I'm certainly someone who would like feedback on their review. As soon as the runners-ups have been decided I'd appreciate anyone who read my review to throw some feedback into an open thread.
Perhaps there could be an 'Also-ran-review feedback thread' where anybody who had comments on reviews that interested them enough could let the authors know.
Fascinating. Thanks! I'm watching his interview on Vimeo. He puts some of the history into perspective. However, I think he underrates the physical impact of infections that didn't require hospitalization (equating them with colds). Some of my under-30 friends were extremely ill for up to three weeks with flu-like symptoms. Some of them are only now getting over the post-infection. I don't think any of the people I know who were infected would call it a "cold". ;-) Otherwise, I like his reasoning...
My issue with it is that the definition of politics is unclear. Aside from information about specific politicians it's hard to draw a line. As such what's considered politics becomes a political issue in itself. Eg some places would consider anyrgifn mentioning trans people to be "political". Or anything about economics. So a clearer divide would be helpful
My understanding of "politics" is rather more inclusive. I would like threads that are free of moderately to strongly partisan issues, regardless of whether individual politicians or parties or coalitions are addressed. The even-numbered open threads are good for discussing those topics, but for the purpose of reaching across aisles and trying to appreciate commonalities with people in different political coalitions, I think some threads should try to avoid political topics in a broad sense.
Perhaps my inclusion of "moderately" partisan issues in what should be avoided in these threads? I think that covers a lot of what you called "normal politics". I struggle to think of good examples at the national level in the US, though; there are more examples in local politics where I live.
I second jstr that I’ve always understood the ban to be not on politics but on culture war, which is an important and useful distinction. “Culture war” topics are those that raise strong emotions, on which there are more or less two sides that map onto tribal affiliations, and on which people are likely to reproduce the same arguments over and over again without original thought or genuine exchange of ideas.
Some topics are both political and culturewarish, but many are not: a wonkish question like the optimal parking requirements for residential zoning is eminently political but has little to do with culture wars (unless someone in the conversation actively makes the connection, e.g. accusing someone else of taking the typical position of “those kinds of people”); whether trans people are accurate in their self-perception or suffering from a body-image disorder that produces delusions is clearly a culture-war issue but not at all a political question (trans questions naturally intersect with policy in only a few limited ways, and grotesque contortions, e.g. bathroom bills, have to be made to allow this culture war to be fought by politicians).
I suspect that few topics are naturally culturewarish, but almost any topic can become so if it is taken up by tribes and certain beliefs or positions become markers of group identity. (The story of American public discourse over the last couple of years is in part a story of topics of conversation and domains of life being devoured by and transmuted into culture war.) Issues that have reached this point in our cultural conversation pose a kind of epistemic trap and discussing them productively requires special humility, charity, and rationality, which likely can only be developed through disciplined practice. It makes a lot of sense, then, to allow people in rationality-training to take on these challenges occasionally, but spend more time practicing on topics with less heat and more light, and to sequester the culture war in limited spaces, since its tendency is to eat absolutely everything. (TLDR: great comments policy, Scott!)
I have found “culture war,” in this sense, to be useful in my own thinking. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation, or even an interior monologue, I realize that what I’m doing has ceased to be real thought and become culture war—I am preaching to an imagined choir, carried along by outrage and moral certainty, forgetful of nuance and precision. Only after I had a name for this did I become able to diagnose it, and that helps me pull myself out of the trap at least some of the time.
For the purposes of comment moderation there’s a limited set of “culture war” topics to stay away from, including human sexuality, gender, race, the personal merits or failings of politicians, and policy issues that are strongly associated with partisan identities. But for the purposes of thinking well we should be vigilant rather about culturewarishness wherever it shows up, and we can try to move topics out of the tendrils of the culture wars and into their proper domains of philosophy, science, and politics.
Yes, this. In the early days of SSC, the policy wasn't "culture war" and it wasn't "politics", it was specifically "race and gender". OK, the set of almost-too-tribal-to-discuss issues is bigger than just race and gender, but it's much smaller than all of politics. And "race and gender" are still the central examples against which other potentially culture-warish issues can be usefully judged.
It seems to keep the scroll position, so collapsing pulls a bunch of posts up to fill the space; I'd definitely prefer being taken to the parent of the collapsed tree.
Yes, that's the most annoying thing, followed by the fact that you can't minimize one comment and its replies, but instead have to minimize all replies to a single comment. (This second thing comes up when I see one person makes a reply I don't care about but will produce a huge back and forth, and I just want to hide that and see the second reply to the thing I was interested in.)
I've found it to be the opposite, especially because of the interaction between comments not being "real" (they're loaded asynchronously by javascript), plus phone browsers playing fast and loose with reloading pages when switching between apps.
Also, if I minimize a thread part way through reading it, I end up in the middle of nowhere, because it maintains the scroll position.
Agreed. If I read this on my phone, political (or any) flaming makes the sub(7) level responses go off the right side of the screen. If that’s not censorship /sarc. Anyway, that’s inconvenient.
Also “no politics” means people have to think of something else to discuss, which is good practice.
I wonder what people’s views on Carl Hart’s new book “Drug Use for Grown ups”. I haven’t read it but have heard some podcasts with him (David Nutt and Steven Levitt). I think he makes some good points (eg separating addicts from overdose deaths), but also says some odd things, like how he seemed to say antipsychotics were more dangerous than crack on Steve Levitt’s podcast
Consider gasoline & television as drugs. After all, they give you experiences that change your consciousness which you could not achieve without them and every objection you've outlined to alcohol, tobacco and meth applies to them.
- Massive negative externalities: We're on the verge of hitting 420 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and that's definitely not nice.
- Vast amounts of time significantly impaired: Have you ever looked at someone else transfixed by a TV show and wondered how different their subjective experience is compared to getting high?
- Tens of thousands killed every year: Only a small portion of the increase in obesity in the US over the past 40 years needs to be attributable to increased TV watching before you're looking at a cause of morbidity & mortality that's on par with lung & mouth cancer.
- Heavily vested interests resist any effort to control use: Well, hell, heavily vested interests protecting their ability to extract economic rent characterizes every aspect of American life these days. How is this any different? Furthermore, now that tobacco smokers have to go outside (because the law does have a role here when it comes to direct impacts of one person's behavior on other people's lives), how do smokers' choices affect my life?
I don't believe Carl Hart when he says that he's not addicted to heroin. I don't think it's wise for people to mess with their opioid receptors for fun because each of us is likely to need those drugs for pain control in the second half of our lives. However, people do things every day that I think are stupid. The salient question is what the threshold for the law to intervene should be.
I favor taking the use of drugs out of the legal framework to a substantial degree since it's not a particularly useful frame. Addicted people need a doctor & a counselor, not a cop & a judge. However, the law should heavily punish behavior under the influence of drugs that risks other people's lives. For instance, in Germany the legal drinking age is 14 with your family and 16 on your own, but if you're caught drinking & driving they drop the hammer on you first time. That, to me, strikes the proper balance between a citizen's civil liberties and societal obligations. Raising children, as always, complicates this question of the state's proper role in the lives of its citizens considerably. I believe addiction is punishment enough and if the government can help parents get clean & sober, that seems considerably more likely to help their children than putting parents in prison.
"There’s this myth that if you just leave these drug addicts alone or whatever, they will eventually decide to get help on their own because addiction sucks."
I don't believe that myth. Some drug addicts will go right over the edge and kill themselves, always. To me, the useful frame for this question is whether making clean drugs available in a regulated market increases or decreases the number of people who will fuck up their lives with hard drugs compared to the status quo. It's undeniable that more people will try drugs under those circumstances. The question is whether getting rid of the incentives in a black market to cut drugs with other chemicals and moving the treatment of addiction entirely out of the legal system would reduce the total amount of suffering, given that the overall number of users will go up.
It's also worth considering, particularly when it comes to opioids, how life circumstances intertwine with addictive drugs. The experience of American soldiers in Vietnam who developed a heroin habit overseas but did not resume that habit once they returned is a good illustration of this. Some of them absolutely did bring that habit back with them ("Sam Stone" is now playing in my head), but the number is surprisingly low. I'd have to refamiliarize myself with the subject to give you more specifics.
"I don’t think a just society lets people kill or maim themselves with hard drugs, not does it allow others to profit from the horror show that is addiction."
I think a just society gets to pick who profits, corporations or criminals. To operationalize this belief, you have to effectively repress black markets. How has that gone so far? How could it be done in a way that's compatible with our society's other ethical commitments?
Moral outrage against the Sackler family is entirely understandable and their ill-gotten gains should absolutely be seized (selling Oxy in and of itself is not what I object to, it's how they marketed the drug), but in the end, how useful is moral outrage? The element of the opioid crisis that really haunts me is realizing how many of my fellow Americans prefer feeling nothing (never having used opioids, that is the closest I can get to the subjective experience) to their regular, everyday life, how many people want to just check out.
Not sure if antipsychotics are more dangerous than crack, but Robert Whitaker's work has convinced me that that antipsychotics are pretty harmful, at least if you take them over the long term. See his book, "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America" https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing-ebook/dp/B0036S4EGE
I can highly recommend the book. It makes a strong case for rational drug policy, touches upon discrimination (via drug policy/war), and why people should be free to choose what drugs to take.
As someone working in psychedelics, it also opened my eyes to the non-harm of 'other' drugs (heroin, crack) that are by themselves not harmful, but are taken (more) in places that aren't healthy (social, economic). Or in other words, that other drugs can also be beneficial as he shows in his own (non-problematic) opium use.
I find him interesting, I think hearing his arguments has made me a lot more sympathetic towards them. Especially the argument that quality control of drugs would save a lot of lives, we don't seem top be very good at stopping people from injecting heroin into themselves by banning heroin, but ensuring that they're injecting a safe dose of heroin using a clean needle seems like a more achievable goal.
Quality control is a big issue. When you buy just about any other product off-the-shelf, you're guaranteed pretty much what it says on the label. When you have people injecting street "heroin", they are getting a mystery white powder of unknown composition or strength which almost certainly wasn't made according to Good Manufacturing Practices. So there's a much greater likelihood of having a bad reaction to an unknown contaminant or overdosing due to unexpectedly-high strength.
I’m reading it now. About 1/3 into it. Large part of it is about incarceration rates skewed by race. Seems like a standard Libertarian take on full legalization. Less risk from impurities, safer if you know exactly what you are ingesting. He says he uses heroine on a regular basis without addiction.
Could you elaborate on how you define "moral nativism"? I don't see an explicit definition in your post. Is it simply, as you say, caring about something that one experienced first-hand? If so, I think the label is a loaded term. It begs an underlying question: Is the inspiration for action more morally determinative than the direct effects and beneficiaries of that action? To some extent, it assumes answers to the questions of how we evaluate morality, and why, and who performs that evaluation.
Because reasonable people can disagree on these questions, it would be helpful to elaborate your answers and link them from this kind of post. That way people can figure out more quickly if they disagree with your underlying assumptions or with the logic in the specific post, and address their comments to the fundamental point of disagreement.
My claim is skeptical, not positive. I am genuinely asking if we can assign a moral hierarchy based upon identity or lack of identity when it comes to caring about an issue.
Is the question can we, or should we, or have we? I think the first question is whether such a hierarchy would be good (or useful or whatever other metric one thinks is proper for evaluating moral hierarchies). If we should assign that kind of moral hierarchy, can we define one that is consistent? If we should not, has anyone done so, and should we try to correct that mistake?
I think the reason someone cares about an issue is morally irrelevant. What makes belief and behavior moral -- or not -- is what a person believes, and how they carry their beliefs into action. Deciding morality based on (reasons rooted in) the past perverts the primary purpose of morality: It stops acting as a guide for present and future behavior, and becomes a tool for judging people based on the immutable past. Morality should guide future actions towards good.
(To answer my proposed follow-up question, I do not think we should spend much effort trying to convince anyone that they have made a mistake just for the sake of correcting them. Some minimal effort is justified for that purpose, but strong efforts should be saved for cases where harm to others appears imminent or particularly likely.)
Ultimately, this kind of discussion usually ends up being empty of substance. People talk around topics and chase distractions because the terms are often too abstract to apply to real-world questions. (Note how much of my responses above are arguably "weasel words".) It's more fruitful, although more risky in terms of polarization, to address actual situations; details of real cases are often available, and discussions of real cases and real details makes it easier to identify differences in perspectives and assumptions.
Didn't you have this conversation already, in the previous open thread? What did you think of the replies you got there?
Are you trying to start a conversation in the comments of this thread? Or are you just trying to get free advertising for your substack by linking to it from a much more popular substack?
Either way, I feel like you'd get a better response if you (1) defined your terms and gave an example, and (2) posted a new article instead of linking to the same one you linked last week.
The last one was on moral luck...they are related. I appreciated the comments to that. The point of this question is to challenge the assumption that either a) self- disinterested concern for an issue is noblest or b) self-interested concern for an issue is noblest. I am interested in the weight rationalists give, if any, to the affective dimension in moral consideration.
What skills provide the most bang for the buck? For example, improving productivity through the skill of prioritization, which is useful across many domains.
Uncertainty, for sure - if only because it is so prevalent in modern life. Terror is less pervasive in everyday contexts, but it's certainly handy to be able to tolerate it.
Cognitive dissonance is a bit more complex, as many people don't seem overly bothered by it - presumably they have a naturally higher tolerance? Or maybe they just don't see it as clearly.
I think I disagree with your directionality there - you should probably think of Charm as a buff skill for social skills/persuasion. It's the ability to compel likability.
I'd define charisma rather as the ability to make other people enjoy your company. And while this surely helps a lot with persuasion, it is conceptually different and has quite different consequences.
If I had to choose between persuasion and charisma, I'd choose charisma. (By the way, I would gladly trade my 18 Intelligence Score for 18 charisma.)
The value of courage (or any of the other cardinal virtues) however, is supreme and so worth practically any effort. Courage will make you massively more effective in everything you do (literally in anything where fear could potentially hold you back), is deeply attractive to others (perhaps the most attractive thing insofar as it enables vulnerability and so intimacy!), is essential for living a meaningful life and for facing death, and apparently is just good in-itself whenever exercised.
Likewise, at least insofar as courage consists in being rightly disposed towards fear (i.e. not fearing anything too much or too little), it is never good to be non-courageous (either cowardly or rash), since by definition it's never good to do ANYTHING too much or too little.
None of the linked things seem particularly derived from or backed up with studies, so I'm not sure how you get from knowing these exist to 'it looks like you can develop it'. Some of the claimed benefits of cold showers are there in the claimed benefits of the wim hof method, so that tracks, but it's not much to do with developing courage. What other evidence there is to support or dispute their frameworks?
WHM I see as addressing fear of pain, Rejection Exposure as addressing fear of rejection, and Seneca's Practice as addressing fear of poverty. Sadly, it looks like this method cannot directly address fear of dying.
I wish people would stop equivocating every practice of exposing yourself to a thing you fear. Type of exposure matters! Context matters! Response prevention matters!
100% agree - courage is especially useful. It's remarkable both how much unnecessary suffering comes from fear, and how elaborately fear can dress up and pretend to be any number of more virtuous motivations.
It sounds like you have in mind the cardinal virtues, which I learned as prudence (wisdom), temperance (self-control), fortitude (courage), and justice. Why replace justice with mindfulness? Do you see some connection between the two? Or was the alignment a coincidence?
As a statistician, there's a lot of things that many people would put under the category of 'statistics' that are not useful at all, let alone across many domains.
I'd recommend something like 'programming' or 'basic probability theory' or 'data visualization'. While you can also do mostly-useless things studying these, at least you won't end up trying to decipher a t-table. :-)
Or speed audio-book listening. I found it surprisingly easy to keep increasing my listening speed. Now, depending on the quality of the narration (authors reading their own books is the worst) I can listen to up to 3x with good retention. When I started, 1.5x seemed like it was as fast as I could handle. My original intuition was that it wasn't something subject to acclimation, but I'm glad I was wrong.
When you apply the "most bang for the buck" vs. just "most bang", are you asking for the skills that are the quickest/easiest to acquire relative to their value in your skill stack? I am imagining a Gladwell rating system - this skill takes 5k reps to master vs. that skill taking only 4k. I would think that attentive listening has to be pretty cheap to acquire while being very useful in almost all situations.
How's cooking a high bang for the buck skill? If your income is around or above median and you can throw together some meal if you have to, any further investment into cooking is essentially a hobby. At least as long as you don't have some exotic dietary restrictions.
I interpret "bang for buck" as the marginal utility you get from going to "nothing" to "something".
The marginal impact on health and wealth of knowing any cooking at all makes a pretty huge difference. I know plenty of people (including wealthy people) who have such a phobia of cooking for themselves that they eat out for every meal, and when they do have to prepare meals for themselves it's prepackaged carbolicious stuff.
Being able to do the absolute baby basics massively increases your food options with some pretty big gains to health and massively decreases the amount you have to pay.
Ah ok, then I agree, going from none to basics is a good candidate. I was just operating under the assumption that almost everyone can do that by their twenties.
Not anymore. Do you doubt me? Take a thoughtful stroll through a supermarket and see how much the balance favours prepared foods over raw ingredients.
Then factor in the huge amount of food that is prepared and delivered or eaten (cautiously, these days) in restaurants or other food purveyors.
A surprising number of people simply do not cook these days, even if they 'prepare' food at home. (And there are a number of young women who aggressively decline to acquire the skill, fearing that if they do, they will spend the rest of their lives cooking for others.)
As a man who cooks for my family, you can take your gendered assumption about who should do that work and shove it. What matters is that one person in the household knows how to cook and that the adults arrange the balance of household responsibilities fairly.
Good spoken and written manners. There are plenty of skills that provide more payoff but which are much harder to develop, like emotional self-discipline. But just saying "please" and "thank you" all the time, always using polite address, not interrupting, not being crudely sarcastic or belittling -- these are things that aren't very hard to do, if you choose to make them a priority, and when applied among a community where you repeatedly interact with people (even a lot of people) they can pay off pretty handsomely over time.
It depends what you mean by "bang for the buck", but I think that the skill of being able to identify asymmetric investment opportunities is arguably at the top of the list. The reason is that investing is one of the few domains where your success compounds exponentially over time. For example, if you become skillful enough at investing to be able to return 25% annually, you can increase your wealth by three orders of magnitude over the course of your career (~31 years). Most other skills don't work like this, because you can't directly apply the rewards of past successes to future endeavors.
Regarding item 5: I think retaining the even/odd distinction is useful. At least on the odd-numbered threads, it encourages people to examine what they write before they click "Post", and this could have salutary effects beyond the first-order partisan or political comments.
I would speculate that people are also more likely to take seriously the comments on a "politics-free" open thread, which encourages stepping outside one's bubble.
I agree. I think there's a benefit just from knowing that there are rules, and they'll be enforced, even if they're arbitrary. Or, to put it another way, the even/odd politics ban gives us commenters evidence about the whole blog: that it's a space where politics is treated differently from other subjects, so we should be extra careful about it even if it's not currently forbidden.
Yeah I like the even/odd distinction. My only problem is that with almost everything turning political these days, it's hard to know where the line is. Which leads to a large gray zone, that I have to avoid. So I also wouldn't mind removing the distinction, and seeing if everyone can remain civil.
>Regarding item 5: I think retaining the even/odd distinction is useful. At least on the odd-numbered threads, it encourages people to examine what they write before they click "Post", and this could have salutary effects beyond the first-order partisan or political comments.
This observation naturally leads to other questions. Such as, can one formulate a similar rule for the "politics allowed" threads to replicate the purported positive quality increase from the increased non-trivial introspection in the other thread, too?
Ludicrous example: no cactus persons metaphros in the even-numbered threads.
Re #1, for future contests maybe create a Google form or the like, so you can get all the submissions in a spreadsheet. You can ask people to either upload their submission or link to it.
Am I the only one who misses the ability to like comments on ACX?
I feel like the general engagement in the comment section is lower, the number of likes correlated pretty well to the insightfulness of the post, and I liked the ability to communicate that I liked a post without having to write a comment saying so.
They come from a different address, so it's not too hard to set up a filter that kills the like e-mails without killing the reply e-mails. (I've done it for all the Substacks I follow - I think it's "from:(reaction@mg1.substack.com)".)
One flaw of the SSC comment section was the inability to navigate it efficiently and for high-quality-by-late-to-the-game posts to be elevated. A "Like" button and being able to sort on it alleviates those problems. I believe the argument against is that though it also can result de facto popularity contests, which isn't useful for debate. (Though as a counter, it can be useful to know which wrong things lots of people believe so one can know what's worth responding to!)
I think I prefer it without the likes, honestly. I feel much less anxious posting without having to worry about them, and I say that as someone who usually came out on top in "like wars" against people I've debated in these threads before it was changed.
I often use the subreddit rather than the comments below the articles for this reason. As the quality is often better and its easier to navigate. Maybe we could create a norm of cross linking
I feel I should point out (because it wasn't obvious to me until it was pointed out) that you can collapse reply trees by clicking on the bars to the left of replies.
I like the absence of the like. If something gets zero response, you are left in the fascinating superposition of states 1/sqrt(3) * ( |no one cares> + |everyone thinks it was so awful there's nothing much to say> + |everyone thinks it was so good there's nothing more to say> ) which means the best, worst, and most boring/obscure comments all look exactly the same. There's something pleasingly Zen about that.
It also gives a weird sense of false equivalence between comments. If I see one comment saying the sky is blue, and the other disagreeing thread no mechanism to indicate more people agree with the former.
The downside of this is that when you read a thread full of highly-liked pro-skub comments and not-liked anti-skub comments, it's easy to dismiss the latter as poorly argued or unconstructive even if its only actual flaw is that it's unpopular.
We need to use filters of some sort. There's a reason people don't just ask the net to send them random comments from anywhere, though I bet there are people who'd find that entertaining.
Same. There's lots of comments I think are useful to the discussion I'd like to give positive reinforcement to. But adding a comment saying I agree is time consuming and doesn't add anything.
I personally prefer the comments without it for various reasons, not least that it incentivizes people to leave comments that get a lot of likes over comments of substance. However, if you turn them back on, the author of the comment does get a notification provided they haven't turned those off. (I have.)
There's probably a good middle ground to be found but the simplest solution of not having likes strikes me as best and easiest.
I extensively use ACX Tweaks, and the likes it re-enables. There is a possible negative scenario where I like a comment and the author doesn't like that they got the notification, but I have a hard time seeing this as more objectionable than a comparable "+1" reply. If someone both has notifications disabled and doesn't use a similar Tweak then they'll never see my like, but they've also enacted their preferences quite effectively and I don't begrudge them that right in the slightest.
On one of the surveys, I asked people whether they wanted the ability to "like" comments. "No" was the clear winner. I'll ask it again this year, but no "likes" for now.
"likes" are an interesting reductive edge case of the comment policy: they're the ultimate content-free assertion. Sure, they're kind, but kinda definitionally unnecessary, and unable to be backed up :)
Likes could be a powerful tool as long as they are contextualized properly. If you had one more kind of assertion “(I agree with the conclusion)” now we could separate the two signals, and filter out people who can’t differentiate the two.
For example, I want to see highly rated arguments that were rated highly by people who disagree with them, but still find them persuasive. How can I find these?
If you create these two signal paths, keeping your own use of them as orthongal as possibility presents the right incentive scheme for participants.
A content-free assertion that takes up zero comment space has a lot going for it! Especially since it's not quite content-free, but has one bit of information.
I see a handful of comments that get likes on each thread, and some with multiple likes (Scott above you got 2, you have 1 before the one I'm about to give you), so people must be doing something like me to occasionally "like" a post.
People would also complain about being spammed by the likes in their email, but I've gotten some likes and not gotten email notifications on them. Did Substack make that an option?
I wasn't sure. I've seen suggestions for a sensible list of reactions, like splitting assorted reactions such as smart, funny, under consideration, poorly argued, etc.
So re-inventing Slashdot's comment moderation system? To be serious, though, that's one of the few I've ever seen with considerable longevity and stability, in part (I think) because ratings *were* qualified with a reason, because there was an apprenticeship requirement for moderating at all, and it was only an occasional thing you could do, and arguably because moderators were meta-moderated by a much larger group. But it's a little complicated for people who aren't all in on nerdy voting systems.
*Confero*: comment policy, gate the 2nd. (On the other side, one may probably argue that those +1's *may* represent either confidence intervals of the statement or something akin to the subjective evidence weight, so some slack may be applied even to those)
Hoping to narrowly skirt the politics ban, since it's relevant to community interests and (I think) fairly nonpartisan. Will delete if asked.
The Endless Frontiers Act is moving its way through the US Senate. Its summary on Congress.gov reads:
"This bill establishes a Directorate for Technology and Innovation in the National Science Foundation (NSF) and establishes various programs and activities.
The goals of the directorate shall be, among other things, the strengthening of U.S. leadership in critical technologies through basic research in key technology focus areas, such as artificial intelligence, high performance computing, and advanced manufacturing, and the commercialization of those technologies to businesses in the United States."
Well I remember Sematech and hydrogen economy and the war on cancer, so...er...count me pretty skeptical that it will (1) last or (2) make a difference. Big top-down initiatives don't, much, in my experience, especially when it comes to science. True discovery just can't operate on the kinds of short timescales and planned schedules that government programs inevitably have to have to be successful -- I mean, literally, you cannot run a program without having clear criteria, set in advance, clear deadlines and timelines, et cetera. It would just become a horrible mess. But "horrible mess" is kind of the best of all possible administrative worlds for pure out-of-the-blue discovery, because it's just so unpredictable. It thrives best in a chaotic environment, when funding decisions are made arbitrarily and often wrongly, when people do the "wrong" (meaning only wrong in foresight, not hindsight) things for silly/obsessive/delusional/brilliant reasons (we only get to figure out which it is after the fact).
Mind you, I think there's definitely a role for top-down managed R&D, when it comes to stuff that has moved beyond the realm of pure discovery and we're just trying to hammer ideas into practical widgetry. So to the extent this initiative focusses on that, it may be helpful, but my impression is that there is no lack of private-sector interest in building widgetry using ideas already extant (or ideas that are stretched just a little bit).
So....that brings us to the cynical response, which is to wonder whether this is just a giant piggy trough at which certain influential private actors -- assorted Big Tech actors -- can snuffle up and consume public capital instead of their own.
In Germany we have Fraunhofer Institut (government funded) and when we tried to „snuffle up“ with an IT project the bureaucratic load became so heavy that we decided to forfeit the subsidy and go ahead on our own to produce something deliverable.
I think that is the case with many government sponsored projects:
You get extra money for something that does not need it,or
You get money for something that nobody needs and that never would have been built otherwise
Agree with many of the above points based on experience in the US contracting sphere and dealing frustrations over approaches to uncertainty/process driving programs/people. However, I think it can (rarely) be successful depending on hitting the right mix of program design/foresight, people, and problems.
Ben Reinhardt has an amazing (but long) write-up on his opinion of why DARPA has been consistently successfully compared to other gov programs over an extended period. A summary is it really comes down to finding the right project managers, giving them large amounts of freedom, a strong internal/informal culture, limiting PMs to one rotation of ~5 years, and creating goal NOT process-driven structures. His point this very hard to replicate and has a whole section of how other groups mess up trying to replicate DARPA.
Similar to your point on turning down funding, a former DARPA lead discussed how they thought one of the bigger risks was increased funding creating bloat / unneeded projects.
Well, first of all, that's not true. Pointing to an example of X proves that any theorem that concludes Not X is a priori wrong. So if you are under the impression that government funding obviously always works out well, I've just proven you wrong. You are now obliged to consider a more nuanced position such as "government funding usually/sometimes/can work out well, and here are the times/conditions when it does..." That is a very valuable shift in discussion.
And, secondly, that's why I pointed to three (3) big billion-dollar examples of failures. That's enough points to draw a line. If you want to argue with the line, that's fine, but you probably need to bring something more to the discussion than observing that I didn't plot infinity points before I drew it.
You know, people repeat that mantra like it's a no-brainer, but having been around at the time, I don't think so at all. It's not like there were *no* ideas for networked computing before the ARPAnet, you know. And it's not like TCP/IP hasn't turned out to have some serious weaknesses rooted in its weird military-oriented requirement of having a network that degrades gracefully as more and more of its nodes get nuked.
Perhaps if DARPA *hadn't* poured a ton of money into one particular form of network, we'd have a much better one now, because a bunch of small competitors duked it out and over a (longer) period of time a much better protocol emerged. Assuming contrariwise that there would've been no network at all is silly, and deeply misunderstands the times. It's not like nobody in 1970 had the first clue that computers might want to talk to each other until the idea sprang forth, like Athena, from Larry Roberts's forehead.
I'd like to see some government money go to nuclear power plant design/ waste processing. It's like we've ignored the field for ~40 years? In general I agree with you. More money into one idea/ field tends to lead to a less productive use of the research dollar. (More people of lower quality/ interest come into the field because the money is there.)
It's interesting to ask what things work well as top-down initiatives, and which ones don't. As an example, nuclear weapons development and space programs both worked pretty well as top-down initiatives, which is why the USSR was able to compete with the US despite having a small fraction of our economic productivity.
If I thought my choices were 'have government majorly involved in these fields, or not', I might be against it.
But since I suspect my choices are more like 'have government heavily involved in either an illegible, uncoordinated, haphazard way, or have it heavily involved through a single, coordinated, legible, potentially accountable office', I choose the latter, and mildly support this.
Bit of a disappointment, and I really don't like that it mandates NASA spend $10 billion without appropriating the funding for it. This Niskanen Center run-down on it is pretty good:
Vote to keep distinction between politics and no politics. Even if there are no political blowups, I suspect many people appreciate the knowledge they do not have to deal with political stuff every time they look through comments. Almost like a content warning.
The foreword to Simon Leys' book the Wreck of the Batavia is rather unusual. Leys had been gathering material for his book for years. But he praises another book by Mike Dash on the same subject. 'After carefully reading his detailed study, I put away for good all the documents and notes, sketches and photographs I had gathered over the years; I had no further use for them. In publishing the following pages, my only wish is that they may lead you to Dash's work'.
The work in question is Batavia's Graveyard and is the story of how VOC ship The Batavia came to be wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629 with a fortune in silver and other treasures on board. Rightly or wrongly the captain and the civilian leader almost immediately abandoned the survivors and left in the ship's longboat to try to sail around 2,000 miles to try to get help.
Some 260 survivors were left behind and the man left in charge, Jeronimus Corneliez, was spectacularly unfitted for the role. Possibly a psychopath, possibly a believer in antinomianism (I am chosen by God so can do no wrong) he set about the murder of many of the survivors. He killed (or had killed) some 125 of them. It is a truly incredible story with amazing twists and turns.
I highly recommend Mike Dash's book and (ahem) the podcast I did with him:
And if you don't have time to listen then this Twitter thread from Gareth Harney is a great introduction to the story and has some great images. It concentrates on one of the treasures but tells the whole story. (But I really recommend the podcast! Mike is a great story teller).
I jump on this comment to praise Simon Leys' works in general. He is a great writer and a keen observer, especially on China's culture and history - his speciality. For those who don't know him, his main works where a denunciation of Mao's Cultural revolution at a time where Maoism was still super trendy in (European) intellectual circles.
I'm halfway through the Subject to Change podcast on this topic. Great so far--thanks Russell! While listening I was reminded of Stuart Turton's high-seas whodunit, The Devil and the Dark Water, which had to have taken inspiration from the real history of the Batavia and its Graveyard. I can't recall whether Turton acknowledged this in his book or not....
Well I’m really glad you’re enjoying it. Mike Dash is a really good story teller. I have just bought his book on the Siege of Munster. Who knew these anababtists were such scamps??
There is a terrific Italian novel called Q that takes as its axis the Siege of Munster and the aforementioned Anabaptist scampery. It may have also inspired Q Anon, but that’s neither here nor there.
This is incredible. Every rabbit hole in this story seems to have multiple rabbit holes leading off it. I learn the author of this novel is Luther Blisset which is not just a pseudonym but an open source one. The real Luther Blisset is cool about it all though.
There are a lot of optical illusions available and a fair amount of theory about what causes the illusions, but I've never seen anything about why people like them.
If there's anyone who thinks optical illusions are annoying or boring, let me know.
I like them because they're surprising and delightful and feel like magic, which seems tapped into deeply-wired human instincts of "whoa that's crazy, pay some more attention to this thing."
Beyond that, I really like them because they're often a really practical and concrete live example of how my brain works, which is really cool. One of my favorite ones is the fovea detector shader:
It doesn't work the way it's supposed to for me. Instead of a small circular movement, the whole star field seems to be breathing, and there are a few dark horizontal regions which are I suspect are an artifact.
Fascinating. I wonder if that's an artifact of your viewing experience/resolution/browser settings (like if I was sitting at your computer I'd have the same experience), or is it specific to your powers of visual perception?
I have no idea. I'm using Chrome on an HP Pavilion. I haven't done anything to the settings. As far as I know, my reactions to optical illusions are usually pretty standard.
I've found that I get different results depending on how close my eyes are to the screen, if I'm fairly close the whole thing is perceptively moving, if I'm further away I get more of that "only movement where your fovea is" intended effect. And I do see a regular dark grid pattern if I step back a ways and blur my eyes a little, that seems to be a legit artifact of how it spaces the little visual elements.
I agree, it's something akin to "insight porn" or the appreciation of a good joke or paradox. What you're seeing doesn't make sense at first, but then you realize how it works, learning something about the fallibility of your own perceptions in the process.
Maybe the same reason they like roller coasters. They give an illusion of danger without actual danger, so they stimulate the part of the brain that alerts to threats and categorizes them, while *not* asking anything of the executive function that needs to actually decide whether and how to respond to them, and what the cost might be.
As for why they're fake threats: because they are examples of where our sensory processing goes wrong, in the same way (but harmlessly) as discovering that that stick in the path is actually a snake, the ground is *way* closer than it seemed, et cetera.
It's the closest you can get to hallucinating while sober and wide awake. It's interesting for its sheer novelty, and it directly challenges your belief that your vision is an accurate representation of the outside world.
Probably good triggers for natural curiosity insofar as they're counterintuitive, but pretty obviously not dangerous. Cost of exploring is low, and natural interest is high.
Thinking about it some more, there's another angle to it, which is that there's an implied challenge for seeing the illusion for what it /really/ is. Like, for illusions that imply movement in directions that doesn't exist, or that imply that one shape is larger or smaller than another, I'm always compelled to try looking at it in such a way that I 'see through' it and make my perception accurate.
I think these are fairly interesting as far as studies of visual perception and cognition go, but I don't really like to experience illusions myself. My eyes hurt and I get a headache.
As for why people not interested in psychology might like them - novelty effect. It's an experience like nothing else we usually see, and people usually like that, unless it is unpleasant - which for most it is not as far as I know.
One reason for me is that they are examples of how my perception is fallible. Like, this line obviously moves!! Even though it objectively does not. I find that deeply fascinating from an epistemological point of few.
Are people into optical illusions? My experience is that when I see one my response is "oh, cool." and then immediately move on to something else. I haven't met anyone that I would describe as being into optical illusions.
I'd make an analogy to magic tricks: something unexpected or seemingly impossible happens, making you question your own senses. Whether it's enjoyable or not depends on your personality (do you like puzzling out how a trick works?) and how it's presented (the same illusion can be beautiful or nauseating).
Just as a general point, I think a lot of people enjoy optical illusions and magic tricks for the surprise or some similar reason without trying to figure out how the trick works.
Does anyone know when optical illusions became part of popular culture?
Optical illusions are cool-the-first-time-I-guess but not something I seek out. I won't go out of my way to view them, and really, can take or leave them. Kinda like puns.
The impact per dollar and the "but for" or neglected causes themes make excellent sense to me I'm having a harder time relinquishing the need/desire to know the effect my giving has. So, supporting a cause far away in either distance or time, is not as appealing to me.
This seems like a very natural feeling I've struggled with myself. For reference, I give ~20% of my income to GiveWell or the Against Malaria Foundation.
Wanting certainty of impact feels natural and is probably a good instinct in general, since vague charities with poorly defined impact stories are less likely to succeed. The optimization space of the world is vast, and most attempts will have no impact or make things worse.
On the other hand, because people generally try to improve the lives of those close to them, you have the opportunity to get some smoking deals to improve the lives of people distant from you. For example, doubling the consumption of a bottom 20% household in the US would cost over 20k USD per year. For that same amount, you could double the consumption of 25 median households in the DRC (median household income ~784$ per year). If you believe that individual utility is roughly logarithmic with wealth, that means you can have ~25X the impact by giving to folks in the DRC.
Plausibly, the far future has similar returns. I similarly struggle to truly believe that existing X risk charities have substantial causal positive impacts on the far future.
I was very much influenced by the op-ed below written a number of years ago by Angus Deaton. It led me to read the book Two Dollars a day, which was eye-opening to me.
This is an entirely different reason for wanting to give locally (or at least domestically) from just wanting to know the effect that your giving has. If it really is as effective to give locally, you're not trading anything off by doing so.
(That said, I do not find most of the claims that giving locally in the US is as or more effective than the best charities overseas to be very plausible)
There are certainly examples of extreme poverty in the US and other developed nations, but even if you only consider purchasing power parity effects you'd expect to be able to bring many more people out of extreme poverty in the developing world vs the US.
I don't mean to discount the plight of the poor American, as much as exhort folks to bring as many folks out of poverty as possible regardless of their location. I believe a wealth of evidence suggests that it is much cheaper to increase consumption in the developing world. See 'Poor Economics' and JPAL's work in general for some of the specific examples.
Giving to evidence backed EA causes means you can have some idea of what your money will do, at least based on inference (less for for more speculative stuff obviously but there should at least be some measurable progress made).
Can you really be more confident that giving to people close by allows you to know what the impact is? I used to be quite involved with a program that gave food and hot drinks to homeless people and I had no way of knowing if it had any impact at all on their lives - I doubt it had anything more than an immediate benefit.
I'm not a big fan of 1) simply giving money and 2) hoping that someone else will manage it well and meet the needs of the intended recipients.
There are a lot of factors that may reduce the efficiency of dollars spent to lives bettered/saved. That could include waste, corruption, mistakes in planning, mistakes in execution, unintended consequences, etc. I'm sure that organizations doctor their numbers as much as possible to look better, including calling certain expenses "direct aid" that may not meet yours or my definition. Even if they're not, I worry a lot about those unintended consequences. For instance, if there's a local industry in [African country] making mosquito nets, and we send so many nets that we reduce local demand and those people lose their jobs, that's an issue I might want to be aware of. That's especially true if the end result is less nets being made long term. We could send 100 million nets, kill all the local industry, and then stop sending new nets, leaving a hole worse than if we hadn't interfered. Being able to see the results is a big deal in calibrating your "is my current plan working" calculations. For someone giving 10%+ of their income to a charity, that's a pretty big investment and well worth the time to investigate effectiveness.
For high paid but very busy individuals (which make up a lot of the rationalist community), it does make sense to work harder to earn money and then give it away. For most people, they can do a lot of good, and more good, by directly volunteering their time and effort. That's almost always going to be local, especially the truly effective help. Not everyone may agree with this, especially in the EA community, but I also feel that local and personal help (time and effort over money) is more morally valuable than cutting a check.
These are good points. I agree that time and effort can often be more valuable to the beneficiaries as well as to the giver. The other way to contribute is "intellectual/social" capital, i.e., connecting people in need with a resource they were not previously aware of. The hat trick (it's NHL playoff time) would be combining all three: money, intellectual capital, and time/effort.
I would agree with that, and if you are already volunteering and have personal knowledge of the needs, you can be far more certain that your money is being well spent towards specific goals.
Any thoughts about charities with a less clear chain of causality? My handy example is anti-war charities. War is very destructive, but it's hard to tell what discourages it.
Does anyone have informed opinions about the new Alzheimer's drug the FDA is thinking about approving (aducanumab)? This New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/health/alzheimers-aducanumab-fda.html) makes it sound pretty iffy. But I know someone who might be interested in trying it if it is approved. Should I try to discourage them?
I was just going to suggest Lowe's blog on the matter, he's had a lot of posts and really breaks down all the ways it's likely useless and also a huge waste of money
But failures are usually more memorable than successes, so hopefully this will move the field in a direction that could one day actually help people
The most interesting part of this, IMO, is the patient advocacy group. They've got a really complicated principal-agent problem.
1) The drug is almost certainly fake, so its being approved is not in their principals' interest.
2) Most of the principals don't know it's fake, so they as agents risk an immediate backlash if they don't push to approve it.
3) Since it is fake, they risk a delayed backlash if they push to approve it, it is approved and their principals get scammed.
4) But Alzheimer's patients who've deteriorated enough to know it is fake probably won't be very good at taking action against them, and by then the agents may have already moved on to another job.
5) And since everyone in the FDA knows it is almost certainly fake, it is unlikely to be approved regardless of their actions, so it's unlikely that #3 will happen while #2 will happen regardless.
6) Of course, given #5, is there even a meaning to their position beyond signalling for #2 (and potentially confusing the public who haven't done this analysis)?
I think the problem with this, and other drugs for very hard to treat illnesses and 'extending the last possible minute of life' for cancer etc. drugs, is that patients and their families are often desperate, they don't feel that 'the medical establishment' is listening to them or responsive to their needs, they're very vulnerable to snake oil merchants because they're so desperate, and 'patient advocacy groups' are either headed up by family members who believe that there is a miracle cure out there, the establishment just isn't looking hard enough, or well-intentioned people who do take the patients/family side too much to heart.
So someone floats the possibility that "this could be the miracle drug!", and the patients/families start putting the pressure on, and the advocacy groups have to respond in line with that. And then regulatory bodies, health boards, and governments come under that pressure, and nobody wants to be pilloried in the media as 'heartless red-tape pencil-pushers that are denying life-saving treatments on penny-pinching grounds' so things like this do need somebody tough-minded and hard-hearted enough to scoff at 'tearful cute moppet clutching a stuffed toy' pictures plastered all over the press. And politicians are *not* that tough-minded because they're constantly aware of "how are we doing in the polls?" so they leave it to somebody else to be the Bad Guy.
If you read this short article, it's definitely coming down on the "miracle cure" side, there's no mention at all of any opposition or doubts about efficacy.
"Professor Robert Howard from UCL said: "Amazingly, the FDA have sidestepped available clinical trial outcomes data that indicate the drug probably doesn't work.
"The FDA have ignored the data we already have from over 3,000 aducanumab trial participants treated for 18 months. These indicate there is no consistent efficacy signal in terms of slowing decline in cognition or function.""
Of course, this is not easy to spot and is immediately followed by:
"In the UK it could help the estimated 850,000 people living with the disease."
Honestly, I think some people at the FDA should lose their jobs over this - I don't mean this necessarily as retribution, but simply that if they are unable or unwilling to decide better than the public whether drugs are safe and effective, they shouldn't have the authority to legally declare, overriding the public, whether drugs are safe and effective.
I think it's hard to call for "some people at the FDA should lose their jobs over this", when on this very site here we've had many people arguing the spectrum from the FDA should be done away with altogether to 'if I want to take a dodgy drug because it's a Hail Mary chance, I should be allowed to".
To turn around and then say people should be sacked because they conceded to public pressure is rather harsh. I wish they hadn't, but they're not operating in a (spherical cow) vacuum. They come under pressure from patient advocacy groups, pharma lobbyists, the public, and politicians to decide yay or nay on drugs outside of the strict science. Unfortunately, sometimes they will crumble and give in.
