trump's personality is probably a necessity for actually withstanding the nonstop media/Democrat/Republican etc attack that would hit any future candidate with similar policies. Most people simply don't have the personality to stand there without the slightest flinch while being bullied on live TV for years at a time. You'd have to either be an egotistical blowhard or a saint, and I don't think we're lucky enough to get a saint next time.
Why do you think illegal immigration is bad? Or, to rephrase, what about illegal immigration is problematic? And what specific policy prescriptions do you think that Donal Trump both endorsed, and further accomplished that you think address these issues with illegal immigration?
Taking peoples' kids away was probably a big part of it too. People are willing to risk a lot for a chance at a better life, but when they risk having their kids taken and never returned, that's much more than most are willing to countenance.
Fair point (about the reversal). Still, when talking about Trump's policies, I don't think you can talk about how Trump cut down on border crossings without mentioning it (splitting up families). I think the cruelty was the point, and I think it worked. I think this was probably much more effective than the wall. Eyeballing the numbers, it looks like crossings were way up in 2019, which is consistent with people not being afraid to lose their kids and not being deterred by the wall, which I like because it conforms to my expectations. :)
Unaccompanied minors is unrelated to family separation IMO, since those kids (teenagers?) arrive already separated. Is the trafficking's point suggesting that they only separated kids from adults they suspected of being traffickers? Because I'm pretty sure that's not true.
Of course, no one ever tried making it illegal to work undocumented. By which I mean enforcing that illegality with e-Verify and robust monitoring from above. (This is my pet policy.) Or did they try it and I didn't hear about it?
I think you might be exactly right about this. Any Republican candidate for president is subject to a non-stop DDOS attack of completely random claims and accusations. Trying to respond civilly and seriously is prohibitively time-consuming and does not help at all; the current attacker, one of the crowd, will just switch to another random attack angle. That's how we ended up with Trump whose typical response to every attack is something like "you are a waste of space, and your mother was a hedgehog", causing the media to go into overdrive over what a horrible person he is to say something like that.
Trump is this country's response to the DDOS attack invariably aimed at a conservative presidential candidate. I think most conservatives would love to see an ordinary conservative who fights win the election, but nobody knows if that is currently possible.
Correction, should read "Any candidate for president is..."
> Is Trump likely to have a successor
What counts as a "successor" of Trump? Is it just someone vaguely-like-him with political power? (If so, see other replies; I don't really have original thoughts on this.) Is it the next POTUS? (If so, yes; it's Joe Biden.) Is it something completely different? (If so, it depends.)
I was thinking of someone who can gain a lot of enthusiasm from Trump's base.
There's definitely a set of guys competing to get their attention. Hawley maybe?
I'm inclined to think that the successor would be obvious-- that level of enthusiasm isn't subtle.
If you're saying "maybe", it isn't Hawley.
It's possible that there won't be a successor, or that one won't emerge while Trump is capable of running.
I think it's too soon. And I think it's right that a successor can't emerge while he's still a candidate, which I think he is.
How can we in principle figure out whether some regulator institute is unnecessary and needs to be defunded or on the contrary requires more investments to work better, without actually implementing such changes? I've seen some talks about defunding the police and abolishing the FDA but I feel generally confused about my abilities to evaluate arguments.
Suppose we have a Regulator that is ensuring that no-one produce poisonous hamburgers. Regulator functioning cost some tax money and creates some problems to the hamburger producing businesses. Suppose only 0.0001% of hamburgers turn out to be poisonous. So most of the regulator work is dealing with false positives which creates problems to businesses that do not poison their customers. But how to account for survivors bias here? Maybe there are so few poisonous hamburgers only due to the fact that such regulator exists and people are aware of it in the first place?
Food adulteration was (and continues to be) a problem. In 19th century Britain, as urban populations grew (particularly London), the market to supply them with foodstuffs exploded. Human ingenuity was then applied to wring the maximum profit out of the minimum of supplies. Milk was one item routinely adulterated: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/observations-on-london-milk
"During the 1850s the extent of the problem was revealed by investigators such as Rugg, and public outrage ensued. During surprise visits to premises and based on anecdotal evidence, Rugg discovered that the most common substances used to adulterate milk were ‘water, flour, starch, chalk, and the brains of sheep’ (p. 30), as well as ‘treacle, salt, whiting, sugar of lead’ – the latter being highly poisonous."
Milk wasn't the only foodstuff adulterated, anything that could be stretched by judicious addition of adulterants was (this is distinct from using preservatives or artificial colourings and flavourings, practices that also went on as chemical sophistication increased).
The entire article is provided here free of charge by Durham University website, thank you Durham! It is very interesting, and indeed puts the campaign for clean food as another one of the Victorian moral crusades: https://dro.dur.ac.uk/10391/1/10391.pdf
Adding water to milk is the simplest and cheapest means of adulterating it, and goes on to this day; it's one of the routine tests done on milk samples in dairy co-operative laboratories. There can be innocent explanations (messing up milking machine lines when cleaning out the lines so that the waste water goes into the bulk tank) but often it's an attempt at fraud (the farmer gets paid a fixed price per gallon of milk, so adding water = more gallons from the same amount of milk). We've seen cases of food adulteration from China, particularly for infant formula.
So yeah, my conclusion would be: good results came about from regulation being instituted and are maintained in the presence of regulation; loosen up regulation and we're likely to go back to the good (bad) old days.
Here, have a Chesterton poem about grocers who were often suspected of adulterating their products to increase profits:
The Song Against Grocers
G.K. Chesterton
(From "The Flying Inn", 1914)
God made the wicked Grocer
For a mystery and a sign,
That men might shun the awful shops
And go to inns to dine;
Where the bacon's on the rafter
And the wine is in the wood,
And God that made good laughter
Has seen that they are good.
The evil-hearted Grocer
Would call his mother "Ma'am,"
And bow at her and bob at her,
Her aged soul to damn,
And rub his horrid hands and ask
What article was next
Though MORTIS IN ARTICULO
Should be her proper text.
His props are not his children,
But pert lads underpaid,
Who call out "Cash!" and bang about
To work his wicked trade;
He keeps a lady in a cage
Most cruelly all day,
And makes her count and calls her "Miss"
Until she fades away.
The righteous minds of innkeepers
Induce them now and then
To crack a bottle with a friend
Or treat unmoneyed men,
But who hath seen the Grocer
Treat housemaids to his teas
Or crack a bottle of fish sauce
Or stand a man a cheese?
He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar for cash down;
He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
The purest salt in town,
He crams with cans of poisoned meat
Poor subjects of the King,
And when they die by thousands
Why, he laughs like anything.
The wicked Grocer groces
In spirits and in wine,
Not frankly and in fellowship
As men in inns do dine;
But packed with soap and sardines
And carried off by grooms,
For to be snatched by Duchesses
And drunk in dressing-rooms.
The hell-instructed Grocer
Has a temple made of tin,
And the ruin of good innkeepers
Is loudly urged therein;
But now the sands are running out
From sugar of a sort,
The Grocer trembles; for his time,
Just like his weight, is short.
I just wanted to thank you for posting this; it's a nice little poem.
You're welcome, much of Chesterton's verse is fun to say aloud! Imagine the Wicked Grocer laughing like a pantomime villain at the thought of widespread ptomaine poisoning among his poorer customers!
What he said 🔽 also aren't all hamburgers poisonous i.e. harmful to the health, the atmosphere and biodiversity? 🐮🤢
Multiple countries exist with different regulatory systems. You can look at places that lack the relevant agency, or have a less strong or differently structured version, and see the differences
So does it mean we do not have a way to figure things without similar cases from the past or other countries with relevant experience? It doesn't matter what is the rate of false/true positives/negatives of our Regulator or the cost of its operating, it tells us nothing about its necessity?
If so, why do people still use such data while arguing about police or FDA?
How long do you think it'll be until the first robot coup?
(I don't necessarily mean AI rebellion, just some non-state actor seizing power with a robot army.)
If I go by replies I am still receiving after leaving a critical comment on that cutesy-poo Boston Robotics "Do you love me (now that I can dance)" Youtube video, there will be a large swathe of the population ready, willing and able to immediately surrender because robots are so good and pure and loveable and never started wars (actual quote there) and only irrational haters could possibly find them creepy 🙄
(Presumably drones don't count as "robots" for the purposes of "starting/waging wars").
Plainly there are enough robot-lovers out there, that simply *having* a robot army will be enough to win their allegiance.
> If I go by replies I am still receiving after leaving a critical comment on that cutesy-poo Boston Robotics "Do you love me (now that I can dance)" Youtube video
YT comments are generally trashy and bad, so I wouldn't trust them. You can, however, ask me and other ACT commenters.
(Personally, my response would depend on the situation - "robot coup" is kind of a vague term - but if it didn't concern me directly I wouldn't care that much.)
Do you mean seizing power in a third world country or in a "great power"? The first kind arguably happens already when some factions in civil wars get support from US drones without US officially being involved in the conflict. The second kind is unlikely to happen outside of a full scale AI takeover, I'd say.
Meant weak country; as you say, if you can knock over one great power you can knock over all of them.
I don't think that robot armies worth the name would ever come to be completely untethered from said great powers, because the having the infrastructure requred to support them is basically synonymous with being one.
Stretching into technicalities, "assassinating the president with a drone" is the kind of thing that could happen any day now, you don't need an army of enough robots to shoot all the enemy soldiers.
Now I'm curious about whether it's possible to assassinate POTUS with a drone (obligatory note to US Secret Service: I am not planning on doing this and don't suggest anyone else try it either).
Anyway my guess is that it's not possible, that the SS have spent a long time thinking about this scenario over the past decade already, that they're constantly scanning for drones any time that POTUS is outdoors, and that the obvious countermeasure is just to go inside and close the door, and that he is never more than some small known number of seconds from the nearest shelter when he is outdoors.
Not sure really. I guess I’ll worry when Linda Hamilton starts training hard and getting cut.
https://www.google.com/search?q&tbm=isch&hl=en-US&tbs=rimg:CRNCsfPw8D2TYVh50ytPCgPr&sa=X&ved=0CBYQuIIBahcKEwigvOeDy9HwAhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQEg&biw=414&bih=622#imgrc=s_bqfumygIExuM
Link doesn't work.
Not sure what I did wrong. When I click on it I go to a Pintrest page showing a jacked Sarah Connors holding an automatic rifle in Terminator II
Just takes me to Google Images search bar.
Hmm... That kinda sucks. Since I’m still screwing this up try Googling
"bad ass sarah connors"
and go to images. You should be able to take your pick there.
Oh, I've seen the movies, though I didn't recall the actor's name offhand.
As I said in the OP, though, I'm speaking of what I term the Lesser Problem (human warlords with robot armies) rather than the Greater Problem (Skynet). Of course, it's plausible that the Greater Problem could happen first and kill us all, in which case the Lesser Problem is moot.
Works for me too
The summer in Ireland - if we get a summer, after the past thunderstorms and unseasonal rain and possibly more rain coming - could be ruined!
Not because of Covid (well, indirectly because of Covid) but because the traditional summertime ice-cream treat, the 99, is threatened due to a lack of Flakes https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/99-problems-after-flake-shortage-24122907
For those of you for whom that was incomprehensible, let me just pause to go "Another reason to blame Mondalez, Cadbury's has never been the same since the Americans took over!"
Okay, so we have the ordinary soft-serve vanilla ice-cream in a cone. Some genius (allegedly possibly Scots-Italian) took the chocolate Flake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flake_(chocolate_bar) and inserted it into the cone, creating the iconic 99. https://www.carlowlive.ie/resizer/-1/-1/true/1494595550100.jpg--.jpg?1494595551000
But alas! We are running out of Flakes! In order to address the crisis, Mondalez issued a statement to The Irish Times (sort of like issuing one to The New York Times as 'the newspaper of record', that's how serious things are) to explain the shortage and reassure us all that matters were in hand. Because the entire story is behind a paywall, here it is below:
"Supply problems and soaring demand has caused a shortage of the crumbliest chocolate that traditionally elevates ice-cream cones to 99 status.
Despite the cold start to the summer, demand for mini Flakes has intensified in recent weeks while supply has struggled to keep up, and 99s are now at risk of disappearing from shops, vans and ice-cream parlours entirely.
Cone connoisseurs across the Irish ice-cream industry have said they have never seen shortages like this, and warned that supplies may be exhausted by the middle of June.
Joe Quinn of the Bon Bon beach shop in Salthill was tipped off about the shortages last week and managed to secure a supply ahead of his shop’s reopening today after months of lockdown. “I was lucky to get some in because they can’t be got now,” he said.
Paddy O’Donnell’s Clarmac business supplies Flakes to ice-cream vendors across the country, but he said his supplies were dwindling.
“They are impossible to get at the moment but there is word they will be coming out in dribs and drabs. It is the first time I heard of a shortage like this.”
He said half of his supply was gone already. “I have sold more Flakes so far this year than I had right up to the middle of last summer,” he said. “Hopefully things will be back to normal soon but I am lucky at leave to have some stock left.”
Cadbury, which makes the crumbly chocolate bars that have been sitting on top of soft scoop ice-cream cones for almost 100 years, confirmed the shortages but moved to assure the public that it was working hard to boost supplies to satisfy summer demand.
“We are seeing a recent increase in demand for our Cadbury 99 Flake in Ireland, ” said a spokeswoman for Mondalez , the multinational that now owns Cadbury. “The product is still available to order and we’re continuing to work closely with our customers.”
For generations Cadbury made its 99 Flakes in Dublin, but in recent years the bulk of its production has moved to Egypt. The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
No blame to the Egyptians, but the American owners just don't realise the importance of the iconic British Isles products they have acquired (as we saw with the proposal for the super-league recently).
And why is it called a 99? Other explanations for the name are as follows:
"One claim states that it originated from Portobello, Scotland, where Stefano Arcari who had opened a shop in 1922 at 99 Portobello High Street. Arcari would break a large "Flake" in half and stick it in ice cream but the name came from the shop's address.
Elsewhere, another address-based claim for the beloved ice cream is made by the Dunkerleys in Gorton, Manchester, who operated a sweet shop at 99 Wellington Street.
The report states that: "The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
The Cadbury website says that the reason behind the Flake being called a "99" has been "lost in the mists of time"."
It is indeed delicious! Cool, soft, sweet, creamy ice-cream contrasting with crunch of chocolately goodness, a little piece of heaven on a summer's day 😀
Interestingly, a soft serve with a Flake is an Aussie Maccas classic as well. Must be an influence from our Irish immigrant past!
What are some counter-intuitive lessons on getting along with people/making friends?
Ben Franklin's observation that "He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged" is counterintuitive but very useful.
For whatever reason, politely asking someone to do you a small favor makes a much bigger impression than doing them a small favor would. It's a very handy thing to remember.
Ah yes this is a good one. Has this ever helped you in your own life?
Not through deliberate action, like asking people for small favors as a calculated way to build a bond. I have noticed that my willingness to ask for favors plays a role in my ability to get along with people but it's not deliberate.
One habit that I do try to consciously cultivate is gratitude. If someone helps me out, even with something small, I try to make sure they know that I appreciate it. I'm not sure if that's related to the Ben Franklin effect or not but it leaves a huge positive impression on other westerners (mainland Chinese are typically just confused).
Thanks! This is helpful
Why is that about mainland Chinese?
I have no idea. Probably it just comes off as fake, like how non-Americans find it off-putting when Americans casually use "how are you?" as a greeting.
Patrick O'Brian used the inverse of this idea several times in his books. It was a recurring theme that someone who had wronged, say, Jack Aubrey, would afterwards hold it against Aubrey. The wrongdoer's pricks of conscience would essentially force him into morphing Aubrey into the villain. I have seen this play out in real life a couple of times.
It's a little hacky, but remembering little facts about a person means a lot to them. Even if it's something as simple as remembering they were going to watch the football and asking about that next time you see them.
What is a research paper/blog post that you've read that fundamentally changed the way you looked at the world? Preferably not one written by Scott as there's a chance I would have read it already. I've gotten amazing recommendations from ACX readers in the past, and hence trying this again.
This blog over at Ribbonfarm made me, on a deep and visceral level, understand and appreciate some things. Even if I wanted to I couldn't go back to the way of thinking I had before reading this.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/
Thanks for the great recommendation! That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for
Ribbonfarm would be so much more readable if Rao could just dial back his edgelording by about 50%.
Ah, I'd just been pointing out to everyone that we're already living in the future. Laptops, tablets and communicators right out of Star Trek... even some flying car prototypes and chicken nuggets grown in labs... and falling global poverty trending more toward utopia than dystopia (though China and Russia worry me in the long run...)
40 years ago was already the future, too: you could enjoy Hawaiian pineapples in Canada, fly across the Atlantic in a huge jet with 45 rows, 9 columns, alcoholic drinks and hot meals while watching a movie on a big screen, or just stay home and talk to people on the other side of that ocean in real time. A great many could own their own climate-controlled homes and partake in a reliable food-supply system with news from across the world delivered on a color video screen. Vaccines successfully fought many illnesses, and quite a few health problems could be solved by sophisticated surgeries built on centuries of hard-won knowledge.
Though I never thought of myself as a "futurist", the part about "why so few futurists make any money" describes me well: "They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately," he adds, "technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered." But wait, did smartphones really not alter human behavior much? Didn't European empires and their automation radically reshape the world, deleting many cultures in the process? It happened slowly and first-worlders saw little of the drama, but still.
Some parts are confusing, like "what shapes our experience of universal mobile communication definitely has ... a lot to do with pacifiers." Maybe we're supposed to read his earlier essays first.
"Quick, imagine the fifteenth century."
I'm thinking subsistence farming, occasional waves of disease, and enough boredom to make war seem exciting by comparison. Illiteracy. Poverty. Religiosity. Community. Conformity. Local food and entertainment... 'course, it all seemed normal at the time.
"You’re thinking of people in funny pants and hats, right (if you’re of European descent. Mutatis mutandis if you are not)? Perhaps you are thinking of dimensions of social experience like racial diversity and gender roles."
Yeh, no.
On the whole I find the article interesting, but vague, abstract, and somehow "off". I'm never sure exactly what it is saying or why it is saying it. I find it odd, for instance, how it speaks of "Future Nausea" but describes more of a political nausea: "a nauseating mix of news from forgotten classmates, slogan-placards about issues trivial and grave, revisionist histories coming at us via a million political voices, the future as a patchwork quilt of incoherent glimpses". What do the myriad political dumpster fires shining from dozens of echo chambers have to do with "the future"? Maybe he's just pointing out that we're "living in the future", but unlike, say, video calls, this was not a future Star Trek ever predicted. Or how about "We understand Facebook in terms of school year-books" - but this is not how I have ever thought about Facebook. More broadly, it would have benefited from more examples to show what it was talking about.
https://acoup.blog/ made me understand various parts of history at a much deeper level than before, in particular how popular depictions of history get things wrong.
I don't know about changing the way I view the world, but for changing the way I view crime and public policy, I might go with Steven Levitt's paper "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not" (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533004773563485)
It may be a stretch to say "fundamentally changed" --- maybe more like "made concrete an idea that I had an inkling of" --- but I think of this paper by Gelman and friends every time I see someone claim a large, potentially causal, effect from some obscure independent variable: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/piranhas.pdf
It's discussed on his group's blog as well (probably in many places): https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/12/15/piranha-problem-social-psychology-behavioral-economics-button-pushing-model-science-eats/
Some of the better work by Zvi has this quality, I especially like Out to Get You. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/ Related posts that are also worth reading include his posts on Slack and Easy Mode/Hard Mode.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/piles-ancient-poop-reveal-extinction-event-human-gut-bacteria?fbclid=IwAR2chXWcXREMWg8xSiDy3sLVlJzyDBKrK7EDV-CTSEYUQmboqTlnzAl_0S0
Dozens of species of human gut bacteria have gone extinct. Does the precautionary principle recommend recreating them or not recreating them.