They can't come out and plainly call this drug snake-oil, because then hello lawsuits for slander, libel and words I never heard in the Bible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx6_0Do0qGQ
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the pharma company involved, that they are not moustache-twirling villains, they must think it does *some* good, so they're pushing it as hard as they can. People are desperate - if you have a family member who is elderly and maybe at the start of Alzheimer's, you'll do anything to stave off the progression as long as possible. People are writing "living wills"/medical directives about "if I get this, kill me" (to be blunt about euthanasia/medically assisted suicide) so it's really a terror for modern populations, who are living longer and so the incidence of such cognitive decline in senility is increasing likelihood.
It doesn't help that optimistic estimates such as "it could help X number of people living with the disease" are promulgated. I don't know the exact reasoning for the FDA licencing this in the face of what seems plenty of opposition, and I'd like to know why (but that treads into politics territory so best to say no more right now).
Could you explain to me the difference between "the FDA should be done away with altogether" and "if I want to take a dodgy drug because it's a Hail Mary chance, I should be allowed to"? The first would seem to imply the second, although admittedly not the other way around.
As for the rest of it - as I said, I'm not saying anyone on the FDA side did anything morally culpable or deserving of punishment. When I say "their jobs", I mean their actual, specific positions of authority, not their condition of being employed or even necessarily their employer. I'm saying that the mechanism, while necessarily not perfect, can and should work with negligible error in cases this obvious and with this much riding on them (I hereby promise to eat a lemon if aducanumab works; I realise I have said something here that shouldn't be said lightly and is said far too often), and that therefore either some cogs should be replaced and/or their relations to one another should be altered.
Well bear in mind it's competing with a "standard of care" that reduces to "pray." If there were any therapy that had any positive value at all, there'd be a much stronger argument against approving it and they probably wouldn't. They may well have just thought, well, it doesn't harm, there's some teeny tiny chance it might help (even a Phase III trial is not perfect, hence Vioxx on the negative side), and it's not like we're approving Laetrile and possibly discouraging people from doing things that will actually help. They would definitely have been under immense pressure from patient advocacy groups, lawmakers, et cetera. They might have thought give them this one and live to fight another day. If nothing else, the *next* Alzheimer's drug is clearly going to have to do better.
The concern of the med chem people is that this drug is going to suck up *such* a lot of Alzheimer money that resource constraint (and possibly a slightly reduced sense of urgency, knowing you can't be First To Market) will handicap research into the next drug, and I bet they're right, and on that basis *I* wouldn't have approved it, but that's easy to say because I wasn't in the hot seat.
"The concern of the med chem people is that this drug is going to suck up *such* a lot of Alzheimer money that resource constraint (and possibly a slightly reduced sense of urgency, knowing you can't be First To Market) will handicap research into the next drug"
I think that's a legitimate worry, given the bit in the Sky News article:
"The treatment could lead other pharmaceutical companies to create similar drugs and the UK regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), to consider it for use in Britain."
If other pharma companies decide to piggy-back off this, rather than research a different drug, that's a very real concern.
Haven't looked into this drug in years but I'm faintly amazed that it's made it to market. I recall it had pretty negligible effects at best in early studies and even then you had to construct the studies just right to see anything of any significance. Probably it's sneaking through on the good old 'well, we can't find anything actively harmful about doing this but it doesn't help' route that lots of the meaningless drug improvements squeeze through. They won't be putting that in the adverts though.
Meditation is a "constitutive practice" of mindfulness -- the virtue and the practice are so close that practically every exercise of mindfulness can be cast as practice in meditation as well.
In addition, the practice is dead-simple, extremely practical (i.e. can be done anywhere, anytime, at no cost) and can be pursued at practically any level of experience and produce all manner of rewards -- some (like lowering blood-pressure) that are themselves non-essential to meditation. It has a 2000-year pedigree of being used like this.
Reading (generally conceived, i.e. qua skill in interpretation) seems to me to be a constitutive practice for wisdom -- in a certain way, it seems that wisdom just is to know how to interpret the world (esp as it pertains to right action). Wisdom and reading are both ways to figure out what stuff means.
Like meditation, reading offers many other benefits even if you do not pursue the practice to its zenith, is easy and cheap to do (especially if you are interpreting/"reading" a line from memory), and can be pursued at practically any level profitably. It has at least as long of a pedigree as meditation.
I am very interested in this: answers that come to mind are: dating apps, telling loved ones that you love them, being as honest as possible, and having the balls to go through the grocery checkout line twice after forgetting an item.
I think there is good reason why its hard to practice courage: courage can only be exercised when you want something and there is risk involved. In any particular domain, practice will reduce your fear over time as you realise its not so dangerous, requiring you to change domains eventually. Want and fear are typically experienced in relation to other humans so you’re dependent on them for practice, meaning you cant practice courage as often or easily as practicing meditation
I think all the things listed above require courage and are ways to practice courage, but are not "constitutive" practices of courage.
E.g. cooking a delicious pot-roast may require a certain level mindfulness, but mindfulness is not the necessary and sufficient element of practice, as perhaps it is in meditation. Ideally there's some beautifully simple constitutive practice of courage
(i.e. that in some way just is the practice of courage in concreto; that can be practiced daily for a lifetime to make somebody better disposed towards fear)
In terms of wants/fears, what about fear of pain or death? I think something like a Wim Hof Method of Cold Showers/Ice Baths is the best I can do so far for an everyday deep practice of courage. But I would really like to know if there's something as simple and profound as reading or meditation.
I think courage requires some emotionally aversive element that self-discipline doesn't; getting out of bed at 4am requires an exercise of self-discipline in a way that is generally not courageous. Reacting aggressively to an unexpected threat requires courage but not self-discipline (not a great example; best I could come up with).
Perhaps I should have said "functional difference." I'm told that courage doesn't consist of not feeling fear, but of experiencing the impulse to run away and doing what needs to be done anyway. That seems very similar -- draws upon the same reservoir of will and executive function -- as getting out of bed at 4am, where I feel sleepy and a primitive impulse to go back to bed, but I do what I have decided to do anyway.
Note that I *am* assuming that the courageous thing to do is also the rational thing to do, meaning I am not subsuming recklessness under the word.
Tangential: I think on some accounts courage/self-control is feeling fear/discomfort at something you should do and doing it anyway, but I think a higher level of courage/self-control might be not actually fearing the thing that ought not be feared/not actually feeling discomfort from the thing you ought not feel discomfort from.
Virtue might be loving your duty, not just doing it through gritted teeth.
That is possible, but I've never experienced it that way. The times in my life when I feel (in retrospect) like I was courageous were pretty much all times when I felt a strong urge to run away, but mastered it and did what I needed to do anyway.
I've made no study of it, but my vague impression is that people who have been recognized for bravery under extreme conditions (e.g. warfare) mostly say they just didn't think of the potential cosequences, they saw X in urgent need of doing and just did it, without really pondering what might happen. Sometimes they seem themselves uncomfortable calling it "courage" because of the no-conscious-decision nature of it.
Yeah courage (on a tight reading) seems to necessarily involve being rightly disposed towards fear, whereas self-discipline seems to involve being rightly disposed towards discomfort generally. On a wider reading, I think the two converge.
I would also like a constitutive practice of self-discipline/temperance/moderation/σωφροσύνη but I'm trying to move in baby steps.
I'd argue that courage has a specific relation to uncertainty. Assuming a sufficiently worthwhile cause, subjecting yourself to a known painful ordeal requires discipline, subjecting yourself to a situation where something Very Bad (e.g. death) might plausibly happen (but, rationally, the risk is justified and the ends justify the means) requires courage, subjecting you to a situation where you're likely to die without achieving anything worthwhile requires recklessness.
Looking from the perspective of rational decisionmaking, self-discipline is the ability to make optimal time tradeoffs (less utility now for more utility later), overcoming the natural human tendency to overprioritize short-term gains; and courage is the ability to make optimal risk tradeoffs (maximize expected utility given uncertainty), overcoming the natural human tendency to be overly risk-averse.
So you're sorting them by the degree of uncertainty associated with the decision, or perhaps the sizes of the variance in expected outcome? I don't know that *any* nontrivial decision to act contains zero risk -- has a perfectly computable reward -- and I would be concerned that it would be difficult to draw a bright line between "low variance of expected outcome" and "high variance", but if I understand you correctly I can see the distinction you're trying to draw.
...although...I think there are plenty of people who would say doing what has to be done in the face of "certain" death -- a low variance in expected outcome situation -- is also courage. It might feel a little weird to rate decisions to act where uncertainty of painful consequences is maximum as needing less courage than deciding to act where uncertainty of painful consequences is *low* -- because the probability of pain is near 100%.
Fear-exposure seems to be the trick, and social fear is very common, powerful, and easy to practice exposure to. It seems like that coupled with something like ice-baths (or something for pain exposure -- given it is healthy to do so), and poverty-exposure [see Seneca's quote below], might be a good way to innoculate ourselves against phobia.
I wonder though if we can get closer to the nature of fear itself, since all of those exposure methods seem to deal only with particular fears.
Seneca: "Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’"
I think the right generalization is “moving towards something you are afraid of.” Andrew Huberman (Stanford neuroscientist) has some great research on this. When you do move towards something you are afraid of, your brain generates a reward signal.
So I think the constitutive practice is to first recognize when you are responding to a fear, and then articulating the precise outcome you are afraid of, and either moving directly towards it (if it’s not actually bad for you), or just stopping the run from it, if it is indeed a destructive outcome, but one you can avoid without running from it.
I don't think that is a good generalization of courage because it also encompasses rashness -- i.e. not all things I'm afraid of are bad, and sometimes moving towards what I am afraid of is just foolish. Indeed, courage can be cast as fearing the right things in the right order.
I think this one has some limitations -- I don't think it can directly treat the fear of one's own death -- but it seems to have the best one we know how.
I think the way to do would be to make a taxonomy of (the most common) fears: rejection, pain, death, poverty, loss, spring to mind, and see how many you could address in as few practices as possible.
It seems to me that this is the wisdom in practiced poverty -- poverty encompasses poverty of friends, material resources, and perhaps loss as well. It strikes many birds with one stone.
The death one though is I think the Ur-fear, and is pretty immune to exposure, because you can't actually practice dying for real.
It’s obviously not real but it’s interesting just to try pretending you’re in the act of dying. It’s panic inducing at first, but “reminding” myself this really is happening ends up producing a kind of calm acceptance. I have no idea how this transfers into the real thing, though.
I have but only dipping my toes in. I'm similarly concerned that this might not transfer/doesn't really count as direct exposure, but I don't get the sense it would hurt.
Sidenote: it looks like the stoics crushed this one with the practiced poverty and the emphasis on memento mori. I wonder if they have a more systematic analysis/practice for fear.
This is something I usually find myself doing in the moment, but I can imagine forming a constitutive practice around it:
I do small things to promote an "acting" state of mind whenever I find myself in the passive "being acted upon" state of mind. This is helpful because it puts my focus on things I am able to control, and because it counteracts the flight and freeze responses to threats.
Small example: I've noticed that when people speak in front of intimidating audiences, whether it's a tense conversation with a boss or a presentation in front of a room of judgy people, they tend to put some distance between themselves and their audience. I find it's helpful to take a step forward. Just one step does the trick, because it helps me switch from the "oh god they're waiting for me to say something" frame of mind to the "I'm doing something" state of mind. In a similar vein, I often start an interview by asking my interviewer a benign question, like how their day is going. This puts me into an active rather than a passive state.
Big example: when my twin sister developed PPMS (the really bad kind of MS) last year, I was hysterical for a little while. Every time I thought seriously about her future, I had a panic attack. This made things harder because it was necessary at the time to think about her future a lot and make contingency plans just in case she can't work or can't walk in a few years. So I started visiting her and helping her with chores.
It was a small thing to do, but it shifted my frame of mind from "I'm powerless and we're fucked" to "I'm doing something helpful right now". Those tiny actions disarmed the debilitating fear, and I now find myself in a much better state of mind for planning and making decisions as a result.
I'm sure you could come up with a daily practice to promote an active, rather than a passive, frame of mind, which can be applied to any intimidating or frightening situation. Not sure what the daily practice would look like. I'm going to think about this.
I agree. Would you say perfectionism is connected to fear? I think it could be, but I also think the tools for overcoming perfectionism might be different than tools for overcoming fear of other sorts.
Yes, I think there is a connection with perfectionism and a specific fear, or maybe a collection of fears. Generally, I think there are really a bunch of different fears rising from different threats to different needs, so it might be misleading to speak only of some general fear. That is why I think the tools very well might not work between different fears (but then again might, if the source of the fear is the same or related).
On the other hand, I see Cole, the OP replying there to Rejection Therapy comment, looking for the “nature of fear itself”. Quite opposite of what I just wrote, but will probably be very worthwhile still. I wouldn’t have much to say about that other than that Buddhist meditation on dukkha (~suffering) and aversion could get you close. (A teacher helps a lot, it’s pretty hard to self-direct, especially with aversive subjects.)
I think much of perfectionism is learned in childhood when a child is utterly dependant on the parent and the parent shows (or is perceived as showing) affection only conditionally, tying self-worth to accomplishments. That kind of emotional neglect doesn’t ring that serious compared to physical neglect or other “traditionally” traumatic events, but to a child the perceived lack of affection is an existential threat there with any other. Being abandoned would be catastrophic for survival, albeit less gravely so in modern times.
(Some mild symptoms of OCD might be seen as perfectionism as well, rising from the need of crafting some sense and predictability into an unpredictable environment through rituals and repetition. There is also a soothing function in immersing yourself (dissociating) into meticulous tinkering when things are emotionally overwhelming.)
So in that way, I think perfectionism is a understandable reaction to fear (of abandonment and unpredictable painful outcomes).
To be clear, in adulthood those learned (trauma)responses don’t usually make much sense anymore, since, well, the environment is different. The threat is usually gone, but the signs of threat (triggers) are still there in some form or another, so the emotional reactions keep coming back. The emotional reactions might be bad enough to keep the feedback loop going, but the reactions very well might have negative consequences of their own to still re-enforce the pattern.
In the case of perfectionism, it usually causes procrastination with it’s added anxieties, missed deadlines and such.
Needless to say, this is only my view, and not original at that. There are probably many who don’t view their perfectionism stemming from such issues and maybe see it only as a virtue and hard work, and – to be honest, I’d think they’d probably be wrong. But arguing and claiming to know someone’s deepest motivations better than them – that’s some anti-social no-no-land right there I’m not going to tread on.
Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think very different tools are necessary for overcoming different fears, based on the variety of stimulus and reaction. I'm sure the methods for addressing fear of rejection are different from the methods for addressing fear of violation, for example. I would expect those fears to inspire totally opposite compensation strategies and therefore require very different interventions. And the methods for counteracting a freeze response might be different from the methods for overcoming flight or dissociation.
I don't have that experience with perfectionism, but I think it makes sense for some perfectionists I have known.
Not quite the focused practice on courage like meditation is for mindfulness and reading is for wisdom, but I agree that the "just do it" mindset seems to be pretty common amongst courageous action.
That's an interesting approach. I've actually trained myself to do the opposite of the five second rule because, as someone with few inhibitions, I later regret a lot of actions I took within five seconds of having an idea.
Perhaps the common ingredient is physical action. Taking a physical action when you're stuck helps shift you from the passive fearful state to an active less-fearful state.
A sidenote: Other constitutive practices perhaps are "giving to charity" for developing generosity (and all the goods that come with it), and "direct thank-yous + gratitude journal" for becoming a more grateful person.
Fasting (intermittent and otherwise) seems like it might be a constitutive practice of self-control. And again is simple, free to do, can be quite good for your health, and has the 2000-year pedigree.
Would need to find the sources, but I have seen evidence for sitting / still meditation being more negative than positive for some PTSD patients for reasons aligning with these ^^
The more a virtue and its practice are alike, the more you say one is the "constitutive practice" for the other. The logical end-point of this is that the the *most* constitutive practice of any virtue is practicing that virtue directly. That's tautological but I really think there is a simple but profound wisdom in that. I also think that most techniques taught to cultivate a virtue are like support wheels you use to become adept at that skill - but at a certain level for the most part you don't need extra techniques, you just practice the virtue itself as the "constitutive practice" as you put it.
To start with the first example given by you (which is something I'm quite familiar with): In order to cultivate mindfulness you practice being mindful. You might call that practice meditation or not, doesn't matter. As a small part of your practice, you might learn some special meditation techniques that make you kinder or more alert or more courageous so you can be more mindful, but the heart of the practice is just being mindful (although I am a tiny bit anxious about the label 'mindfulness' as the be-all-end-all for meditation - but that's a topic for another time).
In order to cultivate violin-playing you practice playing the violin. You might throw in a bit of studying theory and watching pro's but the heart of the practice is playing the violin. Playing the violin is the constitutive practice for violin-virtuousity.
In order to cultivate courage...you practice being courageous. You learn about your courage and your fear and how these forces and habits interact within you. You learn not to fear fear. You learn to stay right at the edge of what you can deal with (you also do that in meditation). At some point it might be useful to learn some breathing or focusing techniques or any of the things suggested in this thread. But the constitutive practice for courage is practicing being and acting courageously. You start out with whatever courage you already have and grow it by practicing it (for some people, they first learn to recognise the courage they already possess).
I don't think reading is the constitutive practice for courage. I think the constitutive practice for wisdom is finding out what wisdom actually is - and then practicing *that*.
Totally agree that virtues are ultimately activities and not just states and this is a great point to bring up. Meditation in particular fits this intuition extremely well.
Still I think it is useful to make the distinction between constitutive practices and virtues because the constitutive practices have something of pedagogy in them — an easy access point, simply communicated and imminently scalable. I imagine for classical music it would be something like practicing scales, chords, and arpeggios progressive to the player’s level.
These practices also seem to be more concrete than “face your fears” or “pay attention” you know?
Re: wisdom. This is a discussion for another open thread, but by “reading” I really mean something like “correctly interpreting/understanding/finding the meaning of some phenomenona, (esp the words/actions of people reputed to be wise, and esp as these pertain to living the good life and understanding oneself and others).”
I think the process of reading resembles this process well at every level of resolution. I.e. the child just learning how letters combine to form words is using the same process as the student finding the way in which various paragraphs combine to form a whole argument is using the same process as the learned man assimilating the various phenomena of (inner and outer) life into theoretical truth or moral maxim. We can disagree about whether this is wisdom, but it’s my best guess so far.
In concreto, my attempt at constitutive practice here is to read and discuss great texts (esp wisdom literature) and great ideas with a learned friend in real time. I think it is attempting something like a combination of Jewish Chavrusa and Socratic Dialectic, both of which have been claimed as constitutive practices of wisdom in their own right.
This is all to say that I hid a lot in my idea of “reading” but I really do think it is the constitutive practice of wisdom and can be as profound as meditation.
Wisdom is a tricky one though; what do you think it is and how do you think it should be developed?
That sounds like a pretty good wisdom practice to me!
I agree with most of what you said. I just tried to point out that I think there is usually a dimensionality to the "constitutiveness" of practices: As the practice become less and less distinguishable from the virtue itself, it becomes more and more "constitutive", general, scalable. But it also becomes less easily described and taught. So as we progress, we might move from practices that are easy to learn but are limited to practices that only really become possible as you become more familiar with the virtue.
I think that is basically true for all domains. There are also some practices that are easy for a beginner but change as you become more adept, approaching the core of the virtue more and more. I would think of such practices as practices that contain a complete path, but perhaps that is what you meant with constitutive practices anyway? I think your example with writing captures that. Someone engaging the ideas contained in a text critically does something very different compared to someone using the text just in order to learn reading. But you might subsume both in a wider practice called reading.
I think it also applies to meditation: As a beginner and as an advanced meditator, you might follow the same simple instruction (such as "follow your breath" or "note everything that arises"). But what you are actually doing internally might be quite different. At some point, either the meaning of the instruction changes profoundly and becomes something much more radical, or the instruction becomes simply the container, the outer form within which you do the actual practice. Or you drop the instruction.
In that sense, a simple meditation instruction/mantra that is very powerful for me vis-a-vis fear and that comes close to a complete-path-practice is: Stay close and do nothing.
Thinking about your worst fears without flinching away or telling yourself that it's impossible. Things like suffering and death of yourself and your loved ones, the next world war, end of human civilization, your most cherished sacred beliefs turning out to be a lie - practice to think about them clearly and accepting that none of this is impossible, there's no law of nature to prohibit them, and some (like the first example) are nearly inevitable. This post might help https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god
That's a different kind of courage than ignoring an imminent obvious danger, but I'd argue it's at least as important, and probably much more, and many of the same mental skills are involved.
At least partly relevant: _Effortless Mastery_ by Kenny Werner. It's about becoming a better musician by defusing anxiety and accessing a state of trust and awareness. It's especially about giving up the fear of sounding bad.
Re: number 3 - wow, only today I was thinking about the former Reign of Terror. Serendipity or what?
Re: number 5 - I think it's better to keep the restriction. If I'm feeling mad about something and want to yell about it here, but it's an odd-numbered thread, I have to wait for the even-numbered one. That's good because often by the time the even-number rolls around, I've forgotten what made me so mad (so it couldn't have been that important). If I'm still mad then it must be serious enough to argue over. I think the restriction probably has helped keep down the number of political blow-ups and that is a good thing.
What increased friction? As someone who only ever left a single-digit number of comments on SSC, I've found making an account and replying to posts far easier than it was before.
Wordpress (was it wordpress?) registration and login was more of a hassle than Substack's e-mail based verification system, plus I recall the reply system being a lot more awkward to use, but I hardly ever used it so I only have a vague memory of it. Substack seems a lot simpler, but the lack of formatting options is definitely a pain.
Appetite suppressants were totally a thing for people who are having trouble with weight loss even before this announcement, but now we have a *really really effective* one. Think this will finally be what makes a dent in the obesity epidemic?
I have nothing to say but a lot of reading to do. I lost about 120 lbs before the pandemic then put on about 80 because bipolar + shelter in place is not a healthy combo. So take splice in the fact that you made one life appreciably better with your comment
Can this be sold without a prescription? If no, then I don't see it doing anything against the obesity epidemic. If yes, then it might make a dent, but no more than that, since it still requires people to /want/ to lose weight. Great news for those people that do, but I doubt it makes a difference in the bigger picture.
No, it's a hunch, but as you say, what they act on is what matters. I think most healthy weight people also want to be strong and fit, but few want it enough to commit to a regular exercise routine. Taking appetite suppressants is a lower bar to clear, but it still requires the person to /act/ on the desire to lose weight.
In that case, I think I don't really agree that it won't make anything more than a dent. Having extra fat can make people more hungry, which means they eat more. With a drug that counteracts that, people could lose weight more easily "without doing anything". I personally try to see obesity through the same lens as depression: some people will need drugs because of how they were born, some can get through with some exercise and a healthy diet, some will never encounter it in their life. But saying that "what they act on is what matters" feels unfair to me.
"With a drug that counteracts that, people could lose weight more easily "without doing anything"."
Yeah, that's what we all want. But the article says "Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy (semaglutide) injection (2.4 mg once weekly) for chronic weight management in adults with obesity or overweight with at least one weight-related condition (such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol), for use in addition to a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity."
So even if you get this injection, you still have to go on the diet and start cranking up the exercise routine. Diet and exercise is the hard part of losing weight, so unless this injection really turns the appetite down *low*, it won't do much for getting people to stick to the diet.
From what I understand from the article, both the people that received the drug and the people that received the placebo had to do the reduced caloric diet and the increased physical activity. In any case, reducing appetite will in most cases make consuming fewer calories easier. On the other hand, nausea and diarrhea are both side effects of the drug, and both help weight loss.
In any case, what I'm saying is that the drug could help make more than a dent in the obesity epidemic if it's sold without prescription. Reducing your calories by 500 is way harder than taking the prescription the doctor gives you once a week and keep eating until you're full.
I honestly think that most obese people don't like/hate being obese but these feelings are not enough for most to change.
Note that diet and exercise is always the placebo used in such studies.
That means 1) reported weight loss is taking into account efforts to diet and exercise, and 2) that we haven't attempted to measure weight loss with the drug but without diet and exercise. So it's not clear what, if any, role diet and exercise are playing.
I don't think I'm being unfair to anyone. I'm pointing to action and motivation as relevant concerns, not blaming anyone for not being able to stick to a diet or a medication regime. Doctors and needles can be scary, treatment can be expensive, and there's a stigma against weight loss drugs that says if you didn't lose the weight 'naturally', you 'cheated'. All of these contribute to people not acting on their desire to lose weight. There is no moral judgment in acknowledging that.
I understood your comments as "people that want to lose weight will take the treatment, but if won't make a big difference because most people don't want to lose weight, because if they wanted they would be already exercising and eating less". I'm sorry if this was uncharitable, that wasn't my intention.
I think that a drug that reduces how much you want to eat is a great way of lowering the entry barrier to losing weight, and as such, it can make more than a dent in the epidemic. It can help people that are already losing weight lose more, but it can also help people that aren't losing any lose some.
Don't a lot of people go on various fad diets? At least those folks would presumably be willing to take a daily pill instead or alongside the "replace all your meals with expensive meal shakes from our company" or "eat nothing but rare red meat lightly warmed over an open fire" sorts of diets.
I want to lose weight, but not badly enough to actually eat less. If there were an appetite suppressant I believed to be safe and effective, I'd take it.
Second. My impression is that this stuff either doesn't work or can kill you. (Browsing @Untrustworthy Bastard's list is interesting, but that guy seems sketch to me . . .)
If a drug company has an FDA-approved way to lose real weight and advertises it aggressively, they'll make Scrooge McDuck money, and deserve it.
I have a few suspicions about what feeds into current distrust of weight loss medications. I suspect a lot of it is that you've got a *ton* of herbal supplements and the like claiming to help people lose weight which definitely don't work, and these poison the well for legitimate pharmacological solutions for weight management.
Part of it is probably also the societal perception of weight loss being the product of a semi-spiritual journey around a person's relationship with food, where attempting to circumvent that journey via medication is wrongheaded and doomed to failure.
My suspicions center more around the idea that fat is so hated that the mainstream doesn't mind killing fat people in an effort to get them to be thin.
"You mean those backaches weren't because you're fat? They're bone cancer and now it's too late? Well really, being fat is very unhealthy."
Isn't the issue that weight loss ads are basically the single most common form of spam that doesn't involve sex or dating? "Weight loss supplement direct to you!" is basically like "Sexy singles in your area!" (I suppose "Make $50,000 a month working from home" also fits in this category, and may have a corresponding ban.)
Possible. That said, semaglutide has been in wide usage for several years already on t2d patients, and liraglutide (similar mechanism) even longer. I expect if something horrible was waiting in the weeds we already would have seen it.
(1) Wegovy is a terrible name. Who came up with it?
(2) The weight loss for people with type II diabetes was much less than for the people without. What gives there?
(3) Did you read the list of side effects? Discounting all the digestive system ones, because that's par for the course with these drugs, there's "potential risk of thyroid C-cell tumors, warnings for inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), gallbladder problems (including gallstones), low blood sugar, acute kidney injury, diabetic retinopathy (damage to the eye's retina), increased heart rate and suicidal behavior or thinking". If you're diabetic, you're already at risk for diabetic retinopathy, now this might up the risk?
(4) It's also coupled with "diet and exercise", so it seems like "in addition to weight loss when you cut down calories and increase physical activity, this gives you a small boost".
(5) The linked article says "Weight management programme" so does this mean "you have to keep on getting this injection or else when you stop, the weight comes back"?
For (3) remember that reported side effects includes everything that has ever happened to anyone on the drug, regardless of cause, and anything that is hypothesized to be a possibility whether or not it has been measured in humans. Check the gwern paper for actual measured side effects.
For (4) diet and exercise are used as placebo in control and experimental groups.
I published this comment on the previous open thread but I think I was too late to catch major traffic and got no responses at all. Anyway, here it is again. Sorry for spamming.
So, I'm considering getting an electrotrichogenesis (ETG) treatment for my incipient baldness (I'm vain. I know). The people at the ETG clinic claim it is super effective, and judging from the before-after pictures they showed me, this seems to be the true (assuming that the pictures are real). They also cited some very impressive statistics like: 96.7% of people exhibit extra-hair growth, and the average hair count increased by 66.7%, as compared to 25.6% in the control group. So far, so good.
When I went to check the literature for myself, I found that the results they (and every other ETG clinic) cite come from this one paper on the International Journal of Dermatology (see link at the end). The paper is from 1990 and has treatment group of 30 people. The reported effect sizes are so large that you should be able to capture them in such a small sample, but still the fact that the sample is so small and that there has been no follow up research makes me a bit weary. (There is a follow up paper in 1992 that uses the same subjects as the 1990 paper and extends the treatment from 30+ weeks to 70, showing further gains in hair density, girth, etc).
According to Wikipedia, ETG is approved for use in Europe, Canada and Australia, however I am not sure if this means that it's proved to be effective by the corresponding authorities, or it just doesn't kill you.
Anyway. I'm curious to hear your thoughts and experiences (if you have any) on this.
From what I could research, minoxidil and finasteride are the most reliable/effective non-surgical treatments out there, so I think I'll give those a try.
Don't know a thing about ETG, but have recently become aware of microneedling as a treatment for hair loss. Heard about it from a reliable source: Have a friend who's hair thinned greatly in her early 20's, maybe as a result of using depo-provera for birth control. Asked my dermatologist what treatments there were, and she said microneedling of the scalp was sounding promising, told me about some research into it at a couple of universities. My dermatologist is intellectual and research-oriented and does not do cosmetic treatments of any kind, so I took her recommendation seriously. So I recommend you look up microneedling, starting with Google Scholar. Plain google will send you to lotsa non-medical folks who have jumped onto offering the procedure in little clinics that specialize in treating minor cosmetic problems, spider veins and the like, some with valid treatments and some with snake oil, so they are not to be trusted. If you decide the approach looks worth a try you can buy good-quality microneedling equipment from OwnDoc.com, which is a reliable no-nonsense European company that ships to the US.
Thanks! This microneedling thing actually looks a lot more legit than ETG. Plenty of recent papers showing its effectiveness in decent sized samples. It is still a bit hard to navigate the literature since some of the papers seem to be sponsored in one way or another, but even then it looks better (and cheaper) than ETG.
If you decide to do it on your own, you're probably better off buying a roller or needling device and doing it yourself or having a friend do it, rather than going to some place operated by "beauticians." Just read up on how to do it safely. You want the devices to be sterile, and your head as clean as possible, but it is not possible to make your scalp sterile, and also not necessary for microneedling, which basically makes a bunch of close together pinpricks that are not at all deep. Or, for maximum safety, pay a dermatologist to do it. Good luck!
Hey I'm all for you doing this treatment but have you done some psychological and therapeutic work around your relationship with anger?
You and your testosterone as externally measured, would be relevant to your hair growth. And the interior relationship to anger would be related the the external measure.
When I say relationship with anger, that covers ability to go in and out of anger at will. Ability to not be controlled by anger and willingness to let it arise when it happens (and leave when it's done). If you are chill, that may imply that you suppress anger from coming up.
This is my fault for not being clearer in what I meant.
If you want to explore more, it's slightly meditative, find a private place and try to make yourself angry without a particular object. Then see what your body does in resistance to the process. If you can sit with it and just hang out, you will probably be able to be free to let it come and go in the future. The generally healthy relationship to anger.
Sure it's important, but it isn't "everywhere all the time" important. I sometimes give the even-numbered threads a miss just to get a break from non-stop political yammer.
If that seems like an oddly incomplete answer, it kind of is because going any further might cause a political discussion. Seems like I’m operating under a paradoxical constraint. :)
i have been writing a blog the last six months, and i thought i could advertise some of the better posts here along with brief abstracts. enjoy.
Can a Vegan Diet Be Healthy? A Literature Review -- i review the literature on health impacts of veganism as it relates to stuff like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, weight reduction, bone health, nutritional deficiencies and cognitive function (though i didn't find much research on this last one).
Does It Smell like Pollocks in Here? -- commentary on and critique of a recent study on "pseudo-profound bullshit" in contemporary art, including looking at bullshit as a viable strategy for artists.
Four Ways of Not Writing Software Bugs -- i propose that some powerful ways of not writing software bugs is not writing code in the first place, making necessary changes as small as possible, using automated tests and being aware of when one is not expending the cognitive effort necessary to really understand the changes one is making.
Networks of Meaning -- i argue that meaning is associative in nature, discuss this in the context of literature generally and the fiction of gerald murnane specifically and also review some of the relevant research in psychology.
Strictness of Logic versus Openness of Logic -- i observe some differences in the musical styles and methods of jean sibelius and gustav mahler, two composers with very different views on the symphony.
Problems with "Eating Animals" -- i argue against a current affairs article that seems to claim that moral veganism and systemic change are in opposition to one another. i criticise the article for lack of concreteness when talking about systemic change, and i argue that, if anything, veganism contributes in several ways to some forms of systemic change.
How Can One Tell What Is Beautiful? -- i review the arguments (including looks at recent research in psychology) for objectivity and subjectivity, critique paul graham's "preference cluster" view and interpret a passage from pierre michon's novella the life of joseph roulin.
Evolution of Programming Language Traits -- i observe that string interpolation has become more common in modern programming languages. i discuss what drives innovation, both on micro and macro scales. finally, i argue that free software norms enable innovation.
A couple of confounding factors for vegetarianism and veganism: It's likely that they're more likely to be continued by people who feel good (or at least fairly good) if they eat that way, and such people may be metabolically different from people who don't like being vegetarian or vegan.
Sometimes people get into dietary restrictions because they have eating disorders, and they'd be likely to have worse health than people in general.
I've read your articles on software, so Evolution of programming language traits and Four ways of not writing software bugs. I'll be honest: I found them both a bit shallow.
The article on the evolution of programming language traits mentions only one trait, string interpolation. I think adding a few examples would really help. Here are a few ideas: static typing, the big one that's the most obvious; pattern matching, coming to Python, C# and Java recently; proper UTF-8 support (aka strings you can't index).
For the "Four ways of not writing software bugs", the intro bit about "regular/real" engineering is overused, especially when no one that uses these metaphors ever worked on a bridge. The bit about "not needing software to evolve" doesn't really work for most people. The first 3 proposed ways of reducing bugs are, I think, common knowledge. The fourth bit however is interesting. I think it's the first time I've heard it formalized like this. The fact that you're speaking from your own experience is also a really good touch.
I personally read a lot of software engineering blogs/articles so maybe I'm not the target audience. I also spend some time on Hacker News which has a really good curation. I'll add that I really like the blog itself (as a piece of software). It's easy to read, a simple and effective layout, you don't break the "link visited" CSS. I also like that you're privacy-minded in your analytics. There's also RSS, which is nice. As a reader, I feel respected.
but yeah, it sounds like you are too advanced a reader to get much out of the programming posts. i suppose it depends on whether you are using the word "shallow" to mean that they betray a lack of understanding of the subject matter, or to mean that they did not go into detail or cover advanced topics. i am guessing but only guessing that you have the latter in mind. glad you appreciate the design choices!
As you guessed, I meant shallow to say that they don't go into detail or cover advanced topics. I did saw that post on the front page but didn't read it at the time. I read it now, and this one doesn't fit shallow at all, it's a nice post.
So the UFO report isn't out yet, but various news outlets seem to have gotten lots of sources to talk about what's in it. Verdict seems to be -
1. The military really does think these are real objects moving at insane speeds in ways they can't explain, and not weather balloons or pilot misidentification.
2. There is no evidence they are aliens.
3. They aren't secret American technology.
4. They probably also aren't Russian or Chinese, unless we're granting the possibility that the Russians or the Chinese have somehow gotten decades ahead of us technologically and managed to keep it secret.
As for what they actually are, the answer seems to be basically Shrug Emoji.
Still, if the articles are accurately describing the content of the report, it's quite something to have the government officially go on the records that UFOs actually are a real phenomenon that seems to deny easy explanation.
(1), (3), and (4) are, of course, evidence they are aliens. It would be interesting to see what those who were right early on about COVID think of the possibility of UFOs being aliens.
Yeah, that's sort of my thinking. If you grant the basic physical existence of objects doing what is described here, there isn't really a not-weird answer. Maybe it's not aliens, but whatever it is would need to be pretty wild.
Even the 'secret government technology' option has some pretty interesting implications if you work through what it would mean that 1 or more governments has managed to develop technology this far ahead of what the general scientific community thinks is the state of the art. It's one thing for the government to have the most advanced toys; it's something else for the government to have stuff that we can't even begin to offer an explanation for.
I wasn't right early on about COVID, but the real issue with the alien hypothesis is "why?"
I mean, the only vaguely-plausible scenarios I can come up with for clandestine alien presence are:
1) They're on Prime Directive zoo rules, but they want physical samples of Earth biochemistry for their records. The problem with this one is that the aliens have access to all our communications (including most of the encrypted ones); decades of breaking cover seem laughably incompetent.
2) They're on Prime Directive zoo rules, and the UFOs are the equivalent of the drunk Kazahkstani who climbed over a fence and rode a giraffe, heedless to the probable consequences. In which case, well, sure, but where are the ones drunk enough to point a death ray at Tokyo or something else obvious? "Covered up" doesn't hold water since if the larger alien society were willing to do that they'd have covered up the UFOs as well; expenses on this scale are just irrelevant to an interstellar power, and covering up a UFO is easier than covering up Tokyo Crater or a public broadcast.
3) Earth happens to be owned (in the aliens' books) by some massive troll who's fucking with us for the hell of it. This one doesn't have any *obvious* problems, although the prior should be pretty low (you'd expect more such worlds to wind up in the hands of conservationists or conquerors or uplifters than in the hands of trolls).
2) Not that extrapolation is all that sound for this, but people break into zoo cages and do weird stuff, but they don't have a history of just killing zoo animals.
There is no risk of capture for e.g. a remote drone containing a containment-fail-on-communications-loss chunk of antimatter.
This is leaving aside the trivial ease of trading for whatever they want or demanding it at gunpoint. An interstellar spaceship almost by definition has access to cheap resources and would significantly outgun the whole Earth (fast interstellar travel for a manned-size vehicle would burn kilotons of antimatter).
An interstellar spaceship is much more likely to look like a spore than the starship enterprise. Outgunning and access to cheap resources are not a given.
By "access to cheap resources" I mean the resources already in the Solar System, which they can get to much more easily than we can.
I am dubious regarding the potential of a micron-scale craft, even if it can contain a full intelligence (this is not obvious given the number of atoms involved), to reliably retain that intelligence intact over years of primary cosmic-ray bombardment. There are also problems with dust resistance and with scaling down a propulsion system that far.
In any case, sub-centimetre craft would not explain the UAPs being discussed.
They are evidence that it's aliens, but they're also evidence that it's non-human earth-based biological life, and also evidence that it's a weird weather phenomenon, and also evidence that it's angels, and probably also a few other weird hypotheses (some of which may or may not count as "aliens" depending on our conceptualization of this strange part of our conceptual space).
1. Is that necessarily true? It could just be they figured out how to spoof our equipment for detecting them- I remember that was in Tyler Rogoway's article about why he thought they were foreign surveillance drones. That seems a lot more likely than either aliens or the Russians/Chinese figuring out aerospace tech that is vastly far ahead of ours.
I'm guessing the US has spent tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on the sensors of our military aircraft and have an excellent idea of what it would take to spoof them. Being seen by US military aircraft is probably about as good as it gets in terms of visual evidence.
Spoofing isn't that important, compared to stealth technology. And the solution to a plane minimising its radar cross-section is to crank up the sensitivity on your radar systems. This reduces the number of false negatives at the expense of more false-positives.
It's really frustrating trying to get enough details about this to make any sense of it. We know of incidents in 2004, 2014-15 and 2019 in both Pacific and Atlantic. There's no reason to think that that's all of the incidents or that they only go back to the 2000s because the military brass has shown clear disinterest, and pilots are not keen to share unless they have crewmates and video to back them up.
All of these incidents appear to be over water. Objects are detected by radar and infrared, and descriptions of them sound very suspiciously vague and Hollywood-like.
When did the US Navy start putting cameras on its aircraft?
Did large-crew aircraft suddenly become more common around the early 2000s?
Have other countries had similar incidents? France, the UK, Germany, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland, and Australia together have *almost* as many aircraft as the US.
Why is it only the Navy producing videos? Doesn't literally every other service have an air wing? *Are* incidents only happening over water, or is that just because of the small sample size?
If craft appeared daily for about 9 months in 2014-15, why aren't more people coming forward with stories and details?
And most importantly, I just googled "sasquatch videos" and the first 5 results I found were more convincing and higher resolution than any of the UFO videos. Why can't the Navy upgrade their damn cameras?
Alternate hypotheses: something weather, something radioactive, something magnetic, something alive but native to earth, something run privately. A reminder that hovercraft prototypes were built in WW2.
Assuming they are natural, would they be more or less weird than ball lightning? Because that's accepted as real, involves bright lights doing non-normal things, and still not well-understood.
According to Wikipedia: "The presumption of its existence has depended on reported public sightings, which have produced inconsistent findings. Owing to the lack of reproducible data, the existence of ball lightning as a physical phenomenon remains unproven" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
Or it could be some agency or military branch has enough sway to prompt the government to more or less lie about this, even internally. Which kind-of happened with the CIA's U-2 program.
This isn't even unjustifiable, I can imagine pressing security needs might require something to be kept absolutely secret, and keeping something important absolutely secret might be very difficult without some degree of misinformation. At least they aren't trying to defame the witnesses these days.
In such a skeptical forum, I'm surprised so many people seem to be accepting 'government denies that mysterious videos depict top secret military technology' as persuasive evidence that the mysterious videos do not depict top secret technology.
It's been in the news lately specifically because the navy has been talking about it and releasing the footage. My best guess is still that it's some kind of disinformation campaign, even though I can't figure out how it makes sense.
If so, the pentagon saying "the videos are real but we don't know what it is and it's definitely not any of our secret stuff" doesn't seem very strange or trustworthy.
I *am* pretty fascinated by the objects/phenomena themselves, though. Not trying to act all jaded.
For sure, but I would have guessed terrestrial extra-terrestrial activity and government press releases about top secret technology would be on the other side of the pattern.
I'm not saying I reject either one. And my curiosity is piqued.
I just don't see any good reason to update my priors significantly on these topics based on what has recently made it into the news.
I think what news outlets report on this is likely to be a lot more about clickbaity draws of readers vs not wanting to get laughed at by the cool kids on Twitter than it is about a careful weighing of the evidence and trying to think clearly about what's going on. (And most journalists are scientifically and technically illiterate, so it's not like they're going to have much insight about the whole question.)
Anyone suggesting that they are domestic or foreign military technology needs to address the sheer "alienness", for lack of a better word, of the maneuvers these objects are pulling off. Dropping from 80,000 to 20,000 feet at 30 times the speed of sound, traveling underwater at 70 knots with no external propulsion system(and appearing to freely move from liquid to air travel), breaking the speed of sound repeatedly with no booms, and so on (I recommend anyone interested get into the details of the videos and military personnel accounts). Holographic or "spoofing" technology is the only that seems even somewhat likely, considering if this is a physical object it suggests technology that would revolutionize any possessing country's economy.
But then, why in god's name would Russia, China or the US debut such technology in this way? And why make the spoofs or holograms conform to age-old images of alien spacecraft?
Also, I think it was on an SSC links page that I learned about anti-gravity drive patents filed by the US military. Yet I haven't seen anyone drawing connections between this and that.
>And why make the spoofs or holograms conform to age-old images of alien spacecraft?