Abba Eban: "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." A lot of pro-Israel people were fed up with Netanyahu and the situation in Sheikh Jarrah was just the thing to push them into open disaffection with Israel. Then Hamas rocketed Israel and the usual thugs and anti-Semites came out of the closet. Eban was right.
Well, what could have been the best realistic outcome for Palestine? Netanyahu's ambitions slightly frustrated? They don't care about that, they want the end of the occupation, and let's be honest, that's not on the table, not even remotely close. So they lash out in the most dramatic way possible, at least it makes the frontpage that way.
Gee, I dunno. Starting to chip away at the solid wall of pro-Israel support in the Congress? Working in the system to delegitimate Israeli maximalism? the possibilities are endless.
And how did the prior period of calm help with that? I hadn't heard news about Israel-Palestine for years, and throughout that time Netanyahu held the mantle of power and continued the settlement-building policy, even destroying Palestinian settlements at times. Palestinians (and especially Hamas) seem to gain little from the calm; they merely lose at a slower rate. (But undoubtedly I have much to learn about this)
I think I addressed that. Please read my comment.
You're acting like "the palestinians" are a homogenous and unified group with a common agenda. Just as Netanyahu benefits from stoking the conflict to gain relative to his political rivals within Israel, individuals and factions within Hamas, and Hamas vs opposition groups, benefit from the conflict from the other side.
If anything Hamas and Likud's incentives are pretty closely aligned. Provided the leadership of both are personally safe then conflict benefits them personally, whatever it does to the people they are notionally supposed to work for
It seems like the anonymity of cryptocurrency has led to a raft of various cyber crimes. Obviously, there is a limit to how good cybersecurity can be. It's an arms race that cannot be won. There's only a small hiatus between raising cybersecurity measures in some respect, and the creation of a workaround by cyber criminals. It's a futile aspiration to be fully secure.
I'm curious to know what people foresee as any kind of mitigation of the anonymity of cryptocurrency. Or, whether this community is so libertarian that they consider it a non-issue. Do lives lost that can be lost through crypto- anarchy? Does it matter if hospitals are taken offline by ransomware? What about schools, electrical grids, water supply, ad nauseam. Are there solutions? Does it matter? Discuss.
Who lied to you and told you cryptocurrency is anonymous?
Let me add nuance. Perhaps not “anonymous” but “pseudonymous “ which amounts to the same thing from the standpoint of law enforcement.
It's pseudonymous and (for a fee) further anonymizable via laundering processes.
> Obviously, there is a limit to how good cybersecurity can be. It's an arms race that cannot be won.
I don't think that's true. The financial incentives to use theorem provers and better security models just isn't there, but it could be. If Apple and Google had 5 years to secure their code, after which they would be held liable for every preventable security breach, you can be damned sure they'll switch to memory safe languages and/or code that gets verified by a theorem prover very quickly. The vast majority of security breaches could be prevented just by using memory safe languages.
There is a total solution to life-critical infrastructure (e.g. medical equipment) being taken offline by cyberattacks - airgap it. Can't access = can't hack.
The problem is the fuckwits who don't airgap these things.
That is only partially applicable. You can't air gap a complete network, particularly given that the platforms and all of their connected devices in medical institutions require updates, and are accessed via vpn's and outside sources. Each mri, cat scan, dosing instruments and more are all utilizing individual platforms that must be updated on a regular basis. The amount of Labor it would take to update those manually is untenable. Think about the growth and machine to machine communication, vehicle and infrastructure intercommunication. All of our transportation, traffic controls, lighting grids and more all depend on connections through the cloud and so forth. None of these can be air-gapped on an ongoing basis.
You actually can airgap or otherwise isolate a complete network even though all of the connected devices require updates, etc. I work on such networks regularly. It just requires more work and stricter discipline, which will make some of your coders and users scream bloody murder and complain that you're being unreasonable and demanding the impossible. But if the consequences of not doing that are that people literally die because e.g. medical equipment is being held for digital ransom, then I'm in favor of telling the whiners to go rot in unemployment hell and hiring a new batch of people.
How do you do that with public iot devices remaining available? Every car, truck, street light, traffic light, Etc will be fitted with iot devices that connect through the cloud. Is it still possible to do what you describe?
You don't. There is no reason the life-critical systems of a car should be easily accessible. You debug the software before release, and if you don't you fix it with a physical connection (ideally one which requires unscrewing things to access).
GPS needs to communicate, but you can internally airgap that from anything life-critical.
What magic mushroom says - "Internet of Things" mostly means "Internet of Things that should never have been on the internet". In aviation world, my airplane's shiny new electronic navigation system gets data from, A: sneakernet firmware updates, B: analog voice transmissions which in the pilot's judgement may result in manual data entry, or C: very specific packet formats like GPS or ADS-B. The last part doesn't meet the literal definition of "airgap", but so long as the packet formats are narrowly designed for their specific purpose and the programmers are formally validating their code (and in some cases hardware), you can enforce a roughly equivalent level of internal separation. And we all still have full-analog backups to GPS.
In the airline world, there's been a tendency to relax that to "OK, but we can still use IoT for maintenance data and the in-flight entertainment system", and then *not* rigorously separate those from the navigation and flight control systems, hence "Internet of Things that should never have been on the internet".
I’m interested in crypto-mugging. If you have a million dollars worth of bitcoin, what prevents a mugger with a laptop and a gun from taking it all away from you and never being caught? You can’t trace the transaction, right? Or do I have that wrong?
You can't trace the transaction, but it might be possible to trace the mugger.
Right, but if he physically got away - he had his mask on, there were no video cameras, done - you'd have lost everything with no hope of getting it back, right?
I've never seen this addressed. If we move to cryptocurrency, isn't our entire life savings just sitting in our heads? Part of the reason people DON'T get mugged is that you can only really get like 40 bucks and a watch for it. Not really worth the risk. But what if you could steal fortunes in that way?
Maybe it would be a good idea to carry a camera, though that loses some privacy.
Everything you do to distance access to your bitcoin from yourself makes it less convenient. There are a bunch of tradeoffs.
There *has* been a rise in crypto crime. People with crypto-fortunes have had to resort to some crazy home defense schemes.
It's like if you regularly carry $2 million in cash.
Crypto *is* trackable. The Bitcoin or whatever is all there on the public ledger. Literally anyone on Earth can watch as they are re-assigned. Authorities, in theory, can move in when they interact with a legible part of the financial system like Coinbase, and trace back from there.
(Going back to the $2m in cash, imagine if you knew all the serial numbers of the bank notes you had, and that it was trivial for banks to always report when those serial numbers show up.)
Someone proposed in a prior thread that the exchanges should lock down "illegal" Bitcoin, which are Bitcoin that have ever been used in a forbidden transaction. If you use them they are immediately seized. This is a provocative and interesting proposal that requires more space to get into than I want to do in this comment, but it's something we would need to consider when talking about how to stop crypto-crime.
Do people really like the taste of tea, or bitter foods/drinks in general?
I've always assumed tea is some kind of identity/status signalling phenomenon. I myself have a similar thing going on with eating broccoli.
I really like tea. Coffee is too bitter for me, but broccoli I genuinely enjoy. You might have more bitter receptors than most folks (or be young, bitter foods taste less bitter as you get older from what I've read).
I think broccoli is sweet. I love coffee. I drink it black. I only drink tea with lots of sugar.
You eat broccoli to signal status?
To whom??
You can emphasize / promote all kinds of narratives with any given behavior. One narrative I like goes something like, "not doing the healthy thing is basically just a rationality failure"
Haha
It's true, eating vegetables won't give you much status, unless it's kale and it's 2009 and society is going through that awful kale phase.
On the other hand, noticeably _not_ eating your broccoli will lose you status since it looks like you haven't progressed beyond childhood tastes.
Well, I suppose I haven't, since I dislike broccoli. It's edible if cooked and you put sauce over it, but the virtuous signalling around vegetables is to eat them raw, so I'm not that virtuous!
I sometimes wonder whether people who like bitter flavours (myself included) enjoy the body's defense reaction. (Potential poison: increase alertness, prepare to flush digestive system, …?)
I like the taste of most teas and coffee.
The latter was an acquired taste. I used to hate coffee, but drank it as a pragmatic way to stay caffeinated. That said, now I actually really enjoy the taste quite a bit and even prefer black coffee. I never went through a similar process for tea, it was always nice.
I used to drink tea with sugar. Then one day someone whose spouse was a dentist gave me a graphic description of how drinking tea with sugar all day is like permanently coating your teeth in sugar water, so I made a conscious decision to switch to drinking it black.
It took me a day or two to train my taste buds to prefer it that way, and now if I would accidentally drink some sugared tea, the sweetness would probably make me gag and I'd throw it out in disgust unless it was the only drinkable liquid available.
I tend to roll my eyes at dentists because *everything* will kill your teeth, according to them. As long as you're not emptying half the sugar bowl into your tea, it's fine. Or switch to honey or stevia sweeteners, if you can't retrain your tastebuds.
Honey is sugar. Would it make a difference?
Probably not, I'm sure that plaque bacteria lap it up regardless.
If your plaque bacteria are eating the sugar in your tea, then you must be spooning in so much sugar, you might as well be drinking soda in the first place. Or fruit juice.
There's sugars in lots of food and drink. As long as you're regularly brushing your teeth, drinking sweetened tea is no greater risk of tooth decay than anything else. Dentists like to frighten people because most of us skimp on tooth brushing and flossing, but unless you rigidly stick to only drinking water and no other fluid or liquid, not even milk - there's sugar in pretty damn much everything. And I bet even dentists drink tea and coffee and juice and soda, not just water alone.
It does! Honey doesn't have the same concentrated sweetness as refined white sugar, and can be strongly flavoured itself. This is only personal experience, but I find honey gives a sort of 'rougher' texture to the tea when used instead of sugar. Honey and lemon (with no milk) are the traditional accompaniments to black tea so far as I know, but I've never drunk it like that
I'm sure it tastes different. What I meant was, if you're avoiding sugar to protect your teeth, it doesn't make sense to use honey either.