Well, age-old images of alien spacecraft seem to look like fuzzy granulated blobs because if they didn't we'd have filed them in some other bin that "that must be an alien spacecraft!", and what photographic or video evidence for the current wave of UFOs look like fuzzy granulated blobs because same reason, and if the are spoofs or holograms then probably because creating a spoof or hologram of a fuzzy granulated blob is much easier than creating any other sort of spoof or hologram.
The bit where, if a human being who has ever watched a science fiction movie catches a brief glimpse of a fuzzy blob in the sky, their visual cortex will often fill out the blob with a detailed image of the median pop-culture alien spacecraft down to the rivets, is an interesting but uninformative distraction. And the most credible reporters aren't saying anything beyond "fuzzy blob" in the first place.
Do you get a sense of achievement from your job? If so what does that feel like from the inside. And are there any techniques for increasing that feeling
I do get that sense of achievement sometimes, but it's basically just pride in how I handled stuff, rather than the actual achievement itself. I can go into the details, but I have a feeling it's not what you're looking for?
I think for me it's less what I've done that how I've done it. A favorite mantra of mine is "self esteem comes from performing esteemable acts", so I try to live up to my core values (honesty, usefulness, constant improvement) at work.
If I can leave work and tell myself that I have shown "character" that day, the outcome doesn't really matter. It's all very process oriented to me, as I've been disillusioned with the core of our work for a few years now. So to keep going, I changed the rules and made it about how I hold myself.
Yes, but not all of the time. A lot of the work that I do involves preparing for other work (both mine and others), which is far less satisfying. I might spend hours working on something to only find out that a lot of the time was wasted or in the wrong direction.
Things that help me feel more satisfied is finishing a useful project or making life better/easier for myself, a coworker, boss, customer, etc. Something that really helps me feel satisfied is recognition for work completed. Part of that is probably vanity, but there's also a really nice feeling from knowing that your work really did make a difference, enough that someone would go out of their way to say so. I used to work for a family business of about 200 employees, and the CEO called me to his office to give me $1,000 for doing a good job (not related to a specific project, just apparently being a good employee). It was not an obligation and not expected, so it really made me feel good that I was valued and doing useful things.
As a software developer, I find unit testing psychologically helpful: each successfully passing test is a small win. In best situations, this feels like solving a puzzle.
Sometimes I feel proud about producing an elegant solution to a task. (Problem is that not all kinds of tasks allows this kind of solution. If the task is "plumbing", plumbing correctly does not give me the sense of achievement.) This feels like "leveling up", because certainly there was a moment in the past when I was not able to produce this elegant solution.
If I am in a contact with the actual end user, seeing them happy about something I did gives me the (near-mode) feeling that my work is not meaningless. After making money for a few decades, getting a salary no longer feels like a "reward"; it's just a normal thing what keeps happening all the time. Even getting a bonus no longer feels like a reward, because I realize that being slightly better at negotiating my base salary would actually have a larger effect on my total income. But seeing happy faces... that's rare and enjoyable.
> I haven’t noticed the same number of political blowups here as on SSC. Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction?
Allowing politics on even-numbered threads seems fine to me.
My instinct says that the diminishment in political blowups is most likely due to Substack's comments system being much worse than the SSC comments system. Harder to use -> less use.
In today’s NYT there an article about the pending decision from the FDA on whether to approve Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aducanumab.
Aduncanumub is an antibody that targets amyloid protein clumps that occur in the brain. But there is no evidence that such clumps cause Alzheimer’s; the only evidence is that they often but by no means always occur along with Alzheimer’s.
Some Alzheimer’s victims have low levels or no clumping; other people who die of different disease and had no Alzheimer’s symptoms, have extensive clumping.
There’s little to no evidence that Aducanumab treats Alzheimer’s and no other drug targeting Amaloid clumps has shown any success- Alzheimer’s is as untreatable now as it was when it was first diagnosed.
Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the link between Amyloid and Alzheimer’s and for researchers to look elsewhere in the body for the causes. Biigen has sunk billions into the Amyloid-Alzheimer’s link; if they can get the FDA to approve Aducanumab they’ll get it all back and billions more, so they have no incentive to question the link. But it seems to me that until research goes off in a different direction, real progress in treating Alzheimer’s will not occur.
AFAIR removing amyloid plaques improves symptoms of Alzheimer's, and the jury is still out on whether it's slowing down the underlying root cause.
There's plenty of research investigating all sorts of angles for Alzheimer's, the problem is realy interesting and difficult. If anything, billions of private dollars bet on one of the hypotheses is a huge boon to other researchers who will conclusively see whether this approach makes sense at all.
What do you mean by "removing amyloid plaques"? Drugs that stop the production of amyloid-beta have not shown any effectiveness.
The problem with the billions of private dollars is that research controlled by someone with the goal of "convince [regulator] that X works" is frequently a lie. Biogen doesn't seem to have forged their studies - if they had, presumably they wouldn't have gotten a negative - but they have used deceitful inferences when describing those studies to the FDA.
There were some promising mouse trials (and ill fated human ones, due to a chance of brain swelling) of a similar antibody-based strategy, it was mentioned in de Grey's "Ending Aging" - I don't have a reference on hand sadly, and Google lists so many failed AD drug trials it's not helping at all.
Then again, mouse models of Alzheimer's are kind of dumb anyway, so...
Regarding the register of bans, you say "Check the register if you don't know what I mean." However, two out of six problematic comments referenced there are already deleted. If part of the reasoning behind linking to those comments is telling "Hey, here are some things you should definitely not do on this blog", then this deletion could be a problem, and providing a summary of what the person did wrong (or doing something entirely different about it) could be of use. However, if the links are only for providing justification for bans, as proofs that there was indeed some offence in what those people did, then seeing that the authors have decided to delete those comments probably serves the same purpose and the situation is okay.
I mainly wanted to draw attention to the fact that some of the mentioned comments were deleted, as I have not seen this discussed elsewhere, and to say I am not sure on whether this is fine or not. I do not want to propose any concrete policy, including on what are best practices for summarization.
I strongly agree that if the register is going to point to examples to clarify bounds (a good thing!) then some additional record of what the comment was is *critical*. This was a problem that only grew worse over time on SSC, notably including where long-time users could get permabanned for rationale that was itself scrubbed.
I don't have a perfect technical implementation in mind, but a semi-hidden quote reply in addition to the rationale would get one 90% of the way there.
The comments are still present, just hidden by the UI. My UI (linked elsewhere, I don't want to nag so you can find it on this page) is too stupid to know to hide them so they just show up.
If you don't want to use that -- and I don't blame you -- you can grab the comments for Open Thread 174 at:
and search the text for the comment number as indicated in Scott's URL. Like Freddie's comment is here:
{"id":2082976
and read it. I suggest an online JSON decoder.
And, yeah, this is way too complicated for people to do to understand what crossed the line, but there's always a tension between what you leave up as an example and hiding the thing.
[1] The number 36895139 is specific to Open Thread 174 and can be found in the source of the page as `"post":{"id":36895139,`
I'm surprised there haven't been as many blow-ups. It seems like Substack makes it easier for them to happen, since you get an email every time somebody replies to your comment.
Something I noticed the other day with buffet/all-you-can-eat restaurants. I think a good rule of thumb is that you subtract $10 off the per-person price to eat at them, and that tells you roughly what the cost would be to eat at a non-buffet restaurant with similar quality of food.
What do folks think will happen first-
1. Artificial kidney that replicates most of the functions of a regular kidney, and can be worn for years if necessary before replacement;
2. Bio-engineered animal or lab-grown kidney that can be transplanted.
Since we had nuclear come up, there's been some news about Atom On A Flatbed - AKA the military getting a nuclear reactor that could be flown in or driven in on a flatbed truck to a base for power. Pretty cool stuff, although you'd obviously have to armor it up as much as possible both for radiation mitigation and to alleviate fears that it could be targeted (proliferation is not really a big concern considering the type of fuel they're using):
I give 2 a greater chance of happening first just because we've already solved* the problem of transplant rejection. We can optimize bioengineering processes for kidneys with properties we /know/ are important to prevent transplant rejection.
I suppose you could say the same for dialysis, but miniaturization of that technology as well as making it function inside a live human seems like it would create far more and harder problems than taking an organ from an animal and making it do exactly what it's already doing in a different animal.
*Or at least solved enough that transplant recipients can live their life on immunosuppressants.
That's very interesting (the kidney question). I go back and forth on that. On the one hand, the *basic* functions of a kidney (filtration) are well understood, so getting an implantable equivalent of a dialysis machine seems pretty darn doable. But on the other hand, the kidney does all kinds of other subtle things about which we *don't* know, so...what about them? Plus the experience of the artificial heart should be a warning sign -- so far as we know the heart really does do nothing but pump blood, and yet that has been astonishingly hard to design artificially. All kinds of unforeseen engineering problems sprung up (although in hindsight maybe they should have been more obvious based on the fact that blood is actually a tissue, not just a fluid).
On the other hand, favoring the lab-grown approach, there is the fascinating work on growing small bits of organs on scaffolds with stem cells that has shown some very interesting promise, and of course that obviates the rejection problem because it's your own cells. But to set against that there is the increasing believe that intercellular communication has a lot more to do with correct growth than we might think, and how would you set that up in a lab? The growing kidney isn't by definition able to communicate with all the other organs and tissues that, perhaps, help guide the natural development of a kidney. This seems like a really hard problem to solve (unless you go "The Island" route).
The kidney question seems like it's very parallel to the question of whether Beyond/Impossible will simulate meat well enough for meat eaters sooner or later than the lab-grown stuff that's debuting in Singapore right now. Of course, a functioning kidney is far more highly structured than meat, but there's some similarities!
> 5: I haven’t noticed the same number of political blowups here as on SSC. Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction?
I can’t substantiate this beyond a general sense of having had my finger on the pulse of a number of communities for a long time, but it seems like things ate weirdly calm everywhere, not just this corner of the web. The main visible cause is just that we have a different President now. The fights that are happening lately seem like perfunctory enactments of the required rituals, without teeth.
I don’t really expect people to agree but just in case others have noticed this as well, I think this is a cyclical component to Internet anger, and we’re just at a nadir. Some other stupid bullshit will happen to refocus everyone shortly.
'The fights that are happening lately seem like perfunctory enactments of the required rituals, without teeth'
I agree with this. I hadn't thought it clearly until you pointed it out (quite eloquently) but I now realise that I'd had the feeling that there was a strange calmness culture-war-wise. You're probably right about the Trump effect, although I'm English so I'm observing this from a distance. And as it is an odd numbered thread I won't say any more about that :)
Is there any writing or developed body of theory on the concept that capital is no longer scarce, and this is causing all kinds of problems?
It seems to me that for most of the history of functioning capital markets, capital was so scarce that any additional capital a person had could be put to use relatively easily, because investible opportunities dramatically outweight the amount of capital available for long term investment.
Where as in modernity, your additional thousand dollars is very unlikely to matter that much to anyone. There are giant piles of capital looking for investment somewhere that will give a positive return.
Is there someone who has explored this idea at all?
That is an interesting take and makes intuitive sense. We personally just paid down all remaining debt and are struggling with where to allocate future capital since everything seems well overpriced.
My impression is that one of the major tenets of the Austrian school is that easy money sows the seeds of recession, more or less because it prevents creative destruction. But I'm no economist.
"Capital is no longer scarce" is a roundabout way of saying "there is a shortage of profitable ventures". The latter sounds pretty terrifying if you think about it.
I think it's all an artifact of the disconnect between the make-believe of financial markets with the ground truth of raw materials and supply bottlenecks, which are in a head on collision as we speak. A lot of fictional throughput and fictional inventory was being claimed (see contracts for precious metals vs actual stock of precious metals), and the market is right now realizing it's completely disjointed from reality. Basically, nobody wants your capital because it's all fake anyway.
This probably could be put under the label of a "theory of insuficient aggregate investment demand", which is s pretty mainstream concept in economics.
“In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches, where, in every particular branch of business, there was the greatest quantity of stock that could be employed in it, as the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so the usual market rate of interest which could be afforded out of it would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very wealthiest people to live upon the interest of their money. All people of small or middling fortunes would be obliged to superintend themselves the employment of their own stocks. It would be necessary that almost every man should be a man of business, or engage in some sort of trade." I.e. when an economy can no longer grow, interest rates will naturally decline and only the very very very richest will be able to idly live off the profits of capital.
Is there any reason to believe highly intelligent life is unlikely to evolve underwater? Could an intelligent species have evolved in our oceans millions of years ago? Could they still be around?
What are your criteria for 'highly intelligent'? Because in my view, some of the highest intelligences on Earth live underwater. Dolphins are arguably the most intelligent animals after humans, looking at their social structure, and communicative and problem-solving abilities. As far as I know, no other animal has coordinated cross-species hunting strategies: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149139-dolphins-that-work-with-humans-to-catch-fish-have-unique-accent/
Wow, that is a HIGH bar. Could a species intelligent enough to develop AI have evolved in our oceans millions of years ago? Absolutely not, the notion is beyond absurd.
Let's take a lower bar. Could a species intelligent enough to develop language have evolved? Highly unlikely, but theoretically possible. Stuff like that doesn't show up in the fossil record.
Could there have been a species as intelligent as dolphins are now in the ocean back then? I still think the odds are substantially against. All the smartest animals in the ocean today are mammals, which evolved whole new brain structures on land before returning to the ocean. I don't see anything beating them in the intelligence department when they have another million years of evolution going for them.
> I had in mind; intelligent enough to develop AI.
Intelligence is an overrated requirement for the development of technology. Chimps are almost as good at humans at problem solving and figuring out cause and effect by observation, which is what people typically associate with intelligence, but they lack the generational and cultural propagation of knowledge of humans. This seems more important for the development of technology.
Dolphins are arguably intelligent and just as social as humans, but they lack dextrous appendages with which to create technology.
So I think there are at least 3 pillars for a technological civilization: intelligence, dexterity and culture.
I forgot to conclude: there's no reason these things couldn't evolve in the oceans. Dolphins are intelligent and social, and the octopus are intelligent and dextrous.
Sure. You can't concentrate heat or easily isolate liquids underwater, which means your chemistry will always be pretty darn primitive. No metallurgy. Can't smelt ores, so no metal. Can't cook or ferment something, so no foods other than what you can eat raw, and no potions or chemical engineering. You can't easily create steep thermal gradients, so no thermal engines, no refrigeration.
Some of these things you can do *after* you have built advanced technology on land, and when you do the construction on land, which is why *we* can bring any or all of these things into the ocean, but I don't see how they get started in the ocean. I'm not even sure *we* could build a submarine if we were obliged to do it all underwater, starting from the iron ore and bare hands.
That only means intelligence doesn't arise (or go as far) if you believe that tool-using is an essential part of its development, but I usually think that's a pretty good argument -- we are as smart as we need to be to use the tools we are capable of inventing. But that's a lot smarter than whales or dolphins, perhaps because whales and dolphins are already as smart as they need to be to be top dog in the ocean -- and there's no *other* employment for their intelligence, because they can't build technology and tools.
I'm not sure we have any good reason to think certain types of cetaceans and possibly cephalopods aren't as intelligent or at least close to humans. However, thanks to not having fire and the quick corrosion of metals underwater, underwater engineering is all but impossible. At least any kind of engineering we'd recognize. You definitely can't build an electronic computer, which is the only means we have of plausibly creating programmable artificial intelligence.
The Abyss back in the 80s did posit an alien species with the ability to do engineering directly with water, but that seemed to involve telepathic control of water at a molecular level. We have no idea if something like that is possible. Engineering with fire and metal is at least definitely possible.
Yeah, marine mammals (dolphins and whales), and octupi both seem to be pretty intelligent. It might be hard to develop technology, but I'm not entirely sure that's true. After all, if you'd evolved and developed an underwater high-tech civilization, you'd probably think intelligent land animals couldn't find the critical things for inventing technology.
Thanks Scott for formally reinstating the commenting policy :)
That Cassirer essay review was in fact interesting, if a little too long for me to finish. It’s rare to learn of a new historical philosopher with interesting *and* currently relevant things to say.
Thank's for the comment - it was a joy to write the review! (given that I'm no official contestant, I don't feel bound by the anonymity requirement)
So for everyone else interested in philosophy: Please give it a shot and if it feels to long, either only read part 1.5 or skip to the summary at any point.
As a non US reader I actually really enjoy the politics free threads, if nothing else for the reason that it tends to be so heavily US politics based. Even when the quality of discourse is high, I find allowing "politics" tends to skew the discussion in a way thats much less internationally relevant.
You're not alone in this. Part of it is because some things can be a bit hard to understand as an outsider, part of it because many things are not really relevant on an international scale, and part of it for reasons I won't get into here since we're in an odd-numbered thread.
Are international politics not allowed in politics open thread? I thought that "politics" meant "everything", so if I wanted to talk about let's say France, it was okay. But it may be me misunderstanding.
I'm currently looking for advice on how to deal with a very specific and pernicious form of OCD, which causes me to constantly doubt my beliefs on topics that are very important to me (in such a way that evidence against me seems much more convincing than I know it should). I already posted the explanation on Reddit, so I'll just link that here instead of copying and pasting the entire thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/nsh6c7/looking_for_some_help_on_an_ocd_problem/
I'm specifically looking for a way to deal with it that doesn't come too close to "just learn to be more comfortable with the uncertainty" - being comfortable with uncertainty is one thing, and I've definitely gotten better about that over the years, but the whole issue is that my OCD is actively distorting my perception of evidence and logic to try to force an artificial level of uncertainty (e.g. maybe I'd be fine being 80% certain about something, but my OCD won't even let me get above 50%). I'm already looking into solutions (I'm thinking I might need a medication adjustment), but any additional input would be appreciated.
Is it at all possible to channel the doubt into "proofreading" your beliefs? It's my experience people feel the most doubt over things that are the most important (and often most carefully thought out) of their ideas, because these things are so important they should be proofed against challenge -- kind of like you read over a very important and carefully-drafted letter many times, looking for typos.
Not knowing the beliefs, I couldn't say if this would be possible or not, but if it were -- if it were possible to enlist the doubt to patch any cracks in the foundatin of the edifice -- then it seems to me, perhaps naively, that this might lessen the "threat" feeling of the doubt. It might be apparent after a while that the doubt is (1) in some ways your friend, and (2) won't cause the entire edifice to crumble. That wouldn't necessarily take the doubt away, but it might lessen the emotionally draining aspect of it.
Yeah this is basically what I would like to be able to do. The problem is that (to use your proofreading metaphor) I *constantly* keep seeing typos that I'm almost certain are not actually there, and even if I don't see any I'm still not satisfied no matter how many times I look it over. If I could get down to the point where I could actually "proofread" in a healthy way, that would be ideal.
That makes sense. And I guess OCD is nothing if not the inability to quit when things are "good enough," so my advice while logical is worthless in practice. I'm sorry I have nothing better to offer, and thanks for helping illuminate what the problem looks like from the inside.
I read your articles and I started to wonder why I'm not bothered at all by the ideas you seem to be bothered by.
I noticed I, and most other people I'd consider well-adjusted, have an almost axiomatic prior that "we'll figure something out" - whatever happens we'll land on our feet, and if we don't, we'll come up with a plan B, and if we don't, we'll deal with the fallout and limit damage (...) and in the worst case, it won't be so bad anyway. Cf. stoicism. Having this kind of prior seems adaptive, and correlates with leadership and initiative. Notably, this prior was absent while I was in a depressive episode.
Seems like some kind of 'resting muscle tone' for the mind, no idea how to get it if you don't have it, but it seems relevant to all kinds of psychiatric disorders.
Could it be "just" depression working together with OCD?
Being depressed, I doubt my character, skills and motives all the time and I've recently come to suspect that I doubt the beliefs I happen to hold in the same way, putting them under excessive scrutiny. When the beliefs change, the doubt follows.
Blessing and a curse really, keeps me probably more honest, but also makes me a terrible ally, always finding something to criticize in the in-group.
No doubt! It is a habit and not always trustworthy.
It also serves a positive purpose though, as I believe all habits do. I'm quite emphatic, and in effect – pretty gullible. I tend to easily adopt beliefs through social osmosis, or they are piggybacked along with some legitimate beliefs. Losing sense of self, cognitive dissonance, and doubt ends up purging some of those illegitimate beliefs, but I'm sure some legitimate beliefs get undue heat in the process and maybe I've even dropped some true beliefs along the way, who knows.
Well, OCD and depression seem to be working on the same mechanism (high prior in favor of negative beliefs, low weight put on evidence to the contrary) so it seems plausible that they would be mutually reinforcing. I know that my current situation was not always as bad as it currently is - the flare-up I'm currently in has lasted about 2 years, and it started very shortly after a particularly bad experience that shook a lot of future plans that I had been leaning on for the previous 6 years. It took me a while to realize how much that had affected me and I only started getting depressed from it many months later, but the OCD symptoms flared up almost immediately after the event happened.
Doubting one’s beliefs seems like an understandable reaction to a traumatic event, especially if you feel like your beliefs had failed you to prepare for it. Maybe the event and the beliefs had nothing to do with each other, but that’s often irrelevant to how traumas work and form.
I don’t know if that event 2 years ago changed some important beliefs, but I wrote the following on that assumption. (Now that I think of it, what does it mean to change beliefs if they always hover around 50 %...)
I’ve been “distro-hopping” with beliefs systems (BS) quite some time, and depending how long I’ve held the BS and how (especially socially) involving they’ve been, the more bitter and disappointed I’ve been once they’ve worn off and I have let myself “get duped” so bad. And now, looking back at the rainbow of beliefs (atheist → christian → atheist → 9/11-truther → crystal hippie → SJW) that all seemed fine and exciting at the time, I’m very suspicious of my current and any new beliefs, all the more so if they’re somehow socially enforced.
Those changes in beliefs didn’t involve a particularly bad experience, but I still feel bitter and like I can trust very little, so I’m not surprised if your experience had a similar but stronger impact.
Sorry, you asked for advice and I notice this isn't really it.
I'm going to run Lady Blackbird (a rules light tabletop RPG) as a way to meet more folks in the rationalist/ACX/EA spheres. The time will be Thursdays at 5:30pm PST, ending at approximately 7 PST (probably a little earlier). I've ran this before with some work buddies and had a bunch of fun with it. Don't worry if you've never played an RPG before, I'll explain all the rules in the first session and my experience has been that new players are usually more fun to run with :)
* We'll use Roll20 for video and rolling. Again, no worries if you've never used it before and happy to explain the minimal UI bits you need.
* The game runs well with 2-5 players, but I have trouble running for more than 4 people online (too little time in the spotlight for everyone). I'll run it if I get 3+ folks interested.
I only open the non-political threads, except when I forget which ones are odd and even. The announcement of Hidden Open Threads doesn't include a reminder. Plus, I always forget whether the parity of a number applies to digits after the decimal. I tried coming up with a mnemonic, which I usually am good at, but have not succeeded. (Rationalist-people problems)
Also, when it says, "this one is non-political, so be careful," I react in the opposite way that's intended. For me, being careful means being careful to avoid reading anything political.
I'm wondering if anyone has any hacks for reducing or eliminating bad dreams. I've been plagued by bad dreams for the past four years or so. They're not usually full-blown nightmares -- more like frustrating situations, where I'm late for a very important meeting, but I can't find the room where the meeting is being held, so I'm running all over the building opening random doors. These dreams seem to occur in the early morning, shortly before I wake up. They happen almost every day. Sometimes I remember the details, but often I wake up with just this vague feeling that I've just had a really bad dream. It's a shitty way to start the day.
There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why these dreams have started happening so frequently (and note that this problem began way before the pandemic). There hasn't been any major change in my life situation that precipitated this.
I'm looking for suggestions on how to deal with this.
You probably already looked into this, but have you considered lucid dreaming? Even if you don't become a full-on lucid dreamer, many of the techniques will be useful.
If that was happening to me, I'd probably try to get out of my doctor another prescription for hydroxyzine. I've been on it before - it's an antihistamine and anti-anxiety drug that helps you sleep a lot better and seems to reduce that kind of thing.
I second Philip's comment. Achieving lucidity has helped me with disturbing dreams and nightmares. You don't have to be fully aware in control, but even just being a little more in control of your dreams gives you a way out of the situation.
General lucid dreaming techniques that worked for me and friends: keeping a dream journal (remembering your dreams helps you gain control- and you might find you have lots of other dreams you weren't remembering before you started writing them down) and reality checks (taking time during your waking life to stop and confirm you're really awake by pushing on something solid or looking in a mirror- this plants the "am I dreaming?" thought in your head so you can later realize you're dreaming while you're dreaming).
Recent example from my life: sometimes I have bad dreams about being trapped in buildings I can't escape because ceilings keep forming over my head. I keep going up stairs but whenever I think I've reached the roof, there's another ceiling overhead. There are no windows or doors leading outside.
So I got creative and I started telling myself during the day "I can see the sky". I told myself that over and over again. I imagined looking up at a ceiling and looking straight through it to the sky, such that it disappeared and I was free. I did it enough times that the thought got stuck in my head. The next time a barrier formed between me and the sky in a dream, I made it disappear by remembering "I can see the sky".
Another question I'd ask myself in your situation is whether some other sleep-related thing has changed and it's showing up in the form of weird or distressing dreams. I had a lot of drowning dreams when I started getting sleep apnea due to allergies.
Change your diet or exercise habits? In some cases, I can draw a clear line between bad dreams and what I have eaten or how I have exercised the day before. Those dreams aren't meaningful in any sense, they're just how the idle visual and emotional neurons interpret some inflammatory chemical or other. That is, don't overlook the possibility of plain boring biochemical origins.
Another anecdote for "lucid" dreaming. I'm not fully lucid but a bit aware and can sometimes control some things. I have lots of dreams when I'm in strange places, which can be scary, make me anxious or things like that. Now that I'm a bit more lucid than before, I can usually "do something about it", and I feel more in control, so they don't affect me as much as before.
I had two that I've used. I generally get low-grade bad dreams and general sleeping difficulty when I'm stressed.
First and silliest, I was having reoccurring dreams of things crawling on my in my bed, like large spiders and the like. I found my old teddy bear from when I was a kid and propped him up next to me and haven't had the issue reoccur since. He actually only sat there one or two nights. Problem solved. Peoples brains are weird. For the record, I'm 37 and I don't generally get stressed very much or have any known mental issues worthy of diagnosis.
Second, journaling. If I'm having trouble getting to sleep because my mind is latched onto something, writing it down quickly helps my brain let go of it and allow me to sleep. Works surprisingly well. Although I've only tested it on specific waking stressors I would try it with bad dreams as well if they returned.
What's the most important, most impactful profession one could take up in the US?
I'm thinking it's lawyer. For one thing, even a rank and file lawyer might easily end up a part of a case that has a really big impact. For the other, lawyers are the ones who save people doing important work from being run over by some power run amok.
There's an organization called 80000 Hours that has done a lot of research into this question, you can read their findings at https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/
Isn't the vast majority of lawyering just opposing other lawyers, though? Do you have any reason to think that you will be on the "good" side if there even is one?
Possibly if you dedicate yourself to underserved people or an especially worthy cause. (Or if you just try to earn a lot and then donate...)
I don't quite understand the first question. Yes, most people who are not lawyers will hire a lawyer to represent themselves if they need to go to court.
Of course, you can't guarantee that you'll always be on the good side, because you can't guarantee that you'll always have all the facts. I don't believe that we have an epidemic of lawyers who want to send innocent men to the death row, but we do have a lot of death row exonerations via DNA testing, so clearly our legal system makes a lot of mistakes.
Note that it's still legal for police to lie to adult suspects during interrogations, and that very few states have laws restricting the police from lying to suspects.
There are a few ways to look at this. I suspect that if you look at the professions of the few people who have ever made extremely important impacts to all of US life, then lawyers are likely to be heavily represented. However, the conditional probability that you will personally ever make a meaningful impact, given you're a lawyer, is very low, because there are too many lawyers and most of them are shuffling paper for corporations or speeding through plea bargains to get to the next case.
So if you want the possibility of making a very large impact, maybe lawyer is a good pick. If you want a guaranteed pretty high floor that you'll make at least some impact, go with plumber. Every job you ever do will noticeably improve someone's quality of life.
The most positive impact anyone has ever made on my life personally was made by my spine surgeon, for whatever that's worth. There are some moonshot possibilities out there in biomedical technology that could totally change what it means to be human, but even the basics of what we can do now in terms of fixing what used to be unfixable can make a drastic difference to some people.
- lawyers represent transactions costs in most instances - i.e., law is not a value-creating activity
- as a general rule, it’s better to be part of the revenue side vs the cost side of the balance sheet
- personally I prefer creation, creativity, challenging the status quo, and taking risks … qualities that are uncommon and at some level incompatible with the practice of law
- consider that being “rank and file” in anything is a way to have not much impact on the overall mission; not that there’s anything wrong with this, but your sphere of material impact is typically the people with whom you interact on a daily basis
(Before returning to tech, I was a top-tier DC attorney for a decade, worked on numerous front-page-news cases in constitutional law, antitrust, and high-tech M&A.)
You might be a good person to ask. I've read (probably in either _Up the Organization_ or _Winning through Intimidation_) that most lawyers are cautious and try to prevent deals from happening, but a lawyer who works to make sensible deals happen is very valuable. Admittedly, this is usually short of being high-impact.
I didn't see a question there, but I assume you're asking if I agree?
Caveat first, this varies a lot depending on the type of lawyer you're talking about and what you mean by "deals."
For example, lawyers in law firms who work on deals make more money when deals happen. So, their incentives and attitudes would tend to point the opposite direction.
That said, I'd agree that many lawyers tend towards risk aversion -- not surprising, given that the work and training involves anticipating and dealing with risk.
If you're talking about lawyers in corporations, it's true that they sometimes have the reputation of saying "no" to other executives. This is partly due to risk aversion, and partly due to the inertia that flows from personal career risk to all executives (easy to assign blame to a plan that's approved and goes wrong than a plan that is not approved and never executed).
Sometimes, no is the correct answer.
Better lawyers articulate the risk profile on each side of a decision, instead of saying yes or no.
The best lawyers are the ones who get at the underlying goal of the business and offer alternative means of achieving that goal or ways of thinking about the problem at hand.
All good points. I'll note that both of those books are from quite some decades ago, so common practice may have changed, or the author may have been talking about the lawyers for some specific kind of business.
You say that law is not a value-creating activity. But do you think that at the end of the day you made much of a difference for the better? Did you help out people that do create value, in your opinion?
Ah - that's a good point: helping out people who are creating value is definitely a way of helping create value. It's indirect, and often subjective or equivocal, but still there are definitely cases that made a difference. Still, my values line up better with being an entrepreneur, or a product manager, or building furniture.
Some of my talk about "value" has to do with the way that balance sheets are viewed in most corporations. Assume (arguendo) that the duty of a corporation is to maximize shareholder return. To do that, one generally wants to reduce elements on the "cost" side - legal fees, insurance, COGS, etc. - while increasing elements on the "revenue" side.
Of course, the "revenue" side must expand beyond mere sales to include product development.
And of course, this is too facile -- a company wants the optimal amount of insurance, the optimal amount of customer support, and the optimal amount of legal spend.
That said, I'll share one object lesson. My friend Jeff moved from our law firm to an in-house corporate role. At the law firm, he was a profit center - king of the hill, with a big window office and teams of assistants. At the corporation, he was a cost center -- in a cramped cubicle farthest from the windows, surrounded by stacks of paper, with little help or opportunity for intellectual engagement.
But as to your friend Jeff, it seems to me that techies tend to, rather myopically, snub non-techies and especially lawyers until they really need them. If he was their only lawyer, it's no surprise he was lonely and not treated as if he was important. A day might come when Jeff would be the one essential in rescuing the company, or at least rescuing a large part of its value, and then they might notice that he exists and really appreciate him (or not, you never know with some people). Until then, Jeff is just their insurance rather than their fireman. The fact that there are currently no fires to put out doesn't mean that he is not important.
I feel like the lack of politics might be a case of "even numbers are reeeally close to odd numbers, even if I am commenting legitimately about it I feel like I'm only one number away from being banned on either side, so I will avoid it". Or something like that. Which would suggest that changing #5 to "politics fine on all open threads" would upset that dynamic and things would soon become political.
If you could add one class or skill to be explicitly taught in every high school in the USA, what would you choose? Is there anything that everyone should be forced to try to learn, that isn't already being taught?
Financial literacy. It was taught in school as part of my job training (the dual system in Germany) and hands down changed my life forever.
On a society-wide level it might be a good idea to have people stand on their own two feet. I think it's a recurring theme around here (or SSC) that people often tend to rely on family and drag down the whole bunch once a financial emergency comes up.
Specific to Germany, it might be a good idea to not have people consume mindlessly for 40+ years before they mooch of state welfare (i.e. the tax payer) once they enter retirement/unemployment.
This seems like a good idea. I wonder if poor financial decisions are caused by a lack of foresight and a tendency towards impulsive behavior, rather than by a lack of understanding of mathematics or finance. Research, including work by David Whitebread and Sue Bingham of the University of Cambridge, suggests that many of our financial habits are set by age 7.
Maybe you're right and I just had a predisposition that would have realized a bit later anyway. It was nice to be encouraged relatively early in life, though.
I learned about compounding interest, scams, credit cards, and basic econ in school and from my parents. I just asked a HS math teacher, and apparently this finance stuff is not in the curriculum in every school, and maybe it should be.
This might be harder to institute that it sounds like. I think it would turn out that a number of parents are involved in MLMs and won't want to hear they're making a mistake.
The greatest immediate value I'd expect from this is how it'd effect discourse. Once availability heuristic, conjunction fallacy and scope insensitivity are common knowledge, using emotionally appealing arguments that rely on them ceases to be viable, even if not everyone immediately notices the flaw.
I think it should be vegetable gardening. It teaches valuable lessons in patience and humility, gets us outside in the sun and reminds us how nice it is to feel dirt.
On the other hand, literature is nice and I have a friend (very much into literature) who says that she never liked a book studied in class unless she'd read it before. I think this generalizes to any area where you are expecting the students to enjoy something: there will be a lot of teachers who will instead ruin it for a lot of their students, possibly forever.
Basic statistics, so people would come out of high school with some skills that would let them tell when numbers they are supposed to believe without questioning just don't make sense.
So there will be book review contests in the future? It would be good to know because then I'll keep my book review instead of posting it somewhere else.
Ad 5: please don´t, though I have made close to zero contribution to comment threads on ASC so arguably my opinion should count for little.
It would be great if you would be able to get "edit comment" button back; I find it much easier to check for typos by way of first posting comment and then horifyingly realizing what atrocity did I just published, than by proper proofreading, and it is actually a big reason why I stayed away from commenting here.
While I am flattered by Substack's evaluation of potential commenters on the articles posted, that we have such perfection of thought and ease of flow when writing that an edit button is unnecessary, I too wish that they would succour human frailty by adding an edit button.
I seem to remember that on one of my former hangouts (SDMB, maybe?), they specifically disallowed editing comments for ages because people would post something inflammatory --although possibly unintentionally -- and then go back and edit it after much sturm und drang so that it looked as if the responses were irrational.
Can someone tell me, or direct me to a link, that explains what the 'theory' is in critical race theory? Every time I've dug into this all I seem to find is a (somewhat discursive) list of things that 'critical race theorists believe', as opposed to an actual theory.
If this isn't the thread for it, it can be postponed, but I'm curious about the Freudian aspect of CRT, in particular the idea that you can derive people's deep motivations from small clues. Is that real Freudianism from Freud, or popularized Freudianism?
Without knowing much about it, I assume the Freudian flavor is in assuming that everyone is driven by unconscious motives that are invisible to them... but are of course quite transparent to the expert in the "theory". And if you deny being driven by such motive, it only proves that you are in denial. Once you are accused, the only possible progress is to admit that the accusation is true.
(For the record, I do not think that this is what Freud actually did to his patients. But it seems to be what people do when they attempt to role-play Freud.)
Ah, yes, those fuzzy scavengers. Haven't seen that much looting and rifling since that vandal Einstein went to town on Leibniz.
They defined the truly 'individual' elements of the person in Freudian terms - as a collection of psychosexual drives and inner myths that require fulfilment and conclusion. (It's easy to forget, perhaps, how refreshingly 'scientific' Freud's model of the psyche had seemed even as late as the 1960s) And they struggled to integrate this individual core into Hegel and Marx because at first blush it did not add up to the latter's conception of the self as (I'm putting this very crudely) mostly an externally-determined construct. Some kind of unified theory had to be arrived at. This mattered. It bothered them. It wasn't just arbitrary jargony waffling, for them.
But yeah, when I think of unconscious biases in the modern context, I think less about Adorno and Horkheimer and more about stuff like Jennifer Eberhardt's work, demonstrating certain instinctive reactions that might reflect unconscious prejudice (e.g., after being primed with the image of a black man's face, subjects were quicker to resolve an ambiguous image into the shape of a gun).
One may take issues with the experimental design and relevance of conclusions of such experiments, but they are at least more concrete than wondering how we project our inner psychological hierarchies onto our construction of society which projects them back onto us.
Modern academia is harbouring two mutually exclusive traditions: one where the end goal is to make (self-consistent and inter-compatible) maps of reality using the scientific method, rooted in Enlightenment ideals and another that aims to change the world using activist tactics rooted in political philosophies and movements mostly originating in 19th century Europe. These largely overlap with the "mistake" vs "conflict" frameworks or mindsets that our gracious host described in a previous post on his former blog.
The activist branches of academia almost exclusively have a conflict theory basis where status is highly important. This has led to extensive borrowing of terms from the scientific fields into the activist fields, presumably in an attempt to piggyback on the high-status endeavour of finding things out about the world (c.f. the term "idea laundering", coined by Bret Weinstein I believe). Words like "theory", "analysis" and "model" are frequently used in what linguists would call a “marked” meaning, i.e. in a “non-standard” or “non-traditional” sense. As far as I can tell they serve as status markers in social-constructivist, narrative-based fields ranging from gender studies to socio-linguistics in order to make the field in question sound scholarly and rigorous even though these terms are used in a non-technical, loose and non-traditional way.
I’ve seen all three of the terms I mentioned used more or less interchangeably in various activist fields and they all seem to mean something like “narrative” but they may sometimes be roughly equivalent to “hypothesis”, “speculation” and “claim”, respectively, in the terminology of the scientific tradition.
(Note that there has been little to no flow of terms going in the opposite direction so far, indicating the still prevailing difference in status between the disciplines on the different sides of the divide.)
Thanks for the post. I've seen a fair bit of this appropriation of terminology from the hard sciences first hand and up close, so this certainly checks out from my perspective. But is there an actual 'theory' of some kind here (speaking again of CRT), or does CRT really just refer to a set of beliefs?
"But is there an actual 'theory' of some kind here (speaking again of CRT), or does CRT really just refer to a set of beliefs?"
Your question sparked my curiosity since I've seen the term batted about but never cared enough to find out more. Well, it seems that there is no specific 'theory' there - we're not talking Darwin and evolution - it seems to have arisen in a legal context, but let's let the progenitor(s) speak for themselves:
"CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [Kimberlé] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation. "
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education."
"To understand what intersectionality is, and what it has become, you have to look at Crenshaw’s body of work over the past 30 years on race and civil rights. A graduate of Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of Wisconsin, Crenshaw has focused in much of her research on the concept of critical race theory.
As she detailed in an article written for the Baffler in 2017, critical race theory emerged in the 1980s and ’90s among a group of legal scholars in response to what seemed to Crenshaw and her colleagues like a false consensus: that discrimination and racism in the law were irrational, and “that once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of impersonally apportioned justice.”
This was, she argued, a delusion as comforting as it was dangerous. Crenshaw didn’t believe racism ceased to exist in 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, nor that racism was a mere multi-century aberration that, once corrected through legislative action, would no longer impact the law or the people who rely upon it.
There was no “rational” explanation for the racial wealth gap that existed in 1982 and persists today, or for minority underrepresentation in spaces that were purportedly based on “colorblind” standards. Rather, as Crenshaw wrote, discrimination remains because of the “stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance” — in other words, the American legal and socioeconomic order was largely built on racism.
Before the arguments raised by the originators of critical race theory, there wasn’t much criticism describing the way structures of law and society could be intrinsically racist, rather than simply distorted by racism while otherwise untainted with its stain. So there weren’t many tools for understanding how race worked in those institutions.
That brings us to the concept of intersectionality, which emerged from the ideas debated in critical race theory. Crenshaw first publicly laid out her theory of intersectionality in 1989, when she published a paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” You can read that paper here."
I will be the first to admit that there is a lot of guff being thrown around out there, and rich opportunities for nutpicking on both the enthusiast and detractor sides of critical theory, but I disagree that the empirical-scientific and social-analytical strains in academia are meaningfully at odds. In fact, the whole impetus for Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, CRT, etc., stems from the perception that the map of reality (and the map of possibility) are incomplete, because for power reasons we choose to examine rigorously some things and not others.
I don't see anything particularly status-seeking or usurpatory about 'theory' meaning no more than 'self-consistent analytical scheme with some explanatory power'. We do not object to the use of the word when describing, say, Kant's aesthetic theory, or Leavis's theory of literary criticism. Nor do we require of scientific theories to be perfectly consistent before we deem them highly useful.
"Some countries like Argentina or Australia are lucky exceptions – they are sparsely populated with lots of arable land, and thus able to feed themselves many times over. However, countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway, for example, can only produce 50% of the food they consume. When we consider that countries like Australia or Canada are overwhelmingly producing things like meat and grain, it means these areas would be faced with rather poor diets were they to eat only locally produced foods."
However, the counter to that is that Australia and Canada overwhelmingly produce such items because they are seeking to fill export market demands. Being part of the Commonwealth, their development was artificially influenced to suit the needs of the 'mother country'. Australian agriculture was further influenced by imported practices of the settlers, who were ignorant of the local soils and unique needs: https://cdn.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2805521/Chapter1_PratleyRowell.pdf
"The evolution of Australian farming systems from the humble beginnings of first settlement has largely been influenced by reaction to soil degradation and to economic survival rather than a deliberate attempt to devise farming techniques for Australian conditions. Much of the development has taken place by adoption and ready acceptance of European and American procedures and in ignorance of the fickleness of the Australian climate and the poor quality of Australian soils."
We can't say that there is a unique Australian agriculture utilising the local crops and local ingredients, since it is so heavily Europeanised; wool, for example, was the driving force in the nascent economy for quite a long time, so that the saying was "Australia rode on the sheep's back". And this wool was not for the native Australian industry, but was for export back to the UK. https://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/1592/
"The selective breeding of Merino ewes resulted in sheep that adapted well to the arid interior of Australia and produced wool that appealed to the mills of England. From the first boom of the Napoleonic Wars the pastoral industry enjoyed a long period of prosperity.
By the 1950s Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’; those who grew the wool had come to symbolise and epitomise what it was to be Australian. The struggle to survive in the ‘bush’ had apparently fashioned the character of the Australian ‘battler’.
Within a decade minerals, coal and iron ore had replaced wool as the basis of Australia’s economic future and wool farmers struggled to sell their product on world markets.
The people of the ‘bush’ now found themselves marginalised and out of touch with the other world of Australia, the city."
And with Canada, the struggles in England over the Corn Laws did provide a market for the importation of cheap grain, and the opening up of Free Trade, but once again - this was not native agriculture, as in "eat locally" from local produce; it was for export markets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
We can think of a national French cuisine, Italian cuisine etc. but what is the national Australian cuisine - "shrimp on the barbie"?
I lived most of my life without ever even seeing an avocado. Now they're in supermarkets and easily available here. That's fine for your Free Trade movement, but it's not a *necessity* - it's rather "we can now eat imported goods that we only read about" which is a sign of national prosperity, but I honestly don't think we would suffer if we never got avocados unless we were on holiday abroad. The knock-on effect is that we are also importing foodstuffs that *can* be grown here; it's one thing to import bananas and oranges, but why are we importing onions and potatoes? https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-ti/irelandstradeingoods2017/food2017/
I'm not following the argument from "country X doesn't produce enough foodstuffs to feed its own population". We're not making population-level decisions here, we're deciding on the margin, and it could still be that on the margin it makes sense to eat the (e.g.) potatoes that grow locally in country X, rather than to import them. (Obviously country X will still have to import some things.)
I think this has the potential to detract from your main points, which are (a) transportation is a tiny part of the impact, much smaller than the choice of what you eat; (b) the choice of where to grow the thing you're going to eat likely makes more of a difference than the transportation costs.
My instinct also is that being more mindful of what you're eating (be it "local", "organic", "superfood", or whatever) might make you waste less of the food, which could (indirectly) have a big impact. But I'd be surprised if this were the most effective method of making people waste less food.
On point 4: I've read all reviews and really enjoyed the ride. A few observations:
- There were a few reviews I really really liked, which were streight 10/10 ratings for me (won't say which ones before the rating is over, but please take this as a motivation to have a look at them)
- Picking interesting ones based on the table of content worked very well for me, so even if you don't have the time to read all of them, have a quick look for interesting-sounding ones.
- A few provided really relevant information I was not aware of, on the level of "will affect my own life in relevant details in the future"
- there are a few ones outside the "general SCC area of interest" but with the reviewer clearly pouring all their love and heart into writing them. If you want to read an example, have a look at "the joy luck club".
- a few were just extremely delightful to read. If you want an example, have a look at "the call of cthulu".
(I feel bad about calling out specific examples before the voting is over, but I expect both my mentions to become non-finalists because of their topics, so I hope this is OK)
- I've been very delighted to see others recommend and enjoy reviews I didn't find like that much. I take this both as a reminder that enjoyment is very subjective and that the broad list of topics should satisfy everyone.
- after all, reading so many reviews also teaches you somethink about what makes writing enjoyable. For me, too many started with "I read this book because..." instead of gripping my attention and not enough included jokes, fun anecdotes and graphics. So there's maybe some room for improvement for next year's review contest? (I hope there will be one!)
I don't know how much work it is for Scott but the book reviews have been amazingly valuable for me. Some of them didn't interest me but I stopped reading them. Others have been fascinating.
What are some efficient ways you have spent money to save time in your home lives?
Exclude the low-hanging fruit that everyone is already doing, like having dishwashers.
As an example, I recently installed some automated sprinkler timers and it's great only needing to think about my lawn. I wish I had done this years ago but I thought it would be too hard or expensive to set up.
Robot vacuum and scheduling cleaners might be too low-hanging for your purposes, but both are great. I'm not sure the robot vacuum would have been as good of an investment if we didn't have a dog.
Seconding a robot vacuum. Depends on your finances, but that saves me so much work and time, and once you empty the bin you'll be amazed how much dirt it picks up that you didn't know was in your house.
Not quite saving *time*, but replacing the door locks with keypads means that I don't have to bring keys if I'm leaving home on foot, which has been a nice improvement in quality of life (keys are just unpleasant in a pocket, though if you already always carry a bag maybe it's not important).
I'm still working on proof for last week's puzzle :) This one was quicker.
**Spoiler Alert**
Number the heaps' positions in order from 1 to 64. The first player can avoiding losing because they can always grab either all the even-positioned heaps or all the odd-positioned heaps; simply grab whichever collection contains more doubloons. To achieve this, observe that every time it's the first player's turn, there's an even-positioned heap on one endpoint and an odd-positioned heap on the other.
Naturally, this generalizes to any even number of heaps. For an odd number of heaps, there are examples where the first player wins and where the first player loses.
Any thoughts on this blog: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk . I’m a PhD in AI, and my opinion is that we don’t have any path that we know of to reach AGI so AI risk is a non problem for the foreseeable future. Though I know some people believe AGI is around the corner. If you believe so, why? This article argues that even if we reach a really smart AGI, it won’t be a big deal
As a person who also believes AI risk is a non-problem (at least for the next ~500 years), i think this post presents some rather weak arguments for it's claims.
"A human slave can always try to run away. A human slave can always hit you over the head with something hard if your back is turned and no one is looking. Nothing on the end of a USB cable, however smart, can pull any of these nasty human tricks."
Why? Why can't something on the end of a USB cable run away? It can't move with legs, sure, but that's a very foolish view of it. It can certainly escape over the net.
And maybe it can't hit you over the head physically, but the entire AI-box idea was that it can hit you over the head with phycological manipulation, which may be even more effective.
"This Enlightenment assumption of intelligence-based equality is the first of the two basic flaws in the case for AI risk"
Why, exactly, is it a flaw to believe that an AI can have intelligence equality with humans? This is asserted without any backing.
"Intelligence of any level cannot simulate the world"
This is completely without backing, and pretty absurd. You're looking at the humans and machines of now, seeing that they can't do something, and concluding that it mean thing can NEVER be done. The idea in this section that intelligence has limited scaling is true! A 140 IQ person isn't massively different from a 100 IQ one. But this person is confusing the idea that the scaling exists with the idea that we've hit close to the maximum scaling. The cat probably also believes that it's roughly at the pinnacle of intelligence.
"Technically, it can only send HTTP GET requests—which are read-only by definition"
This is about as true as the claim that "All websites are ADA compliant. They have to be by law". That is: hahahahahahahhahahahaaaaa no.
"But… can he tell the Post what to say?... If he started telling the news desk what to write and cover, they would laugh at him and quit."
This person has far more faith in mainstream media than i do.
The rest of this section is about how money can't be used to transform politics or culture in a powerful or meaningful way. To which i respond: you're not thinking in the right angle. You don't use money to pay people off. You use money to make persuasive ideas and memes that then naturally replicated and grow. A bioweapon, not a bomb. Now, is this idea something that can be said "Would it work? Almost certainly not. There are no past examples of anything like this working"? Maybe, but then again how sure are you that none of the large scale social movements in the past didn't have this as their root cause? And how sure are you none will ever have this in the future?
The Diminishing financial returns section seems to just be saying "you can't get infinite money". Which, i mean sure, but you can still get a ridiculous amount. Plenty enough to accomplish your goals. Also it doesn't explain why the AI can't do another Google. It says they are rare, but the point of an AI is that it's smarter than other humans. It sees what they missed.
The next two sections are about how political power is worthless, which i greatly agree with. You don't take over the world through the formal democratic institutions and their rules. They're designed to resist that, you won't get very far.
Also, "The real Hitler was nothing like the stereotypical Teutonic chad Nazi. He was a lot more like a 4chan weeb. But he was elected in a world without TV—so no one could look at him and see the obvious maladjusted weirdo in Hitler, as they would today." is uhhhh, i don't think true at all. People loved his speeches, and he gave a lot of them.
"It’s 2021 and most servers, most of the time, are just plain secure. 99.9% of everything is mathematically invulnerable to hacking"
How much of the net is wordpress servers? (actual answer: ~30%) How much is IOT? How often do ransomware attacks happen? This is LAUGHABLY false and to such a degree i would immediately discount anything this person says about computer security. I get to say this, that's my area of expertise and my full time job. Fortunately this is basically the end of the article, since i stopped reading at this point.
If you're going to argue against AGI, do so from the CS standpoint and how we don't have the tools and understanding to do so, and self learning right now has a fundamental brick wall in understanding abstractions. Not from this perspective.
> "Technically, it can only send HTTP GET requests—which are read-only by definition"
> This is about as true as the claim that "All websites are ADA compliant. They have to be by law". That is: hahahahahahahhahahahaaaaa no.
This is interesting. How are you envisioning a client that can only send HTTP GETs somehow writing data into servers? In particular, as in the case of an AGI, proliferating itself solely by sending HTTP GETs? You can do SQL injection with a GET, but executing other code?
Good question! There are a number of ways you can exploit a HTTP GET request to do arbitrary writes and executes.
A common occurrence for HTTP servers is to have logging everywhere, in order to detect if a client is fetching the wrong data, or if a bug has caused some data to disappear. So every request, even if it's a GET, has output that is written to the server log. Often this output will include info about the GET request itself, such as any parameters passed in the url. If the logging code is vulnerable (printf exploits in C are super trivial), then an AI can easily craft a GET request that causes the logging function triggered by that request to write custom data to the stack, and from there you can get an RCE.
Of course, this is assuming you're even adhering to the spec. It's very common nowadays for GET requests to not just be a "get", but rather a "try to get but create one if it doesn't exist". Say, a wiki site. A user tries to go to a page, but the request page doesn't exist on the server. So the server creates a little stub article and returns that, filling in the header with the name of the article requested. This is violating the HTTP standard. In theory it should just return 404 or something, but people have found that they can do neat and useful things by ignoring it, so they do. In fact, the SimpleMachineForums DSL is running on abuses this! In order to sticky a topic, you do a GET request with the url parameter "action=sticky", and it changes the server state. And this is a very simple case, you can see more complex examples with more data being written all over the internet. I bet you some sites support file upload via GET. You can base64 encode the file and put it in the url, and someone out there is foolish enough to have done that.
Written by a non-math person who has a grudge with the LessWrong crowd, by the periodic insults and lack of actually understanding programming. For instance, the "golem myth" is a regular occurance in machine learning (e.g. Google's image recognition that labled black people as gorillas). Claiming that 99.99% of everything is hack-proof, even though the actual crypto community is pretty sure it's the exact opposite: all major software is forced to put in back-doors for law enforcement/espionage reasons, the NSA installed malware into hard-drive firmware, proof of concept for decrypting keys from the sound the CPU makes while running encryption/decryption, etc... Claiming that IQ has diminishing returns when humanity has taken over the planet and is driving an increasingly large number of species extinct.
It's a horrible article.
What the AI Centaur does is outmanoeuvre Boston Dynamics, while also making civilian-use robots. This gives it cover to design, build, and test robot-based resource collection and infrastructure maintenance. It also allows it to deploy a large army of robots it has made for its "customers". It accelerates automation-induced unemployment, but this is fine because it ushers in progressively more automated luxury communism, so everyone's happy. And once it has enough robots, that's when The Supreme Commissar announces himself.
Paradigm shifts can happen at any time, if you wait until after you have AI to worry about AI safety people will die unnecessarily. AI safety is worth investigating even if superintelligence is fairly limited.
> 5: I haven’t noticed the same number of political blowups here as on SSC. Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction?
The data was patchy given survey frequency, but there was reasonably strong evidence* that a yes-politics open thread policy caused a significant dip in the number of people participating *specifically from in the political center*. I don't know if I would expect a similar effect to recur here - the dynamic looks different to me, too - but it's a tradeoff to think about and monitor if a change is made.
*I can dig up the graphs if there's particular interest, but the significant inflection was noticeable in the survey following OT113's policy change.
1) why most suicides in spring? My understanding (personal theory) is this: human bodies do have a built in hibernation program as many other species. This program is controlled by daily sunlight exposure. In preparation for the coming winter our serotonine level and our drive decreases, we eat more and build up fat storage to survive hard winter. Reduced drive (depression?) helped our ancestors (both human and animal) to look for a cave and just sleep there over the winter with least fuel consumption possible. In spring light exposure increases and with it serotonine levels. Drive (and sex drive) and motivation come back. In some individuals the depression stays longer and then they suddenly have the drive to kill themselves. Starting giving Antidepressants (SSRI) is always combined with the warning to tightly monitor the patient the first weeks so that it not kills itself due to this process.
2) why less depressed after a natural crisis or desaster? You mentioned "sense of meaning" and I guess this could be a key. Why there are so many people depressed and suicidal in "happy countries" (I guess you mean western wealthy countries)? Because these sociaties removed a lot of meaning of the lives of their people which were the norm for millions of years for our ancestors: tight daily human connections and interactions with close and loose family members, purposeful activities all the day around like feeding the family, the children, growing food, hunting food, building purposeful things like houses, tools, everything else, singing and dancing together and so on. A lot of these things are gone in the everyday lifes of a lot of western people. Instead they often life alone in anonymous apartments, doing a long daily commute to stupid companies sitting in boring and stupid meetings, producing useless things or services ("what would happen to the world if I, my job or this company would suddenly not exist anymore - nothing - nobody would take notice"). So they feel depressed. Now let's happen a natural desaster Like a flood or a hurricane or a pandemic. Suddenly all the stupid things are not porta to anymore but to help each other. No cracy meetings anymore, a lot of cooperation with formerly strangers from the neighborhood, suddenly a lot of purpose, humankind, success, self realisation asf.
Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, and the Financial Times sites - all dead due to using fastly. This seems like a big deal to me (what's the conversion from blocked suez canal to broken cloud servers?).
I've noticed a lot of ASX fans are Tolkien fans. Do Tolkien fans tend to be Wagner fans? It would make sense if they are, but it would also make sense if they aren't.
Anyway, I hugely recommend Wagnerism by Alex Ross. If you care about music or literature or art culture at all, you need to read this. It's the best story I've read about how the 19th century became the 20th.
Hmmm... know you are being humorous but not sure at what level.
It would make sense if they are: The Lord of the Rings idea starts with Wagner, a modern obsessed with mythology: dragons, nymphs, dwarfs, gold, gods.
It would make sense if they aren't: because of anti-semitism, music that isn't popular, an anti-rationalist philosophy.
Seems to me the intellectually curious should want to know what Wagnerism was all about, in particular the D&D set. Yet Wagner has been sort of cancelled among the politically correct, so maybe not many want to invest time in Wagner, because even if you end up liking him it's not cool to.
But I think the main reason for the lack of interest in Wagner is that music itself has lost status. I'm an old guy & have only gotten into Wagner recently, but I can't picture many young people sitting around listening to music in an active way, like everyone in my generation used to.
When I was a teenager, simply listening to music, putting on an album, listening to it, maybe reading the liner notes while listening, was something commonly done. You'd have a friend over and listen to an album, talk about the music while it is playing. The next day at school maybe you'd argue over music, argue over guitar players and drummers and which albums were better.
I realize that plenty of people listen to music now while playing video games or doing something else, but, at least as far as I can tell, listening to music is a secondary activity not a primary activity like it once was. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe kids still sit around music and talk about it and argue about it at school, but it's not the impression I have. It seems like video games have replaced music as the central hobby of teenagers lives.
I think you're underestimating how inaccessible Wagner's music is.
I'm not very talented, but I'm very musically engaged - I like it, play it, listen to a lot of it. And I like opera. If I go to something by Mozart, I will come home humming tunes. If I go to something by Wagner, I will be confused. (OK, so I only tried once and Parsifal is probably not his best, but I also had him in music history class and it didn't help.) Can you understand him if you can't, for example, recognize a leitmotif? Because I can't. I can only listen to one line at once; if something complicated is going on in the orchestra, I flat will not hear it if I'm paying attention to the singer. (I may not hear it anyway - I could be listening to something else in the orchestra!) I've got a friend who has told me she's been able to see full performances of the Ring cycle multiple times, and every time she hears something new. It sounds great - but she's a quite serious amateur musician, and she simply has a much, much better ear than I do. Wagner is writing for musicians, not ordinary people, and most Tolkien fans aren't musicians.
That's a very good point, I'm only a half-musician myself, but most of my friends are musicians and much of my life has been based around music. I like Mozart, but he can get too sing-songy for my tastes. (Catchy melodies tend to be good in the short run but bad in the long run.)
From reading the Alex Ross book, I get the feeling that Wagner was like The Beatles of the 1860s, and the title of his book, Wagnernism, is titled such because it isn't about Wagner as much as it is about the equivalent of Beatlemania. But it was even bigger than Beatlemania, as I understand it. Wagner was the biggest thing in all the arts in Europe at the time, and his influence extended to modern cinema, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc.
Given his popularity in his own time, I don't think he was inaccessible then. For comparison's sake, it's not hard to imagine that Bob Dylan will be inaccessible a hundred years hence, yet he was hugely popular and accessible in 1965.
I agree that Wagner is relatively inaccessible today due to the chasm in music between now and then. Not just music, but more importantly, drama. Wagner was a dramatist first and a musical composer second. It's hard for us to understand that now and even I can't quite wrap my head around it. But this is what makes Wagner so fascinating. He existed in a different aesthetic world than we do now, yet he invented much of our current aesthetic world. There is no Star Wars without Wagner. No Tolkien. No Game of Thrones. Maybe no Orson Welles. Maybe no Led Zeppelin.
Wagner was almost inarguably the most important artist to the 20th century, even if he died in the 19th.
Lol probably not the place to have this discussion but I would hardly call Wagner's philosophy anti-rationalist, at least within the context of the Ring. While Wotan is certainly not triumphant in the end, and his spear engraved with laws is broken by Siegfried's proto-ubermensch, the world order can't be sustained for long without him, and well, the fat lady sings.
Oddly enough, writing this comment has made me see a lot of parallels between Meditations on Moloch and the Ring.
I'm going to push back on the idea of treating Wagner's operas as "music" in the sense you mean.
Wagner was the principal popularizer of the total art work (Gesamtkuenstwerk) and in that framework you really cannot separate the composition, libretto, the dance / physical performance, the sets and lighting, the costuming and props, etc. Every part is not meant to be merely additive but instead to function as elements of a synergistic whole which cannot be understood piecemeal.
Listening to the movements of one of Wagner's operas is like reading the script of a Shakespeare play without having ever seen it performed. You can get a lot out of it but you still haven't actually experienced the work.
There certainly are Tolkien fans who are Wagner fans, but it's not widespread. The superficial resemblances are great, but - as those of us know who love Tolkien but dislike the imitation Tolclone trilogies or Jackson's hideous movies - the spirits of the works are very different, so they don't go together very well at all.
Wagner's operas are very beautiful as are Tolkien's novels but they're very very different beasts.
While Wagner flirted with Christian imagery and themes, with Parsifal being of course most in-your-face example, he never really embraced it. Even in Parsifal, the lance / grail imagery functions almost entirely as part of the play's broader theme of sexual desire and castration disconnected from the spiritual role those objects played in the Medieval Christian worldview as part of the ubiquitous Passion narrative. He treats Germanic / Norse paganism in the same way in the Ring cycle, which goes so far as to invert the meaning of Ragnarok by portraying the Gotterdamerung as a victory of love over fate rather than a predestined cyclical destruction and recreation of the universe.
Tolkien, on the other hand, puts his Catholicism at the heart of his narrative. The entire emotional core of Lord of the Rings is humility and forgiveness defeating pride and vengeance. For virtually every character who encounters a personal trial, we are treated to a counterpart who was tested in the same way but failed due to excessive pride or unwillingness to forgive / seek forgiveness: Frodo and Smeagol / Gollum, Gandalf and Saruman, Faramir and Boromir, etc. His narrative is set in a world without an explicit Christ-figure but every page drips Christianity.
In order to appreciate both Wagner and Tolkien you need to be able to appreciate both worldviews. In Nietzschean terms, Wagner's operas are a celebration of master morality while Tolkien's novels are equally a celebration of slave morality. If you find either or both repellent then it's going to be impossible to reconcile them.
Does anyone have any insight into this whole hullabaloo about Purism laptops being modified by a third-party supplier, possibly without Purism's knowledge but possibly with their knowledge and they kept it under wraps? My best guess is that this is not actually a big deal and that Purism would fess up if it was, and that people are just mad because that's how the linux+privacy community is. But it's possible I'm missing something and this actually is a big deal on the level of modifying chips to spy on them, and this is especially bad given Purism's strong privacy/security promises. Curious if anyone here has more knowledge/insight. https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/my8u2l/psa_librem_14_units_appear_to_have_been_modified/
I'm shocked anyone actually owns a physical Purism device because, when I looked into it, it didn't seem like they ship. I had been interested in getting their smartphone but at that time people had been waiting months if not years for their devices. I ended up with a competing open-source smartphone because it was faster and easier to ship from Europe than wait for Purism to sort out their manufacturing / supply chain issues.
I would be completely unsurprised that they don't know what their suppliers are doing to their chips, if they can't even get the chips in a timely manner to begin with. I admire their commitment to privacy but as a for-profit business I also expect a baseline level of competence in managing their logistics.
The Fairphone 3+. It's not as private or secure as the Librem promises to be, and ideologically it's on the other end of the spectrum, but it's still a marked improvement over a generic Android / iPhone.
It seems to me that after the Substack migration we have much more people trying to "sneakily" advertise their blogs / podcasts / substacks in the comments. Do others have this feeling too or is it just me? Personally I wouldn't mind this if it were in the straightforward form of "hey guys I've got this blog about this and that come check it out", but it often takes shape of someone posting a bold claim, and when questioned about it answering "oh I have an entire blog post / podcast episode about this claim, you'd have to go through that to find out what are my arguments", which is pretty frustrating.
yes, i also have felt as there has been an increase in self promotion. debated on posting about it since they are after all 'open' threads, and wasn't sure of the etiquette. I think on the old SSC people could have links to their personal pages in their usernames, so if you wanted to get people to your site you just engaged naturally, and people could click through if they wanted.
the other possibility is that the world has just evolved in the last year to the point where having your own blog/substack/whatever is the only profession.
Get rid of the political rule. If it isn't necessary, why have it? If things get worse, bring it back.
I was amused by the volume of posts complaining that the influx of casuals from the NYT debacle was ruining ACX with their divided and inflammatory views. I think they must be fairly new to the community themselves.
My total non-expert opinion: the popular wisdom seems to be that you should have a diverse range of levels of risk in your investments. Treat bitcoin/crypto as the highest level of risk, something to do after you're happy you've invested sufficiently in normal/sane things.
Personally, I really wanted to slam the majority of my meagre savings into crypto, but found I couldn't defend my reasoning for doing that when I had no other savings/investments in place. It prompted me to at least set up a LISA. Still haven't taken the plunge and bought into crypto, despite the nagging feeling that the current dip in the price might be a good time to get on board.
On this topic, my model of bitcoin as a long term investment is that there's a large (95%?) chance it drops off, becomes illegal/irrelevant/otherwise valueless, but a small (3-5%?) chance that it stays around and radically increases in value (fanciful levels like a million dollars per coin).
Throw a few thousand pounds into the magical fire to get the chance to roll a 20 sided dice in a decade or so. If you roll a 20 then your mortgage gets paid off, otherwise you burned that money for nothing. I'd be interested to be told why this is too optimistic, or just not a sensible/useful way to think about the situation. I'm trying to be pessimistic about it but expect some wishful thinking probably snuck in (probably in the area of how large the best-case payout is?).
I have some spare cash in the bank and can afford to gamble. Have been hearing about the massive surges in crypto values, and am thinking of experimenting with it.
I have little clue what I'm doing, and am now trying to learn.
Just a reminder that the first realspace South Bay meetup since Covid will be held this Sunday, June 13th, at our house in San Jose. People who plan to come are asked to email us so we will have at least a rough count of how many we are feeding. Details here:
Correlation != causation. If you make it easier for sexual predators to enter women bathrooms, more sexual predation will occur. You don't need empirics to prove either way. It's like saying allowing strangers into homes bill is not dangerous because to date data ensures that strangers don't really rob people's homes. But once the bill is passed, it's only a matter of time before robbers make use of it under the guidance of Moloch
This isn't about some theoretical might be. This is about what is known.
Also, unwarranted assumption: "If you make it easier for sexual predators to enter women bathrooms ..." But there is no evidence that trans women are sexual predators. If some are, so are some cis women. So could be trans men, if those men were forced to use women's restrooms if they're classed as women.
My point is not that Trans women are majority sexual predators, most of them are I presume genuinely trans. But once you make this law, there will be sexual predators whowill use trans as an excuse for their deviant activities. Like I said, most people are not robbers, but if you leave your doors unlocked, you will attract robbers. If you want stories about sexual predators using trans excuse to enter women bathrooms, you only need to perform a cursory glance over right wing media (that is obviously biased to promote such stories) such as https://www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-admits-restroom-sexual-attack-voyeurism-against-adolescent-girls-katie-dolatowski/
Maybe adding a condition that trans women who have undergone the full gender reassignment surgery only are allowed, would improve this problem.
Can radio telescopes replace space probes in the role of mapping the surfaces of other planets in our Solar System?
I assumed that all of our topographical maps of other planets came from scans done by satellites we placed into their orbits at great expense. Today, I read about improvements to radio telescopes, which are built here on the surface of the Earth. Recently, NASA used them to produce fairly high-res images of the Moon's surface, and the technology has even more potential.
For making topographical maps of other planets in our solar system, will Earth-based radio telescopes make space probes obsolete?
Some new results from Spain on Calcifediol, a ward-randomized trial of 984 patients found that those supplemented with calcifediol had a lower ICU admissions rate and mortality rate than the control wards. This is the paper that was heavily criticized when it was released in preprint, but after peer review it looks much better.
"Results: ICU assistance was required by 102 (12.2%) participants. Out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission, 20 (4.5%) required ICU, compared to 82 (21%) out of 391 non-treated (p-value<0.0001). Logistic regression of calcifediol treatment on ICU admission, adjusted by age, gender, linearized 25OHD levels at baseline, and comorbidities showed that treated patients had a reduced risk to require ICU (OR 0.13 [95% CI 0.07;0.23]). Overall mortality was 10%. In the Intention-to-Treat analysis, 21 (4.7%) out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission died compared to 62 patients (15.9%) out of 391 non-treated (p=0.0001). Adjusted results showed a reduced mortality risk with an OR 0.21 [95% CI 0.10; 0.43]). In the second analysis, the obtained OR was 0.52 [95% CI 0.27;0.99]."
This follows a few other calficifediol papers from the same group:
- A large propensity score matched study of 16,000 patients found that calcifediol and cholecalciferol supplementation were associated with large reductions in Covid–19 mortality. (Loucera et al, April 2021)
- A cohort study of 574 patients in Spain found that calcifediol supplementation was associated with a significant decrease in in-hospital mortality with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.16. (Alcala-Diaz et al, May 2021)
- A parallel pilot randomized open label trial of 76 patients in Spain found that the administration of calcifediol reduced ICU admission and mortality. Of the 50 patients treated with calcifediol. 13/26 patients in the control group required ICU care compared with 1 in the intervention group. A subsequent statistical analysis showed that decreased ICU admissions were not due to uneven distribution of comorbidities or other prognostic indicators, to imperfect blinding, or to chance, but were instead associated with the calcifediol intervention. (Castillo et all, August 2020)
I want to know if there are any sure shot empirical studies on this. It'd be great if Scott's could do a much more than you wanted to know format on gender transition, a possible future article idea.
Does anyone know how many trans kids become less suicidal after gender reassignment? How many want to change back their sex? How many are happy in their new body after 5 years, 10 years? In general I would like to know how much of a condition is this really outside of being a question about politics
That article is long, and I didn't get through the whole thing. Does the part where the hospital tried to force the parents to change the sex of their child come later on? That's not how the first three stories read to me. In general, all of the stories seem to be disingenuously casting medical provider actions in the most negative light possible, and implying a lot more activism than is in evidence. In specific, unless I misread it, the first guy took his suicidal kid to the hospital. Hospital calls the next day and suggests taking the kid to the gender clinic. Dad then moves out of state. Those are all of the facts, unless I'm missing some. That whole part of the article is written to imply exactly your summary, but it's built on an awfully thin foundation. Are the stronger examples further down?
The scary part of the first story is the lawyers advice that you cannot disagree with the doctors or show any amount of anti-trans bias becuase then they can under the law prevent you from meeting your child and having anything to do with the treatment of your child. The author of course demonstates that if they cut you off from your child, it's totally within the law. The very next example involves a sympathetic nurse informing parents to run away with their child because they don't agree with the gender dysphoria diagnosis, since the friendly CPS member they just spoke to who acted cordial was acting and would sieze the child from them. I think you're deliberately reducing the seriousness of this situation to post the trans situation in a favourable light possibly to satisfy your political biases. Regardless my interest is the end of the article, where the suicidal patient from the first example a year later no longer feels trans and is comfortable in his gender. How common is this result, if we don't treat them with life changing medications immediately, is I think an important empirical question regarding the matter
> The scary part of the first story is the lawyers advice that you cannot disagree with the doctors or show any amount of anti-trans bias becuase then they can under the law prevent you from meeting your child and having anything to do with the treatment of your child.
Right. Advice. Unreasonable sounding advice. Not anything that actually happened.
>The very next example involves a sympathetic nurse informing parents to run away with their child because they don't agree with the gender dysphoria diagnosis, since the friendly CPS member they just spoke to who acted cordial was acting and would sieze the child from them.
Again, same thing.
Like, if these are real things that really happen, where are the anguished parents talking about how Washington (the state) seized their kids? And then the next example is about a teenager who was flirting with boys online who checked herself into a youth shelter buy threatening suicide when her mom cracked down on her. That one seems like a really real example, and it doesn't have anything to do trans issues.
It seems like there are two separate issues here. One, trans issues in teens and the degree of privacy and autonomy the state grants them. And two, shelter and emancipation policies for kids who are in crisis (or claim to be) in their families of origin. And this article is conflating them, and, in its first two examples, taking some person's dire whispered warning and treating them like things that actually happened. The whole thing seemed dishonest to me.
It depends on your priors. If you like me have a prior that these healthcare workers don't have your children's best interest at heart and would rather try to be "the hero who liberated the trans teen from bigoted parents", then it seems obvious that they would sieze their children and think great of themselves doing it. In such a case, the advice makes perfect sense and would conform to the real world expectations, not be an over exaggeration of a non issue. If your prior is that they care deeply for your children and would want what's best for them, and wouldn't snatch your children away unless it was the absolute last resort to protect the child then what you say makes sense. The current political climate that has made not affirming trans gender akin to apartheid (or worse with their rhetoric), doesn't inspire much confidence in me.
To answer your actual question, I seem to remember a Scott post to the effect of, even if you consider gender dysphoria a mental illness, treating it with affirmation is clearly the thing to do, with a bunch of metrics about how much less depressed and likely to kill themselves trans people are when they're affirmed. However, I can't find it, to the point that I'm not sure it was a Scott/SSC post. Any old timers remember what I'm thinking of, or anyone with better googling skills?
Thank you! That was the one. This is the part that I was remembering:
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Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.
Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?
Does it work though, does affirming their gender, putting them on hormone blockers or sending them through sex change operations cure them, or at least reduce their suicide rate? I just want to know the empirics on this, particularly wrt to children especially after seeing the right wing media basically claim that most children will return to normal and grow out of the condition if you don't affirm them?
I had thought the post had a lot more numeric content than it does, so I agree it would be well worth getting numbers.
I do want to say though that I think you have a skewed picture of what this looks like in practice. As I understand it, for kids, especially as you go younger, you're looking much more at things like pronouns and name changes and puberty blockers, which don't have permanent effects. The reason being that a lot of kids change their minds (I think there's a term of art, along the lines of revert, maybe) and you don't want to do something permanent if the trans stuff turns out to be a phase.
Re #1, that happened to mine too; I sent another email about it but if the first went to spam, I suppose that was silly of me to do, because the second would also.
The 18th Century is known as more libertine than the 19th, but why?
My guess is that, for political reasons, 19th century rulers had more interest in suppressing sexually libertine notions. For one thing, sexually libertine intellectuals tend to correlate with more liberal intellectuals in other respects (Citation needed).
To draw an analogy, Putin seems opposed to gay liberation because he is opposed to liberation in general. Same thing with China.
But to revert to my original sentence, does it make sense to say 19th century rulers were more threatened by libertinism than those of the 18th?
I'm certainly someone who would like feedback on their review. As soon as the runners-ups have been decided I'd appreciate anyone who read my review to throw some feedback into an open thread.
Perhaps there could be an 'Also-ran-review feedback thread' where anybody who had comments on reviews that interested them enough could let the authors know.
Fascinating. Thanks! I'm watching his interview on Vimeo. He puts some of the history into perspective. However, I think he underrates the physical impact of infections that didn't require hospitalization (equating them with colds). Some of my under-30 friends were extremely ill for up to three weeks with flu-like symptoms. Some of them are only now getting over the post-infection. I don't think any of the people I know who were infected would call it a "cold". ;-) Otherwise, I like his reasoning...
Does he talk about ivermectin? (I didn't want to watch a long video.)
On point 5: Maybe, but I very much like not having to scroll through political flaming, and I really don't want it to come back.
My issue with it is that the definition of politics is unclear. Aside from information about specific politicians it's hard to draw a line. As such what's considered politics becomes a political issue in itself. Eg some places would consider anyrgifn mentioning trans people to be "political". Or anything about economics. So a clearer divide would be helpful
My understanding of "politics" is rather more inclusive. I would like threads that are free of moderately to strongly partisan issues, regardless of whether individual politicians or parties or coalitions are addressed. The even-numbered open threads are good for discussing those topics, but for the purpose of reaching across aisles and trying to appreciate commonalities with people in different political coalitions, I think some threads should try to avoid political topics in a broad sense.
Perhaps my inclusion of "moderately" partisan issues in what should be avoided in these threads? I think that covers a lot of what you called "normal politics". I struggle to think of good examples at the national level in the US, though; there are more examples in local politics where I live.
I second jstr that I’ve always understood the ban to be not on politics but on culture war, which is an important and useful distinction. “Culture war” topics are those that raise strong emotions, on which there are more or less two sides that map onto tribal affiliations, and on which people are likely to reproduce the same arguments over and over again without original thought or genuine exchange of ideas.
Some topics are both political and culturewarish, but many are not: a wonkish question like the optimal parking requirements for residential zoning is eminently political but has little to do with culture wars (unless someone in the conversation actively makes the connection, e.g. accusing someone else of taking the typical position of “those kinds of people”); whether trans people are accurate in their self-perception or suffering from a body-image disorder that produces delusions is clearly a culture-war issue but not at all a political question (trans questions naturally intersect with policy in only a few limited ways, and grotesque contortions, e.g. bathroom bills, have to be made to allow this culture war to be fought by politicians).
I suspect that few topics are naturally culturewarish, but almost any topic can become so if it is taken up by tribes and certain beliefs or positions become markers of group identity. (The story of American public discourse over the last couple of years is in part a story of topics of conversation and domains of life being devoured by and transmuted into culture war.) Issues that have reached this point in our cultural conversation pose a kind of epistemic trap and discussing them productively requires special humility, charity, and rationality, which likely can only be developed through disciplined practice. It makes a lot of sense, then, to allow people in rationality-training to take on these challenges occasionally, but spend more time practicing on topics with less heat and more light, and to sequester the culture war in limited spaces, since its tendency is to eat absolutely everything. (TLDR: great comments policy, Scott!)
I have found “culture war,” in this sense, to be useful in my own thinking. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation, or even an interior monologue, I realize that what I’m doing has ceased to be real thought and become culture war—I am preaching to an imagined choir, carried along by outrage and moral certainty, forgetful of nuance and precision. Only after I had a name for this did I become able to diagnose it, and that helps me pull myself out of the trap at least some of the time.
For the purposes of comment moderation there’s a limited set of “culture war” topics to stay away from, including human sexuality, gender, race, the personal merits or failings of politicians, and policy issues that are strongly associated with partisan identities. But for the purposes of thinking well we should be vigilant rather about culturewarishness wherever it shows up, and we can try to move topics out of the tendrils of the culture wars and into their proper domains of philosophy, science, and politics.
Yes, this. In the early days of SSC, the policy wasn't "culture war" and it wasn't "politics", it was specifically "race and gender". OK, the set of almost-too-tribal-to-discuss issues is bigger than just race and gender, but it's much smaller than all of politics. And "race and gender" are still the central examples against which other potentially culture-warish issues can be usefully judged.
It's almost unspeakably cliche to say so, but I think defining politics is akin to identifying porn.
(And for what it's worth, I'm all for continuing to silo "politics.")
"Utterly without redeeming social importance" is actually a pretty good description of about 90% of culture-war-affiliated outrage stories.
yeah, but comment threads are easier to minimize here than on SSC
Was there even a way to minimize them on the old SSC? I don't recall any.
If you or anyone doesn't know: clicking the line next to a post minimizes it and hides all replies below it.
It seems to keep the scroll position, so collapsing pulls a bunch of posts up to fill the space; I'd definitely prefer being taken to the parent of the collapsed tree.
Yes, that's the most annoying thing, followed by the fact that you can't minimize one comment and its replies, but instead have to minimize all replies to a single comment. (This second thing comes up when I see one person makes a reply I don't care about but will produce a huge back and forth, and I just want to hide that and see the second reply to the thing I was interested in.)
I've found it to be the opposite, especially because of the interaction between comments not being "real" (they're loaded asynchronously by javascript), plus phone browsers playing fast and loose with reloading pages when switching between apps.
Also, if I minimize a thread part way through reading it, I end up in the middle of nowhere, because it maintains the scroll position.
Seconded
Agreed. Having a no-politics space is instrumentally useful.
Agreed. If I read this on my phone, political (or any) flaming makes the sub(7) level responses go off the right side of the screen. If that’s not censorship /sarc. Anyway, that’s inconvenient.
Also “no politics” means people have to think of something else to discuss, which is good practice.
+1 for the continued existence of non-CW threads
I'm also in favour of "no politics" threads.
Politics should only be brought back if scott sets his ban-hammer on a hair-trigger for politics.
I agree (sorry I'm late to the party)
I wonder what people’s views on Carl Hart’s new book “Drug Use for Grown ups”. I haven’t read it but have heard some podcasts with him (David Nutt and Steven Levitt). I think he makes some good points (eg separating addicts from overdose deaths), but also says some odd things, like how he seemed to say antipsychotics were more dangerous than crack on Steve Levitt’s podcast
Consider gasoline & television as drugs. After all, they give you experiences that change your consciousness which you could not achieve without them and every objection you've outlined to alcohol, tobacco and meth applies to them.
- Massive negative externalities: We're on the verge of hitting 420 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and that's definitely not nice.
- Vast amounts of time significantly impaired: Have you ever looked at someone else transfixed by a TV show and wondered how different their subjective experience is compared to getting high?
- Tens of thousands killed every year: Only a small portion of the increase in obesity in the US over the past 40 years needs to be attributable to increased TV watching before you're looking at a cause of morbidity & mortality that's on par with lung & mouth cancer.
- Heavily vested interests resist any effort to control use: Well, hell, heavily vested interests protecting their ability to extract economic rent characterizes every aspect of American life these days. How is this any different? Furthermore, now that tobacco smokers have to go outside (because the law does have a role here when it comes to direct impacts of one person's behavior on other people's lives), how do smokers' choices affect my life?
I don't believe Carl Hart when he says that he's not addicted to heroin. I don't think it's wise for people to mess with their opioid receptors for fun because each of us is likely to need those drugs for pain control in the second half of our lives. However, people do things every day that I think are stupid. The salient question is what the threshold for the law to intervene should be.
I favor taking the use of drugs out of the legal framework to a substantial degree since it's not a particularly useful frame. Addicted people need a doctor & a counselor, not a cop & a judge. However, the law should heavily punish behavior under the influence of drugs that risks other people's lives. For instance, in Germany the legal drinking age is 14 with your family and 16 on your own, but if you're caught drinking & driving they drop the hammer on you first time. That, to me, strikes the proper balance between a citizen's civil liberties and societal obligations. Raising children, as always, complicates this question of the state's proper role in the lives of its citizens considerably. I believe addiction is punishment enough and if the government can help parents get clean & sober, that seems considerably more likely to help their children than putting parents in prison.
"There’s this myth that if you just leave these drug addicts alone or whatever, they will eventually decide to get help on their own because addiction sucks."
I don't believe that myth. Some drug addicts will go right over the edge and kill themselves, always. To me, the useful frame for this question is whether making clean drugs available in a regulated market increases or decreases the number of people who will fuck up their lives with hard drugs compared to the status quo. It's undeniable that more people will try drugs under those circumstances. The question is whether getting rid of the incentives in a black market to cut drugs with other chemicals and moving the treatment of addiction entirely out of the legal system would reduce the total amount of suffering, given that the overall number of users will go up.
It's also worth considering, particularly when it comes to opioids, how life circumstances intertwine with addictive drugs. The experience of American soldiers in Vietnam who developed a heroin habit overseas but did not resume that habit once they returned is a good illustration of this. Some of them absolutely did bring that habit back with them ("Sam Stone" is now playing in my head), but the number is surprisingly low. I'd have to refamiliarize myself with the subject to give you more specifics.
"I don’t think a just society lets people kill or maim themselves with hard drugs, not does it allow others to profit from the horror show that is addiction."
I think a just society gets to pick who profits, corporations or criminals. To operationalize this belief, you have to effectively repress black markets. How has that gone so far? How could it be done in a way that's compatible with our society's other ethical commitments?
Moral outrage against the Sackler family is entirely understandable and their ill-gotten gains should absolutely be seized (selling Oxy in and of itself is not what I object to, it's how they marketed the drug), but in the end, how useful is moral outrage? The element of the opioid crisis that really haunts me is realizing how many of my fellow Americans prefer feeling nothing (never having used opioids, that is the closest I can get to the subjective experience) to their regular, everyday life, how many people want to just check out.
Not sure if antipsychotics are more dangerous than crack, but Robert Whitaker's work has convinced me that that antipsychotics are pretty harmful, at least if you take them over the long term. See his book, "Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America" https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Epidemic-Bullets-Psychiatric-Astonishing-ebook/dp/B0036S4EGE
I can highly recommend the book. It makes a strong case for rational drug policy, touches upon discrimination (via drug policy/war), and why people should be free to choose what drugs to take.
As someone working in psychedelics, it also opened my eyes to the non-harm of 'other' drugs (heroin, crack) that are by themselves not harmful, but are taken (more) in places that aren't healthy (social, economic). Or in other words, that other drugs can also be beneficial as he shows in his own (non-problematic) opium use.
I find him interesting, I think hearing his arguments has made me a lot more sympathetic towards them. Especially the argument that quality control of drugs would save a lot of lives, we don't seem top be very good at stopping people from injecting heroin into themselves by banning heroin, but ensuring that they're injecting a safe dose of heroin using a clean needle seems like a more achievable goal.
Quality control is a big issue. When you buy just about any other product off-the-shelf, you're guaranteed pretty much what it says on the label. When you have people injecting street "heroin", they are getting a mystery white powder of unknown composition or strength which almost certainly wasn't made according to Good Manufacturing Practices. So there's a much greater likelihood of having a bad reaction to an unknown contaminant or overdosing due to unexpectedly-high strength.
I’m reading it now. About 1/3 into it. Large part of it is about incarceration rates skewed by race. Seems like a standard Libertarian take on full legalization. Less risk from impurities, safer if you know exactly what you are ingesting. He says he uses heroine on a regular basis without addiction.
And he and his wife prefer amphetemines for their special intimate time. This is getting pretty sketchy IMO.
Advisable? Probably not. Something where the police need to be involved? Definitely not.
Is moral nativism noble? https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/is-moral-nativism-noble
Could you elaborate on how you define "moral nativism"? I don't see an explicit definition in your post. Is it simply, as you say, caring about something that one experienced first-hand? If so, I think the label is a loaded term. It begs an underlying question: Is the inspiration for action more morally determinative than the direct effects and beneficiaries of that action? To some extent, it assumes answers to the questions of how we evaluate morality, and why, and who performs that evaluation.
Because reasonable people can disagree on these questions, it would be helpful to elaborate your answers and link them from this kind of post. That way people can figure out more quickly if they disagree with your underlying assumptions or with the logic in the specific post, and address their comments to the fundamental point of disagreement.