What tea are you drinking that's bitter? I think you need better tea.
Although, now that I say that, I realize I've been told the same thing by a coffee snob who said that "good coffee is NEVER bitter" (emphasis theirs). So I might be a bit of a tea snob when I say good tea is never bitter, but I feel pretty confident about that because I've never had to get accustomed to tea before enjoying it like I had to with coffee, even without sugar. To this day I'd never drink black coffee unless it was to stave off hypothermia.
Being a tea snob doesn't necessarily mean a tea purist though. I'll drink the floweriest, fruitiest teas and herbal teas. Earl grey or ceylon blends just strike me as boring, but I love the stuff with orange and turmeric, or lemon and cloves, or ginger and cardamom, you name it.
If you're British, you might be confusing status signalling with genuine caffeine addiction, which is a thing with tea as much as it is with coffee.
Possibly by "bitter", they mean the strong tannin flavour in some teas. And again, that can be from being brewed/steeped too long, or because the tea is cheap and nasty. Or this person could be sensitive to certain flavours so that those are much 'stronger' as far as they are concerned. I'm one of the people who thinks coriander tastes like soap, for instance: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-cilantro-taste-like-soap-to-some-people
If they're drinking strong, malty, black tea that is unsweetened and/or no milk, and they don't like it, then don't drink it. Find a lighter black tea, or a different tea entirely. And if people are snobby about what tea you drink, to heck with them. It's your tongue, not theirs.
Irish versus British tastes in tea have been mentioned on here earlier; Irish tastes tend to like the stronger, African or Indian teas while the Brits like lighter, Chinese and Ceylon blends.
Helpful discussion here: https://afternoonteareads.com/english-irish-scottish-breakfast-tea/
As I grew up in the Deep South, I was raised on heavily-sweetened iced tea. I still view it as a Heaven-sent elixir, although I when I have iced tea these days I usually sweeten it with Splenda. I have never been able to get much into hot tea, although I do like Twining's Irish Breakfast Tea, brewed with boiling water and just a bit of sugar. I think I will go brew some right now.
Apparently, I am very suggestible.
It is always time for tea! ☕
Good tea is on par with good wine. When it comes to taste complexity and deepness. But you have to brew it correctly and also good tea is really really hard to get in the United States. There is no tea culture here.
Good tea is really easy to get in the United States - you just have to know where. See https://www.uptontea.com/ .
You're supposed to add sugar. Tea on its own tastes bad, tea with sugar is great.
One of my friends was just telling me (just talking about stuff in his life, not as an answer to this question) about how much he likes bitter greens.
Blue cheese and black coffee eg. NYT crossword clue. Answer: AQUIRED TASTE.
Cultural pressure can make us do funny things. Try being an adult male and saying you don’t like the taste of beer.
Only once did I express that opinion in public. To my surprise a much younger man said “I’m glad to hear another man admit it!”
Jebus. I misspelled acquired. My kingdom for an edit feature.
I like blue cheese. I eat for fun by myself. I don't talk about it much.
Olives are mostly too bitter to be fun for me, but evidence suggests that a lot of people like them.
I eat blue cheese sometimes just because I can. I don't think I really like it.
OMG Blue cheese on a greasy (80/20) grilled hamburger, with lettuce and summer tomato... short sleeves a must, as the extra juice runs down your arms. Well I'm from Buffalo, and we dip chicken wings in blue cheese. :^)
I've always disliked the taste of beer and acknowledged it throughout my life. Though I still tolerated some beer-drinks with fruit flavor and believed myself to enjoy them as well as some other alcoholic drinks like wine.
Last year I made and kept a resolution not to consume ethanol for a year. Then when I tried one of my favorite alcoholic drinks... it tasted terrible! Later I tried to drink some wine and it was absolutely unpleasing as well. Seems like a year without drinking at all made me completely disacquire the taste for alcohol.
It's very funny. I've never thought of myself as someone easily susceptible to social pressure (being kind of autistic and all) but turns out I was somewhat lying to myself all this time.
I met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like coca cola
C-O-L-A, Cola
‘Lola’ The Kinks
I don't think it's a matter of lying to yourself or status games. I think it's just that you got used to it, and after abstaining for a while you weren't used to it anymore.
The wife and I did one of those low carb, no sugar diets for a while a couple of years ago. While the diet didn't stick and the weight came back, I did acquire black coffee and straight whiskey during the exercise, and I've retained both tastes since. Humans are weird.
After my first wife left me, I made a point of acquiring a taste for beer because I thought it would make dating easier. Once I had it, I proudly told my sister that I was now capable of drinking beer straight. She laughed for a minute solid.
Being a dude is hard sometimes.
What kind of tea? Black tea, white tea, green tea, herbal tea? Tea with milk and sugar? Tea with lemon? Tea with nothing?
I really like vinegar and sharp-flavoured foods, so that is a thing. I grew up on "black tea with milk and sugar", so taking a step into "herbal teas" was a whole new experience and some I like, some I don't.
I don't like blue cheese, I think possibly because I have a mild penicillin allergy. So while there may be some signalling going on of people pretending they like certain foods in order to be taken as posh, I think there really are people who like those flavours.
Let's quote "The Screwtape Letters"!
"The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions."
"Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is my favorite cook book. Samin, turned me on to acid.
There is so much wisdom in that book even before you get to the theology.
Do people who like bitter find that there are different sorts of bitter, or just different intensities?
There are lots of foods of which bitter is part of their taste profile if that's what you mean? In the same way there are lots of sweet foods but their flavor is not just "sweet"
Yes.
Personally I find it bizarre that there are people who eat pineapple voluntarily. Isn't the diversity of human experience wonderful.
I like some teas, and most with sweetener and sometimes milk. I've reached the don't mind stage with black coffee. It tastes like productivity and morning, which masks that it also tastes pretty bad. I like the less bitter chunk of the beer spectrum, especially stouts and lighter wheat beers (I think I dislike what beer people call hoppy beers, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to be sure.)
On broccoli: toss it in olive oil, salt and pepper, then roast it at 400 until the edges go brown. Brings out the sweetness.
But, as someone said below, I'm in my mid-forties. Differences may be age based.
I don't *enjoy* tea/coffee/broccoli per se, but I'll drink them. There's also a thing that tea/coffee is a natural stimulant, so people who are sleepier than normal will drink it to feel Super Productive(tm).
Also, I once combined ramen noodles, hot water, and a tea bag, and consumed the results. It was surprisingly okay.
Tea is used for flavoring in some Chinese recipes.
The thing that mystifies me is upscale bitter cheese. There's a reasonable chance that a cheese which costs over $30/pound will be bitter.
I don't think blue cheeses are bitter.
I'm having trouble thinking of cheeses that are normally over $30/lb. Around here that would be above all the usual (and actually good) Italian and French suspects at high-end specialty grocers. Very, very, very old imported cheddars? Some rare Alpine cheeses? Venezuelan beaver cheese?
I do like bitter in general though.
A lot of it is artisanal cheeses-- for example, Cowgirl Creamery. Mount Tam (a cheese, not a company).
Some of the cheeses I thought were over $30/pound (Red Leicester, Point Reys Blue, Prima Donna) are more in the $20 to $25/pound range.
https://www.mercato.com/item/woolwich-dairy-cheese-triple-creme-goat-brie-65-ounces/78804?featuredStoreId=816
Oh, look, here's one. $17 for 6.5 ounces.
Can anyone tell me the difference between Rats, which I take to be rationalist; and post-rats, which I take to be post-rationalists? I’m sure this is a really naive question but I thought I’d toss it anyway…
Post-rats deliver the mail.
idk for sure, but what comes to mind is that phase of LessWrong where many rats came to the conclusion that doing this rationality thing deliberately doesn't really work, and that they're better off e.g. consuming productivity advice
Thanks…I came across a tweet about some anecdotal observations that Post-rats are more susceptible to right wing leanings because of their penchant for desiring to be seen as countercultural/radical thinking, especially if it’s unacceptable to the media & academic practices. There’s a strand in there about Post-rats starting to see the new-left is the right which I thought was interesting in itself. I also realized that I’ve been coming across the term post-rats are but nothing concrete and thought I’d ask here
and I'm surprised nobody else felt like answering; perhaps the term really is quite nebulous
Any predictions on how the Bill Gates saga is going to unfold?
I can say with 60% confidence that this will blow over quickly and not tarnish his legacy in a lasting way, unless it is proved that he solicited illegal sex from teenagers, which I think has a probability of maybe 20%. Are these odds reasonable?
I think he will probably wind up taking a public step back from The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation. Call it a 75% chance it will just be called 'The Gates foundation' in 2022
Yes that sounds likely
...A 20% chance that Bill Gates will be found to have *solicited illegal sex from teenagers* seems very unreasonable to me, and I would be heavily against that. (To bet against you in particular would require a precise objective standard for what counts as proof, because your extremely high odds make me suspect we are living in different mental & media universes here.)
If you don 't know that Bill Gates has some connection to Jefferey Epstein then that would explain the different universes
I'm aware of the connection. I just think that the chances of him actually being convicted are low. My comment above offers a lengthier explanation
"had some connection to" elides the relevant details, my friend. Epstein had boatloads of money, donated it everywhere, and was apparently very charismatic. That's how he walked in powerful circles, not by renting sex slaves to Bill Gates or whatever.
Epstein's accusers stories are all similar: they involve him, his wife, and *not* Bill Gates.
To better explain the 20% prediction:
I would say that the likelihood that Bill Gates actually had sex with illegal sex with teenagers is, say, 40%. I think he probably did party with Epstein, etc, but possibly did not partake in illegal sex. Reasons for believing that: he only sought to meet adult women in Microsoft before, and that having sex with teenagers lies wayy outside the moral compass of most men, including adulterers.
The likelihood of him getting convicted of such offenses is obviously lower, and I think it is 20% because he probably has enough pull with various agencies to avoid getting convicted. Notably Trump, with far clearer connections with Epstein than Gates, has still avoided being convicted for this.