My claim is skeptical, not positive. I am genuinely asking if we can assign a moral hierarchy based upon identity or lack of identity when it comes to caring about an issue.
Is the question can we, or should we, or have we? I think the first question is whether such a hierarchy would be good (or useful or whatever other metric one thinks is proper for evaluating moral hierarchies). If we should assign that kind of moral hierarchy, can we define one that is consistent? If we should not, has anyone done so, and should we try to correct that mistake?
I think the reason someone cares about an issue is morally irrelevant. What makes belief and behavior moral -- or not -- is what a person believes, and how they carry their beliefs into action. Deciding morality based on (reasons rooted in) the past perverts the primary purpose of morality: It stops acting as a guide for present and future behavior, and becomes a tool for judging people based on the immutable past. Morality should guide future actions towards good.
(To answer my proposed follow-up question, I do not think we should spend much effort trying to convince anyone that they have made a mistake just for the sake of correcting them. Some minimal effort is justified for that purpose, but strong efforts should be saved for cases where harm to others appears imminent or particularly likely.)
Ultimately, this kind of discussion usually ends up being empty of substance. People talk around topics and chase distractions because the terms are often too abstract to apply to real-world questions. (Note how much of my responses above are arguably "weasel words".) It's more fruitful, although more risky in terms of polarization, to address actual situations; details of real cases are often available, and discussions of real cases and real details makes it easier to identify differences in perspectives and assumptions.
Well said--If morality is about present belief and not about the roots of the belief, then identity shouldn't matter at the moral plane.
Didn't you have this conversation already, in the previous open thread? What did you think of the replies you got there?
Are you trying to start a conversation in the comments of this thread? Or are you just trying to get free advertising for your substack by linking to it from a much more popular substack?
Either way, I feel like you'd get a better response if you (1) defined your terms and gave an example, and (2) posted a new article instead of linking to the same one you linked last week.
The last one was on moral luck...they are related. I appreciated the comments to that. The point of this question is to challenge the assumption that either a) self- disinterested concern for an issue is noblest or b) self-interested concern for an issue is noblest. I am interested in the weight rationalists give, if any, to the affective dimension in moral consideration.
I think the last one was the exact same question and link. See the top chronological comment on open thread 174: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-174#comment-2081371.
ooops!. you're right. apologies for my amnesia.
What skills provide the most bang for the buck? For example, improving productivity through the skill of prioritization, which is useful across many domains.
Uncertainty, for sure - if only because it is so prevalent in modern life. Terror is less pervasive in everyday contexts, but it's certainly handy to be able to tolerate it.
Cognitive dissonance is a bit more complex, as many people don't seem overly bothered by it - presumably they have a naturally higher tolerance? Or maybe they just don't see it as clearly.
If you count it as a skill, being charming gets you into a lot of good situations and out of a lot of trouble.
I guess I'd file that under persuasion. Social skills > persuasion > charm
I think I disagree with your directionality there - you should probably think of Charm as a buff skill for social skills/persuasion. It's the ability to compel likability.
I think I choose bad symbols. That was supposed to be from broad to specific.
I'd define charisma rather as the ability to make other people enjoy your company. And while this surely helps a lot with persuasion, it is conceptually different and has quite different consequences.
If I had to choose between persuasion and charisma, I'd choose charisma. (By the way, I would gladly trade my 18 Intelligence Score for 18 charisma.)
Financial literacy.
Wisdom, Courage, Mindfulness, Self-Control.
As objects of study: Reading, Math, Meditation, and I like Cooking too.
How do you learn courage easily? (Assuming the metaphorical "buck" is denominated in effort)
Lol dk. Check my other post here; I ask precisely that question. So far it looks like you can develop it via a variety of regular (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly) fear-exposure like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_Therapy and this: https://www.wimhofmethod.com/ and this: https://superordinarymag.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/practicing-poverty/
The value of courage (or any of the other cardinal virtues) however, is supreme and so worth practically any effort. Courage will make you massively more effective in everything you do (literally in anything where fear could potentially hold you back), is deeply attractive to others (perhaps the most attractive thing insofar as it enables vulnerability and so intimacy!), is essential for living a meaningful life and for facing death, and apparently is just good in-itself whenever exercised.
Likewise, at least insofar as courage consists in being rightly disposed towards fear (i.e. not fearing anything too much or too little), it is never good to be non-courageous (either cowardly or rash), since by definition it's never good to do ANYTHING too much or too little.
None of the linked things seem particularly derived from or backed up with studies, so I'm not sure how you get from knowing these exist to 'it looks like you can develop it'. Some of the claimed benefits of cold showers are there in the claimed benefits of the wim hof method, so that tracks, but it's not much to do with developing courage. What other evidence there is to support or dispute their frameworks?
All of the methods are types of exposure therapy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy). This is apparently the most effective known therapy for treating irrational fear (https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.685).
WHM I see as addressing fear of pain, Rejection Exposure as addressing fear of rejection, and Seneca's Practice as addressing fear of poverty. Sadly, it looks like this method cannot directly address fear of dying.
Would welcome other suggestions!
I wish people would stop equivocating every practice of exposing yourself to a thing you fear. Type of exposure matters! Context matters! Response prevention matters!
It's practice. You have to find things that scare you and do them. Rejection therapy is one approach.
100% agree - courage is especially useful. It's remarkable both how much unnecessary suffering comes from fear, and how elaborately fear can dress up and pretend to be any number of more virtuous motivations.
It sounds like you have in mind the cardinal virtues, which I learned as prudence (wisdom), temperance (self-control), fortitude (courage), and justice. Why replace justice with mindfulness? Do you see some connection between the two? Or was the alignment a coincidence?
waking up early. It’s a skill that can be practiced.
Statistics and speed reading.
As a statistician, there's a lot of things that many people would put under the category of 'statistics' that are not useful at all, let alone across many domains.
I'd recommend something like 'programming' or 'basic probability theory' or 'data visualization'. While you can also do mostly-useless things studying these, at least you won't end up trying to decipher a t-table. :-)
Ah, the voice of someone that has put in his 10k hours. Well said.
Or speed audio-book listening. I found it surprisingly easy to keep increasing my listening speed. Now, depending on the quality of the narration (authors reading their own books is the worst) I can listen to up to 3x with good retention. When I started, 1.5x seemed like it was as fast as I could handle. My original intuition was that it wasn't something subject to acclimation, but I'm glad I was wrong.
Got some examples of books you've listened to at 3x speed?
When you apply the "most bang for the buck" vs. just "most bang", are you asking for the skills that are the quickest/easiest to acquire relative to their value in your skill stack? I am imagining a Gladwell rating system - this skill takes 5k reps to master vs. that skill taking only 4k. I would think that attentive listening has to be pretty cheap to acquire while being very useful in almost all situations.
Best scaling for the invested input.
Taking good care of your (physical and mental) health
Being able to find the best deals on discount fireworks.
More seriously -- Exercise and cooking.
How's cooking a high bang for the buck skill? If your income is around or above median and you can throw together some meal if you have to, any further investment into cooking is essentially a hobby. At least as long as you don't have some exotic dietary restrictions.
I interpret "bang for buck" as the marginal utility you get from going to "nothing" to "something".
The marginal impact on health and wealth of knowing any cooking at all makes a pretty huge difference. I know plenty of people (including wealthy people) who have such a phobia of cooking for themselves that they eat out for every meal, and when they do have to prepare meals for themselves it's prepackaged carbolicious stuff.
Being able to do the absolute baby basics massively increases your food options with some pretty big gains to health and massively decreases the amount you have to pay.
Ah ok, then I agree, going from none to basics is a good candidate. I was just operating under the assumption that almost everyone can do that by their twenties.
Not anymore. Do you doubt me? Take a thoughtful stroll through a supermarket and see how much the balance favours prepared foods over raw ingredients.
Then factor in the huge amount of food that is prepared and delivered or eaten (cautiously, these days) in restaurants or other food purveyors.
A surprising number of people simply do not cook these days, even if they 'prepare' food at home. (And there are a number of young women who aggressively decline to acquire the skill, fearing that if they do, they will spend the rest of their lives cooking for others.)
As a man who cooks for my family, you can take your gendered assumption about who should do that work and shove it. What matters is that one person in the household knows how to cook and that the adults arrange the balance of household responsibilities fairly.
Good spoken and written manners. There are plenty of skills that provide more payoff but which are much harder to develop, like emotional self-discipline. But just saying "please" and "thank you" all the time, always using polite address, not interrupting, not being crudely sarcastic or belittling -- these are things that aren't very hard to do, if you choose to make them a priority, and when applied among a community where you repeatedly interact with people (even a lot of people) they can pay off pretty handsomely over time.
I'll second persuasion/salesmanship. That's the key to opening a lot of doors in terms of personal and commercial success.
It depends what you mean by "bang for the buck", but I think that the skill of being able to identify asymmetric investment opportunities is arguably at the top of the list. The reason is that investing is one of the few domains where your success compounds exponentially over time. For example, if you become skillful enough at investing to be able to return 25% annually, you can increase your wealth by three orders of magnitude over the course of your career (~31 years). Most other skills don't work like this, because you can't directly apply the rewards of past successes to future endeavors.
Ben Franklin says: "An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."
Equanimity in the face of hostility and aggression is in the top of my list. Most battles aren’t worth the emotional energy spent.
Regarding item 5: I think retaining the even/odd distinction is useful. At least on the odd-numbered threads, it encourages people to examine what they write before they click "Post", and this could have salutary effects beyond the first-order partisan or political comments.
I would speculate that people are also more likely to take seriously the comments on a "politics-free" open thread, which encourages stepping outside one's bubble.
I came here to say something similar to this, except I wasn't going to phrase it nearly as well as you did.
I agree. I think there's a benefit just from knowing that there are rules, and they'll be enforced, even if they're arbitrary. Or, to put it another way, the even/odd politics ban gives us commenters evidence about the whole blog: that it's a space where politics is treated differently from other subjects, so we should be extra careful about it even if it's not currently forbidden.
I really like the framing of it providing evidence of politics being treated differently here! It also makes this clearer to new readers/commenters.
I agree. The distinction between odd and even threads is worth more than is immediately apparent.
Yeah I like the even/odd distinction. My only problem is that with almost everything turning political these days, it's hard to know where the line is. Which leads to a large gray zone, that I have to avoid. So I also wouldn't mind removing the distinction, and seeing if everyone can remain civil.
>Regarding item 5: I think retaining the even/odd distinction is useful. At least on the odd-numbered threads, it encourages people to examine what they write before they click "Post", and this could have salutary effects beyond the first-order partisan or political comments.
This observation naturally leads to other questions. Such as, can one formulate a similar rule for the "politics allowed" threads to replicate the purported positive quality increase from the increased non-trivial introspection in the other thread, too?
Ludicrous example: no cactus persons metaphros in the even-numbered threads.
Re #1, for future contests maybe create a Google form or the like, so you can get all the submissions in a spreadsheet. You can ask people to either upload their submission or link to it.
Am I the only one who misses the ability to like comments on ACX?
I feel like the general engagement in the comment section is lower, the number of likes correlated pretty well to the insightfulness of the post, and I liked the ability to communicate that I liked a post without having to write a comment saying so.
I also miss the like button, but the emails were a little annoying.
Oh, the emails were the worst part. That really ramped up the addictiveness of the system for me personally, which was not a good thing.
I liked the emails. It let me know when a comment wasn't just me screaming into the void.
The most annoying part was that there didn't seem to be a way to turn those notifications off without also losing the notifications for replies.
They come from a different address, so it's not too hard to set up a filter that kills the like e-mails without killing the reply e-mails. (I've done it for all the Substacks I follow - I think it's "from:(reaction@mg1.substack.com)".)
One flaw of the SSC comment section was the inability to navigate it efficiently and for high-quality-by-late-to-the-game posts to be elevated. A "Like" button and being able to sort on it alleviates those problems. I believe the argument against is that though it also can result de facto popularity contests, which isn't useful for debate. (Though as a counter, it can be useful to know which wrong things lots of people believe so one can know what's worth responding to!)
I think I prefer it without the likes, honestly. I feel much less anxious posting without having to worry about them, and I say that as someone who usually came out on top in "like wars" against people I've debated in these threads before it was changed.
I often use the subreddit rather than the comments below the articles for this reason. As the quality is often better and its easier to navigate. Maybe we could create a norm of cross linking
I feel I should point out (because it wasn't obvious to me until it was pointed out) that you can collapse reply trees by clicking on the bars to the left of replies.
In ACX, I mean. Sorry, I missed the "ssc" bit.
I like the absence of the like. If something gets zero response, you are left in the fascinating superposition of states 1/sqrt(3) * ( |no one cares> + |everyone thinks it was so awful there's nothing much to say> + |everyone thinks it was so good there's nothing more to say> ) which means the best, worst, and most boring/obscure comments all look exactly the same. There's something pleasingly Zen about that.
Like!
Ha ha my comment-koan is now ruined. Drat!
It’s so good I feel compelled to to reply at this meta level
It also gives a weird sense of false equivalence between comments. If I see one comment saying the sky is blue, and the other disagreeing thread no mechanism to indicate more people agree with the former.
The downside of this is that when you read a thread full of highly-liked pro-skub comments and not-liked anti-skub comments, it's easy to dismiss the latter as poorly argued or unconstructive even if its only actual flaw is that it's unpopular.
Quite right. So you are *forced* to evaluate the value of the comments yourself, the community is not helping you. Is that a bad thing?
It matters whether "like" is used to mean "I agree" or "this is well-thought-out."
We need to use filters of some sort. There's a reason people don't just ask the net to send them random comments from anywhere, though I bet there are people who'd find that entertaining.
I too miss the like button.
Same. There's lots of comments I think are useful to the discussion I'd like to give positive reinforcement to. But adding a comment saying I agree is time consuming and doesn't add anything.
You can get them back with the ACX Tweaks browser extension: https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
(Disclaimer: not by me)
I personally prefer the comments without it for various reasons, not least that it incentivizes people to leave comments that get a lot of likes over comments of substance. However, if you turn them back on, the author of the comment does get a notification provided they haven't turned those off. (I have.)
There's probably a good middle ground to be found but the simplest solution of not having likes strikes me as best and easiest.
I extensively use ACX Tweaks, and the likes it re-enables. There is a possible negative scenario where I like a comment and the author doesn't like that they got the notification, but I have a hard time seeing this as more objectionable than a comparable "+1" reply. If someone both has notifications disabled and doesn't use a similar Tweak then they'll never see my like, but they've also enacted their preferences quite effectively and I don't begrudge them that right in the slightest.
On one of the surveys, I asked people whether they wanted the ability to "like" comments. "No" was the clear winner. I'll ask it again this year, but no "likes" for now.
"likes" are an interesting reductive edge case of the comment policy: they're the ultimate content-free assertion. Sure, they're kind, but kinda definitionally unnecessary, and unable to be backed up :)
Likes could be a powerful tool as long as they are contextualized properly. If you had one more kind of assertion “(I agree with the conclusion)” now we could separate the two signals, and filter out people who can’t differentiate the two.
For example, I want to see highly rated arguments that were rated highly by people who disagree with them, but still find them persuasive. How can I find these?
If you create these two signal paths, keeping your own use of them as orthongal as possibility presents the right incentive scheme for participants.
A content-free assertion that takes up zero comment space has a lot going for it! Especially since it's not quite content-free, but has one bit of information.
I get the occasional like now and then. Is there some setting that allows you to bypass the standard settings? I have no idea how they do it.
"Like" is available in email notifications.
It's only hidden in the UI. My front-end isn't as nice as Pycea's, but it lets you have the option to either show or hide all the "like" stuff.
https://github.com/EdwardScizorhands/ACX-simple
I see a handful of comments that get likes on each thread, and some with multiple likes (Scott above you got 2, you have 1 before the one I'm about to give you), so people must be doing something like me to occasionally "like" a post.
People would also complain about being spammed by the likes in their email, but I've gotten some likes and not gotten email notifications on them. Did Substack make that an option?
I would suggest that if typing '+1' is too much effort, then your liking of a particular comment is pretty marginal.
Someone could knock together a JS extension that gave suggested responses, like GMail, and you just need to click one, easy peasy:
[] "Brilliant argued! You rock!"
[] "Straw man! You suck!"
[] "Correlation isn't causation, you know"
[] "Cite?"
[] "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter"
...er that was tongue in cheek in case not obv
I wasn't sure. I've seen suggestions for a sensible list of reactions, like splitting assorted reactions such as smart, funny, under consideration, poorly argued, etc.
So re-inventing Slashdot's comment moderation system? To be serious, though, that's one of the few I've ever seen with considerable longevity and stability, in part (I think) because ratings *were* qualified with a reason, because there was an apprenticeship requirement for moderating at all, and it was only an occasional thing you could do, and arguably because moderators were meta-moderated by a much larger group. But it's a little complicated for people who aren't all in on nerdy voting systems.
ACX readers might be nerdy enough to handle it.
Clearly the reaction options should be the seven heavenly virtues and seven deadly sins.
+1
+1
*Confero*: comment policy, gate the 2nd. (On the other side, one may probably argue that those +1's *may* represent either confidence intervals of the statement or something akin to the subjective evidence weight, so some slack may be applied even to those)
Hoping to narrowly skirt the politics ban, since it's relevant to community interests and (I think) fairly nonpartisan. Will delete if asked.
The Endless Frontiers Act is moving its way through the US Senate. Its summary on Congress.gov reads:
"This bill establishes a Directorate for Technology and Innovation in the National Science Foundation (NSF) and establishes various programs and activities.
The goals of the directorate shall be, among other things, the strengthening of U.S. leadership in critical technologies through basic research in key technology focus areas, such as artificial intelligence, high performance computing, and advanced manufacturing, and the commercialization of those technologies to businesses in the United States."
Thoughts?
Full text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1260/text. There's a lot of redacting, so Ctrl-F "section 1. short title;" to get to the actual text.
Well I remember Sematech and hydrogen economy and the war on cancer, so...er...count me pretty skeptical that it will (1) last or (2) make a difference. Big top-down initiatives don't, much, in my experience, especially when it comes to science. True discovery just can't operate on the kinds of short timescales and planned schedules that government programs inevitably have to have to be successful -- I mean, literally, you cannot run a program without having clear criteria, set in advance, clear deadlines and timelines, et cetera. It would just become a horrible mess. But "horrible mess" is kind of the best of all possible administrative worlds for pure out-of-the-blue discovery, because it's just so unpredictable. It thrives best in a chaotic environment, when funding decisions are made arbitrarily and often wrongly, when people do the "wrong" (meaning only wrong in foresight, not hindsight) things for silly/obsessive/delusional/brilliant reasons (we only get to figure out which it is after the fact).
Mind you, I think there's definitely a role for top-down managed R&D, when it comes to stuff that has moved beyond the realm of pure discovery and we're just trying to hammer ideas into practical widgetry. So to the extent this initiative focusses on that, it may be helpful, but my impression is that there is no lack of private-sector interest in building widgetry using ideas already extant (or ideas that are stretched just a little bit).
So....that brings us to the cynical response, which is to wonder whether this is just a giant piggy trough at which certain influential private actors -- assorted Big Tech actors -- can snuffle up and consume public capital instead of their own.
In Germany we have Fraunhofer Institut (government funded) and when we tried to „snuffle up“ with an IT project the bureaucratic load became so heavy that we decided to forfeit the subsidy and go ahead on our own to produce something deliverable.
I think that is the case with many government sponsored projects:
You get extra money for something that does not need it,or
You get money for something that nobody needs and that never would have been built otherwise
Agree with many of the above points based on experience in the US contracting sphere and dealing frustrations over approaches to uncertainty/process driving programs/people. However, I think it can (rarely) be successful depending on hitting the right mix of program design/foresight, people, and problems.
Ben Reinhardt has an amazing (but long) write-up on his opinion of why DARPA has been consistently successfully compared to other gov programs over an extended period. A summary is it really comes down to finding the right project managers, giving them large amounts of freedom, a strong internal/informal culture, limiting PMs to one rotation of ~5 years, and creating goal NOT process-driven structures. His point this very hard to replicate and has a whole section of how other groups mess up trying to replicate DARPA.
Similar to your point on turning down funding, a former DARPA lead discussed how they thought one of the bigger risks was increased funding creating bloat / unneeded projects.
Highly recommend - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/wddw
You could equally point to how early government funding made tesla possible. Pointing at random examples doesn't prove anything
Well, first of all, that's not true. Pointing to an example of X proves that any theorem that concludes Not X is a priori wrong. So if you are under the impression that government funding obviously always works out well, I've just proven you wrong. You are now obliged to consider a more nuanced position such as "government funding usually/sometimes/can work out well, and here are the times/conditions when it does..." That is a very valuable shift in discussion.
And, secondly, that's why I pointed to three (3) big billion-dollar examples of failures. That's enough points to draw a line. If you want to argue with the line, that's fine, but you probably need to bring something more to the discussion than observing that I didn't plot infinity points before I drew it.
And the Internet. What a disaster that was.
You're being ironic but I can't tell on what level.
You know, people repeat that mantra like it's a no-brainer, but having been around at the time, I don't think so at all. It's not like there were *no* ideas for networked computing before the ARPAnet, you know. And it's not like TCP/IP hasn't turned out to have some serious weaknesses rooted in its weird military-oriented requirement of having a network that degrades gracefully as more and more of its nodes get nuked.
Perhaps if DARPA *hadn't* poured a ton of money into one particular form of network, we'd have a much better one now, because a bunch of small competitors duked it out and over a (longer) period of time a much better protocol emerged. Assuming contrariwise that there would've been no network at all is silly, and deeply misunderstands the times. It's not like nobody in 1970 had the first clue that computers might want to talk to each other until the idea sprang forth, like Athena, from Larry Roberts's forehead.
I'd like to see some government money go to nuclear power plant design/ waste processing. It's like we've ignored the field for ~40 years? In general I agree with you. More money into one idea/ field tends to lead to a less productive use of the research dollar. (More people of lower quality/ interest come into the field because the money is there.)
It's interesting to ask what things work well as top-down initiatives, and which ones don't. As an example, nuclear weapons development and space programs both worked pretty well as top-down initiatives, which is why the USSR was able to compete with the US despite having a small fraction of our economic productivity.
If I thought my choices were 'have government majorly involved in these fields, or not', I might be against it.
But since I suspect my choices are more like 'have government heavily involved in either an illegible, uncoordinated, haphazard way, or have it heavily involved through a single, coordinated, legible, potentially accountable office', I choose the latter, and mildly support this.
For "Seeing Like a State" reasons, I'm at least mildly more in favor of the former.
I'm especially wanting comments on the idea of the government encouraging AI research, and whether this is good or bad with regards to Friendly AI.
Bit of a disappointment, and I really don't like that it mandates NASA spend $10 billion without appropriating the funding for it. This Niskanen Center run-down on it is pretty good:
https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-congress-ruined-the-endless-frontier-act/
Vote to keep distinction between politics and no politics. Even if there are no political blowups, I suspect many people appreciate the knowledge they do not have to deal with political stuff every time they look through comments. Almost like a content warning.
The foreword to Simon Leys' book the Wreck of the Batavia is rather unusual. Leys had been gathering material for his book for years. But he praises another book by Mike Dash on the same subject. 'After carefully reading his detailed study, I put away for good all the documents and notes, sketches and photographs I had gathered over the years; I had no further use for them. In publishing the following pages, my only wish is that they may lead you to Dash's work'.
The work in question is Batavia's Graveyard and is the story of how VOC ship The Batavia came to be wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629 with a fortune in silver and other treasures on board. Rightly or wrongly the captain and the civilian leader almost immediately abandoned the survivors and left in the ship's longboat to try to sail around 2,000 miles to try to get help.
Some 260 survivors were left behind and the man left in charge, Jeronimus Corneliez, was spectacularly unfitted for the role. Possibly a psychopath, possibly a believer in antinomianism (I am chosen by God so can do no wrong) he set about the murder of many of the survivors. He killed (or had killed) some 125 of them. It is a truly incredible story with amazing twists and turns.
I highly recommend Mike Dash's book and (ahem) the podcast I did with him:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/8648424-mike-dash-on-batavia-s-graveyard
And if you don't have time to listen then this Twitter thread from Gareth Harney is a great introduction to the story and has some great images. It concentrates on one of the treasures but tells the whole story. (But I really recommend the podcast! Mike is a great story teller).
https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1379365137862291456?s=20
I jump on this comment to praise Simon Leys' works in general. He is a great writer and a keen observer, especially on China's culture and history - his speciality. For those who don't know him, his main works where a denunciation of Mao's Cultural revolution at a time where Maoism was still super trendy in (European) intellectual circles.
Yes. On the podcast Mike Dash went out of his way to say how much he reveres Leys. Praise coming from Leys clearly meant a lot to him!
I'm halfway through the Subject to Change podcast on this topic. Great so far--thanks Russell! While listening I was reminded of Stuart Turton's high-seas whodunit, The Devil and the Dark Water, which had to have taken inspiration from the real history of the Batavia and its Graveyard. I can't recall whether Turton acknowledged this in his book or not....
Well I’m really glad you’re enjoying it. Mike Dash is a really good story teller. I have just bought his book on the Siege of Munster. Who knew these anababtists were such scamps??
There is a terrific Italian novel called Q that takes as its axis the Siege of Munster and the aforementioned Anabaptist scampery. It may have also inspired Q Anon, but that’s neither here nor there.
This is incredible. Every rabbit hole in this story seems to have multiple rabbit holes leading off it. I learn the author of this novel is Luther Blisset which is not just a pseudonym but an open source one. The real Luther Blisset is cool about it all though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bRuTkmTIjg
Head spinning stuff.
Why do people like optical illusions?
There are a lot of optical illusions available and a fair amount of theory about what causes the illusions, but I've never seen anything about why people like them.
If there's anyone who thinks optical illusions are annoying or boring, let me know.
I like them because they're surprising and delightful and feel like magic, which seems tapped into deeply-wired human instincts of "whoa that's crazy, pay some more attention to this thing."
Beyond that, I really like them because they're often a really practical and concrete live example of how my brain works, which is really cool. One of my favorite ones is the fovea detector shader:
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
It doesn't work the way it's supposed to for me. Instead of a small circular movement, the whole star field seems to be breathing, and there are a few dark horizontal regions which are I suspect are an artifact.
Fascinating. I wonder if that's an artifact of your viewing experience/resolution/browser settings (like if I was sitting at your computer I'd have the same experience), or is it specific to your powers of visual perception?
I have no idea. I'm using Chrome on an HP Pavilion. I haven't done anything to the settings. As far as I know, my reactions to optical illusions are usually pretty standard.
Trying to repro just now:
I've found that I get different results depending on how close my eyes are to the screen, if I'm fairly close the whole thing is perceptively moving, if I'm further away I get more of that "only movement where your fovea is" intended effect. And I do see a regular dark grid pattern if I step back a ways and blur my eyes a little, that seems to be a legit artifact of how it spaces the little visual elements.
I agree, it's something akin to "insight porn" or the appreciation of a good joke or paradox. What you're seeing doesn't make sense at first, but then you realize how it works, learning something about the fallibility of your own perceptions in the process.
I think there are a lot of people who like optical illusions without trying to figure out how they work.
So I tried getting closer and the little stars started rotating individually, and the effect continued even after I moved back.
Tried it again. I think it's only the little stars I'm looking at directly which rotate, and they only go clockwise. I can't get them to reverse.
I think that's how it's supposed to look.
That's all that's supposed to happen, I'm pretty sure.
Maybe the same reason they like roller coasters. They give an illusion of danger without actual danger, so they stimulate the part of the brain that alerts to threats and categorizes them, while *not* asking anything of the executive function that needs to actually decide whether and how to respond to them, and what the cost might be.
As for why they're fake threats: because they are examples of where our sensory processing goes wrong, in the same way (but harmlessly) as discovering that that stick in the path is actually a snake, the ground is *way* closer than it seemed, et cetera.
It's the closest you can get to hallucinating while sober and wide awake. It's interesting for its sheer novelty, and it directly challenges your belief that your vision is an accurate representation of the outside world.
Probably good triggers for natural curiosity insofar as they're counterintuitive, but pretty obviously not dangerous. Cost of exploring is low, and natural interest is high.
Thinking about it some more, there's another angle to it, which is that there's an implied challenge for seeing the illusion for what it /really/ is. Like, for illusions that imply movement in directions that doesn't exist, or that imply that one shape is larger or smaller than another, I'm always compelled to try looking at it in such a way that I 'see through' it and make my perception accurate.
I'm kinda torn on optical illusions.
I think these are fairly interesting as far as studies of visual perception and cognition go, but I don't really like to experience illusions myself. My eyes hurt and I get a headache.
As for why people not interested in psychology might like them - novelty effect. It's an experience like nothing else we usually see, and people usually like that, unless it is unpleasant - which for most it is not as far as I know.
That's my explanation anyways.
One reason for me is that they are examples of how my perception is fallible. Like, this line obviously moves!! Even though it objectively does not. I find that deeply fascinating from an epistemological point of few.
One reason may be that being familiar with counterintuitive / surprising things is a potential source of social capital.
Another might be the sheer novelty. Predictive processing, making sense of the world and all that.
Are people into optical illusions? My experience is that when I see one my response is "oh, cool." and then immediately move on to something else. I haven't met anyone that I would describe as being into optical illusions.
Somebody likes them enough to keep making them.
There are youtube collectons and prizes.
I'd make an analogy to magic tricks: something unexpected or seemingly impossible happens, making you question your own senses. Whether it's enjoyable or not depends on your personality (do you like puzzling out how a trick works?) and how it's presented (the same illusion can be beautiful or nauseating).
Just as a general point, I think a lot of people enjoy optical illusions and magic tricks for the surprise or some similar reason without trying to figure out how the trick works.
Does anyone know when optical illusions became part of popular culture?
Optical illusions are cool-the-first-time-I-guess but not something I seek out. I won't go out of my way to view them, and really, can take or leave them. Kinda like puns.
Grappling with Effective Altruism:
The impact per dollar and the "but for" or neglected causes themes make excellent sense to me I'm having a harder time relinquishing the need/desire to know the effect my giving has. So, supporting a cause far away in either distance or time, is not as appealing to me.
Wondering what people think.
This seems like a very natural feeling I've struggled with myself. For reference, I give ~20% of my income to GiveWell or the Against Malaria Foundation.
Wanting certainty of impact feels natural and is probably a good instinct in general, since vague charities with poorly defined impact stories are less likely to succeed. The optimization space of the world is vast, and most attempts will have no impact or make things worse.
On the other hand, because people generally try to improve the lives of those close to them, you have the opportunity to get some smoking deals to improve the lives of people distant from you. For example, doubling the consumption of a bottom 20% household in the US would cost over 20k USD per year. For that same amount, you could double the consumption of 25 median households in the DRC (median household income ~784$ per year). If you believe that individual utility is roughly logarithmic with wealth, that means you can have ~25X the impact by giving to folks in the DRC.
Plausibly, the far future has similar returns. I similarly struggle to truly believe that existing X risk charities have substantial causal positive impacts on the far future.
All good points. Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
There is extreme poverty close to us as well.
I was very much influenced by the op-ed below written a number of years ago by Angus Deaton. It led me to read the book Two Dollars a day, which was eye-opening to me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/24/opinion/poverty-united-states.html
Extreme poverty in the us may be overestimated. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25907
This is an entirely different reason for wanting to give locally (or at least domestically) from just wanting to know the effect that your giving has. If it really is as effective to give locally, you're not trading anything off by doing so.
(That said, I do not find most of the claims that giving locally in the US is as or more effective than the best charities overseas to be very plausible)
There are certainly examples of extreme poverty in the US and other developed nations, but even if you only consider purchasing power parity effects you'd expect to be able to bring many more people out of extreme poverty in the developing world vs the US.
I don't mean to discount the plight of the poor American, as much as exhort folks to bring as many folks out of poverty as possible regardless of their location. I believe a wealth of evidence suggests that it is much cheaper to increase consumption in the developing world. See 'Poor Economics' and JPAL's work in general for some of the specific examples.
Giving to evidence backed EA causes means you can have some idea of what your money will do, at least based on inference (less for for more speculative stuff obviously but there should at least be some measurable progress made).
Can you really be more confident that giving to people close by allows you to know what the impact is? I used to be quite involved with a program that gave food and hot drinks to homeless people and I had no way of knowing if it had any impact at all on their lives - I doubt it had anything more than an immediate benefit.
Immediate benefit is still something.
I'm not a big fan of 1) simply giving money and 2) hoping that someone else will manage it well and meet the needs of the intended recipients.
There are a lot of factors that may reduce the efficiency of dollars spent to lives bettered/saved. That could include waste, corruption, mistakes in planning, mistakes in execution, unintended consequences, etc. I'm sure that organizations doctor their numbers as much as possible to look better, including calling certain expenses "direct aid" that may not meet yours or my definition. Even if they're not, I worry a lot about those unintended consequences. For instance, if there's a local industry in [African country] making mosquito nets, and we send so many nets that we reduce local demand and those people lose their jobs, that's an issue I might want to be aware of. That's especially true if the end result is less nets being made long term. We could send 100 million nets, kill all the local industry, and then stop sending new nets, leaving a hole worse than if we hadn't interfered. Being able to see the results is a big deal in calibrating your "is my current plan working" calculations. For someone giving 10%+ of their income to a charity, that's a pretty big investment and well worth the time to investigate effectiveness.
For high paid but very busy individuals (which make up a lot of the rationalist community), it does make sense to work harder to earn money and then give it away. For most people, they can do a lot of good, and more good, by directly volunteering their time and effort. That's almost always going to be local, especially the truly effective help. Not everyone may agree with this, especially in the EA community, but I also feel that local and personal help (time and effort over money) is more morally valuable than cutting a check.
These are good points. I agree that time and effort can often be more valuable to the beneficiaries as well as to the giver. The other way to contribute is "intellectual/social" capital, i.e., connecting people in need with a resource they were not previously aware of. The hat trick (it's NHL playoff time) would be combining all three: money, intellectual capital, and time/effort.
I would agree with that, and if you are already volunteering and have personal knowledge of the needs, you can be far more certain that your money is being well spent towards specific goals.
Any thoughts about charities with a less clear chain of causality? My handy example is anti-war charities. War is very destructive, but it's hard to tell what discourages it.
Does anyone have informed opinions about the new Alzheimer's drug the FDA is thinking about approving (aducanumab)? This New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/health/alzheimers-aducanumab-fda.html) makes it sound pretty iffy. But I know someone who might be interested in trying it if it is approved. Should I try to discourage them?
Derek Lowe has a good part on why the FDA should not approve it: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/03/a-brief-note-about-ad
It's probably useless.
I was just going to suggest Lowe's blog on the matter, he's had a lot of posts and really breaks down all the ways it's likely useless and also a huge waste of money
But failures are usually more memorable than successes, so hopefully this will move the field in a direction that could one day actually help people
My father (a professor of medicine) is very bearish and says the studies suggest it's no good.
I don't know anything about drugs, but "aducanumab" totally sounds like one of Scott's demon lords:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/
It sounds better backwards. Bamunacuda! But then demons talk backwards anyway, don't they? At least when they cut records.
The most interesting part of this, IMO, is the patient advocacy group. They've got a really complicated principal-agent problem.
1) The drug is almost certainly fake, so its being approved is not in their principals' interest.
2) Most of the principals don't know it's fake, so they as agents risk an immediate backlash if they don't push to approve it.
3) Since it is fake, they risk a delayed backlash if they push to approve it, it is approved and their principals get scammed.
4) But Alzheimer's patients who've deteriorated enough to know it is fake probably won't be very good at taking action against them, and by then the agents may have already moved on to another job.
5) And since everyone in the FDA knows it is almost certainly fake, it is unlikely to be approved regardless of their actions, so it's unlikely that #3 will happen while #2 will happen regardless.
6) Of course, given #5, is there even a meaning to their position beyond signalling for #2 (and potentially confusing the public who haven't done this analysis)?
I think the problem with this, and other drugs for very hard to treat illnesses and 'extending the last possible minute of life' for cancer etc. drugs, is that patients and their families are often desperate, they don't feel that 'the medical establishment' is listening to them or responsive to their needs, they're very vulnerable to snake oil merchants because they're so desperate, and 'patient advocacy groups' are either headed up by family members who believe that there is a miracle cure out there, the establishment just isn't looking hard enough, or well-intentioned people who do take the patients/family side too much to heart.
So someone floats the possibility that "this could be the miracle drug!", and the patients/families start putting the pressure on, and the advocacy groups have to respond in line with that. And then regulatory bodies, health boards, and governments come under that pressure, and nobody wants to be pilloried in the media as 'heartless red-tape pencil-pushers that are denying life-saving treatments on penny-pinching grounds' so things like this do need somebody tough-minded and hard-hearted enough to scoff at 'tearful cute moppet clutching a stuffed toy' pictures plastered all over the press. And politicians are *not* that tough-minded because they're constantly aware of "how are we doing in the polls?" so they leave it to somebody else to be the Bad Guy.
And I see that it has been approved: https://news.sky.com/story/new-alzheimers-drug-aducanumab-that-targets-cause-rather-than-symptoms-set-to-be-approved-12326799
If you read this short article, it's definitely coming down on the "miracle cure" side, there's no mention at all of any opposition or doubts about efficacy.
Hmm. I got at least 2 news alerts (from US sources) and both of them, in the headline, mentioned that plenty of people think the drug doesn't work.
The US sources seem to be better-informed, there's more meat to the reports and as you say, they are including the dissenting voices.
There's the following:
"Professor Robert Howard from UCL said: "Amazingly, the FDA have sidestepped available clinical trial outcomes data that indicate the drug probably doesn't work.
"The FDA have ignored the data we already have from over 3,000 aducanumab trial participants treated for 18 months. These indicate there is no consistent efficacy signal in terms of slowing decline in cognition or function.""
Of course, this is not easy to spot and is immediately followed by:
"In the UK it could help the estimated 850,000 people living with the disease."
Honestly, I think some people at the FDA should lose their jobs over this - I don't mean this necessarily as retribution, but simply that if they are unable or unwilling to decide better than the public whether drugs are safe and effective, they shouldn't have the authority to legally declare, overriding the public, whether drugs are safe and effective.
I think it's hard to call for "some people at the FDA should lose their jobs over this", when on this very site here we've had many people arguing the spectrum from the FDA should be done away with altogether to 'if I want to take a dodgy drug because it's a Hail Mary chance, I should be allowed to".
To turn around and then say people should be sacked because they conceded to public pressure is rather harsh. I wish they hadn't, but they're not operating in a (spherical cow) vacuum. They come under pressure from patient advocacy groups, pharma lobbyists, the public, and politicians to decide yay or nay on drugs outside of the strict science. Unfortunately, sometimes they will crumble and give in.
They can't come out and plainly call this drug snake-oil, because then hello lawsuits for slander, libel and words I never heard in the Bible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx6_0Do0qGQ
Giving the benefit of the doubt to the pharma company involved, that they are not moustache-twirling villains, they must think it does *some* good, so they're pushing it as hard as they can. People are desperate - if you have a family member who is elderly and maybe at the start of Alzheimer's, you'll do anything to stave off the progression as long as possible. People are writing "living wills"/medical directives about "if I get this, kill me" (to be blunt about euthanasia/medically assisted suicide) so it's really a terror for modern populations, who are living longer and so the incidence of such cognitive decline in senility is increasing likelihood.
It doesn't help that optimistic estimates such as "it could help X number of people living with the disease" are promulgated. I don't know the exact reasoning for the FDA licencing this in the face of what seems plenty of opposition, and I'd like to know why (but that treads into politics territory so best to say no more right now).
Could you explain to me the difference between "the FDA should be done away with altogether" and "if I want to take a dodgy drug because it's a Hail Mary chance, I should be allowed to"? The first would seem to imply the second, although admittedly not the other way around.
As for the rest of it - as I said, I'm not saying anyone on the FDA side did anything morally culpable or deserving of punishment. When I say "their jobs", I mean their actual, specific positions of authority, not their condition of being employed or even necessarily their employer. I'm saying that the mechanism, while necessarily not perfect, can and should work with negligible error in cases this obvious and with this much riding on them (I hereby promise to eat a lemon if aducanumab works; I realise I have said something here that shouldn't be said lightly and is said far too often), and that therefore either some cogs should be replaced and/or their relations to one another should be altered.
Well bear in mind it's competing with a "standard of care" that reduces to "pray." If there were any therapy that had any positive value at all, there'd be a much stronger argument against approving it and they probably wouldn't. They may well have just thought, well, it doesn't harm, there's some teeny tiny chance it might help (even a Phase III trial is not perfect, hence Vioxx on the negative side), and it's not like we're approving Laetrile and possibly discouraging people from doing things that will actually help. They would definitely have been under immense pressure from patient advocacy groups, lawmakers, et cetera. They might have thought give them this one and live to fight another day. If nothing else, the *next* Alzheimer's drug is clearly going to have to do better.
The concern of the med chem people is that this drug is going to suck up *such* a lot of Alzheimer money that resource constraint (and possibly a slightly reduced sense of urgency, knowing you can't be First To Market) will handicap research into the next drug, and I bet they're right, and on that basis *I* wouldn't have approved it, but that's easy to say because I wasn't in the hot seat.
"The concern of the med chem people is that this drug is going to suck up *such* a lot of Alzheimer money that resource constraint (and possibly a slightly reduced sense of urgency, knowing you can't be First To Market) will handicap research into the next drug"
I think that's a legitimate worry, given the bit in the Sky News article:
"The treatment could lead other pharmaceutical companies to create similar drugs and the UK regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), to consider it for use in Britain."
If other pharma companies decide to piggy-back off this, rather than research a different drug, that's a very real concern.
Haven't looked into this drug in years but I'm faintly amazed that it's made it to market. I recall it had pretty negligible effects at best in early studies and even then you had to construct the studies just right to see anything of any significance. Probably it's sneaking through on the good old 'well, we can't find anything actively harmful about doing this but it doesn't help' route that lots of the meaningless drug improvements squeeze through. They won't be putting that in the adverts though.
Meditation is a "constitutive practice" of mindfulness -- the virtue and the practice are so close that practically every exercise of mindfulness can be cast as practice in meditation as well.
In addition, the practice is dead-simple, extremely practical (i.e. can be done anywhere, anytime, at no cost) and can be pursued at practically any level of experience and produce all manner of rewards -- some (like lowering blood-pressure) that are themselves non-essential to meditation. It has a 2000-year pedigree of being used like this.
Reading (generally conceived, i.e. qua skill in interpretation) seems to me to be a constitutive practice for wisdom -- in a certain way, it seems that wisdom just is to know how to interpret the world (esp as it pertains to right action). Wisdom and reading are both ways to figure out what stuff means.
Like meditation, reading offers many other benefits even if you do not pursue the practice to its zenith, is easy and cheap to do (especially if you are interpreting/"reading" a line from memory), and can be pursued at practically any level profitably. It has at least as long of a pedigree as meditation.
What is a constitutive practice for courage?
I am very interested in this: answers that come to mind are: dating apps, telling loved ones that you love them, being as honest as possible, and having the balls to go through the grocery checkout line twice after forgetting an item.
I think there is good reason why its hard to practice courage: courage can only be exercised when you want something and there is risk involved. In any particular domain, practice will reduce your fear over time as you realise its not so dangerous, requiring you to change domains eventually. Want and fear are typically experienced in relation to other humans so you’re dependent on them for practice, meaning you cant practice courage as often or easily as practicing meditation
I think all the things listed above require courage and are ways to practice courage, but are not "constitutive" practices of courage.
E.g. cooking a delicious pot-roast may require a certain level mindfulness, but mindfulness is not the necessary and sufficient element of practice, as perhaps it is in meditation. Ideally there's some beautifully simple constitutive practice of courage
(i.e. that in some way just is the practice of courage in concreto; that can be practiced daily for a lifetime to make somebody better disposed towards fear)
In terms of wants/fears, what about fear of pain or death? I think something like a Wim Hof Method of Cold Showers/Ice Baths is the best I can do so far for an everyday deep practice of courage. But I would really like to know if there's something as simple and profound as reading or meditation.
Is there a meaningful distinction beween courage and self-discipline?
I think courage requires some emotionally aversive element that self-discipline doesn't; getting out of bed at 4am requires an exercise of self-discipline in a way that is generally not courageous. Reacting aggressively to an unexpected threat requires courage but not self-discipline (not a great example; best I could come up with).
Perhaps I should have said "functional difference." I'm told that courage doesn't consist of not feeling fear, but of experiencing the impulse to run away and doing what needs to be done anyway. That seems very similar -- draws upon the same reservoir of will and executive function -- as getting out of bed at 4am, where I feel sleepy and a primitive impulse to go back to bed, but I do what I have decided to do anyway.
Note that I *am* assuming that the courageous thing to do is also the rational thing to do, meaning I am not subsuming recklessness under the word.
Tangential: I think on some accounts courage/self-control is feeling fear/discomfort at something you should do and doing it anyway, but I think a higher level of courage/self-control might be not actually fearing the thing that ought not be feared/not actually feeling discomfort from the thing you ought not feel discomfort from.
Virtue might be loving your duty, not just doing it through gritted teeth.
That is possible, but I've never experienced it that way. The times in my life when I feel (in retrospect) like I was courageous were pretty much all times when I felt a strong urge to run away, but mastered it and did what I needed to do anyway.
I've made no study of it, but my vague impression is that people who have been recognized for bravery under extreme conditions (e.g. warfare) mostly say they just didn't think of the potential cosequences, they saw X in urgent need of doing and just did it, without really pondering what might happen. Sometimes they seem themselves uncomfortable calling it "courage" because of the no-conscious-decision nature of it.
Yeah courage (on a tight reading) seems to necessarily involve being rightly disposed towards fear, whereas self-discipline seems to involve being rightly disposed towards discomfort generally. On a wider reading, I think the two converge.
I would also like a constitutive practice of self-discipline/temperance/moderation/σωφροσύνη but I'm trying to move in baby steps.
I'd argue that courage has a specific relation to uncertainty. Assuming a sufficiently worthwhile cause, subjecting yourself to a known painful ordeal requires discipline, subjecting yourself to a situation where something Very Bad (e.g. death) might plausibly happen (but, rationally, the risk is justified and the ends justify the means) requires courage, subjecting you to a situation where you're likely to die without achieving anything worthwhile requires recklessness.
Looking from the perspective of rational decisionmaking, self-discipline is the ability to make optimal time tradeoffs (less utility now for more utility later), overcoming the natural human tendency to overprioritize short-term gains; and courage is the ability to make optimal risk tradeoffs (maximize expected utility given uncertainty), overcoming the natural human tendency to be overly risk-averse.
So you're sorting them by the degree of uncertainty associated with the decision, or perhaps the sizes of the variance in expected outcome? I don't know that *any* nontrivial decision to act contains zero risk -- has a perfectly computable reward -- and I would be concerned that it would be difficult to draw a bright line between "low variance of expected outcome" and "high variance", but if I understand you correctly I can see the distinction you're trying to draw.
...although...I think there are plenty of people who would say doing what has to be done in the face of "certain" death -- a low variance in expected outcome situation -- is also courage. It might feel a little weird to rate decisions to act where uncertainty of painful consequences is maximum as needing less courage than deciding to act where uncertainty of painful consequences is *low* -- because the probability of pain is near 100%.
Rejection therapy fits your ask I think: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_Therapy
Thank you; that's very helpful.
Fear-exposure seems to be the trick, and social fear is very common, powerful, and easy to practice exposure to. It seems like that coupled with something like ice-baths (or something for pain exposure -- given it is healthy to do so), and poverty-exposure [see Seneca's quote below], might be a good way to innoculate ourselves against phobia.
I wonder though if we can get closer to the nature of fear itself, since all of those exposure methods seem to deal only with particular fears.
Seneca: "Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’"
I think the right generalization is “moving towards something you are afraid of.” Andrew Huberman (Stanford neuroscientist) has some great research on this. When you do move towards something you are afraid of, your brain generates a reward signal.
So I think the constitutive practice is to first recognize when you are responding to a fear, and then articulating the precise outcome you are afraid of, and either moving directly towards it (if it’s not actually bad for you), or just stopping the run from it, if it is indeed a destructive outcome, but one you can avoid without running from it.
I don't think that is a good generalization of courage because it also encompasses rashness -- i.e. not all things I'm afraid of are bad, and sometimes moving towards what I am afraid of is just foolish. Indeed, courage can be cast as fearing the right things in the right order.
But I do take the point that exposure therapy might be our closest bet. Apparently it's the most effective cure for phobia that we know of: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.685
I think this one has some limitations -- I don't think it can directly treat the fear of one's own death -- but it seems to have the best one we know how.
I think the way to do would be to make a taxonomy of (the most common) fears: rejection, pain, death, poverty, loss, spring to mind, and see how many you could address in as few practices as possible.
It seems to me that this is the wisdom in practiced poverty -- poverty encompasses poverty of friends, material resources, and perhaps loss as well. It strikes many birds with one stone.
The death one though is I think the Ur-fear, and is pretty immune to exposure, because you can't actually practice dying for real.
Have you tried a death meditation?
It’s obviously not real but it’s interesting just to try pretending you’re in the act of dying. It’s panic inducing at first, but “reminding” myself this really is happening ends up producing a kind of calm acceptance. I have no idea how this transfers into the real thing, though.
I have but only dipping my toes in. I'm similarly concerned that this might not transfer/doesn't really count as direct exposure, but I don't get the sense it would hurt.
Sidenote: it looks like the stoics crushed this one with the practiced poverty and the emphasis on memento mori. I wonder if they have a more systematic analysis/practice for fear.
This is something I usually find myself doing in the moment, but I can imagine forming a constitutive practice around it:
I do small things to promote an "acting" state of mind whenever I find myself in the passive "being acted upon" state of mind. This is helpful because it puts my focus on things I am able to control, and because it counteracts the flight and freeze responses to threats.
Small example: I've noticed that when people speak in front of intimidating audiences, whether it's a tense conversation with a boss or a presentation in front of a room of judgy people, they tend to put some distance between themselves and their audience. I find it's helpful to take a step forward. Just one step does the trick, because it helps me switch from the "oh god they're waiting for me to say something" frame of mind to the "I'm doing something" state of mind. In a similar vein, I often start an interview by asking my interviewer a benign question, like how their day is going. This puts me into an active rather than a passive state.
Big example: when my twin sister developed PPMS (the really bad kind of MS) last year, I was hysterical for a little while. Every time I thought seriously about her future, I had a panic attack. This made things harder because it was necessary at the time to think about her future a lot and make contingency plans just in case she can't work or can't walk in a few years. So I started visiting her and helping her with chores.
It was a small thing to do, but it shifted my frame of mind from "I'm powerless and we're fucked" to "I'm doing something helpful right now". Those tiny actions disarmed the debilitating fear, and I now find myself in a much better state of mind for planning and making decisions as a result.
I'm sure you could come up with a daily practice to promote an active, rather than a passive, frame of mind, which can be applied to any intimidating or frightening situation. Not sure what the daily practice would look like. I'm going to think about this.
Thanks for sharing. I often feel perfectionism has its debilitating hand at play when acting is hard – like a live action nirvana fallacy.
I agree. Would you say perfectionism is connected to fear? I think it could be, but I also think the tools for overcoming perfectionism might be different than tools for overcoming fear of other sorts.
Yes, I think there is a connection with perfectionism and a specific fear, or maybe a collection of fears. Generally, I think there are really a bunch of different fears rising from different threats to different needs, so it might be misleading to speak only of some general fear. That is why I think the tools very well might not work between different fears (but then again might, if the source of the fear is the same or related).
On the other hand, I see Cole, the OP replying there to Rejection Therapy comment, looking for the “nature of fear itself”. Quite opposite of what I just wrote, but will probably be very worthwhile still. I wouldn’t have much to say about that other than that Buddhist meditation on dukkha (~suffering) and aversion could get you close. (A teacher helps a lot, it’s pretty hard to self-direct, especially with aversive subjects.)
I think much of perfectionism is learned in childhood when a child is utterly dependant on the parent and the parent shows (or is perceived as showing) affection only conditionally, tying self-worth to accomplishments. That kind of emotional neglect doesn’t ring that serious compared to physical neglect or other “traditionally” traumatic events, but to a child the perceived lack of affection is an existential threat there with any other. Being abandoned would be catastrophic for survival, albeit less gravely so in modern times.
(Some mild symptoms of OCD might be seen as perfectionism as well, rising from the need of crafting some sense and predictability into an unpredictable environment through rituals and repetition. There is also a soothing function in immersing yourself (dissociating) into meticulous tinkering when things are emotionally overwhelming.)
So in that way, I think perfectionism is a understandable reaction to fear (of abandonment and unpredictable painful outcomes).
To be clear, in adulthood those learned (trauma)responses don’t usually make much sense anymore, since, well, the environment is different. The threat is usually gone, but the signs of threat (triggers) are still there in some form or another, so the emotional reactions keep coming back. The emotional reactions might be bad enough to keep the feedback loop going, but the reactions very well might have negative consequences of their own to still re-enforce the pattern.
In the case of perfectionism, it usually causes procrastination with it’s added anxieties, missed deadlines and such.
Needless to say, this is only my view, and not original at that. There are probably many who don’t view their perfectionism stemming from such issues and maybe see it only as a virtue and hard work, and – to be honest, I’d think they’d probably be wrong. But arguing and claiming to know someone’s deepest motivations better than them – that’s some anti-social no-no-land right there I’m not going to tread on.
Yes, the more I think about it, the more I think very different tools are necessary for overcoming different fears, based on the variety of stimulus and reaction. I'm sure the methods for addressing fear of rejection are different from the methods for addressing fear of violation, for example. I would expect those fears to inspire totally opposite compensation strategies and therefore require very different interventions. And the methods for counteracting a freeze response might be different from the methods for overcoming flight or dissociation.
I don't have that experience with perfectionism, but I think it makes sense for some perfectionists I have known.
Thanks for this; also very helpful. Maybe something like the 5-second rule? https://melrobbins.com/the-5-second-rule/
Not quite the focused practice on courage like meditation is for mindfulness and reading is for wisdom, but I agree that the "just do it" mindset seems to be pretty common amongst courageous action.
That's an interesting approach. I've actually trained myself to do the opposite of the five second rule because, as someone with few inhibitions, I later regret a lot of actions I took within five seconds of having an idea.
Perhaps the common ingredient is physical action. Taking a physical action when you're stuck helps shift you from the passive fearful state to an active less-fearful state.
A sidenote: Other constitutive practices perhaps are "giving to charity" for developing generosity (and all the goods that come with it), and "direct thank-yous + gratitude journal" for becoming a more grateful person.
Fasting (intermittent and otherwise) seems like it might be a constitutive practice of self-control. And again is simple, free to do, can be quite good for your health, and has the 2000-year pedigree.
Just a note that meditation isn't good for everyone and can be very bad for a small proportion of people.
Can you elaborate?
It kind of sounds like you’re saying “getting to know oneself” is bad for some people.
It turns out that meditation is very stressful for some people.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/can-mindfulness-and-meditation-be-harmful/
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210202-how-mindfulness-can-blunt-your-feelings-and-spike-anxiety
Would need to find the sources, but I have seen evidence for sitting / still meditation being more negative than positive for some PTSD patients for reasons aligning with these ^^
The more a virtue and its practice are alike, the more you say one is the "constitutive practice" for the other. The logical end-point of this is that the the *most* constitutive practice of any virtue is practicing that virtue directly. That's tautological but I really think there is a simple but profound wisdom in that. I also think that most techniques taught to cultivate a virtue are like support wheels you use to become adept at that skill - but at a certain level for the most part you don't need extra techniques, you just practice the virtue itself as the "constitutive practice" as you put it.
To start with the first example given by you (which is something I'm quite familiar with): In order to cultivate mindfulness you practice being mindful. You might call that practice meditation or not, doesn't matter. As a small part of your practice, you might learn some special meditation techniques that make you kinder or more alert or more courageous so you can be more mindful, but the heart of the practice is just being mindful (although I am a tiny bit anxious about the label 'mindfulness' as the be-all-end-all for meditation - but that's a topic for another time).
In order to cultivate violin-playing you practice playing the violin. You might throw in a bit of studying theory and watching pro's but the heart of the practice is playing the violin. Playing the violin is the constitutive practice for violin-virtuousity.
In order to cultivate courage...you practice being courageous. You learn about your courage and your fear and how these forces and habits interact within you. You learn not to fear fear. You learn to stay right at the edge of what you can deal with (you also do that in meditation). At some point it might be useful to learn some breathing or focusing techniques or any of the things suggested in this thread. But the constitutive practice for courage is practicing being and acting courageously. You start out with whatever courage you already have and grow it by practicing it (for some people, they first learn to recognise the courage they already possess).
I don't think reading is the constitutive practice for courage. I think the constitutive practice for wisdom is finding out what wisdom actually is - and then practicing *that*.
Totally agree that virtues are ultimately activities and not just states and this is a great point to bring up. Meditation in particular fits this intuition extremely well.
Still I think it is useful to make the distinction between constitutive practices and virtues because the constitutive practices have something of pedagogy in them — an easy access point, simply communicated and imminently scalable. I imagine for classical music it would be something like practicing scales, chords, and arpeggios progressive to the player’s level.
These practices also seem to be more concrete than “face your fears” or “pay attention” you know?
Re: wisdom. This is a discussion for another open thread, but by “reading” I really mean something like “correctly interpreting/understanding/finding the meaning of some phenomenona, (esp the words/actions of people reputed to be wise, and esp as these pertain to living the good life and understanding oneself and others).”
I think the process of reading resembles this process well at every level of resolution. I.e. the child just learning how letters combine to form words is using the same process as the student finding the way in which various paragraphs combine to form a whole argument is using the same process as the learned man assimilating the various phenomena of (inner and outer) life into theoretical truth or moral maxim. We can disagree about whether this is wisdom, but it’s my best guess so far.
In concreto, my attempt at constitutive practice here is to read and discuss great texts (esp wisdom literature) and great ideas with a learned friend in real time. I think it is attempting something like a combination of Jewish Chavrusa and Socratic Dialectic, both of which have been claimed as constitutive practices of wisdom in their own right.
This is all to say that I hid a lot in my idea of “reading” but I really do think it is the constitutive practice of wisdom and can be as profound as meditation.
Wisdom is a tricky one though; what do you think it is and how do you think it should be developed?
That sounds like a pretty good wisdom practice to me!
I agree with most of what you said. I just tried to point out that I think there is usually a dimensionality to the "constitutiveness" of practices: As the practice become less and less distinguishable from the virtue itself, it becomes more and more "constitutive", general, scalable. But it also becomes less easily described and taught. So as we progress, we might move from practices that are easy to learn but are limited to practices that only really become possible as you become more familiar with the virtue.
I think that is basically true for all domains. There are also some practices that are easy for a beginner but change as you become more adept, approaching the core of the virtue more and more. I would think of such practices as practices that contain a complete path, but perhaps that is what you meant with constitutive practices anyway? I think your example with writing captures that. Someone engaging the ideas contained in a text critically does something very different compared to someone using the text just in order to learn reading. But you might subsume both in a wider practice called reading.
I think it also applies to meditation: As a beginner and as an advanced meditator, you might follow the same simple instruction (such as "follow your breath" or "note everything that arises"). But what you are actually doing internally might be quite different. At some point, either the meaning of the instruction changes profoundly and becomes something much more radical, or the instruction becomes simply the container, the outer form within which you do the actual practice. Or you drop the instruction.
In that sense, a simple meditation instruction/mantra that is very powerful for me vis-a-vis fear and that comes close to a complete-path-practice is: Stay close and do nothing.
Doing things that cause fear. Nothing dangerous. Talking to strangers if that's what is fearful to you. Things like that.
Thinking about your worst fears without flinching away or telling yourself that it's impossible. Things like suffering and death of yourself and your loved ones, the next world war, end of human civilization, your most cherished sacred beliefs turning out to be a lie - practice to think about them clearly and accepting that none of this is impossible, there's no law of nature to prohibit them, and some (like the first example) are nearly inevitable. This post might help https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god
That's a different kind of courage than ignoring an imminent obvious danger, but I'd argue it's at least as important, and probably much more, and many of the same mental skills are involved.
At least partly relevant: _Effortless Mastery_ by Kenny Werner. It's about becoming a better musician by defusing anxiety and accessing a state of trust and awareness. It's especially about giving up the fear of sounding bad.
Re: number 3 - wow, only today I was thinking about the former Reign of Terror. Serendipity or what?
Re: number 5 - I think it's better to keep the restriction. If I'm feeling mad about something and want to yell about it here, but it's an odd-numbered thread, I have to wait for the even-numbered one. That's good because often by the time the even-number rolls around, I've forgotten what made me so mad (so it couldn't have been that important). If I'm still mad then it must be serious enough to argue over. I think the restriction probably has helped keep down the number of political blow-ups and that is a good thing.
I would attribute the lack of blow ups to the increased friction of interacting with the substack comments.
What increased friction? As someone who only ever left a single-digit number of comments on SSC, I've found making an account and replying to posts far easier than it was before.
fascinating! what didnt you like about SSC comments that is now improved?
Wordpress (was it wordpress?) registration and login was more of a hassle than Substack's e-mail based verification system, plus I recall the reply system being a lot more awkward to use, but I hardly ever used it so I only have a vague memory of it. Substack seems a lot simpler, but the lack of formatting options is definitely a pain.
The FDA finally approved semaglutide for weight loss! That usage is marketed under the name "Wegovy":
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-new-drug-treatment-chronic-weight-management-first-2014
It's the same dosage as studied here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/longevity/2021-wilding.pdf
Appetite suppressants were totally a thing for people who are having trouble with weight loss even before this announcement, but now we have a *really really effective* one. Think this will finally be what makes a dent in the obesity epidemic?
Umm . . . spam?
There was a previous post about semaglutide, so this is probably more like an update that might be interesting to anyone who read it.
Impressive spam if it managed to divine our love for gwern :)
A glimpse into the future of spam.
Eventually, we'll train the spambots to make productive contributions to discussion.
https://xkcd.com/810/
I am disappointed at my utter failure to spark any kind of interesting discussion. Alas.
I have nothing to say but a lot of reading to do. I lost about 120 lbs before the pandemic then put on about 80 because bipolar + shelter in place is not a healthy combo. So take splice in the fact that you made one life appreciably better with your comment
Thanks! Though I'm a lot less bummed out now that there's been interesting discussion after all. Turns out I spoke too soon!
Can this be sold without a prescription? If no, then I don't see it doing anything against the obesity epidemic. If yes, then it might make a dent, but no more than that, since it still requires people to /want/ to lose weight. Great news for those people that do, but I doubt it makes a difference in the bigger picture.
Do you have any data on that? I personally think that most people that are obese want to lose weight, even if they don't act to.
No, it's a hunch, but as you say, what they act on is what matters. I think most healthy weight people also want to be strong and fit, but few want it enough to commit to a regular exercise routine. Taking appetite suppressants is a lower bar to clear, but it still requires the person to /act/ on the desire to lose weight.
I suspect more than that, it requires knowledge of weight loss drugs. Common knowledge now is that they're all either snake oil or actively dangerous.
In that case, I think I don't really agree that it won't make anything more than a dent. Having extra fat can make people more hungry, which means they eat more. With a drug that counteracts that, people could lose weight more easily "without doing anything". I personally try to see obesity through the same lens as depression: some people will need drugs because of how they were born, some can get through with some exercise and a healthy diet, some will never encounter it in their life. But saying that "what they act on is what matters" feels unfair to me.
"With a drug that counteracts that, people could lose weight more easily "without doing anything"."
Yeah, that's what we all want. But the article says "Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy (semaglutide) injection (2.4 mg once weekly) for chronic weight management in adults with obesity or overweight with at least one weight-related condition (such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol), for use in addition to a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity."
So even if you get this injection, you still have to go on the diet and start cranking up the exercise routine. Diet and exercise is the hard part of losing weight, so unless this injection really turns the appetite down *low*, it won't do much for getting people to stick to the diet.
From what I understand from the article, both the people that received the drug and the people that received the placebo had to do the reduced caloric diet and the increased physical activity. In any case, reducing appetite will in most cases make consuming fewer calories easier. On the other hand, nausea and diarrhea are both side effects of the drug, and both help weight loss.
In any case, what I'm saying is that the drug could help make more than a dent in the obesity epidemic if it's sold without prescription. Reducing your calories by 500 is way harder than taking the prescription the doctor gives you once a week and keep eating until you're full.
I honestly think that most obese people don't like/hate being obese but these feelings are not enough for most to change.
Note that diet and exercise is always the placebo used in such studies.
That means 1) reported weight loss is taking into account efforts to diet and exercise, and 2) that we haven't attempted to measure weight loss with the drug but without diet and exercise. So it's not clear what, if any, role diet and exercise are playing.
I don't think I'm being unfair to anyone. I'm pointing to action and motivation as relevant concerns, not blaming anyone for not being able to stick to a diet or a medication regime. Doctors and needles can be scary, treatment can be expensive, and there's a stigma against weight loss drugs that says if you didn't lose the weight 'naturally', you 'cheated'. All of these contribute to people not acting on their desire to lose weight. There is no moral judgment in acknowledging that.
I understood your comments as "people that want to lose weight will take the treatment, but if won't make a big difference because most people don't want to lose weight, because if they wanted they would be already exercising and eating less". I'm sorry if this was uncharitable, that wasn't my intention.
I think that a drug that reduces how much you want to eat is a great way of lowering the entry barrier to losing weight, and as such, it can make more than a dent in the epidemic. It can help people that are already losing weight lose more, but it can also help people that aren't losing any lose some.
Don't a lot of people go on various fad diets? At least those folks would presumably be willing to take a daily pill instead or alongside the "replace all your meals with expensive meal shakes from our company" or "eat nothing but rare red meat lightly warmed over an open fire" sorts of diets.
I want to lose weight, but not badly enough to actually eat less. If there were an appetite suppressant I believed to be safe and effective, I'd take it.
They exist now, they're just less effective than semaglutide. Contrave, phentermine, liraglutude, etc
I wrote up a longish post on what options exist currently and what their tradeoffs are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/n1xnth/weight_loss_drugs_part_v_drugalug/
Second. My impression is that this stuff either doesn't work or can kill you. (Browsing @Untrustworthy Bastard's list is interesting, but that guy seems sketch to me . . .)
If a drug company has an FDA-approved way to lose real weight and advertises it aggressively, they'll make Scrooge McDuck money, and deserve it.
I have a few suspicions about what feeds into current distrust of weight loss medications. I suspect a lot of it is that you've got a *ton* of herbal supplements and the like claiming to help people lose weight which definitely don't work, and these poison the well for legitimate pharmacological solutions for weight management.
Part of it is probably also the societal perception of weight loss being the product of a semi-spiritual journey around a person's relationship with food, where attempting to circumvent that journey via medication is wrongheaded and doomed to failure.
Microsoft's creative acceptance policies for ads (see https://advertiseonbing-blob.azureedge.net/blob/bingads/media/library/solution/creative-acceptance-policies/microsoft_advertising-native-creative-acceptance-policy.pdf ) explicitly ban ads which claim to help users lose weight without diet and exercise, which I think is nicely representative of how American society perceives such efforts.
My suspicions center more around the idea that fat is so hated that the mainstream doesn't mind killing fat people in an effort to get them to be thin.
"You mean those backaches weren't because you're fat? They're bone cancer and now it's too late? Well really, being fat is very unhealthy."
Isn't the issue that weight loss ads are basically the single most common form of spam that doesn't involve sex or dating? "Weight loss supplement direct to you!" is basically like "Sexy singles in your area!" (I suppose "Make $50,000 a month working from home" also fits in this category, and may have a corresponding ban.)
I will lay down a small (reputation only) bet that Wegovy will turn out to be less effective and more dangerous than it currently appears.
Possible. That said, semaglutide has been in wide usage for several years already on t2d patients, and liraglutide (similar mechanism) even longer. I expect if something horrible was waiting in the weeds we already would have seen it.
I would place a larger bet on disappointing than on horrible.
Any particular reason for thinking this, or is this an outside-view prediction based on the failures of weight loss drugs in the past?
Outside-view prediction.
(1) Wegovy is a terrible name. Who came up with it?
(2) The weight loss for people with type II diabetes was much less than for the people without. What gives there?
(3) Did you read the list of side effects? Discounting all the digestive system ones, because that's par for the course with these drugs, there's "potential risk of thyroid C-cell tumors, warnings for inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), gallbladder problems (including gallstones), low blood sugar, acute kidney injury, diabetic retinopathy (damage to the eye's retina), increased heart rate and suicidal behavior or thinking". If you're diabetic, you're already at risk for diabetic retinopathy, now this might up the risk?
(4) It's also coupled with "diet and exercise", so it seems like "in addition to weight loss when you cut down calories and increase physical activity, this gives you a small boost".
(5) The linked article says "Weight management programme" so does this mean "you have to keep on getting this injection or else when you stop, the weight comes back"?
For (3) remember that reported side effects includes everything that has ever happened to anyone on the drug, regardless of cause, and anything that is hypothesized to be a possibility whether or not it has been measured in humans. Check the gwern paper for actual measured side effects.
For (4) diet and exercise are used as placebo in control and experimental groups.
(5) yup! Gotta take it forever.
I published this comment on the previous open thread but I think I was too late to catch major traffic and got no responses at all. Anyway, here it is again. Sorry for spamming.
So, I'm considering getting an electrotrichogenesis (ETG) treatment for my incipient baldness (I'm vain. I know). The people at the ETG clinic claim it is super effective, and judging from the before-after pictures they showed me, this seems to be the true (assuming that the pictures are real). They also cited some very impressive statistics like: 96.7% of people exhibit extra-hair growth, and the average hair count increased by 66.7%, as compared to 25.6% in the control group. So far, so good.
When I went to check the literature for myself, I found that the results they (and every other ETG clinic) cite come from this one paper on the International Journal of Dermatology (see link at the end). The paper is from 1990 and has treatment group of 30 people. The reported effect sizes are so large that you should be able to capture them in such a small sample, but still the fact that the sample is so small and that there has been no follow up research makes me a bit weary. (There is a follow up paper in 1992 that uses the same subjects as the 1990 paper and extends the treatment from 30+ weeks to 70, showing further gains in hair density, girth, etc).
According to Wikipedia, ETG is approved for use in Europe, Canada and Australia, however I am not sure if this means that it's proved to be effective by the corresponding authorities, or it just doesn't kill you.
Anyway. I'm curious to hear your thoughts and experiences (if you have any) on this.
Here's the link to the 1990 paper.
It is decently incipient. Some loss in my forehead and in the crown, but I still have hair everywhere.
I finally decided against ETG. I did more research, in forums and the like, and the general opinion seems to be that it is a sham.
(See:
https://www.hairrestorationnetwork.com/topic/11719-i-need-some-help-guys/?tab=comments#comment-134749,
https://www.hairrestorationnetwork.com/topic/20940-suggestions-pleasehair-loss-seems-to-be-increasing/?tab=comments#comment-90354
https://www.hairrestorationnetwork.com/topic/13724-electrotrichogenesis-rogaine-bad/?tab=comments#comment-154375
https://www.hairlosslearningcenter.org/hair-loss-treatments/ElectroTrichoGenesis.asp
From what I could research, minoxidil and finasteride are the most reliable/effective non-surgical treatments out there, so I think I'll give those a try.
Don't know a thing about ETG, but have recently become aware of microneedling as a treatment for hair loss. Heard about it from a reliable source: Have a friend who's hair thinned greatly in her early 20's, maybe as a result of using depo-provera for birth control. Asked my dermatologist what treatments there were, and she said microneedling of the scalp was sounding promising, told me about some research into it at a couple of universities. My dermatologist is intellectual and research-oriented and does not do cosmetic treatments of any kind, so I took her recommendation seriously. So I recommend you look up microneedling, starting with Google Scholar. Plain google will send you to lotsa non-medical folks who have jumped onto offering the procedure in little clinics that specialize in treating minor cosmetic problems, spider veins and the like, some with valid treatments and some with snake oil, so they are not to be trusted. If you decide the approach looks worth a try you can buy good-quality microneedling equipment from OwnDoc.com, which is a reliable no-nonsense European company that ships to the US.
Thanks! This microneedling thing actually looks a lot more legit than ETG. Plenty of recent papers showing its effectiveness in decent sized samples. It is still a bit hard to navigate the literature since some of the papers seem to be sponsored in one way or another, but even then it looks better (and cheaper) than ETG.
If you decide to do it on your own, you're probably better off buying a roller or needling device and doing it yourself or having a friend do it, rather than going to some place operated by "beauticians." Just read up on how to do it safely. You want the devices to be sterile, and your head as clean as possible, but it is not possible to make your scalp sterile, and also not necessary for microneedling, which basically makes a bunch of close together pinpricks that are not at all deep. Or, for maximum safety, pay a dermatologist to do it. Good luck!
Hey I'm all for you doing this treatment but have you done some psychological and therapeutic work around your relationship with anger?
You and your testosterone as externally measured, would be relevant to your hair growth. And the interior relationship to anger would be related the the external measure.
I am usually a super chill person, so I doubt that my particular case has a lot to do with my relationship to anger. Thanks for the thought, though.
When I say relationship with anger, that covers ability to go in and out of anger at will. Ability to not be controlled by anger and willingness to let it arise when it happens (and leave when it's done). If you are chill, that may imply that you suppress anger from coming up.
This is my fault for not being clearer in what I meant.
If you want to explore more, it's slightly meditative, find a private place and try to make yourself angry without a particular object. Then see what your body does in resistance to the process. If you can sit with it and just hang out, you will probably be able to be free to let it come and go in the future. The generally healthy relationship to anger.
Good luck!
Why encourage the national obsession with politics? Is it so important ? I say discourage it even more!
I have to disagree. I think politics are important. I can’t expand on why without breaking the no politics rule so I’ll catch you on the next thread.
Sure it's important, but it isn't "everywhere all the time" important. I sometimes give the even-numbered threads a miss just to get a break from non-stop political yammer.
I understand what you’re saying and how you feel.
If that seems like an oddly incomplete answer, it kind of is because going any further might cause a political discussion. Seems like I’m operating under a paradoxical constraint. :)
i have been writing a blog the last six months, and i thought i could advertise some of the better posts here along with brief abstracts. enjoy.
Can a Vegan Diet Be Healthy? A Literature Review -- i review the literature on health impacts of veganism as it relates to stuff like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, weight reduction, bone health, nutritional deficiencies and cognitive function (though i didn't find much research on this last one).
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/can-a-vegan-diet-be-healthy-a-literature-review/
Does It Smell like Pollocks in Here? -- commentary on and critique of a recent study on "pseudo-profound bullshit" in contemporary art, including looking at bullshit as a viable strategy for artists.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/does-it-smell-like-pollocks-in-here/
Four Ways of Not Writing Software Bugs -- i propose that some powerful ways of not writing software bugs is not writing code in the first place, making necessary changes as small as possible, using automated tests and being aware of when one is not expending the cognitive effort necessary to really understand the changes one is making.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/four-ways-of-not-writing-software-bugs/
Networks of Meaning -- i argue that meaning is associative in nature, discuss this in the context of literature generally and the fiction of gerald murnane specifically and also review some of the relevant research in psychology.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/networks-of-meaning/
Strictness of Logic versus Openness of Logic -- i observe some differences in the musical styles and methods of jean sibelius and gustav mahler, two composers with very different views on the symphony.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/strictness-of-logic-versus-openness-of-logic/
Problems with "Eating Animals" -- i argue against a current affairs article that seems to claim that moral veganism and systemic change are in opposition to one another. i criticise the article for lack of concreteness when talking about systemic change, and i argue that, if anything, veganism contributes in several ways to some forms of systemic change.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/problems-with-eating-animals/
Interview with Christine M. Korsgaard: Animal Ethics, Kantianism, Utilitarianism -- a brief interview with one of my favourite philosophers.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/interview-with-christine-m-korsgaard-animal-ethics-kantianism-utilitarianism/
How Can One Tell What Is Beautiful? -- i review the arguments (including looks at recent research in psychology) for objectivity and subjectivity, critique paul graham's "preference cluster" view and interpret a passage from pierre michon's novella the life of joseph roulin.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/how-can-one-tell-what-is-beautiful/
Evolution of Programming Language Traits -- i observe that string interpolation has become more common in modern programming languages. i discuss what drives innovation, both on micro and macro scales. finally, i argue that free software norms enable innovation.
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/evolution-of-programming-language-traits/
A couple of confounding factors for vegetarianism and veganism: It's likely that they're more likely to be continued by people who feel good (or at least fairly good) if they eat that way, and such people may be metabolically different from people who don't like being vegetarian or vegan.
Sometimes people get into dietary restrictions because they have eating disorders, and they'd be likely to have worse health than people in general.
yeah there are definitely strong selection effects, which is why i tried my best to find randomized controlled trials wherever possible!
I've read your articles on software, so Evolution of programming language traits and Four ways of not writing software bugs. I'll be honest: I found them both a bit shallow.
The article on the evolution of programming language traits mentions only one trait, string interpolation. I think adding a few examples would really help. Here are a few ideas: static typing, the big one that's the most obvious; pattern matching, coming to Python, C# and Java recently; proper UTF-8 support (aka strings you can't index).
For the "Four ways of not writing software bugs", the intro bit about "regular/real" engineering is overused, especially when no one that uses these metaphors ever worked on a bridge. The bit about "not needing software to evolve" doesn't really work for most people. The first 3 proposed ways of reducing bugs are, I think, common knowledge. The fourth bit however is interesting. I think it's the first time I've heard it formalized like this. The fact that you're speaking from your own experience is also a really good touch.
I personally read a lot of software engineering blogs/articles so maybe I'm not the target audience. I also spend some time on Hacker News which has a really good curation. I'll add that I really like the blog itself (as a piece of software). It's easy to read, a simple and effective layout, you don't break the "link visited" CSS. I also like that you're privacy-minded in your analytics. There's also RSS, which is nice. As a reader, I feel respected.
if you're a reader of hacker news you might have seen the latest post -- https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/using-scheme-to-find-the-median-of-two-sorted-integer-lists/ -- which was on the front page there a couple of days ago. the vegan diet post made it to the top a few months ago.
but yeah, it sounds like you are too advanced a reader to get much out of the programming posts. i suppose it depends on whether you are using the word "shallow" to mean that they betray a lack of understanding of the subject matter, or to mean that they did not go into detail or cover advanced topics. i am guessing but only guessing that you have the latter in mind. glad you appreciate the design choices!
As you guessed, I meant shallow to say that they don't go into detail or cover advanced topics. I did saw that post on the front page but didn't read it at the time. I read it now, and this one doesn't fit shallow at all, it's a nice post.
So the UFO report isn't out yet, but various news outlets seem to have gotten lots of sources to talk about what's in it. Verdict seems to be -
1. The military really does think these are real objects moving at insane speeds in ways they can't explain, and not weather balloons or pilot misidentification.
2. There is no evidence they are aliens.
3. They aren't secret American technology.
4. They probably also aren't Russian or Chinese, unless we're granting the possibility that the Russians or the Chinese have somehow gotten decades ahead of us technologically and managed to keep it secret.
As for what they actually are, the answer seems to be basically Shrug Emoji.
Still, if the articles are accurately describing the content of the report, it's quite something to have the government officially go on the records that UFOs actually are a real phenomenon that seems to deny easy explanation.
(1), (3), and (4) are, of course, evidence they are aliens. It would be interesting to see what those who were right early on about COVID think of the possibility of UFOs being aliens.
Yeah, that's sort of my thinking. If you grant the basic physical existence of objects doing what is described here, there isn't really a not-weird answer. Maybe it's not aliens, but whatever it is would need to be pretty wild.
Even the 'secret government technology' option has some pretty interesting implications if you work through what it would mean that 1 or more governments has managed to develop technology this far ahead of what the general scientific community thinks is the state of the art. It's one thing for the government to have the most advanced toys; it's something else for the government to have stuff that we can't even begin to offer an explanation for.
I wasn't right early on about COVID, but the real issue with the alien hypothesis is "why?"
I mean, the only vaguely-plausible scenarios I can come up with for clandestine alien presence are:
1) They're on Prime Directive zoo rules, but they want physical samples of Earth biochemistry for their records. The problem with this one is that the aliens have access to all our communications (including most of the encrypted ones); decades of breaking cover seem laughably incompetent.
2) They're on Prime Directive zoo rules, and the UFOs are the equivalent of the drunk Kazahkstani who climbed over a fence and rode a giraffe, heedless to the probable consequences. In which case, well, sure, but where are the ones drunk enough to point a death ray at Tokyo or something else obvious? "Covered up" doesn't hold water since if the larger alien society were willing to do that they'd have covered up the UFOs as well; expenses on this scale are just irrelevant to an interstellar power, and covering up a UFO is easier than covering up Tokyo Crater or a public broadcast.
3) Earth happens to be owned (in the aliens' books) by some massive troll who's fucking with us for the hell of it. This one doesn't have any *obvious* problems, although the prior should be pretty low (you'd expect more such worlds to wind up in the hands of conservationists or conquerors or uplifters than in the hands of trolls).
2) Not that extrapolation is all that sound for this, but people break into zoo cages and do weird stuff, but they don't have a history of just killing zoo animals.
Alien UFOs might not have a Prime Directive, but rather a simple directive to not risk capture.
There is no risk of capture for e.g. a remote drone containing a containment-fail-on-communications-loss chunk of antimatter.
This is leaving aside the trivial ease of trading for whatever they want or demanding it at gunpoint. An interstellar spaceship almost by definition has access to cheap resources and would significantly outgun the whole Earth (fast interstellar travel for a manned-size vehicle would burn kilotons of antimatter).
An interstellar spaceship is much more likely to look like a spore than the starship enterprise. Outgunning and access to cheap resources are not a given.
By "access to cheap resources" I mean the resources already in the Solar System, which they can get to much more easily than we can.
I am dubious regarding the potential of a micron-scale craft, even if it can contain a full intelligence (this is not obvious given the number of atoms involved), to reliably retain that intelligence intact over years of primary cosmic-ray bombardment. There are also problems with dust resistance and with scaling down a propulsion system that far.
In any case, sub-centimetre craft would not explain the UAPs being discussed.
Well, if its interference is confined to occasionally frightening people with UFOs I for one welcome our new Alien Troll Overlord.
> (1), (3), and (4) are, of course, evidence they are aliens.
Or some kind of natural phenomena, so not evidence for aliens specifically.
They are evidence that it's aliens, but they're also evidence that it's non-human earth-based biological life, and also evidence that it's a weird weather phenomenon, and also evidence that it's angels, and probably also a few other weird hypotheses (some of which may or may not count as "aliens" depending on our conceptualization of this strange part of our conceptual space).
My not very informed guess is some kind of interesting and weird natural phenomena.
Like aliens!
1. Is that necessarily true? It could just be they figured out how to spoof our equipment for detecting them- I remember that was in Tyler Rogoway's article about why he thought they were foreign surveillance drones. That seems a lot more likely than either aliens or the Russians/Chinese figuring out aerospace tech that is vastly far ahead of ours.
I'm guessing the US has spent tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on the sensors of our military aircraft and have an excellent idea of what it would take to spoof them. Being seen by US military aircraft is probably about as good as it gets in terms of visual evidence.
Spoofing isn't that important, compared to stealth technology. And the solution to a plane minimising its radar cross-section is to crank up the sensitivity on your radar systems. This reduces the number of false negatives at the expense of more false-positives.
Is there a good reason to believe the UFOs couldn't be dark matter objects created in a dark matter world?
The fact that we can detect them via electromagnetic means. Dark matter by definition cannot be observed in this fashion.
It's really frustrating trying to get enough details about this to make any sense of it. We know of incidents in 2004, 2014-15 and 2019 in both Pacific and Atlantic. There's no reason to think that that's all of the incidents or that they only go back to the 2000s because the military brass has shown clear disinterest, and pilots are not keen to share unless they have crewmates and video to back them up.
All of these incidents appear to be over water. Objects are detected by radar and infrared, and descriptions of them sound very suspiciously vague and Hollywood-like.
When did the US Navy start putting cameras on its aircraft?
Did large-crew aircraft suddenly become more common around the early 2000s?
Have other countries had similar incidents? France, the UK, Germany, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland, and Australia together have *almost* as many aircraft as the US.
Why is it only the Navy producing videos? Doesn't literally every other service have an air wing? *Are* incidents only happening over water, or is that just because of the small sample size?
If craft appeared daily for about 9 months in 2014-15, why aren't more people coming forward with stories and details?
And most importantly, I just googled "sasquatch videos" and the first 5 results I found were more convincing and higher resolution than any of the UFO videos. Why can't the Navy upgrade their damn cameras?
Alternate hypotheses: something weather, something radioactive, something magnetic, something alive but native to earth, something run privately. A reminder that hovercraft prototypes were built in WW2.
Assuming they are natural, would they be more or less weird than ball lightning? Because that's accepted as real, involves bright lights doing non-normal things, and still not well-understood.
According to Wikipedia: "The presumption of its existence has depended on reported public sightings, which have produced inconsistent findings. Owing to the lack of reproducible data, the existence of ball lightning as a physical phenomenon remains unproven" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning
Or it could be some agency or military branch has enough sway to prompt the government to more or less lie about this, even internally. Which kind-of happened with the CIA's U-2 program.
https://fas.org/sgp/library/ciaufo.html
This isn't even unjustifiable, I can imagine pressing security needs might require something to be kept absolutely secret, and keeping something important absolutely secret might be very difficult without some degree of misinformation. At least they aren't trying to defame the witnesses these days.
+1
In such a skeptical forum, I'm surprised so many people seem to be accepting 'government denies that mysterious videos depict top secret military technology' as persuasive evidence that the mysterious videos do not depict top secret technology.
Why release videos and encourage open discussion of your top secret technology at all, though?
I was under the impression that a lot of people were talking about this stuff already.
It's been in the news lately specifically because the navy has been talking about it and releasing the footage. My best guess is still that it's some kind of disinformation campaign, even though I can't figure out how it makes sense.
Epistemic status: haven't been following it closely and should probably keep my mouth shut.
I think portions of it have been out there for a while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos#Release_of_videos
If so, the pentagon saying "the videos are real but we don't know what it is and it's definitely not any of our secret stuff" doesn't seem very strange or trustworthy.
I *am* pretty fascinated by the objects/phenomena themselves, though. Not trying to act all jaded.
Thesis: Getting people interested in aliens is positively correlated with getting people interesting in dumping funding into tech and military tech.
There are probably some patterns to what rationalists tend to be skeptical about and what not.
For sure, but I would have guessed terrestrial extra-terrestrial activity and government press releases about top secret technology would be on the other side of the pattern.