So if Bill Gates is indeed convicted of soliciting illegal sex with teenagers, I will drastically have to change the way I understand the world. I am mostly used to powerful men getting away with things, although this of course has recently started changing with Epstein, Weinstein, etc
If only we had some reliable estimate for P(public figure gets convicted for sex crime | public figure commits sex crime)
I'm guessing it's significantly lower than 1/2
Though, I notice, that line of reasoning fails to account for the already occurred confounding events a la "related issue X hits the press"
This seems even more utterly absurd to me, I have to say.
For what value of y and d, if any, would you be willing to bet $d at 5:1 odds that Bill Gates will be convicted of having sex with teenagers in y years?
How about I bet $50 at 5:1 odds that Gates will not get convicted of soliciting sex from teenagers within a year? From what I understand, you will pay me $50 if I win and I will pay you $250 if you win. We can talk further if the amount is too low or the time frame too short. I will concede if Bill Gates is convicted of these offenses by a jury within 12 months or is about to be convicted (my definition of "about to be convicted" is that a strong case has already been laid down against him in court, and the jury is deliberating upon a conviction).
Uh, I'm sorry if I was unclear — I am willing to bet that Gates *won't* be convicted, because as I said, I am shocked by your extremely high probability (20%!!) that he will be. If he is convicted or about to be convicted within a year, you get $250; if not, I get $50. Feel free to counter-propose your proposed terms now that you know you'd be on the opposite side of the bet.
Ah I now understand. Sorry, the 20% was not something I rigorously derived, but was only supposed to be a place-holder for "low, but non-zero". If I did something like rigorous analysis, maybe the actual percentage would be something like 10%..or maybe 5%.
Would you be willing to bet $50 at 10:1 odds? I apologize for changing the odds in such a manner. I am almost certainly going to lose the money, but I also think that taking bets with high odds can be beneficial in the long run if done enough times.
What I find interesting is that Jeff Epstein had a _lot_ of prominent known associates, but the media has been incredibly uninterested in following up on any of these connections, at least until their wives drop them in it.
The only person who seems to have actually got in trouble so far is Marvin Minksy, who is a relative nobody.
No he hasn't, you're just in a bubble.
And more importantly, deceased.
What little I'm reading is very confusing and I can't quite get straight what happened. I did jokingly suggest, back when the divorce news first hit and people were speculating in a joking manner that Bill was dumping her for a sexy young replacement, that "how do you she isn't dumping him now the kids are grown?"
Looks like I was more correct than I knew. If any of the rumours in the news are true, e.g. a female employee claimed she had a long-term affair with Bill, then that's radioactive. I mean, wow. "She only got a promotion because she banged the boss"? "Women aren't good enough to get a promotion on their merits, so they bang the boss, see that woman and Bill Gates"? That makes for a great working atmosphere!
And apparently he was playing away - or attempting to - with other women at Microsoft and the Foundation during the marriage. Yeah, I think Melinda's lawyers are going to take him to the cleaners, but as you said, unless there is evidence of groping or physical coercion or threats that he'd fire them and make sure they never got a job in the industry again, then I think the view will be "geek who couldn't even manage to hook a supermodel or something with his level of wealth" patronising view rather than "sexual predator" or what have you.
I know nothing about Bill/Melinda Gates, but I find the notion of a rich, powerful, and sexually active person who is absolutely faithful to his/her spouse to be absolutely unimaginable. I mean, sure, it's possible that such people exist, but it's also possible that unicorns exist, in some capacity.
The rich and powerful have the means to cheat, certainly, but so do a lot of people from other classes. Do you think every charming man and pretty woman cheat?
No, but rich people can afford to cheat with few consequences. Yes, occasionally the consequences do catch up with them, but the probability of this happening is quite low if one is rich.
Can they? If Henry the Deadbeat gets another girl pregnant, nothing changes. If Bill the Gates gets a girl pregnant, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in child support on the line.
I think "hundreds of millions" is pushing it a bit; the silence of an ordinary person can be bought much cheaper than that. Also, consider that Bill Gates's net worth is in the hundreds of *billions*.
I think this gets things backwards. If Henry gets a girl pregnant, then unless he's a successful deadbeat, he's on the hook for real money, as a percentage of his income. Child support payments are no joke.
If Bill Gates gets a girl pregnant, lawyers and accountants take care of it. The money may be life-changing for her, but it's only noticeable to him if he makes a point of noticing it.
The absolute value of the consequences are higher though, this will probably knock billions off of Gates' net worth.
I imagine that to someone with access to pretty much anything the world has to offer, who can literally change the world in significant ways, and who is intelligent enough to realize and appreciate those things, sex is rather uninteresting and even boring. But I imagine that Bill (and Melinda) Gates are occasionally tempted to have intimate, but asexual, relationships with some of the fascinating people they know.
I imagine that sexual success is (mostly to males) a status game that can remain interesting even when you've won other status games
The accounts of his seduction attempts aren't too flattering; "clumsy" was one of the phrases I saw used. So it still comes across as "guy was so much of a nerd, even having Tons Of Money couldn't help him get women".
I read "clumsy" as in "should have had more discretion than to do it at work."
Don't s--- where you eat. When you are Bill Gates, you can get women in lots of places.
The Supreme Court has decided to take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization for the upcoming term, with the eventual decision to be reached before June 2022. The case focuses on Mississippi's 2018 Gestational Age Act, which blocks all abortions after 15 weeks with the only exceptions being medical emergency and severe fetal abnormality. Said law has currently been blocked by the 5th Circuit, and is now on its way to SCOTUS.
This will not have been the only abortion case before the court in recent years, but it will definitely be the most direct. In contrast, June Medical Services LLC v. Russo in 2020 was a challenge to a Louisiana law that required abortion clinics to have certain hospital admission privileges - notably, only one provider in the state qualified. The decision was 5-4 with Roberts joining the liberals; since then, RBG has been replaced by ACB.
I make no predictions as to how it will go at this juncture, well in advance of oral arguments. But one way or another or another entirely, it'll definitely be the highest-profile case in quite some time.
Any chance this could be a sufficient trigger to overturn Roe vs Wade?
I'm pro-abortion but I think Roe vs Wade was a terrible case that should be overturned. I wish more people had orthogonal views on these two issues.
It's certainly the most straightforward opportunity, as the Mississippi law challenges the status quo directly rather than nibbling away at the edges. You'd have to elaborate as to which aspect of Roe you're referring to (Casey changed quite a bit), but regardless the answer would probably be "yes in theory, but we'll see what angles come up in arguments".
I've been bingeing on old SSC. (I'm mostly a newbie.)
https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/
Any other 'best of' collections, or lists?
Thanks.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwqLfDfsHmiavFAGP/the-library-of-scott-alexandria
Covers some even older stuff you might have missed
One of my favorites, which I didn't see in these lists: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/.
Also, if religion is one of your interests this is quite entertaining: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/01/the-hour-i-first-believed/.
Thanks for these
In the not-so-distant past intellectual discussions were done in Latin - why not do that again?
-It selects for conscientious, reasonably intelligent and educated people
-It acts as a signal - by being able to participate in the discussion you show you have put in the work and are more likely than not to be willing to argue in good faith
-Reduced risk of having someone stumble upon your posts and taking them out of context to cancel you or whatever
-It reconnects with a millenia-old tradition of scholarship that was only broken in the name of national interests. It is in Latin that Copernicus, Newton, Euler and countless others spread their findings and theories to the world. Aesthetics and tradition matter
-It is more culturally neutral than living languages - because everyone has to learn it, everyone is equally linguistically insecure, whereas debates in English always kind of give an upper hand to native English speakers, since your point suffers when you make mistakes (even though it shouldn't, but we are irrational)
-It has a long tradition of teaching and plenty of quality learning materials
Is there any drawback that doesn't trivially reduce to "I can't be bothered with learning it"?
Why even bother learning it when Google Translate exists! For extra fun, translate what your saying back and forth a few times
My favorite latin phrase: Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum
- While Latin does select for certain types of people, perhaps it selects too much — Latin does take time, effort, and resources to learn, and those are much more readily available to some than to others. Innovation is fuelled by open access, so proposals to substantially raise the barrier to entry to intellectual discussion must themselves meet a high bar.
- Any such intellectual-discussion language is competing against English. It's not clear to me that Latin is easier to learn than English — Latin is more inflected, but English pronunciation/spelling are more irregular (I liked learning Spanish conjugations at school and found them easy, but many students seem(ed) to struggle much more.)
- Latin is much easier for speakers of Romance languages, English, &c. to learn than for someone who, say, speaks Japanese or Chinese. As noted in my first point, this will hinder some people and (disproportionately) certain groups from accessing such discussions.
As an alternative, I would propose Esperanto:
- It's meant to be easy to learn, but that doesn't mean it's zero-effort, so it would still act as a signal and a selection mechanism.
- It would prevent casual/malicious passersby from easily quote-mining so long as we don't accept Google Translate as a valid translator for cancellation purposes.
- It has its own history (was persecuted by both Nazis and Stalin), but not as much as Latin (and I'll admit I don't really value aesthetics and tradition all that much, so I don't find this point compelling).
- It is also very culturally/linguistically neutral and was meant to be so! I agree that this is important. As I noted above, Latin is easier for speakers of certain languages; while Esperanto, similarly, being based on mostly European languages/roots, is easier for, e.g., a native English speaker to learn than for, e.g., a native Japanese speaker — anecdotally, Esperantists report that Chinese, Japanese, &c. Esperantists find Esperanto much easier than English. I.e., Esperanto may be harder for a Chinese speaker than for a French speaker, but it's still quite easy for both of them. Would Latin also be easier than English?
- Since Esperanto is meant to be a universal second language, it also has a large corpus of teaching materials, from Zamenhof's original book to the Duolingo Esperanto course, and this corpus is being added to even now. Esperanto also has the bonus of events/workshops, many of whom aim to help attendees learn the language (e.g., Retoso 2021, which I meant to attend but didn't... whoops).
Overall, since Esperanto seems much more learnable than Latin (although disclaimer that I've learnt Esperanto and haven't learnt Latin outside of a few Duolingo lessons), and has resources focused on its explicit goal of being a universal second language and facilitating communication, I'd favor it over Latin.
(Going off on a tangent, has anyone seen scientific studies or anything discussing whether we are as cognitively strong in our second languages as in our birth languages? Anecdotally, I wonder if one has to put more effort into processing the language somehow, or if it's processed differently from one's birth language(s), thus causing one to be more vulnerable to misinformation, scams, &c. — perhaps this might operate in a similar way to being distracted by environmental stimuli, except the distraction can't be eliminated. This would have important implications for both private and public sector, for universal second language efforts, for the scientific community, and so on.)
Sure, why not go with Esperanto - I'd chosen Latin because my feeling was that it ticked more of the boxes among the more traditionally minded userbase of ACX but for all intents and purposes Esperanto acts much in the same way and as you said it is more accessible if that's an issue, while still acting as a kind of good-faith filter.
(As an aside, it'd be interesting to have debates on hot button issues exclusively in toki pona, just to see if the language itself can force us to behave in a positive and charitable way.)
It doesn't really matter whether we are 'cognitively strong' when debating - first that didn't prevent all the ancient scholars who used Latin or other lingua francae from doing research and making breakthroughs; second, intellectual discussion is meant to be deep, not fast; it doesn't matter how long it takes you to process a text so long as you understand it in the end, and when you are comfortable enough in a language the 'cognitive lag' is almost negligible, even if it's still present.
Nice — you make good points.
(I haven't gotten around to learning toki pona yet, but I don't think it would work very well, because it'd be hard to speak precisely and I suspect that attempts to specify certain concepts could end up as really long combinations of words.)
Mi konsentas, ni uzu Esperanton por interparoli.
Sed, post dua pensado, ĉi tio maniero de komuniko havas problemojn. Ekzemple, preskaŭ neniu komprenus nin, kaj eĉ tiuj kiuj povus kompreni nin ne sciius Esperanto sufiĉe bone por uzi ĝin tra la tuta konversacio. Ni devus uzi kelkfoje vortojn de la angla...
Nu, ĉi tio estas tia komento, kian mi serĉis.
Regarding cognitive strength in non-native languages: I saw this a while ago, though only by reference in a pop article. At least according to one study, the opposite is true.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41489753?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Thank you! I'll take a look at that.
Latin is also beneficial because it would expose English speaker to a grammatical case language. But why use a dead language? Russian also uses grammatical case and it’s producing new content all the time.
Plus the lack of articles in the language and the lack of a minuscule script in the Cyrillic alphabet let you pretend to be Boris Badinov if you read it out loud word for word.
In the last days of the Cold War Pravda was all anti US Propaganda. “WHEN RUSSIAN BEAR AND AMERICAN EAGLE DECIDE TO HAVE BIG FIGHT NO ONE WILL NOW RESULT”
After the dissolution of the SSRs Pravda went through a funny People Magazine phase/. “FREDDY MERCURY WAS MARTYR TO GAY RIGHTS CAUSE”
Once Putin had control it make anti US rhetoric again.
And yes, I am just messing with you a little bit.
Latin selects for pretentious people who think gatekeeping discussions and having 'in knowledge' is important. Conscientious people are masters of concepts, not words. They can express their knowledge in any language they know, even if they don't know it well. This is why english works, and languages like Esperanto fail. They are tools, not ends.
This awfully sounds like rationalization about one's foreign language shortcomings, no offense. I can assure you it isn't as hard as it looks like, though. You just have to apply yourself, which is kind of the point. It's not about Latin being superior to English for expressing knowledge, it's about signaling that you are diligent and willing to put in the effort to get into a community. The choice itself is not that relevant except for practical matters.
If you think you're above costly signaling, think again.
See my comment one level up about communication being primary and signalling being secondary.
We seem to agree on Esperanto but might disagree on this signalling thing.
So how costly is it? No big deal, or an important barrier?
Is there an important opportunity cost if people are learning Latin instead of working on their subject matter?
People can be assholes in any language, and I think you're confusing conscientiousness (doing work, following rules) with benevolence.
In fact, I *don't* have to apply myself to the task of learning Latin, or Esperanto or Klingon or whatever. I can instead apply myself to the task of learning stuff worth talking about in any language, and then talk about that stuff in English and either ignore or mock and ridicule the tiny clique of Latin-geeks who think they are going to somehow convince all the smart people to adopt their silly dead language. This seems much more likely to serve any purpose from status-signalling to actual effective communication, in any world I am likely to live in.
IMO signalling and selecting should be far from a main focus here; the main purpose of a language is communication, and an easier and more (linguistically) neutral language breaks down barriers to access and allows more people to participate in dialogue. I agree that languages are tools, and I'd like us to use more effective tools.
(Esperanto may not currently be very popular at all, but it and other auxiliary languages are not dead and are ready to come into wider use now, next year, or whenever.)
> neutral language breaks down barriers to access and allows more people to participate in dialogue
You've convinced me that Latin is too inclusive and we should move to something even more specialized, like Klingon.
Darn, that's unfortunate.
Of course the relevant idea here is that the set of people which a language barrier selects for is different, often detrimentally so, from the set of people who would contribute the most value to intellectual dialogue.
Esperanto's claim to fame is being dramatically easier to learn than English or any other 'unplanned' language. I expect Klingon isn't designed to be easy (I did hear it was designed to be practical for English speakers to pronounce, but as alien as possible under that constraint, with, of course, a style that alludes to the warmongering nature of the race.)
As for me, I figured that while Esperanto was a valuable innovation, it failed due to network effects (as with the Google+ social network, the small number of participants works against it) so I started designing Ungglish (ungglish.loyc.net), a language that was a cross between an easy-to-learn interlanguage and a teaching tool for English, so that there is a strong case to be made for teaching it before English - building further on the concept of the "Propaedeutic value of Esperanto": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
However, as with all my other intellectual pursuits, I had no one with which to share this hobby so I stopped working on it.
I believe now that the best way to design an interlanguage involves a giant machine learning system to help choose a vocabulary designed to maximize the language's clarity and translatability, so that by writing text in this interlanguage it can be fairly reliably translated to most other languages. This could be added to the other two features (ease-of-learning and a resemblance to English) to make it a more attractive language for people who want to be able to communicate in many languages on a low budget.
People already take things out of context, imagine when the source material wouldn't even be understandable to people without google translate.
Speaking of google translate, that's not something people had access to during Copernicus, Newton and Euler's time, I'm sure it would make a big difference.
It wouldn't be just the constientious people or the pretentious people who would argue, everyone would try to jump into the discussion with their shoddy translators and everything would be 1000 times worse than before.
"Treatment With MDMA" By Derek Lowe | 17 May 2021
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/17/treatment-with-mdma
"A theme that I return to every so often on the blog is the degree to which we don’t understand the molecular mechanisms of psychiatric syndromes. I’ve found that many people outside of the biomedical world are surprised by this – depression, for example, is something that’s distinctive enough, widespread enough, and certainly has enough of a presence in most people’s consciousness as something real (as it should). And there are even pop-pharmacology explanations that many people have heard of (“not enough serotonin!”), so it can come as a surprise to find out that we really, really don’t have a handle on it on that level at all. And the same goes for all the other diagnoses with similarly high profiles, such as schizophrenia, PTSD, and more."
"All this leads up to this new paper (open access) in Nature Medicine. It presents the result of a randomized placebo-controlled trial for PTSD sufferers. 45 of them got placebo medication plus integrative psychiatric therapy, and another 45 got the same psychiatric therapy after doses of MDMA. The results very strongly indicate a positive effect for the latter, as assessed by widely-accepted ratings scales administered by independent (treatment-blinded) observers. These results appear to be better than any of the drugs actually approved for PTSD therapy, namely sertraline and paroxetine."
"And this work is of course part of a broader movement for the controlled use of psychedelics and other drugs largely known for recreation and for abuse. I’ve written about this before on the blog. Some people who know me personally will have encountered my own policy of no recreational drug use, which is pretty wide-ranging and of lifelong standing. But I’m all for these studies – given the state of knowledge in the field, I see absolutely no reason not to investigate a drug that might be useful just because other people want to take it for fun. It seems a ridiculous distinction to make. And even though I have no desire at all to experiment with my brain chemistry on a random Saturday night, if I suffered from something like PTSD – and I am overwhelmingly glad to say that I don’t – I would leap at the chance to alter my brain chemistry in order to lessen it."
I’ve had deeply entrenched anxiety all my life. One MDMA experience in the mid 1980s helped me more than the 30 years of Prozac that followed. Approval and adoption of this therapy can’t come soon enough for me.
Walter, I love you man but sooner or later you’re going to have to accept the fact that you are an f***ing ***hole.
What brought that on?
Your use name just clicked and I became The Dude for a moment
Tut, tut. The Dude does not use the F word:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6BYzLIqKB8
Lots of legal news today! This one aims at anonymity on the internet, which I hear is something of a topic of note around here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.224281/gov.uscourts.dcd.224281.3.0.pdf
Hopefully we'll get more details, because right now this looks really bad. It appears DoJ issued a subpoena under seal for the account details (incl. name, email, and physical address) of one of Nunes' anonymous Twitter trolls, with an accompanying gag order preventing disclosure of the subpoena. Unless there is one hell of a good explanation behind this, it marks a significant escalation from the already-unacceptable use of punitive litigation that anti-SLAPP exists to combat. More news as it comes in.
Twitter's motion to quash has been mooted. I'm going to hold off on speculating why for a bit since we'll know better soon enough, but the chance it reflects well on the DoJ's initial attempt is infinitesimal.
Looks like DoJ retracted the subpoena back in March, less than a week after new AG's appointment. It's getting nearly impossible to see any interpretation other than this having been a politically-motivated action to attack Nunes' critics, which would be every bit as corrupt as it sounds.