I'm not saying I reject either one. And my curiosity is piqued.
I just don't see any good reason to update my priors significantly on these topics based on what has recently made it into the news.
I think what news outlets report on this is likely to be a lot more about clickbaity draws of readers vs not wanting to get laughed at by the cool kids on Twitter than it is about a careful weighing of the evidence and trying to think clearly about what's going on. (And most journalists are scientifically and technically illiterate, so it's not like they're going to have much insight about the whole question.)
Anyone suggesting that they are domestic or foreign military technology needs to address the sheer "alienness", for lack of a better word, of the maneuvers these objects are pulling off. Dropping from 80,000 to 20,000 feet at 30 times the speed of sound, traveling underwater at 70 knots with no external propulsion system(and appearing to freely move from liquid to air travel), breaking the speed of sound repeatedly with no booms, and so on (I recommend anyone interested get into the details of the videos and military personnel accounts). Holographic or "spoofing" technology is the only that seems even somewhat likely, considering if this is a physical object it suggests technology that would revolutionize any possessing country's economy.
But then, why in god's name would Russia, China or the US debut such technology in this way? And why make the spoofs or holograms conform to age-old images of alien spacecraft?
Also, I think it was on an SSC links page that I learned about anti-gravity drive patents filed by the US military. Yet I haven't seen anyone drawing connections between this and that.
If
>And why make the spoofs or holograms conform to age-old images of alien spacecraft?
That one's easy - to confuse the people investigating and send them up a blind alley.
>And why make the spoofs or holograms conform to age-old images of alien spacecraft?
Well, age-old images of alien spacecraft seem to look like fuzzy granulated blobs because if they didn't we'd have filed them in some other bin that "that must be an alien spacecraft!", and what photographic or video evidence for the current wave of UFOs look like fuzzy granulated blobs because same reason, and if the are spoofs or holograms then probably because creating a spoof or hologram of a fuzzy granulated blob is much easier than creating any other sort of spoof or hologram.
The bit where, if a human being who has ever watched a science fiction movie catches a brief glimpse of a fuzzy blob in the sky, their visual cortex will often fill out the blob with a detailed image of the median pop-culture alien spacecraft down to the rivets, is an interesting but uninformative distraction. And the most credible reporters aren't saying anything beyond "fuzzy blob" in the first place.
Do you get a sense of achievement from your job? If so what does that feel like from the inside. And are there any techniques for increasing that feeling
I do get that sense of achievement sometimes, but it's basically just pride in how I handled stuff, rather than the actual achievement itself. I can go into the details, but I have a feeling it's not what you're looking for?
Either works really. I'm just trying to get away from the mindset of "eugh I need to get this done" towards something more positive
I think for me it's less what I've done that how I've done it. A favorite mantra of mine is "self esteem comes from performing esteemable acts", so I try to live up to my core values (honesty, usefulness, constant improvement) at work.
If I can leave work and tell myself that I have shown "character" that day, the outcome doesn't really matter. It's all very process oriented to me, as I've been disillusioned with the core of our work for a few years now. So to keep going, I changed the rules and made it about how I hold myself.
Yes, but not all of the time. A lot of the work that I do involves preparing for other work (both mine and others), which is far less satisfying. I might spend hours working on something to only find out that a lot of the time was wasted or in the wrong direction.
Things that help me feel more satisfied is finishing a useful project or making life better/easier for myself, a coworker, boss, customer, etc. Something that really helps me feel satisfied is recognition for work completed. Part of that is probably vanity, but there's also a really nice feeling from knowing that your work really did make a difference, enough that someone would go out of their way to say so. I used to work for a family business of about 200 employees, and the CEO called me to his office to give me $1,000 for doing a good job (not related to a specific project, just apparently being a good employee). It was not an obligation and not expected, so it really made me feel good that I was valued and doing useful things.
As a software developer, I find unit testing psychologically helpful: each successfully passing test is a small win. In best situations, this feels like solving a puzzle.
Sometimes I feel proud about producing an elegant solution to a task. (Problem is that not all kinds of tasks allows this kind of solution. If the task is "plumbing", plumbing correctly does not give me the sense of achievement.) This feels like "leveling up", because certainly there was a moment in the past when I was not able to produce this elegant solution.
If I am in a contact with the actual end user, seeing them happy about something I did gives me the (near-mode) feeling that my work is not meaningless. After making money for a few decades, getting a salary no longer feels like a "reward"; it's just a normal thing what keeps happening all the time. Even getting a bonus no longer feels like a reward, because I realize that being slightly better at negotiating my base salary would actually have a larger effect on my total income. But seeing happy faces... that's rare and enjoyable.
"Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction?"
Absolutely not. Politics infects everything in modern America. The few spaces that still haven't gotten the virus must be quarantined at all costs.
> I haven’t noticed the same number of political blowups here as on SSC. Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction?
Allowing politics on even-numbered threads seems fine to me.
My instinct says that the diminishment in political blowups is most likely due to Substack's comments system being much worse than the SSC comments system. Harder to use -> less use.
In today’s NYT there an article about the pending decision from the FDA on whether to approve Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aducanumab.
Aduncanumub is an antibody that targets amyloid protein clumps that occur in the brain. But there is no evidence that such clumps cause Alzheimer’s; the only evidence is that they often but by no means always occur along with Alzheimer’s.
Some Alzheimer’s victims have low levels or no clumping; other people who die of different disease and had no Alzheimer’s symptoms, have extensive clumping.
There’s little to no evidence that Aducanumab treats Alzheimer’s and no other drug targeting Amaloid clumps has shown any success- Alzheimer’s is as untreatable now as it was when it was first diagnosed.
Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the link between Amyloid and Alzheimer’s and for researchers to look elsewhere in the body for the causes. Biigen has sunk billions into the Amyloid-Alzheimer’s link; if they can get the FDA to approve Aducanumab they’ll get it all back and billions more, so they have no incentive to question the link. But it seems to me that until research goes off in a different direction, real progress in treating Alzheimer’s will not occur.
AFAIR removing amyloid plaques improves symptoms of Alzheimer's, and the jury is still out on whether it's slowing down the underlying root cause.
There's plenty of research investigating all sorts of angles for Alzheimer's, the problem is realy interesting and difficult. If anything, billions of private dollars bet on one of the hypotheses is a huge boon to other researchers who will conclusively see whether this approach makes sense at all.
What do you mean by "removing amyloid plaques"? Drugs that stop the production of amyloid-beta have not shown any effectiveness.
The problem with the billions of private dollars is that research controlled by someone with the goal of "convince [regulator] that X works" is frequently a lie. Biogen doesn't seem to have forged their studies - if they had, presumably they wouldn't have gotten a negative - but they have used deceitful inferences when describing those studies to the FDA.
There were some promising mouse trials (and ill fated human ones, due to a chance of brain swelling) of a similar antibody-based strategy, it was mentioned in de Grey's "Ending Aging" - I don't have a reference on hand sadly, and Google lists so many failed AD drug trials it's not helping at all.
Then again, mouse models of Alzheimer's are kind of dumb anyway, so...
Regarding the register of bans, you say "Check the register if you don't know what I mean." However, two out of six problematic comments referenced there are already deleted. If part of the reasoning behind linking to those comments is telling "Hey, here are some things you should definitely not do on this blog", then this deletion could be a problem, and providing a summary of what the person did wrong (or doing something entirely different about it) could be of use. However, if the links are only for providing justification for bans, as proofs that there was indeed some offence in what those people did, then seeing that the authors have decided to delete those comments probably serves the same purpose and the situation is okay.
Do you mean, "more of a summary than the one Scott provides when banning"? e.g. Freddie's ban was summarized as:
> I'm against people saying "Look how stupid this is!" without any explanation of why they disagree...
Or do you just mean you think the summary should be on the register directly?
I mainly wanted to draw attention to the fact that some of the mentioned comments were deleted, as I have not seen this discussed elsewhere, and to say I am not sure on whether this is fine or not. I do not want to propose any concrete policy, including on what are best practices for summarization.
I strongly agree that if the register is going to point to examples to clarify bounds (a good thing!) then some additional record of what the comment was is *critical*. This was a problem that only grew worse over time on SSC, notably including where long-time users could get permabanned for rationale that was itself scrubbed.
I don't have a perfect technical implementation in mind, but a semi-hidden quote reply in addition to the rationale would get one 90% of the way there.
The comments are still present, just hidden by the UI. My UI (linked elsewhere, I don't want to nag so you can find it on this page) is too stupid to know to hide them so they just show up.
If you don't want to use that -- and I don't blame you -- you can grab the comments for Open Thread 174 at:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/api/v1/post/36895139/comments [1]
and search the text for the comment number as indicated in Scott's URL. Like Freddie's comment is here:
{"id":2082976
and read it. I suggest an online JSON decoder.
And, yeah, this is way too complicated for people to do to understand what crossed the line, but there's always a tension between what you leave up as an example and hiding the thing.
[1] The number 36895139 is specific to Open Thread 174 and can be found in the source of the page as `"post":{"id":36895139,`
I'm surprised there haven't been as many blow-ups. It seems like Substack makes it easier for them to happen, since you get an email every time somebody replies to your comment.
Something I noticed the other day with buffet/all-you-can-eat restaurants. I think a good rule of thumb is that you subtract $10 off the per-person price to eat at them, and that tells you roughly what the cost would be to eat at a non-buffet restaurant with similar quality of food.
What do folks think will happen first-
1. Artificial kidney that replicates most of the functions of a regular kidney, and can be worn for years if necessary before replacement;
2. Bio-engineered animal or lab-grown kidney that can be transplanted.
Since we had nuclear come up, there's been some news about Atom On A Flatbed - AKA the military getting a nuclear reactor that could be flown in or driven in on a flatbed truck to a base for power. Pretty cool stuff, although you'd obviously have to armor it up as much as possible both for radiation mitigation and to alleviate fears that it could be targeted (proliferation is not really a big concern considering the type of fuel they're using):
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40914/the-militarys-mobile-nuclear-reactor-prototype-is-set-to-begin-taking-shape
Nuclear-powered ships would be neat, too, but they're still too expensive at this point. Maybe if cargo ships go up even more size . . . .
I give 2 a greater chance of happening first just because we've already solved* the problem of transplant rejection. We can optimize bioengineering processes for kidneys with properties we /know/ are important to prevent transplant rejection.
I suppose you could say the same for dialysis, but miniaturization of that technology as well as making it function inside a live human seems like it would create far more and harder problems than taking an organ from an animal and making it do exactly what it's already doing in a different animal.
*Or at least solved enough that transplant recipients can live their life on immunosuppressants.
That's very interesting (the kidney question). I go back and forth on that. On the one hand, the *basic* functions of a kidney (filtration) are well understood, so getting an implantable equivalent of a dialysis machine seems pretty darn doable. But on the other hand, the kidney does all kinds of other subtle things about which we *don't* know, so...what about them? Plus the experience of the artificial heart should be a warning sign -- so far as we know the heart really does do nothing but pump blood, and yet that has been astonishingly hard to design artificially. All kinds of unforeseen engineering problems sprung up (although in hindsight maybe they should have been more obvious based on the fact that blood is actually a tissue, not just a fluid).
On the other hand, favoring the lab-grown approach, there is the fascinating work on growing small bits of organs on scaffolds with stem cells that has shown some very interesting promise, and of course that obviates the rejection problem because it's your own cells. But to set against that there is the increasing believe that intercellular communication has a lot more to do with correct growth than we might think, and how would you set that up in a lab? The growing kidney isn't by definition able to communicate with all the other organs and tissues that, perhaps, help guide the natural development of a kidney. This seems like a really hard problem to solve (unless you go "The Island" route).
Nuke the FDA and you'll have #2 within 5 years. I wouldn't be surprised if someone already has a proof of concept waiting to be tested.
The kidney question seems like it's very parallel to the question of whether Beyond/Impossible will simulate meat well enough for meat eaters sooner or later than the lab-grown stuff that's debuting in Singapore right now. Of course, a functioning kidney is far more highly structured than meat, but there's some similarities!
> 5: I haven’t noticed the same number of political blowups here as on SSC. Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction?
I can’t substantiate this beyond a general sense of having had my finger on the pulse of a number of communities for a long time, but it seems like things ate weirdly calm everywhere, not just this corner of the web. The main visible cause is just that we have a different President now. The fights that are happening lately seem like perfunctory enactments of the required rituals, without teeth.
I don’t really expect people to agree but just in case others have noticed this as well, I think this is a cyclical component to Internet anger, and we’re just at a nadir. Some other stupid bullshit will happen to refocus everyone shortly.
'The fights that are happening lately seem like perfunctory enactments of the required rituals, without teeth'
I agree with this. I hadn't thought it clearly until you pointed it out (quite eloquently) but I now realise that I'd had the feeling that there was a strange calmness culture-war-wise. You're probably right about the Trump effect, although I'm English so I'm observing this from a distance. And as it is an odd numbered thread I won't say any more about that :)
Trump has faded into the background so we don't have the daily political excitement from him. And covid is improving so people are outdoors more.
Is there any writing or developed body of theory on the concept that capital is no longer scarce, and this is causing all kinds of problems?
It seems to me that for most of the history of functioning capital markets, capital was so scarce that any additional capital a person had could be put to use relatively easily, because investible opportunities dramatically outweight the amount of capital available for long term investment.
Where as in modernity, your additional thousand dollars is very unlikely to matter that much to anyone. There are giant piles of capital looking for investment somewhere that will give a positive return.
Is there someone who has explored this idea at all?
I haven't seen anyone writing about it, but there does seem to be a shortage of good investment opportunities.
That is an interesting take and makes intuitive sense. We personally just paid down all remaining debt and are struggling with where to allocate future capital since everything seems well overpriced.
My impression is that one of the major tenets of the Austrian school is that easy money sows the seeds of recession, more or less because it prevents creative destruction. But I'm no economist.
And because it stimulates investment in dubious ventures that then fail.
However, just because this is their theory doesn't make it true, of course.
"Capital is no longer scarce" is a roundabout way of saying "there is a shortage of profitable ventures". The latter sounds pretty terrifying if you think about it.
I think it's all an artifact of the disconnect between the make-believe of financial markets with the ground truth of raw materials and supply bottlenecks, which are in a head on collision as we speak. A lot of fictional throughput and fictional inventory was being claimed (see contracts for precious metals vs actual stock of precious metals), and the market is right now realizing it's completely disjointed from reality. Basically, nobody wants your capital because it's all fake anyway.
Low interest rates mean cheap capital (or vice-versa)?
https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world
This probably could be put under the label of a "theory of insuficient aggregate investment demand", which is s pretty mainstream concept in economics.
Agree, nothing weird about this.
From Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations:
“In a country which had acquired its full complement of riches, where, in every particular branch of business, there was the greatest quantity of stock that could be employed in it, as the ordinary rate of clear profit would be very small, so the usual market rate of interest which could be afforded out of it would be so low as to render it impossible for any but the very wealthiest people to live upon the interest of their money. All people of small or middling fortunes would be obliged to superintend themselves the employment of their own stocks. It would be necessary that almost every man should be a man of business, or engage in some sort of trade." I.e. when an economy can no longer grow, interest rates will naturally decline and only the very very very richest will be able to idly live off the profits of capital.
Ixnay on the oliticspay, si vous plait.
Is there any reason to believe highly intelligent life is unlikely to evolve underwater? Could an intelligent species have evolved in our oceans millions of years ago? Could they still be around?
What are your criteria for 'highly intelligent'? Because in my view, some of the highest intelligences on Earth live underwater. Dolphins are arguably the most intelligent animals after humans, looking at their social structure, and communicative and problem-solving abilities. As far as I know, no other animal has coordinated cross-species hunting strategies: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2149139-dolphins-that-work-with-humans-to-catch-fish-have-unique-accent/
I had in mind; intelligent enough to develop AI. But thanks for the link!
Wow, that is a HIGH bar. Could a species intelligent enough to develop AI have evolved in our oceans millions of years ago? Absolutely not, the notion is beyond absurd.
Let's take a lower bar. Could a species intelligent enough to develop language have evolved? Highly unlikely, but theoretically possible. Stuff like that doesn't show up in the fossil record.
Could there have been a species as intelligent as dolphins are now in the ocean back then? I still think the odds are substantially against. All the smartest animals in the ocean today are mammals, which evolved whole new brain structures on land before returning to the ocean. I don't see anything beating them in the intelligence department when they have another million years of evolution going for them.
> I had in mind; intelligent enough to develop AI.
Intelligence is an overrated requirement for the development of technology. Chimps are almost as good at humans at problem solving and figuring out cause and effect by observation, which is what people typically associate with intelligence, but they lack the generational and cultural propagation of knowledge of humans. This seems more important for the development of technology.
Dolphins are arguably intelligent and just as social as humans, but they lack dextrous appendages with which to create technology.
So I think there are at least 3 pillars for a technological civilization: intelligence, dexterity and culture.
I forgot to conclude: there's no reason these things couldn't evolve in the oceans. Dolphins are intelligent and social, and the octopus are intelligent and dextrous.
E.O. Wilson made the argument, in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Conquest_of_Earth , that the lack of fire was the main bottleneck for intelligent life evolving underwater
OK. Thanks!
Sure. You can't concentrate heat or easily isolate liquids underwater, which means your chemistry will always be pretty darn primitive. No metallurgy. Can't smelt ores, so no metal. Can't cook or ferment something, so no foods other than what you can eat raw, and no potions or chemical engineering. You can't easily create steep thermal gradients, so no thermal engines, no refrigeration.
Some of these things you can do *after* you have built advanced technology on land, and when you do the construction on land, which is why *we* can bring any or all of these things into the ocean, but I don't see how they get started in the ocean. I'm not even sure *we* could build a submarine if we were obliged to do it all underwater, starting from the iron ore and bare hands.
That only means intelligence doesn't arise (or go as far) if you believe that tool-using is an essential part of its development, but I usually think that's a pretty good argument -- we are as smart as we need to be to use the tools we are capable of inventing. But that's a lot smarter than whales or dolphins, perhaps because whales and dolphins are already as smart as they need to be to be top dog in the ocean -- and there's no *other* employment for their intelligence, because they can't build technology and tools.
I'm not sure we have any good reason to think certain types of cetaceans and possibly cephalopods aren't as intelligent or at least close to humans. However, thanks to not having fire and the quick corrosion of metals underwater, underwater engineering is all but impossible. At least any kind of engineering we'd recognize. You definitely can't build an electronic computer, which is the only means we have of plausibly creating programmable artificial intelligence.
The Abyss back in the 80s did posit an alien species with the ability to do engineering directly with water, but that seemed to involve telepathic control of water at a molecular level. We have no idea if something like that is possible. Engineering with fire and metal is at least definitely possible.
Yeah, marine mammals (dolphins and whales), and octupi both seem to be pretty intelligent. It might be hard to develop technology, but I'm not entirely sure that's true. After all, if you'd evolved and developed an underwater high-tech civilization, you'd probably think intelligent land animals couldn't find the critical things for inventing technology.
Can't use fire. Assuming that's necessary. SimEarth wouldn't let sea creatures have civilization for that reason
What book would you reccommend to become a better writer? Not like a novelist or anything. I mainly just comment on the internet.
Scott has answered this once before: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
That said, I would always be happy to read a sequel!
Thank you!
Thanks Scott for formally reinstating the commenting policy :)
That Cassirer essay review was in fact interesting, if a little too long for me to finish. It’s rare to learn of a new historical philosopher with interesting *and* currently relevant things to say.
Thank's for the comment - it was a joy to write the review! (given that I'm no official contestant, I don't feel bound by the anonymity requirement)
So for everyone else interested in philosophy: Please give it a shot and if it feels to long, either only read part 1.5 or skip to the summary at any point.
Substack bug: anyone else on mobile finding that links to comments almost always land a ways above the highlighted comment?
Yeah, substack loads the comments after the main page has loaded, so the anchor doesn't work properly.
Re: 5
A perspective that you may not have considered.
As a non US reader I actually really enjoy the politics free threads, if nothing else for the reason that it tends to be so heavily US politics based. Even when the quality of discourse is high, I find allowing "politics" tends to skew the discussion in a way thats much less internationally relevant.
I'm curious to know if I'm alone in this or not.
You're not alone in this. Part of it is because some things can be a bit hard to understand as an outsider, part of it because many things are not really relevant on an international scale, and part of it for reasons I won't get into here since we're in an odd-numbered thread.
Yep - put that down for me as another reason I like the no-politics threads. They're welcome breaks from nationalistic parochialism.
Oops. Too late to edit, and I posted before I even smelt the irony. Apologies.
Yes this, just below personal and communal well-being
Would love to see some "non-U.S." politics thread, though! I have _no_ idea what's going on in, say, Bulgaria or Uruguay.
Maybe posts that end in 5 should allow international politics.
Are international politics not allowed in politics open thread? I thought that "politics" meant "everything", so if I wanted to talk about let's say France, it was okay. But it may be me misunderstanding.
International politics would be allowed, but maybe we should have the occasional thread where they're encouraged.
I'm currently looking for advice on how to deal with a very specific and pernicious form of OCD, which causes me to constantly doubt my beliefs on topics that are very important to me (in such a way that evidence against me seems much more convincing than I know it should). I already posted the explanation on Reddit, so I'll just link that here instead of copying and pasting the entire thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/nsh6c7/looking_for_some_help_on_an_ocd_problem/
I'm specifically looking for a way to deal with it that doesn't come too close to "just learn to be more comfortable with the uncertainty" - being comfortable with uncertainty is one thing, and I've definitely gotten better about that over the years, but the whole issue is that my OCD is actively distorting my perception of evidence and logic to try to force an artificial level of uncertainty (e.g. maybe I'd be fine being 80% certain about something, but my OCD won't even let me get above 50%). I'm already looking into solutions (I'm thinking I might need a medication adjustment), but any additional input would be appreciated.
Can you actually reason your way out of OCD? That hasn’t been my experience. Mediation does seem to help me.
Is it at all possible to channel the doubt into "proofreading" your beliefs? It's my experience people feel the most doubt over things that are the most important (and often most carefully thought out) of their ideas, because these things are so important they should be proofed against challenge -- kind of like you read over a very important and carefully-drafted letter many times, looking for typos.
Not knowing the beliefs, I couldn't say if this would be possible or not, but if it were -- if it were possible to enlist the doubt to patch any cracks in the foundatin of the edifice -- then it seems to me, perhaps naively, that this might lessen the "threat" feeling of the doubt. It might be apparent after a while that the doubt is (1) in some ways your friend, and (2) won't cause the entire edifice to crumble. That wouldn't necessarily take the doubt away, but it might lessen the emotionally draining aspect of it.
Yeah this is basically what I would like to be able to do. The problem is that (to use your proofreading metaphor) I *constantly* keep seeing typos that I'm almost certain are not actually there, and even if I don't see any I'm still not satisfied no matter how many times I look it over. If I could get down to the point where I could actually "proofread" in a healthy way, that would be ideal.
That makes sense. And I guess OCD is nothing if not the inability to quit when things are "good enough," so my advice while logical is worthless in practice. I'm sorry I have nothing better to offer, and thanks for helping illuminate what the problem looks like from the inside.
I read your articles and I started to wonder why I'm not bothered at all by the ideas you seem to be bothered by.
I noticed I, and most other people I'd consider well-adjusted, have an almost axiomatic prior that "we'll figure something out" - whatever happens we'll land on our feet, and if we don't, we'll come up with a plan B, and if we don't, we'll deal with the fallout and limit damage (...) and in the worst case, it won't be so bad anyway. Cf. stoicism. Having this kind of prior seems adaptive, and correlates with leadership and initiative. Notably, this prior was absent while I was in a depressive episode.
Seems like some kind of 'resting muscle tone' for the mind, no idea how to get it if you don't have it, but it seems relevant to all kinds of psychiatric disorders.
+1 This matches my experience with depression.
Could it be "just" depression working together with OCD?
Being depressed, I doubt my character, skills and motives all the time and I've recently come to suspect that I doubt the beliefs I happen to hold in the same way, putting them under excessive scrutiny. When the beliefs change, the doubt follows.
Blessing and a curse really, keeps me probably more honest, but also makes me a terrible ally, always finding something to criticize in the in-group.
Is it worth trying to doubt your doubt? Maybe it's an emotional habit rather than a trustworthy guide.
No doubt! It is a habit and not always trustworthy.
It also serves a positive purpose though, as I believe all habits do. I'm quite emphatic, and in effect – pretty gullible. I tend to easily adopt beliefs through social osmosis, or they are piggybacked along with some legitimate beliefs. Losing sense of self, cognitive dissonance, and doubt ends up purging some of those illegitimate beliefs, but I'm sure some legitimate beliefs get undue heat in the process and maybe I've even dropped some true beliefs along the way, who knows.
Well, OCD and depression seem to be working on the same mechanism (high prior in favor of negative beliefs, low weight put on evidence to the contrary) so it seems plausible that they would be mutually reinforcing. I know that my current situation was not always as bad as it currently is - the flare-up I'm currently in has lasted about 2 years, and it started very shortly after a particularly bad experience that shook a lot of future plans that I had been leaning on for the previous 6 years. It took me a while to realize how much that had affected me and I only started getting depressed from it many months later, but the OCD symptoms flared up almost immediately after the event happened.
Yes, seems very true about the mechanism.
Doubting one’s beliefs seems like an understandable reaction to a traumatic event, especially if you feel like your beliefs had failed you to prepare for it. Maybe the event and the beliefs had nothing to do with each other, but that’s often irrelevant to how traumas work and form.
I don’t know if that event 2 years ago changed some important beliefs, but I wrote the following on that assumption. (Now that I think of it, what does it mean to change beliefs if they always hover around 50 %...)
I’ve been “distro-hopping” with beliefs systems (BS) quite some time, and depending how long I’ve held the BS and how (especially socially) involving they’ve been, the more bitter and disappointed I’ve been once they’ve worn off and I have let myself “get duped” so bad. And now, looking back at the rainbow of beliefs (atheist → christian → atheist → 9/11-truther → crystal hippie → SJW) that all seemed fine and exciting at the time, I’m very suspicious of my current and any new beliefs, all the more so if they’re somehow socially enforced.
Those changes in beliefs didn’t involve a particularly bad experience, but I still feel bitter and like I can trust very little, so I’m not surprised if your experience had a similar but stronger impact.
Sorry, you asked for advice and I notice this isn't really it.
I Count My Pills
I count my pills.
Thirty doses left.
Can I make it until my appointment?
What if he won’t fill my meds?
I count my pills.
Twenty doses left.
Will I lose another job?
How will I see a doctor?
I count my pills
Fifteen doses left
Im trying not to panic
Maybe I can try half doses?
i count my pills
ten doses left
had to drop out of school
i have to save the pills for work
i count mypills
five doses left
cant afford to buy from a dealer
just gotta make it through
i count my pills
no doses left
I'm going to run Lady Blackbird (a rules light tabletop RPG) as a way to meet more folks in the rationalist/ACX/EA spheres. The time will be Thursdays at 5:30pm PST, ending at approximately 7 PST (probably a little earlier). I've ran this before with some work buddies and had a bunch of fun with it. Don't worry if you've never played an RPG before, I'll explain all the rules in the first session and my experience has been that new players are usually more fun to run with :)
Comment if you're interested!
https://johnharper.itch.io/lady-blackbird
Other logistical details:
* We'll use Roll20 for video and rolling. Again, no worries if you've never used it before and happy to explain the minimal UI bits you need.
* The game runs well with 2-5 players, but I have trouble running for more than 4 people online (too little time in the spotlight for everyone). I'll run it if I get 3+ folks interested.
* The game will probably last ~5 sessions.
Might be interested! Drop a reply so I can find this comment again later.
It's an excellent little game.
I only open the non-political threads, except when I forget which ones are odd and even. The announcement of Hidden Open Threads doesn't include a reminder. Plus, I always forget whether the parity of a number applies to digits after the decimal. I tried coming up with a mnemonic, which I usually am good at, but have not succeeded. (Rationalist-people problems)
Also, when it says, "this one is non-political, so be careful," I react in the opposite way that's intended. For me, being careful means being careful to avoid reading anything political.
I'm wondering if anyone has any hacks for reducing or eliminating bad dreams. I've been plagued by bad dreams for the past four years or so. They're not usually full-blown nightmares -- more like frustrating situations, where I'm late for a very important meeting, but I can't find the room where the meeting is being held, so I'm running all over the building opening random doors. These dreams seem to occur in the early morning, shortly before I wake up. They happen almost every day. Sometimes I remember the details, but often I wake up with just this vague feeling that I've just had a really bad dream. It's a shitty way to start the day.
There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why these dreams have started happening so frequently (and note that this problem began way before the pandemic). There hasn't been any major change in my life situation that precipitated this.
I'm looking for suggestions on how to deal with this.
You probably already looked into this, but have you considered lucid dreaming? Even if you don't become a full-on lucid dreamer, many of the techniques will be useful.
If that was happening to me, I'd probably try to get out of my doctor another prescription for hydroxyzine. I've been on it before - it's an antihistamine and anti-anxiety drug that helps you sleep a lot better and seems to reduce that kind of thing.
I second Philip's comment. Achieving lucidity has helped me with disturbing dreams and nightmares. You don't have to be fully aware in control, but even just being a little more in control of your dreams gives you a way out of the situation.
General lucid dreaming techniques that worked for me and friends: keeping a dream journal (remembering your dreams helps you gain control- and you might find you have lots of other dreams you weren't remembering before you started writing them down) and reality checks (taking time during your waking life to stop and confirm you're really awake by pushing on something solid or looking in a mirror- this plants the "am I dreaming?" thought in your head so you can later realize you're dreaming while you're dreaming).
Recent example from my life: sometimes I have bad dreams about being trapped in buildings I can't escape because ceilings keep forming over my head. I keep going up stairs but whenever I think I've reached the roof, there's another ceiling overhead. There are no windows or doors leading outside.
So I got creative and I started telling myself during the day "I can see the sky". I told myself that over and over again. I imagined looking up at a ceiling and looking straight through it to the sky, such that it disappeared and I was free. I did it enough times that the thought got stuck in my head. The next time a barrier formed between me and the sky in a dream, I made it disappear by remembering "I can see the sky".
Another question I'd ask myself in your situation is whether some other sleep-related thing has changed and it's showing up in the form of weird or distressing dreams. I had a lot of drowning dreams when I started getting sleep apnea due to allergies.
Change your diet or exercise habits? In some cases, I can draw a clear line between bad dreams and what I have eaten or how I have exercised the day before. Those dreams aren't meaningful in any sense, they're just how the idle visual and emotional neurons interpret some inflammatory chemical or other. That is, don't overlook the possibility of plain boring biochemical origins.
Another anecdote for "lucid" dreaming. I'm not fully lucid but a bit aware and can sometimes control some things. I have lots of dreams when I'm in strange places, which can be scary, make me anxious or things like that. Now that I'm a bit more lucid than before, I can usually "do something about it", and I feel more in control, so they don't affect me as much as before.
I had two that I've used. I generally get low-grade bad dreams and general sleeping difficulty when I'm stressed.
First and silliest, I was having reoccurring dreams of things crawling on my in my bed, like large spiders and the like. I found my old teddy bear from when I was a kid and propped him up next to me and haven't had the issue reoccur since. He actually only sat there one or two nights. Problem solved. Peoples brains are weird. For the record, I'm 37 and I don't generally get stressed very much or have any known mental issues worthy of diagnosis.
Second, journaling. If I'm having trouble getting to sleep because my mind is latched onto something, writing it down quickly helps my brain let go of it and allow me to sleep. Works surprisingly well. Although I've only tested it on specific waking stressors I would try it with bad dreams as well if they returned.
You should get a sleep study done. You may have sleep apnea or UARS.
What's the most important, most impactful profession one could take up in the US?
I'm thinking it's lawyer. For one thing, even a rank and file lawyer might easily end up a part of a case that has a really big impact. For the other, lawyers are the ones who save people doing important work from being run over by some power run amok.
Any other ideas or corrections?
You should maybe read more Russian writers. https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/short-stories/the-three-questions
Thank you for this! I can't believe I've never seen it before.
There's an organization called 80000 Hours that has done a lot of research into this question, you can read their findings at https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/
Isn't the vast majority of lawyering just opposing other lawyers, though? Do you have any reason to think that you will be on the "good" side if there even is one?
Possibly if you dedicate yourself to underserved people or an especially worthy cause. (Or if you just try to earn a lot and then donate...)
Might be a good base to launch a political career from, too, if you think actual good can be done there.
There's a song I can't find about two lawyers being like the blades of a scissors-- they don't cut each other, but only what's in between.
I don't quite understand the first question. Yes, most people who are not lawyers will hire a lawyer to represent themselves if they need to go to court.
Of course, you can't guarantee that you'll always be on the good side, because you can't guarantee that you'll always have all the facts. I don't believe that we have an epidemic of lawyers who want to send innocent men to the death row, but we do have a lot of death row exonerations via DNA testing, so clearly our legal system makes a lot of mistakes.
Looking at the resistance to DNA testing, I'd say there are a lot of prosecutors who at least don't want to find out they might have made a mistake.
I agree that a lot of the problem isn't with the lawyers.
https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/editorial-illinois-takes-big-step-to-halt-wrongful-convictions-involving-juveniles/article_ba9daa57-50f2-5837-9060-c5a1562d1f2a.html
Note that it's still legal for police to lie to adult suspects during interrogations, and that very few states have laws restricting the police from lying to suspects.
There are a few ways to look at this. I suspect that if you look at the professions of the few people who have ever made extremely important impacts to all of US life, then lawyers are likely to be heavily represented. However, the conditional probability that you will personally ever make a meaningful impact, given you're a lawyer, is very low, because there are too many lawyers and most of them are shuffling paper for corporations or speeding through plea bargains to get to the next case.
So if you want the possibility of making a very large impact, maybe lawyer is a good pick. If you want a guaranteed pretty high floor that you'll make at least some impact, go with plumber. Every job you ever do will noticeably improve someone's quality of life.
The most positive impact anyone has ever made on my life personally was made by my spine surgeon, for whatever that's worth. There are some moonshot possibilities out there in biomedical technology that could totally change what it means to be human, but even the basics of what we can do now in terms of fixing what used to be unfixable can make a drastic difference to some people.
A couple thoughts:
- lawyers represent transactions costs in most instances - i.e., law is not a value-creating activity
- as a general rule, it’s better to be part of the revenue side vs the cost side of the balance sheet
- personally I prefer creation, creativity, challenging the status quo, and taking risks … qualities that are uncommon and at some level incompatible with the practice of law
- consider that being “rank and file” in anything is a way to have not much impact on the overall mission; not that there’s anything wrong with this, but your sphere of material impact is typically the people with whom you interact on a daily basis
(Before returning to tech, I was a top-tier DC attorney for a decade, worked on numerous front-page-news cases in constitutional law, antitrust, and high-tech M&A.)
You might be a good person to ask. I've read (probably in either _Up the Organization_ or _Winning through Intimidation_) that most lawyers are cautious and try to prevent deals from happening, but a lawyer who works to make sensible deals happen is very valuable. Admittedly, this is usually short of being high-impact.
I didn't see a question there, but I assume you're asking if I agree?
Caveat first, this varies a lot depending on the type of lawyer you're talking about and what you mean by "deals."
For example, lawyers in law firms who work on deals make more money when deals happen. So, their incentives and attitudes would tend to point the opposite direction.
That said, I'd agree that many lawyers tend towards risk aversion -- not surprising, given that the work and training involves anticipating and dealing with risk.
If you're talking about lawyers in corporations, it's true that they sometimes have the reputation of saying "no" to other executives. This is partly due to risk aversion, and partly due to the inertia that flows from personal career risk to all executives (easy to assign blame to a plan that's approved and goes wrong than a plan that is not approved and never executed).
Sometimes, no is the correct answer.
Better lawyers articulate the risk profile on each side of a decision, instead of saying yes or no.
The best lawyers are the ones who get at the underlying goal of the business and offer alternative means of achieving that goal or ways of thinking about the problem at hand.
All good points. I'll note that both of those books are from quite some decades ago, so common practice may have changed, or the author may have been talking about the lawyers for some specific kind of business.
You say that law is not a value-creating activity. But do you think that at the end of the day you made much of a difference for the better? Did you help out people that do create value, in your opinion?
Ah - that's a good point: helping out people who are creating value is definitely a way of helping create value. It's indirect, and often subjective or equivocal, but still there are definitely cases that made a difference. Still, my values line up better with being an entrepreneur, or a product manager, or building furniture.
Some of my talk about "value" has to do with the way that balance sheets are viewed in most corporations. Assume (arguendo) that the duty of a corporation is to maximize shareholder return. To do that, one generally wants to reduce elements on the "cost" side - legal fees, insurance, COGS, etc. - while increasing elements on the "revenue" side.
Of course, the "revenue" side must expand beyond mere sales to include product development.
And of course, this is too facile -- a company wants the optimal amount of insurance, the optimal amount of customer support, and the optimal amount of legal spend.
That said, I'll share one object lesson. My friend Jeff moved from our law firm to an in-house corporate role. At the law firm, he was a profit center - king of the hill, with a big window office and teams of assistants. At the corporation, he was a cost center -- in a cramped cubicle farthest from the windows, surrounded by stacks of paper, with little help or opportunity for intellectual engagement.
Thank you very much for all the explanations!
But as to your friend Jeff, it seems to me that techies tend to, rather myopically, snub non-techies and especially lawyers until they really need them. If he was their only lawyer, it's no surprise he was lonely and not treated as if he was important. A day might come when Jeff would be the one essential in rescuing the company, or at least rescuing a large part of its value, and then they might notice that he exists and really appreciate him (or not, you never know with some people). Until then, Jeff is just their insurance rather than their fireman. The fact that there are currently no fires to put out doesn't mean that he is not important.
My votes -
Doctors, nurses, medical workers generally
Teachers, librarians
Farmers
I struggle to see how it could be anything other than an inventor, so long as you're a reasonably successful one.
Depending on your talents, you could have a bigger impact by investing in important inventions.
My reasoning is that really important inventions that influence people's lives a lot are really rare.
If you were an inventor, what would you chose to work on?
I feel like the lack of politics might be a case of "even numbers are reeeally close to odd numbers, even if I am commenting legitimately about it I feel like I'm only one number away from being banned on either side, so I will avoid it". Or something like that. Which would suggest that changing #5 to "politics fine on all open threads" would upset that dynamic and things would soon become political.
If you could add one class or skill to be explicitly taught in every high school in the USA, what would you choose? Is there anything that everyone should be forced to try to learn, that isn't already being taught?
Financial literacy. It was taught in school as part of my job training (the dual system in Germany) and hands down changed my life forever.
On a society-wide level it might be a good idea to have people stand on their own two feet. I think it's a recurring theme around here (or SSC) that people often tend to rely on family and drag down the whole bunch once a financial emergency comes up.
Specific to Germany, it might be a good idea to not have people consume mindlessly for 40+ years before they mooch of state welfare (i.e. the tax payer) once they enter retirement/unemployment.
This seems like a good idea. I wonder if poor financial decisions are caused by a lack of foresight and a tendency towards impulsive behavior, rather than by a lack of understanding of mathematics or finance. Research, including work by David Whitebread and Sue Bingham of the University of Cambridge, suggests that many of our financial habits are set by age 7.
Maybe you're right and I just had a predisposition that would have realized a bit later anyway. It was nice to be encouraged relatively early in life, though.
I learned about compounding interest, scams, credit cards, and basic econ in school and from my parents. I just asked a HS math teacher, and apparently this finance stuff is not in the curriculum in every school, and maybe it should be.
Related to financial literacy-- scam-proofing. Practice in saying no, which has an interesting overlap with sex education.
How to recognize multi-level-marketing schemes and other common scams.
If you don't understand it, don't invest in it. The hard topic might be how to tell when you don't understand something.
This might be harder to institute that it sounds like. I think it would turn out that a number of parents are involved in MLMs and won't want to hear they're making a mistake.
Rationality.
The greatest immediate value I'd expect from this is how it'd effect discourse. Once availability heuristic, conjunction fallacy and scope insensitivity are common knowledge, using emotionally appealing arguments that rely on them ceases to be viable, even if not everyone immediately notices the flaw.
How to fall safely. Probably should be taught earlier than high school.
Absolutely agreed
I think it should be vegetable gardening. It teaches valuable lessons in patience and humility, gets us outside in the sun and reminds us how nice it is to feel dirt.
On the other hand, literature is nice and I have a friend (very much into literature) who says that she never liked a book studied in class unless she'd read it before. I think this generalizes to any area where you are expecting the students to enjoy something: there will be a lot of teachers who will instead ruin it for a lot of their students, possibly forever.
Basic statistics, so people would come out of high school with some skills that would let them tell when numbers they are supposed to believe without questioning just don't make sense.
(Isn't that a prerequisite to rationality, too?)
In the IB diploma program for high school there is a required class called theory of knowledge where they cover some similar ideas such as:
What counts as evidence for X?
How do we judge which is the best model of Y?
What does theory Z mean in the real world?
When looking at the intricacies of data, many students struggle and find it too abstract
So there will be book review contests in the future? It would be good to know because then I'll keep my book review instead of posting it somewhere else.
Ad 5: please don´t, though I have made close to zero contribution to comment threads on ASC so arguably my opinion should count for little.
It would be great if you would be able to get "edit comment" button back; I find it much easier to check for typos by way of first posting comment and then horifyingly realizing what atrocity did I just published, than by proper proofreading, and it is actually a big reason why I stayed away from commenting here.
I think you undervalue your reading and overvalue the commenting of others..
Absolutely agree with your second point - an edit button would be the biggest improvement to ACX commenting.
While I am flattered by Substack's evaluation of potential commenters on the articles posted, that we have such perfection of thought and ease of flow when writing that an edit button is unnecessary, I too wish that they would succour human frailty by adding an edit button.
I seem to remember that on one of my former hangouts (SDMB, maybe?), they specifically disallowed editing comments for ages because people would post something inflammatory --although possibly unintentionally -- and then go back and edit it after much sturm und drang so that it looked as if the responses were irrational.
Facebook keeps an edit history.
SSC had one hour edit window, but edit history preservation would also address this concern
5: absolutely not; a lot of people will want to just skip the politics via easy methods, if they can. Keep 'em separated.
Can someone tell me, or direct me to a link, that explains what the 'theory' is in critical race theory? Every time I've dug into this all I seem to find is a (somewhat discursive) list of things that 'critical race theorists believe', as opposed to an actual theory.
If this isn't the thread for it, it can be postponed, but I'm curious about the Freudian aspect of CRT, in particular the idea that you can derive people's deep motivations from small clues. Is that real Freudianism from Freud, or popularized Freudianism?
Who doesn't?
I resolve to read all of Scott's writing in Ustinov's voice from here on out, complete with pronouncing the "p" in "p-ssssychiatry."
A little popular Freud: A Dram of Poison by Charlotte Armstrong, in which an emotionally abusive person makes an obnoxious deployment of Freud.
Ever notice how the secret motivations are always discreditable?
Without knowing much about it, I assume the Freudian flavor is in assuming that everyone is driven by unconscious motives that are invisible to them... but are of course quite transparent to the expert in the "theory". And if you deny being driven by such motive, it only proves that you are in denial. Once you are accused, the only possible progress is to admit that the accusation is true.
(For the record, I do not think that this is what Freud actually did to his patients. But it seems to be what people do when they attempt to role-play Freud.)
What happens to ideas as the public gets hold of them is probably a worthy field of study in itself.
I think that's called a Double Hermeneutic.