Well known science writer Nicholas Wade, late of the NYTimes, wrote a very well researched and reported pair of articles on the origins of the pandemic (links below):. The following is the abstract I made of the articles, which you should read in their entirety:
A research team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology headed by Dr. Zheng-li Shi, (called “Bat Lady” because of her research on bat viruses) did gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Shi had gathered many coronaviruses, (the type to which the virus that produces COVID-19 belongs) from caves in Yunnan in southern China.
Shi took spike protein genes from different viruses and inserted them into a series of virus backbones, to find the combination that would best infect human cells. Some or all of this work was performed in labs at biosafety level 2 on a four step scale, where 4 is the most secure.
One or more people in Wuhan were infected by the viruses produced in these experiments. The virus spread through Wuhan to the rest of the world.
From 2014 through 2019, New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance (run by Dr. Peter Daszak) had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The grants were approved by Anthony Fauci M.D., as Director of NIAID in a way that subverted Presidential instructions not do such research.
In February 2020, (before the pandemic really hit the US) the British medical journal Lancet published a letter written by Daszak and endorsed by others claiming the virus had originated in wildlife and spread through the Wuhan “Wet Market”.
In late 2020 and early 2021, Daszak was a part of a delegation of researchers from WHO that went to China to investigate the origin of the pandemic. Their report said that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.”
Fauci Funded Daszak so Dasak could fund Chinese scientists.
The Chinese scientists created the coronavirus that causes COVI-19. It escaped from their lab, and caused the pandemic that has killed almost 600,000 Americans and more than 3 million worldwide.
Daszak covered up for Fauci and the Chinese.
Links to the Wade articles:
”The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?” By Nicholas Wade | May 5, 2021 in “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
Also at https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
Wade wrote a condensed version for NYPost: “The theory that COVID-19 escaped from a lab may not be so far-fetched” By Nicholas Wade | May 9, 2021
https://nypost.com/2021/05/09/theory-that-covid-escaped-from-a-lab-may-not-be-far-fetched/
After reading the Wade article and much relted information over the last week, this is what I think:
1. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was created by gain of function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One or more people at that laboratory became infected with the virus because of inadequate or negligent procedures. The infected people spread the virus through the city of Wuhan, and they and others spread it across the world.
2. The research at WIV was funded by “Ecohealth Alliance” of New York which is run by Peter Daszak. Ecohealth was funded by grants from NIH/NIAID run by Dr. Fauci. Funding this research was questionable in light of a pause in GoF research requested by the President Obama in 2014, to which the Director of NIH acceded.
3. Fauci lied to the Senate Committee about the NIAID role in funding research at WIV. Far worse than that, not legally, but ethically and morally, Fauci failed to disclose what he knew and failed to investigate the connection of NIAID to WIV in January 2020 when the Pandemic was first noticed in China.
4. Drasak also failed to disclose his involvement with WIV and GoF research. And, what is worse, he actively worked to distract public attention from the possibility that the virus was created at WIV.
5. I am not at all convinced that any set of public polices would have materially altered the course of the pandemic, save one. That one is the crash effort by the US government to create and distribute vaccines. Knowing that the virus was created in a lab would not have changed the course of the Pandemic.
6. That said, for the prevention of future pandemics, for the ability of the American people to trust anything that their Federal Government does, and for our collective sanity, a high level, objective, non-partisan inquiry needs to be made into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Arguably the lab leak hypothesis has been underexamined for multiple reasons that expand from narrow to broad:
1. The people with the most direct knowledge of the GoF research-Shi, Dazak, the Chinese authorities, etc.-have huge incentives to deflect blame from themselves.
2. The larger field of virologists don't want their field condemned, their funding cut, and their careers derailed.
3. The greater scientific community, and the managerial/commentary class along with it, are deeply concerned about fueling "anti-science" views.
4. The same groups are concerned about fueling anti-Chinese views. Both (3) and (4) have significant political valences.
If a lab leak did actually occur, then the people downplaying it are doing something extremely dangerous, since through their actions dangerous research may avoid scrutiny and another pandemic may follow. So we really, really need to get a good answer.
I think you have it right. Further the media will react to Saint Anthony Fauci saying these are not the droids you are looking for just as the imperial stormtroopers did.
I worry that another reason it was underexamined was that Trump came out pretty early saying it was (true/possible?), and there was a reflexive reaction against the theory.
I'm a complete layman in virology and medicine in general. Fauci denied that the type of research that went to Wuhan were of the GoF type, and when I read the grants I just don't have the technical language to parse whether Wade (and the various scientists who signed the 200 signature document) are correct about the research being GoF, or if Fauci is correct in denying it.
As I understand it, these sections of the NIH grants are what have been called into question:
“Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.”
“We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”
And this is Wade translating it into layman's terms:
"What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes (“reverse genetics” and “infectious clone technology”), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures (“in vitro”) and humanized mice (“in vivo”). And this information would help predict the likelihood of “spillover,” the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people."
I'd be interested to see what Scott makes of all this.
That's been the 'best guess' of some for a while. Juri Deigin (sp) on Bret Weinstein podcast was the culmination for me. I'm glad it's getting more 'mainstream'. Oh my story so that China can save face. A rouge scientist was working on this in private.
The Nicholas Wade article was the culmination for me.
78% of epidemiologists surveyed by the NYT think there should be limits on indoor gatherings between vaccinated people from different households:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/upshot/covid-epidemiologists.html
Are they telling Noble Lies, or do they seriously doubt that the vaccines work?
Noble lies & the surveyor
This is why you can't *just* listen to the science on issues of policy like this. These people are epidemiologists. They spent years studying epidemiology. Their job depends on epidemiology and stopping epidemics being very important. Of course they are going to massively overrate the utility of stopping epidemics reletive to the utility of everything else. A lot of them probably came to the conclusion that there is way too much casual human contact years ago, before covid was a thing.
I think you could gather this from reading the article.. it seems to be part noble lies, part other factors... i dont see anything where they doubt the vaccines work.
<quote>
“There are no magic numbers here,” said Noelle Cocoros, an epidemiologist at Harvard. “Establishing some guidelines are important, but as soon as you put a number on something, it becomes gospel for many people and impacts their understanding of risk.”
Some said the issue wasn’t about vaccine effectiveness, but about how to know and trust that everyone at a large gathering was fully immunized.
</quote>
and the 78% number, while technically true (only 22% responded 'unlimited households'), does obscure that most of the 'restrictions' are pretty permissive. Only 6% responded that no interaction should be allowed. 37% were ok with 2 households, 28% with 5 households, 7% with 10 households, and 22% with unlimited households.
These seems like encouraging numbers, given most people only got vaccinated less than a month ago, and we are just getting out of this. I don't really see how you go from this to they 'doubt that the vaccines work', and only slightly see how you could call this a Noble Lie (it seems more like minimizing unknown risk, and going slow)
I don't think it's doubt, so much as "keep maintaining precautions until we're sure the bulk of the population are vaccinated". Covid vaccination advice on our national health service website tells us that vaccination protects others even if they are not vaccinated, but it still recommends "keep protecting yourself and others":
How long your vaccine takes to work
The time you need to wait depends on which vaccine you’ve had.
You can follow the vaccine bonus advice:
7 days after your 2nd Pfizer-BioNTech dose
14 days after your 2nd Moderna dose
14 days after the Janssen vaccine - this is a single dose vaccine
28 days after your 1st AstraZeneca dose - you still need to get your 2nd dose to make sure that your vaccine protection lasts
Vaccine bonus
With the vaccine bonus, you can meet indoors with:
other fully vaccinated people from up to 2 other households
people from 1 other household who are not vaccinated - as long as no more than 3 households are there
You can do this without wearing face coverings or staying 2 metres apart.
The people you meet should not be at high risk from COVID-19 if they are not vaccinated.
Keep protecting yourself and others
Even after you are vaccinated, continue to follow advice on how to stop the spread of COVID-19 in public places.
For example:
social distancing
wearing a face covering
washing your hands properly and often
In a hypothetical universe with zero lockdown costs and infinite state capacity, I can see the reasoning behind doing this until the world reaches herd immunity Right now the biggest threat seems to be a variant that evades the vaccine evolving and spreading worldwide. This threat probably won't be eliminated for a number of years. I personally think the best policy in the US is relaxing restrictions now in order to rebuild state capacity, while having plans and funding in place to swiftly reimpose them if a vaccine resistant variant starts spreading.
What do people here think of the recent UFO news?
Is it actually aliens?
No. I think it's quite likely aliens exist - it's a very big universe, after all - but are they buzzing around our planet, or at least sending probes to buzz around? I don't think so. Partly because there has been an entire mythos built up around alien contacts with Earthlings, which is moved straight into New Age/neopagan beliefs not science, and partly because I think probably the most parsimonious explanation is "various governments testing out new tech in spy planes, fighter planes, drones and the like" and "disinformation", not "The US Navy is telling us UFOs exist and aliens are real".
Interesting!
That’s definitely the position that I’d be inclined to take.
But I’ve seen people who know quite a bit more about physics than I do say that the way some of these crafts have been seen to move would require a *major* breakthrough in our ability to control gravity, and I have a hard time believing that some government agency has made such a groundbreaking discovery in secret, and has successfully concealed it from the global scientific community for 17 years (the USS Nimitz incident, one of the most seemingly-inexplicable sightings, was in 2004.)
It seems very odd to me that the rationalist community has seemed so uninterested in this, given their normal openness to unconventional, science-fiction-sounding scenarios.
I was interested when they released that military footage, but by looking at the video I couldn't figure out anything about the velocity or size of the UFOs, let alone the G-forces acting on them. I Googled around for anyone shedding more light than heat and didn't find anything. I did get confused that between two videos with infrared footage, one seemed to identify the UFO as hot and the other, cold, but maybe I misunderstood.
Approximately how many people are there who should be vaccinated and are willing to be vaccinated but aren't because of lack of availability of vaccine?
In the USA I assume?
No, worldwide. I was wondering whether the US offering 20 million doses is enough to matter very much.
My guess is "not really". There are about eight billion people on earth, and the US is only offering 20 million doses, which is only enough to cover 10 or 20 million people (depending on whether you think each person needs one dose or two; either way, <1% of everyone on earth).
If the US offered an order of magnitude or two more, and they targeted the offer to some of the hardest-hit places (which, judging from https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html, seems to currently be India/Brazil/France/Turkey/etc.) or eliminated or reduced the vaccine prioritization thingy caused by short supply, *then* I would pay more attention. (Although I've already received my second shot, so even then not a lot.) But judging from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2021/05/04/how-big-of-a-vaccine-surplus-will-the-us-have/, it seems that the US is on track to have hundreds of millions of doses in surplus by this fall or winter, so maybe the first part of the previous sentence was kind of meaningless.
Thank you. Offering even a token amount may indicate a change of policy towards offering more.
About half a billion doses have been made so far, so maybe a bit more than 6e9?
Doses made doesn't seem like a good measure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohxGA7fpfu0&ab_channel=WhistlinDiesel
Floridiana Man outfits a truck with 8 gigantic tires so that it can cruise a bit in the Gulf.
I'm posting this because it's delightful, but if people want to get serious, does it fit into Albion's Seed?
Why wouldn't it fit? Are you surprised to see a redneck in Florida? Rural Florida was settled by people from other southern states.
I meant that I don't understand the culture enough to appreciate where making a truck into a boat by putting tires on it fits into habits and ideals.
For those who haven't watched the video, they had a rescue/assist boat powered by eight Cadillac engines.
I have nothing of substance to contribute, but I was definitely not expecting WhistlinDiesel videos linked in ASC comments, much less by Nancy Lebovitz.
Why was my posting the video surprising?
I can't speak for psmith, but I had the same surprise. I think because posting videos about uncouth rednecks driving their monster trucks into the San Francisco Bay would usually be beneath the sophistacation of the Nancy Lebovitz that usually posts here.
But we all have a hidden side!
I prefer to think I have a sophisticated appreciation of excellence wherever I may find it. It's a nicely made video, too.
For what it's worth, I found the video in a list of videos which purported to show that rednecks are awful. The other two videos were uninspired clips of big-wheeled trucks propelling themselves on water, and one of them had Trump flags.
> I prefer to think I have a sophisticated appreciation of excellence wherever I may find it.
Many aspire to this, few achieve it. Surprising others is sign you're on the right track.
I may not have been fair to the source for the link, but I'm not up for sorting it out.
Here's the link:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/04/a-death-in-the-firm.html#comment-2121453
Is there any rationalist review /commentary on the work of Pierre Bourdieu? I've seen a lot of writing on class, signaling, and education that points in the same general direction as Bourdieu, sometimes essentially redoing his whole thing, without ever acknowledging the connection.
Reposting this from OT171:
Cryptocurrency/DeFi/etc has been on my metaphorical radar for quite some time, but I feel hesitant about investing/working in it. Here are some of my worries, in (very roughly) descending order:
1. Coinbase/Binance/etc doesn't allow people under 18 to join and trade (which is think is for legal reasons), and I'm one of them. (And, more generally, the legality of using cryptocurrencies/DeFi/etc.)
2. Even if I don't use a company like that, I might need to install special software in order to do this properly, and I'm afraid of messing up my computer beyond repair in the process.
3. Not everyone accepts cryptocurrency as payment for commerce.
4. I'll have to pay taxes on it, which I don't know how to do properly.
5. There are a lot of criminals involved in this area.
6. Someone recommended (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtj34VMClU) that I use relatively extreme security measures before even beginning (such as writing passwords in a paper notebook, using 2FA everywhere), and I have no sense of calibration on whether this is too much or not enough.
7. Hackers/scammers/ordinary market fluctuations could wipe out any profits that I make.
8. Mining cryptocurrency takes a lot of energy, which produces a lot of environmental damage. Renewable/zero-emissions energy sources could mitigate a lot of it, but it's not exactly straightforward to find or obtain.
9. I don't understand any economics.
Can you clarify whether these issues are as important as I think and recommend ways I could take care of the important ones? Thanks.
@6. Using 2FA everywhere is the correct security posture for basically everyone. At the very least you should have a second factor for anything that can spend money (including your primary and recovery emails). Hacking someone who only uses a password is fairly easy, and becomes much easier if that password is reused.
Since politics is allowed in this thread, and since I read this story today, I'd be interested in opinions and I hope that on here I will get something better than the usual online exchange of "you're a big poopy-head" "no, you are!" that these kinds of thing usually degenerate into.
Okay, so now the investigation into Trump/The Trump Organisation is criminal and not just civil, at least by this story: https://www.rte.ie/news/2021/0519/1222476-trump-organisation-under-criminal-investigation/
So, what do you think: vindictive and pointless campaign that has now reached Ken Starr-levels of "I'm gonna get him for something by hook or by crook" on the part of "Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, [who] has been investigating Mr Trump's pre-presidency business dealings for more than two years" or vital, necessary probe to bring down notorious criminal (well, whatever the charges exactly may be) now that he no longer has the shield of public office?
I don't know the merits of this case, which is why I'm asking. Otherwise, it does look like the Democrats are doing tit for the Clinton impeachment efforts tat.
I don't know anything about it, but the sentence "Both Mr Vance and Ms James are Democrats" makes me think of it as "nothingburger until more info becomes public."
I don't think anyone not part of the investigation has enough information yet to reach any definitive conclusions, but...
My guess is that this will probably be easy to spin both ways. I would bet the organization is guilty of some moderate level fraud. Slightly more fraud than your typical organization, but nothing like having people killed. So nothing serious enough that pro-Ts won't be able to just call it 'everyone is guilty of regulation violations, etc.', even though it will probably be a bit more than that; but Democrats will act like it's treason.
It is also likely that they never would have been investigated if he had not become president. So I guess it is tit for tat, but depending on how serious the crimes are, you may or may not care.
I'm reading Harvey's book (A Brief History of Neoliberalism), and one of the claims he makes in Chapter 2 is "Many of the key breakthrouhgs in pharmaceutical research, for example, had been funded by the National Institute of Health in collaboration with the drug companies. But in 1978 the companies were allowed to take all the benefits of patent rights without returning anything to the state". The reference cited is Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1V1A/), which is a 352-page book that I don't own a copy of and neither does my library system. On the other hand, I'm betting someone in this community knows enough about the history of the NIH to comment -- how much truth is there to this claim? My impression was that, to first order, pharmaceutical companies patent stuff and charge a lot of money to cover the expense of ushering things through FDA approval, and I wouldn't have expected the NIH to have anything to do with that part -- but (a) I might be misrepresenting the current state, and (b) this is talking about the 60s and 70s, and it's entirely possible that the expensive parts of the process were different.
As a data guy, I spend a lot of my time reminding colleagues to think about the "other"/weird buckets in multi-set intersections. "13% of the dentists also have tattoos and adult children, should they get the invitation or not?" It hurts my head to do even with practice, it's conversationally agonizing, and many of my colleagues seem to have never been taught to think this way. But this thinking is hugely important for assessing and attacking almost every significant social/political problem or proposed solution - certainly at least remembering to check whether the "other" buckets have a lot of people in them or not at a bare minimum. Has anybody seen good tools for teaching/talking about these sorts of things?
> But this thinking is hugely important for assessing and attacking almost every significant social/political problem or proposed solution
Sorry I don’t understand. Can you give a concrete example?
What type of invitation are you talking about in your example?
I chose the invitation example as an example of the Venn-diagram holes I have to deal with at work collaborating with marketers. Those problems are (I think) similar to a common public policy problem - in a political context, a better example would be remembering to consider the smallish set of inherited multi-millionaire PoC living in Michigan when, say, constructing a social program designed to push the economic advancement of Michigan PoC. These multi-millionaires could easily be pointlessly admitted to the program were it simply constructed based on race, geographic, and salary rules, accidentally constructing a giant tax loophole for folks who really don't need it. Grilling people about the "corner cases" is conversationally aggravating, but hugely necessary, and I'm looking for advice on how people keep productivity high when working on multi-axis problems like this.
Does Tesla really have the "largest casting machine that has ever been made"? Weren't the casting machines used to make the turrets and hulls of old tanks, like the M4 Sherman, even bigger?
https://youtu.be/CQfKZ5lo9dc
https://tankandafvnews.com/2016/10/08/photo-of-the-day-m60-cast-hull-at-factory/
Wikipedia says (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giga_Press) they are largest "high-pressure die casting", it's likely the tanks were just cast by a different type of machines, especially since tanks are made out of steal and this is aluminium. Also the same article claims it can do ~1000 castings per day, with a speed like this a single machine would cover all US AFVs production during all of WW2 in 3 months. Probably extra speed adds to the size.
The presses of the Heavy Press Program were/are forging and extrusion presses, so perhaps technically out of competition, but they are monumentally huge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program
Just listening to Po-Shen Loh with Lex Fridman. Wow! Perhaps most topical is they've developed a Covid app that tells you when you are in danger. Very cool ideas. (and simple)
https://www.novid.org/about
Hi Scott, longtime reader first time poster, blah blah blah blah.
I recently came across the Dungeons and Discourse writeup (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ep2Z42hYqj68QZz6w/king-under-the-mountain-adventure-log-soundtrack), and the hilarious songs. However some of the links to the lyrics are broken and I cant find them anywhere, Do you still have the lyrics to the missing songs? Specifically "I'm evil Immanuel Kant" and both "All is Water" versions. I've been looking and found all of the other songs but can't find even lyrics for those. Thanks!
If you could ask a random representative US sample any question, what would you ask?
If you think AI takeoff is likely to happen in the next 20-30 years but are useless at coding/politics/business management/finance, how do you do something useful with your life?
I mean, aside from literally stopping people from dying before singularity (which could actually be bad in case of Roko-style or MMAcevedo-style Virtual Hell), there's not much you can do for people that won't be rendered irrelevant by a bad *or* good AI takeoff, and without access to one of those you have ~0 control over the time and goodness of takeoff.
Just want to signal-boost this amazing article by Scott in the journal "Works in Progress"- https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/
Apologies if Scott intended to post it on this substack as well at some point.