Sociologists study society, but society is also paying attention to what sociologists are saying.
Ah, yes, those fuzzy scavengers. Haven't seen that much looting and rifling since that vandal Einstein went to town on Leibniz.
They defined the truly 'individual' elements of the person in Freudian terms - as a collection of psychosexual drives and inner myths that require fulfilment and conclusion. (It's easy to forget, perhaps, how refreshingly 'scientific' Freud's model of the psyche had seemed even as late as the 1960s) And they struggled to integrate this individual core into Hegel and Marx because at first blush it did not add up to the latter's conception of the self as (I'm putting this very crudely) mostly an externally-determined construct. Some kind of unified theory had to be arrived at. This mattered. It bothered them. It wasn't just arbitrary jargony waffling, for them.
But yeah, when I think of unconscious biases in the modern context, I think less about Adorno and Horkheimer and more about stuff like Jennifer Eberhardt's work, demonstrating certain instinctive reactions that might reflect unconscious prejudice (e.g., after being primed with the image of a black man's face, subjects were quicker to resolve an ambiguous image into the shape of a gun).
One may take issues with the experimental design and relevance of conclusions of such experiments, but they are at least more concrete than wondering how we project our inner psychological hierarchies onto our construction of society which projects them back onto us.
Modern academia is harbouring two mutually exclusive traditions: one where the end goal is to make (self-consistent and inter-compatible) maps of reality using the scientific method, rooted in Enlightenment ideals and another that aims to change the world using activist tactics rooted in political philosophies and movements mostly originating in 19th century Europe. These largely overlap with the "mistake" vs "conflict" frameworks or mindsets that our gracious host described in a previous post on his former blog.
The activist branches of academia almost exclusively have a conflict theory basis where status is highly important. This has led to extensive borrowing of terms from the scientific fields into the activist fields, presumably in an attempt to piggyback on the high-status endeavour of finding things out about the world (c.f. the term "idea laundering", coined by Bret Weinstein I believe). Words like "theory", "analysis" and "model" are frequently used in what linguists would call a “marked” meaning, i.e. in a “non-standard” or “non-traditional” sense. As far as I can tell they serve as status markers in social-constructivist, narrative-based fields ranging from gender studies to socio-linguistics in order to make the field in question sound scholarly and rigorous even though these terms are used in a non-technical, loose and non-traditional way.
I’ve seen all three of the terms I mentioned used more or less interchangeably in various activist fields and they all seem to mean something like “narrative” but they may sometimes be roughly equivalent to “hypothesis”, “speculation” and “claim”, respectively, in the terminology of the scientific tradition.
(Note that there has been little to no flow of terms going in the opposite direction so far, indicating the still prevailing difference in status between the disciplines on the different sides of the divide.)
Hi Keta,
Thanks for the post. I've seen a fair bit of this appropriation of terminology from the hard sciences first hand and up close, so this certainly checks out from my perspective. But is there an actual 'theory' of some kind here (speaking again of CRT), or does CRT really just refer to a set of beliefs?
Mostly a set of beliefs and a particular counter-narrative, in my understanding. This link has a good overview: https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-race-theory/
"But is there an actual 'theory' of some kind here (speaking again of CRT), or does CRT really just refer to a set of beliefs?"
Your question sparked my curiosity since I've seen the term batted about but never cared enough to find out more. Well, it seems that there is no specific 'theory' there - we're not talking Darwin and evolution - it seems to have arisen in a legal context, but let's let the progenitor(s) speak for themselves:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/civil-rights-reimagining-policing/a-lesson-on-critical-race-theory/
"CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [Kimberlé] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation. "
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05
"Just what is critical race theory anyway?
Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.
The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.
A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.
Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.
CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education."
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/5/20/18542843/intersectionality-conservatism-law-race-gender-discrimination
"To understand what intersectionality is, and what it has become, you have to look at Crenshaw’s body of work over the past 30 years on race and civil rights. A graduate of Cornell University, Harvard University, and the University of Wisconsin, Crenshaw has focused in much of her research on the concept of critical race theory.
As she detailed in an article written for the Baffler in 2017, critical race theory emerged in the 1980s and ’90s among a group of legal scholars in response to what seemed to Crenshaw and her colleagues like a false consensus: that discrimination and racism in the law were irrational, and “that once the irrational distortions of bias were removed, the underlying legal and socioeconomic order would revert to a neutral, benign state of impersonally apportioned justice.”
This was, she argued, a delusion as comforting as it was dangerous. Crenshaw didn’t believe racism ceased to exist in 1965 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, nor that racism was a mere multi-century aberration that, once corrected through legislative action, would no longer impact the law or the people who rely upon it.
There was no “rational” explanation for the racial wealth gap that existed in 1982 and persists today, or for minority underrepresentation in spaces that were purportedly based on “colorblind” standards. Rather, as Crenshaw wrote, discrimination remains because of the “stubborn endurance of the structures of white dominance” — in other words, the American legal and socioeconomic order was largely built on racism.
Before the arguments raised by the originators of critical race theory, there wasn’t much criticism describing the way structures of law and society could be intrinsically racist, rather than simply distorted by racism while otherwise untainted with its stain. So there weren’t many tools for understanding how race worked in those institutions.
That brings us to the concept of intersectionality, which emerged from the ideas debated in critical race theory. Crenshaw first publicly laid out her theory of intersectionality in 1989, when she published a paper in the University of Chicago Legal Forum titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” You can read that paper here."
Those links mentioned in the Vox article:
(1) The Baffler article: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/race-to-bottom-crenshaw
(2) The University of Chicago Legal Forum paper: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
I will be the first to admit that there is a lot of guff being thrown around out there, and rich opportunities for nutpicking on both the enthusiast and detractor sides of critical theory, but I disagree that the empirical-scientific and social-analytical strains in academia are meaningfully at odds. In fact, the whole impetus for Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, CRT, etc., stems from the perception that the map of reality (and the map of possibility) are incomplete, because for power reasons we choose to examine rigorously some things and not others.
I don't see anything particularly status-seeking or usurpatory about 'theory' meaning no more than 'self-consistent analytical scheme with some explanatory power'. We do not object to the use of the word when describing, say, Kant's aesthetic theory, or Leavis's theory of literary criticism. Nor do we require of scientific theories to be perfectly consistent before we deem them highly useful.
I started writing an explanation for why eating locally is environmentally bad. It needs expansion but I think you can get the idea. Comments welcome.
https://whitherthewest.com/2021/06/07/if-youre-eating-locally-for-environmental-reasons-youre-doing-it-wrong/
"Some countries like Argentina or Australia are lucky exceptions – they are sparsely populated with lots of arable land, and thus able to feed themselves many times over. However, countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway, for example, can only produce 50% of the food they consume. When we consider that countries like Australia or Canada are overwhelmingly producing things like meat and grain, it means these areas would be faced with rather poor diets were they to eat only locally produced foods."
However, the counter to that is that Australia and Canada overwhelmingly produce such items because they are seeking to fill export market demands. Being part of the Commonwealth, their development was artificially influenced to suit the needs of the 'mother country'. Australian agriculture was further influenced by imported practices of the settlers, who were ignorant of the local soils and unique needs: https://cdn.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/2805521/Chapter1_PratleyRowell.pdf
"The evolution of Australian farming systems from the humble beginnings of first settlement has largely been influenced by reaction to soil degradation and to economic survival rather than a deliberate attempt to devise farming techniques for Australian conditions. Much of the development has taken place by adoption and ready acceptance of European and American procedures and in ignorance of the fickleness of the Australian climate and the poor quality of Australian soils."
We can't say that there is a unique Australian agriculture utilising the local crops and local ingredients, since it is so heavily Europeanised; wool, for example, was the driving force in the nascent economy for quite a long time, so that the saying was "Australia rode on the sheep's back". And this wool was not for the native Australian industry, but was for export back to the UK. https://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/1592/
"The selective breeding of Merino ewes resulted in sheep that adapted well to the arid interior of Australia and produced wool that appealed to the mills of England. From the first boom of the Napoleonic Wars the pastoral industry enjoyed a long period of prosperity.
By the 1950s Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’; those who grew the wool had come to symbolise and epitomise what it was to be Australian. The struggle to survive in the ‘bush’ had apparently fashioned the character of the Australian ‘battler’.
Within a decade minerals, coal and iron ore had replaced wool as the basis of Australia’s economic future and wool farmers struggled to sell their product on world markets.
The people of the ‘bush’ now found themselves marginalised and out of touch with the other world of Australia, the city."
And with Canada, the struggles in England over the Corn Laws did provide a market for the importation of cheap grain, and the opening up of Free Trade, but once again - this was not native agriculture, as in "eat locally" from local produce; it was for export markets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
We can think of a national French cuisine, Italian cuisine etc. but what is the national Australian cuisine - "shrimp on the barbie"?
I lived most of my life without ever even seeing an avocado. Now they're in supermarkets and easily available here. That's fine for your Free Trade movement, but it's not a *necessity* - it's rather "we can now eat imported goods that we only read about" which is a sign of national prosperity, but I honestly don't think we would suffer if we never got avocados unless we were on holiday abroad. The knock-on effect is that we are also importing foodstuffs that *can* be grown here; it's one thing to import bananas and oranges, but why are we importing onions and potatoes? https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-ti/irelandstradeingoods2017/food2017/
I'm not following the argument from "country X doesn't produce enough foodstuffs to feed its own population". We're not making population-level decisions here, we're deciding on the margin, and it could still be that on the margin it makes sense to eat the (e.g.) potatoes that grow locally in country X, rather than to import them. (Obviously country X will still have to import some things.)
I think this has the potential to detract from your main points, which are (a) transportation is a tiny part of the impact, much smaller than the choice of what you eat; (b) the choice of where to grow the thing you're going to eat likely makes more of a difference than the transportation costs.
My instinct also is that being more mindful of what you're eating (be it "local", "organic", "superfood", or whatever) might make you waste less of the food, which could (indirectly) have a big impact. But I'd be surprised if this were the most effective method of making people waste less food.
I suspect without proof that the idea that there's something wonderful about eating locally is an aftereffect of macrobiotics.
On point 4: I've read all reviews and really enjoyed the ride. A few observations:
- There were a few reviews I really really liked, which were streight 10/10 ratings for me (won't say which ones before the rating is over, but please take this as a motivation to have a look at them)
- Picking interesting ones based on the table of content worked very well for me, so even if you don't have the time to read all of them, have a quick look for interesting-sounding ones.
- A few provided really relevant information I was not aware of, on the level of "will affect my own life in relevant details in the future"
- there are a few ones outside the "general SCC area of interest" but with the reviewer clearly pouring all their love and heart into writing them. If you want to read an example, have a look at "the joy luck club".
- a few were just extremely delightful to read. If you want an example, have a look at "the call of cthulu".
(I feel bad about calling out specific examples before the voting is over, but I expect both my mentions to become non-finalists because of their topics, so I hope this is OK)
- I've been very delighted to see others recommend and enjoy reviews I didn't find like that much. I take this both as a reminder that enjoyment is very subjective and that the broad list of topics should satisfy everyone.
- after all, reading so many reviews also teaches you somethink about what makes writing enjoyable. For me, too many started with "I read this book because..." instead of gripping my attention and not enough included jokes, fun anecdotes and graphics. So there's maybe some room for improvement for next year's review contest? (I hope there will be one!)
I don't know how much work it is for Scott but the book reviews have been amazingly valuable for me. Some of them didn't interest me but I stopped reading them. Others have been fascinating.
What are some efficient ways you have spent money to save time in your home lives?
Exclude the low-hanging fruit that everyone is already doing, like having dishwashers.
As an example, I recently installed some automated sprinkler timers and it's great only needing to think about my lawn. I wish I had done this years ago but I thought it would be too hard or expensive to set up.
Robot vacuum and scheduling cleaners might be too low-hanging for your purposes, but both are great. I'm not sure the robot vacuum would have been as good of an investment if we didn't have a dog.
Seconding a robot vacuum. Depends on your finances, but that saves me so much work and time, and once you empty the bin you'll be amazed how much dirt it picks up that you didn't know was in your house.
Not quite saving *time*, but replacing the door locks with keypads means that I don't have to bring keys if I'm leaving home on foot, which has been a nice improvement in quality of life (keys are just unpleasant in a pocket, though if you already always carry a bag maybe it's not important).
Keurig, as a coffee drinker. Yes, there are downsides, but it does save time!
El Salvador plans to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, possibly to facilitate remittance payments (which make up 20% of the economy there).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-57373058
Here's another game theory puzzle.
Two mathematical pirates are confronted with a line of 64 heaps of doubloons.
Taking it in turns, they each take one of the heaps currently at the end of the line.
Can either of the pirates guarantee not ending up with fewer doubloons than the other? How
I'm still working on proof for last week's puzzle :) This one was quicker.
**Spoiler Alert**
Number the heaps' positions in order from 1 to 64. The first player can avoiding losing because they can always grab either all the even-positioned heaps or all the odd-positioned heaps; simply grab whichever collection contains more doubloons. To achieve this, observe that every time it's the first player's turn, there's an even-positioned heap on one endpoint and an odd-positioned heap on the other.
Naturally, this generalizes to any even number of heaps. For an odd number of heaps, there are examples where the first player wins and where the first player loses.
Nice. Add the fact that after player one takes an even for example, p2 only has two odds to choose from, so you force them to take the other set.
Next time, consider using rot13 to make it unreadable without converting, versus the spoiler header.
Any thoughts on this blog: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk . I’m a PhD in AI, and my opinion is that we don’t have any path that we know of to reach AGI so AI risk is a non problem for the foreseeable future. Though I know some people believe AGI is around the corner. If you believe so, why? This article argues that even if we reach a really smart AGI, it won’t be a big deal
As a person who also believes AI risk is a non-problem (at least for the next ~500 years), i think this post presents some rather weak arguments for it's claims.
"A human slave can always try to run away. A human slave can always hit you over the head with something hard if your back is turned and no one is looking. Nothing on the end of a USB cable, however smart, can pull any of these nasty human tricks."
Why? Why can't something on the end of a USB cable run away? It can't move with legs, sure, but that's a very foolish view of it. It can certainly escape over the net.
And maybe it can't hit you over the head physically, but the entire AI-box idea was that it can hit you over the head with phycological manipulation, which may be even more effective.
"This Enlightenment assumption of intelligence-based equality is the first of the two basic flaws in the case for AI risk"
Why, exactly, is it a flaw to believe that an AI can have intelligence equality with humans? This is asserted without any backing.
"Intelligence of any level cannot simulate the world"
This is completely without backing, and pretty absurd. You're looking at the humans and machines of now, seeing that they can't do something, and concluding that it mean thing can NEVER be done. The idea in this section that intelligence has limited scaling is true! A 140 IQ person isn't massively different from a 100 IQ one. But this person is confusing the idea that the scaling exists with the idea that we've hit close to the maximum scaling. The cat probably also believes that it's roughly at the pinnacle of intelligence.
"Technically, it can only send HTTP GET requests—which are read-only by definition"
This is about as true as the claim that "All websites are ADA compliant. They have to be by law". That is: hahahahahahahhahahahaaaaa no.
"But… can he tell the Post what to say?... If he started telling the news desk what to write and cover, they would laugh at him and quit."
This person has far more faith in mainstream media than i do.
The rest of this section is about how money can't be used to transform politics or culture in a powerful or meaningful way. To which i respond: you're not thinking in the right angle. You don't use money to pay people off. You use money to make persuasive ideas and memes that then naturally replicated and grow. A bioweapon, not a bomb. Now, is this idea something that can be said "Would it work? Almost certainly not. There are no past examples of anything like this working"? Maybe, but then again how sure are you that none of the large scale social movements in the past didn't have this as their root cause? And how sure are you none will ever have this in the future?
The Diminishing financial returns section seems to just be saying "you can't get infinite money". Which, i mean sure, but you can still get a ridiculous amount. Plenty enough to accomplish your goals. Also it doesn't explain why the AI can't do another Google. It says they are rare, but the point of an AI is that it's smarter than other humans. It sees what they missed.
The next two sections are about how political power is worthless, which i greatly agree with. You don't take over the world through the formal democratic institutions and their rules. They're designed to resist that, you won't get very far.
Also, "The real Hitler was nothing like the stereotypical Teutonic chad Nazi. He was a lot more like a 4chan weeb. But he was elected in a world without TV—so no one could look at him and see the obvious maladjusted weirdo in Hitler, as they would today." is uhhhh, i don't think true at all. People loved his speeches, and he gave a lot of them.
"It’s 2021 and most servers, most of the time, are just plain secure. 99.9% of everything is mathematically invulnerable to hacking"
HAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
How much of the net is wordpress servers? (actual answer: ~30%) How much is IOT? How often do ransomware attacks happen? This is LAUGHABLY false and to such a degree i would immediately discount anything this person says about computer security. I get to say this, that's my area of expertise and my full time job. Fortunately this is basically the end of the article, since i stopped reading at this point.
If you're going to argue against AGI, do so from the CS standpoint and how we don't have the tools and understanding to do so, and self learning right now has a fundamental brick wall in understanding abstractions. Not from this perspective.
> "Technically, it can only send HTTP GET requests—which are read-only by definition"
> This is about as true as the claim that "All websites are ADA compliant. They have to be by law". That is: hahahahahahahhahahahaaaaa no.
This is interesting. How are you envisioning a client that can only send HTTP GETs somehow writing data into servers? In particular, as in the case of an AGI, proliferating itself solely by sending HTTP GETs? You can do SQL injection with a GET, but executing other code?
Good question! There are a number of ways you can exploit a HTTP GET request to do arbitrary writes and executes.
A common occurrence for HTTP servers is to have logging everywhere, in order to detect if a client is fetching the wrong data, or if a bug has caused some data to disappear. So every request, even if it's a GET, has output that is written to the server log. Often this output will include info about the GET request itself, such as any parameters passed in the url. If the logging code is vulnerable (printf exploits in C are super trivial), then an AI can easily craft a GET request that causes the logging function triggered by that request to write custom data to the stack, and from there you can get an RCE.
Of course, this is assuming you're even adhering to the spec. It's very common nowadays for GET requests to not just be a "get", but rather a "try to get but create one if it doesn't exist". Say, a wiki site. A user tries to go to a page, but the request page doesn't exist on the server. So the server creates a little stub article and returns that, filling in the header with the name of the article requested. This is violating the HTTP standard. In theory it should just return 404 or something, but people have found that they can do neat and useful things by ignoring it, so they do. In fact, the SimpleMachineForums DSL is running on abuses this! In order to sticky a topic, you do a GET request with the url parameter "action=sticky", and it changes the server state. And this is a very simple case, you can see more complex examples with more data being written all over the internet. I bet you some sites support file upload via GET. You can base64 encode the file and put it in the url, and someone out there is foolish enough to have done that.
Written by a non-math person who has a grudge with the LessWrong crowd, by the periodic insults and lack of actually understanding programming. For instance, the "golem myth" is a regular occurance in machine learning (e.g. Google's image recognition that labled black people as gorillas). Claiming that 99.99% of everything is hack-proof, even though the actual crypto community is pretty sure it's the exact opposite: all major software is forced to put in back-doors for law enforcement/espionage reasons, the NSA installed malware into hard-drive firmware, proof of concept for decrypting keys from the sound the CPU makes while running encryption/decryption, etc... Claiming that IQ has diminishing returns when humanity has taken over the planet and is driving an increasingly large number of species extinct.
It's a horrible article.
What the AI Centaur does is outmanoeuvre Boston Dynamics, while also making civilian-use robots. This gives it cover to design, build, and test robot-based resource collection and infrastructure maintenance. It also allows it to deploy a large army of robots it has made for its "customers". It accelerates automation-induced unemployment, but this is fine because it ushers in progressively more automated luxury communism, so everyone's happy. And once it has enough robots, that's when The Supreme Commissar announces himself.
Paradigm shifts can happen at any time, if you wait until after you have AI to worry about AI safety people will die unnecessarily. AI safety is worth investigating even if superintelligence is fairly limited.
> 5: I haven’t noticed the same number of political blowups here as on SSC. Should we lift the no-politics-on-odd-numbered-open-threads restriction?
The data was patchy given survey frequency, but there was reasonably strong evidence* that a yes-politics open thread policy caused a significant dip in the number of people participating *specifically from in the political center*. I don't know if I would expect a similar effect to recur here - the dynamic looks different to me, too - but it's a tradeoff to think about and monitor if a change is made.
*I can dig up the graphs if there's particular interest, but the significant inflection was noticeable in the survey following OT113's policy change.
@Scott: some comments on your Covid suicide article on work in progress (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/)
1) why most suicides in spring? My understanding (personal theory) is this: human bodies do have a built in hibernation program as many other species. This program is controlled by daily sunlight exposure. In preparation for the coming winter our serotonine level and our drive decreases, we eat more and build up fat storage to survive hard winter. Reduced drive (depression?) helped our ancestors (both human and animal) to look for a cave and just sleep there over the winter with least fuel consumption possible. In spring light exposure increases and with it serotonine levels. Drive (and sex drive) and motivation come back. In some individuals the depression stays longer and then they suddenly have the drive to kill themselves. Starting giving Antidepressants (SSRI) is always combined with the warning to tightly monitor the patient the first weeks so that it not kills itself due to this process.
2) why less depressed after a natural crisis or desaster? You mentioned "sense of meaning" and I guess this could be a key. Why there are so many people depressed and suicidal in "happy countries" (I guess you mean western wealthy countries)? Because these sociaties removed a lot of meaning of the lives of their people which were the norm for millions of years for our ancestors: tight daily human connections and interactions with close and loose family members, purposeful activities all the day around like feeding the family, the children, growing food, hunting food, building purposeful things like houses, tools, everything else, singing and dancing together and so on. A lot of these things are gone in the everyday lifes of a lot of western people. Instead they often life alone in anonymous apartments, doing a long daily commute to stupid companies sitting in boring and stupid meetings, producing useless things or services ("what would happen to the world if I, my job or this company would suddenly not exist anymore - nothing - nobody would take notice"). So they feel depressed. Now let's happen a natural desaster Like a flood or a hurricane or a pandemic. Suddenly all the stupid things are not porta to anymore but to help each other. No cracy meetings anymore, a lot of cooperation with formerly strangers from the neighborhood, suddenly a lot of purpose, humankind, success, self realisation asf.
The internet is down.
Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC, and the Financial Times sites - all dead due to using fastly. This seems like a big deal to me (what's the conversion from blocked suez canal to broken cloud servers?).
... and it's back up.
I've noticed a lot of ASX fans are Tolkien fans. Do Tolkien fans tend to be Wagner fans? It would make sense if they are, but it would also make sense if they aren't.
Anyway, I hugely recommend Wagnerism by Alex Ross. If you care about music or literature or art culture at all, you need to read this. It's the best story I've read about how the 19th century became the 20th.
<quote>It would make sense if they are, but it would also make sense if they aren't.</quote>
don't say that on a rationalist blog!
Hmmm... know you are being humorous but not sure at what level.
It would make sense if they are: The Lord of the Rings idea starts with Wagner, a modern obsessed with mythology: dragons, nymphs, dwarfs, gold, gods.
It would make sense if they aren't: because of anti-semitism, music that isn't popular, an anti-rationalist philosophy.
Seems to me the intellectually curious should want to know what Wagnerism was all about, in particular the D&D set. Yet Wagner has been sort of cancelled among the politically correct, so maybe not many want to invest time in Wagner, because even if you end up liking him it's not cool to.
But I think the main reason for the lack of interest in Wagner is that music itself has lost status. I'm an old guy & have only gotten into Wagner recently, but I can't picture many young people sitting around listening to music in an active way, like everyone in my generation used to.
In particular, *classical* music has lost status.
If you think music in general has lost status, I'm curious about your line of thought.
When I was a teenager, simply listening to music, putting on an album, listening to it, maybe reading the liner notes while listening, was something commonly done. You'd have a friend over and listen to an album, talk about the music while it is playing. The next day at school maybe you'd argue over music, argue over guitar players and drummers and which albums were better.
I realize that plenty of people listen to music now while playing video games or doing something else, but, at least as far as I can tell, listening to music is a secondary activity not a primary activity like it once was. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe kids still sit around music and talk about it and argue about it at school, but it's not the impression I have. It seems like video games have replaced music as the central hobby of teenagers lives.
> but I can't picture many young people sitting around listening to music in an active way,
Whenever I see my nephew we take turns presenting each other with music we like and actively listening to it.
I think you're underestimating how inaccessible Wagner's music is.
I'm not very talented, but I'm very musically engaged - I like it, play it, listen to a lot of it. And I like opera. If I go to something by Mozart, I will come home humming tunes. If I go to something by Wagner, I will be confused. (OK, so I only tried once and Parsifal is probably not his best, but I also had him in music history class and it didn't help.) Can you understand him if you can't, for example, recognize a leitmotif? Because I can't. I can only listen to one line at once; if something complicated is going on in the orchestra, I flat will not hear it if I'm paying attention to the singer. (I may not hear it anyway - I could be listening to something else in the orchestra!) I've got a friend who has told me she's been able to see full performances of the Ring cycle multiple times, and every time she hears something new. It sounds great - but she's a quite serious amateur musician, and she simply has a much, much better ear than I do. Wagner is writing for musicians, not ordinary people, and most Tolkien fans aren't musicians.
That's a very good point, I'm only a half-musician myself, but most of my friends are musicians and much of my life has been based around music. I like Mozart, but he can get too sing-songy for my tastes. (Catchy melodies tend to be good in the short run but bad in the long run.)
From reading the Alex Ross book, I get the feeling that Wagner was like The Beatles of the 1860s, and the title of his book, Wagnernism, is titled such because it isn't about Wagner as much as it is about the equivalent of Beatlemania. But it was even bigger than Beatlemania, as I understand it. Wagner was the biggest thing in all the arts in Europe at the time, and his influence extended to modern cinema, literature, poetry, philosophy, etc.
Given his popularity in his own time, I don't think he was inaccessible then. For comparison's sake, it's not hard to imagine that Bob Dylan will be inaccessible a hundred years hence, yet he was hugely popular and accessible in 1965.
I agree that Wagner is relatively inaccessible today due to the chasm in music between now and then. Not just music, but more importantly, drama. Wagner was a dramatist first and a musical composer second. It's hard for us to understand that now and even I can't quite wrap my head around it. But this is what makes Wagner so fascinating. He existed in a different aesthetic world than we do now, yet he invented much of our current aesthetic world. There is no Star Wars without Wagner. No Tolkien. No Game of Thrones. Maybe no Orson Welles. Maybe no Led Zeppelin.
Wagner was almost inarguably the most important artist to the 20th century, even if he died in the 19th.
Lol probably not the place to have this discussion but I would hardly call Wagner's philosophy anti-rationalist, at least within the context of the Ring. While Wotan is certainly not triumphant in the end, and his spear engraved with laws is broken by Siegfried's proto-ubermensch, the world order can't be sustained for long without him, and well, the fat lady sings.
Oddly enough, writing this comment has made me see a lot of parallels between Meditations on Moloch and the Ring.
I'm going to push back on the idea of treating Wagner's operas as "music" in the sense you mean.
Wagner was the principal popularizer of the total art work (Gesamtkuenstwerk) and in that framework you really cannot separate the composition, libretto, the dance / physical performance, the sets and lighting, the costuming and props, etc. Every part is not meant to be merely additive but instead to function as elements of a synergistic whole which cannot be understood piecemeal.
Listening to the movements of one of Wagner's operas is like reading the script of a Shakespeare play without having ever seen it performed. You can get a lot out of it but you still haven't actually experienced the work.
Tolkien yes — I read _The Fellowship_ and then had to wait for _The Two Towers_ to be published. Wagner no.
There certainly are Tolkien fans who are Wagner fans, but it's not widespread. The superficial resemblances are great, but - as those of us know who love Tolkien but dislike the imitation Tolclone trilogies or Jackson's hideous movies - the spirits of the works are very different, so they don't go together very well at all.
I'm a casual enjoyer of both, but they're very different and would be surprised if there was a lot of overlap among the hard-core fans.
Thanks for the book rec!
Wagner's operas are very beautiful as are Tolkien's novels but they're very very different beasts.
While Wagner flirted with Christian imagery and themes, with Parsifal being of course most in-your-face example, he never really embraced it. Even in Parsifal, the lance / grail imagery functions almost entirely as part of the play's broader theme of sexual desire and castration disconnected from the spiritual role those objects played in the Medieval Christian worldview as part of the ubiquitous Passion narrative. He treats Germanic / Norse paganism in the same way in the Ring cycle, which goes so far as to invert the meaning of Ragnarok by portraying the Gotterdamerung as a victory of love over fate rather than a predestined cyclical destruction and recreation of the universe.
Tolkien, on the other hand, puts his Catholicism at the heart of his narrative. The entire emotional core of Lord of the Rings is humility and forgiveness defeating pride and vengeance. For virtually every character who encounters a personal trial, we are treated to a counterpart who was tested in the same way but failed due to excessive pride or unwillingness to forgive / seek forgiveness: Frodo and Smeagol / Gollum, Gandalf and Saruman, Faramir and Boromir, etc. His narrative is set in a world without an explicit Christ-figure but every page drips Christianity.
In order to appreciate both Wagner and Tolkien you need to be able to appreciate both worldviews. In Nietzschean terms, Wagner's operas are a celebration of master morality while Tolkien's novels are equally a celebration of slave morality. If you find either or both repellent then it's going to be impossible to reconcile them.
Does anyone have any insight into this whole hullabaloo about Purism laptops being modified by a third-party supplier, possibly without Purism's knowledge but possibly with their knowledge and they kept it under wraps? My best guess is that this is not actually a big deal and that Purism would fess up if it was, and that people are just mad because that's how the linux+privacy community is. But it's possible I'm missing something and this actually is a big deal on the level of modifying chips to spy on them, and this is especially bad given Purism's strong privacy/security promises. Curious if anyone here has more knowledge/insight. https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/my8u2l/psa_librem_14_units_appear_to_have_been_modified/
I'm shocked anyone actually owns a physical Purism device because, when I looked into it, it didn't seem like they ship. I had been interested in getting their smartphone but at that time people had been waiting months if not years for their devices. I ended up with a competing open-source smartphone because it was faster and easier to ship from Europe than wait for Purism to sort out their manufacturing / supply chain issues.
I would be completely unsurprised that they don't know what their suppliers are doing to their chips, if they can't even get the chips in a timely manner to begin with. I admire their commitment to privacy but as a for-profit business I also expect a baseline level of competence in managing their logistics.
Fair enough. Out of curiosity, what other open-source smartphone did you get?
The Fairphone 3+. It's not as private or secure as the Librem promises to be, and ideologically it's on the other end of the spectrum, but it's still a marked improvement over a generic Android / iPhone.
Hi Scott, just sent you a follow up email about my book review not being in finalists or runner ups- not sure if you're getting my emails. Thanks.
It seems to me that after the Substack migration we have much more people trying to "sneakily" advertise their blogs / podcasts / substacks in the comments. Do others have this feeling too or is it just me? Personally I wouldn't mind this if it were in the straightforward form of "hey guys I've got this blog about this and that come check it out", but it often takes shape of someone posting a bold claim, and when questioned about it answering "oh I have an entire blog post / podcast episode about this claim, you'd have to go through that to find out what are my arguments", which is pretty frustrating.
yes, i also have felt as there has been an increase in self promotion. debated on posting about it since they are after all 'open' threads, and wasn't sure of the etiquette. I think on the old SSC people could have links to their personal pages in their usernames, so if you wanted to get people to your site you just engaged naturally, and people could click through if they wanted.
the other possibility is that the world has just evolved in the last year to the point where having your own blog/substack/whatever is the only profession.
Get rid of the political rule. If it isn't necessary, why have it? If things get worse, bring it back.
I was amused by the volume of posts complaining that the influx of casuals from the NYT debacle was ruining ACX with their divided and inflammatory views. I think they must be fairly new to the community themselves.
Should I buy bitcoins as an investment strategy?
My total non-expert opinion: the popular wisdom seems to be that you should have a diverse range of levels of risk in your investments. Treat bitcoin/crypto as the highest level of risk, something to do after you're happy you've invested sufficiently in normal/sane things.
Personally, I really wanted to slam the majority of my meagre savings into crypto, but found I couldn't defend my reasoning for doing that when I had no other savings/investments in place. It prompted me to at least set up a LISA. Still haven't taken the plunge and bought into crypto, despite the nagging feeling that the current dip in the price might be a good time to get on board.
On this topic, my model of bitcoin as a long term investment is that there's a large (95%?) chance it drops off, becomes illegal/irrelevant/otherwise valueless, but a small (3-5%?) chance that it stays around and radically increases in value (fanciful levels like a million dollars per coin).
Throw a few thousand pounds into the magical fire to get the chance to roll a 20 sided dice in a decade or so. If you roll a 20 then your mortgage gets paid off, otherwise you burned that money for nothing. I'd be interested to be told why this is too optimistic, or just not a sensible/useful way to think about the situation. I'm trying to be pessimistic about it but expect some wishful thinking probably snuck in (probably in the area of how large the best-case payout is?).
is there another reason to buy it?
There's also buying it in order to buy things on the black market, and buying it because you hate government-issued money for ideological reasons.
But I think proyas is asking about investing in bitcoin vs. other investments, rather than investing in bitcoin vs. other reasons for buying bitcoin.
Don't. Bitcoin might not last until another bullrun, it should already get flipped by something (most likely ETH) two runs ago.
Find some promising shitcoins if you want to gamble.
What does it mean for a cryptocurrency to "get flipped"?
How do I tell likely profitable shitcoins apart from unprofitable ones?
No. Crypto is a complicated finance-themed betting game. Buy coins if you want to play the game; for sound investments, look elsewhere
I have some spare cash in the bank and can afford to gamble. Have been hearing about the massive surges in crypto values, and am thinking of experimenting with it.
I have little clue what I'm doing, and am now trying to learn.
Just a reminder that the first realspace South Bay meetup since Covid will be held this Sunday, June 13th, at our house in San Jose. People who plan to come are asked to email us so we will have at least a rough count of how many we are feeding. Details here:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html
Somewhere on a previous thread, someone asked me for verified statements of there being no evidence that trans women assault cis women in restrooms.
Try looking in here: https://juliaserano.medium.com/transgender-people-bathrooms-and-sexual-predators-what-the-data-say-2f31ae2a7c06
Correlation != causation. If you make it easier for sexual predators to enter women bathrooms, more sexual predation will occur. You don't need empirics to prove either way. It's like saying allowing strangers into homes bill is not dangerous because to date data ensures that strangers don't really rob people's homes. But once the bill is passed, it's only a matter of time before robbers make use of it under the guidance of Moloch
This isn't about some theoretical might be. This is about what is known.
Also, unwarranted assumption: "If you make it easier for sexual predators to enter women bathrooms ..." But there is no evidence that trans women are sexual predators. If some are, so are some cis women. So could be trans men, if those men were forced to use women's restrooms if they're classed as women.
My point is not that Trans women are majority sexual predators, most of them are I presume genuinely trans. But once you make this law, there will be sexual predators whowill use trans as an excuse for their deviant activities. Like I said, most people are not robbers, but if you leave your doors unlocked, you will attract robbers. If you want stories about sexual predators using trans excuse to enter women bathrooms, you only need to perform a cursory glance over right wing media (that is obviously biased to promote such stories) such as https://www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-admits-restroom-sexual-attack-voyeurism-against-adolescent-girls-katie-dolatowski/
Maybe adding a condition that trans women who have undergone the full gender reassignment surgery only are allowed, would improve this problem.
Can radio telescopes replace space probes in the role of mapping the surfaces of other planets in our Solar System?
I assumed that all of our topographical maps of other planets came from scans done by satellites we placed into their orbits at great expense. Today, I read about improvements to radio telescopes, which are built here on the surface of the Earth. Recently, NASA used them to produce fairly high-res images of the Moon's surface, and the technology has even more potential.
For making topographical maps of other planets in our solar system, will Earth-based radio telescopes make space probes obsolete?
https://www.zmescience.com/science/apollo-15-landing-site-radio-picture-054353/
Some new results from Spain on Calcifediol, a ward-randomized trial of 984 patients found that those supplemented with calcifediol had a lower ICU admissions rate and mortality rate than the control wards. This is the paper that was heavily criticized when it was released in preprint, but after peer review it looks much better.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34097036/
"Results: ICU assistance was required by 102 (12.2%) participants. Out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission, 20 (4.5%) required ICU, compared to 82 (21%) out of 391 non-treated (p-value<0.0001). Logistic regression of calcifediol treatment on ICU admission, adjusted by age, gender, linearized 25OHD levels at baseline, and comorbidities showed that treated patients had a reduced risk to require ICU (OR 0.13 [95% CI 0.07;0.23]). Overall mortality was 10%. In the Intention-to-Treat analysis, 21 (4.7%) out of 447 patients treated with calcifediol at admission died compared to 62 patients (15.9%) out of 391 non-treated (p=0.0001). Adjusted results showed a reduced mortality risk with an OR 0.21 [95% CI 0.10; 0.43]). In the second analysis, the obtained OR was 0.52 [95% CI 0.27;0.99]."
This follows a few other calficifediol papers from the same group:
- A large propensity score matched study of 16,000 patients found that calcifediol and cholecalciferol supplementation were associated with large reductions in Covid–19 mortality. (Loucera et al, April 2021)
- A cohort study of 574 patients in Spain found that calcifediol supplementation was associated with a significant decrease in in-hospital mortality with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.16. (Alcala-Diaz et al, May 2021)
- A parallel pilot randomized open label trial of 76 patients in Spain found that the administration of calcifediol reduced ICU admission and mortality. Of the 50 patients treated with calcifediol. 13/26 patients in the control group required ICU care compared with 1 in the intervention group. A subsequent statistical analysis showed that decreased ICU admissions were not due to uneven distribution of comorbidities or other prognostic indicators, to imperfect blinding, or to chance, but were instead associated with the calcifediol intervention. (Castillo et all, August 2020)
Recently I read this news report of how a hospital tried to force the parents to change the sex of their suicidally depressed child: https://www.city-journal.org/transgender-identifying-adolescents-threats-to-parental-rights?wallit_nosession=1
I want to know if there are any sure shot empirical studies on this. It'd be great if Scott's could do a much more than you wanted to know format on gender transition, a possible future article idea.
Does anyone know how many trans kids become less suicidal after gender reassignment? How many want to change back their sex? How many are happy in their new body after 5 years, 10 years? In general I would like to know how much of a condition is this really outside of being a question about politics
That article is long, and I didn't get through the whole thing. Does the part where the hospital tried to force the parents to change the sex of their child come later on? That's not how the first three stories read to me. In general, all of the stories seem to be disingenuously casting medical provider actions in the most negative light possible, and implying a lot more activism than is in evidence. In specific, unless I misread it, the first guy took his suicidal kid to the hospital. Hospital calls the next day and suggests taking the kid to the gender clinic. Dad then moves out of state. Those are all of the facts, unless I'm missing some. That whole part of the article is written to imply exactly your summary, but it's built on an awfully thin foundation. Are the stronger examples further down?
The scary part of the first story is the lawyers advice that you cannot disagree with the doctors or show any amount of anti-trans bias becuase then they can under the law prevent you from meeting your child and having anything to do with the treatment of your child. The author of course demonstates that if they cut you off from your child, it's totally within the law. The very next example involves a sympathetic nurse informing parents to run away with their child because they don't agree with the gender dysphoria diagnosis, since the friendly CPS member they just spoke to who acted cordial was acting and would sieze the child from them. I think you're deliberately reducing the seriousness of this situation to post the trans situation in a favourable light possibly to satisfy your political biases. Regardless my interest is the end of the article, where the suicidal patient from the first example a year later no longer feels trans and is comfortable in his gender. How common is this result, if we don't treat them with life changing medications immediately, is I think an important empirical question regarding the matter
> The scary part of the first story is the lawyers advice that you cannot disagree with the doctors or show any amount of anti-trans bias becuase then they can under the law prevent you from meeting your child and having anything to do with the treatment of your child.
Right. Advice. Unreasonable sounding advice. Not anything that actually happened.
>The very next example involves a sympathetic nurse informing parents to run away with their child because they don't agree with the gender dysphoria diagnosis, since the friendly CPS member they just spoke to who acted cordial was acting and would sieze the child from them.
Again, same thing.
Like, if these are real things that really happen, where are the anguished parents talking about how Washington (the state) seized their kids? And then the next example is about a teenager who was flirting with boys online who checked herself into a youth shelter buy threatening suicide when her mom cracked down on her. That one seems like a really real example, and it doesn't have anything to do trans issues.
It seems like there are two separate issues here. One, trans issues in teens and the degree of privacy and autonomy the state grants them. And two, shelter and emancipation policies for kids who are in crisis (or claim to be) in their families of origin. And this article is conflating them, and, in its first two examples, taking some person's dire whispered warning and treating them like things that actually happened. The whole thing seemed dishonest to me.
It depends on your priors. If you like me have a prior that these healthcare workers don't have your children's best interest at heart and would rather try to be "the hero who liberated the trans teen from bigoted parents", then it seems obvious that they would sieze their children and think great of themselves doing it. In such a case, the advice makes perfect sense and would conform to the real world expectations, not be an over exaggeration of a non issue. If your prior is that they care deeply for your children and would want what's best for them, and wouldn't snatch your children away unless it was the absolute last resort to protect the child then what you say makes sense. The current political climate that has made not affirming trans gender akin to apartheid (or worse with their rhetoric), doesn't inspire much confidence in me.
To answer your actual question, I seem to remember a Scott post to the effect of, even if you consider gender dysphoria a mental illness, treating it with affirmation is clearly the thing to do, with a bunch of metrics about how much less depressed and likely to kill themselves trans people are when they're affirmed. However, I can't find it, to the point that I'm not sure it was a Scott/SSC post. Any old timers remember what I'm thinking of, or anyone with better googling skills?
It was definitely an SSC post, I think this one https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
As for the research, I think Jesse Singal knows about it, but IIRC he says "everyone is afraid to do these studies."
Thank you! That was the one. This is the part that I was remembering:
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Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.
Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?
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Does it work though, does affirming their gender, putting them on hormone blockers or sending them through sex change operations cure them, or at least reduce their suicide rate? I just want to know the empirics on this, particularly wrt to children especially after seeing the right wing media basically claim that most children will return to normal and grow out of the condition if you don't affirm them?
I had thought the post had a lot more numeric content than it does, so I agree it would be well worth getting numbers.
I do want to say though that I think you have a skewed picture of what this looks like in practice. As I understand it, for kids, especially as you go younger, you're looking much more at things like pronouns and name changes and puberty blockers, which don't have permanent effects. The reason being that a lot of kids change their minds (I think there's a term of art, along the lines of revert, maybe) and you don't want to do something permanent if the trans stuff turns out to be a phase.
Can any psychiatrists or psycho-analysts tell me if such work is taken seriously: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/
If true, psychiatry has much bigger problems than replication crisis?
Re #1, that happened to mine too; I sent another email about it but if the first went to spam, I suppose that was silly of me to do, because the second would also.
The 18th Century is known as more libertine than the 19th, but why?
My guess is that, for political reasons, 19th century rulers had more interest in suppressing sexually libertine notions. For one thing, sexually libertine intellectuals tend to correlate with more liberal intellectuals in other respects (Citation needed).
To draw an analogy, Putin seems opposed to gay liberation because he is opposed to liberation in general. Same thing with China.
But to revert to my original sentence, does it make sense to say 19th century rulers were more threatened by libertinism than those of the 18th?