In commercial/private space, audits/quality control checks of the product are considered necessary and relatively routine. And it's done all the time with coding. There are processes and generally accepted procedures for this.
We should have a process by which the election authority can say - with pride and confidence - "We are strongly convinced that while there might have been some errors and fraudulent ballots cast, the combined errors and fraud were much less than the difference between the winner and the loser of the election. Here, let us show you our methods of ensuring this."
We don't have that. And - for this election at least - there was much less "I will show you how good we ran the election and how secure our numbers are!" and much less "how dare you question us!"
> We should have a process by which the election authority can say - with pride and confidence - "We are strongly convinced that while there might have been some errors and fraudulent ballots cast, the combined errors and fraud were much less than the difference between the winner and the loser of the election. Here, let us show you our methods of ensuring this."
This exists, though; you can go on azsos.gov and read about it.
One might symmetrically ask: what kind of audit would convince a person who believed there was fraud that there really wasn't any? We know the answer isn't "a hand audit conducted by Republicans", because Arizona has already had one of those. If people can't write down an answer to that question in advance -- ideally, in advance of the disputed election, or study, or whatever, but at least in advance of the audit's outcome -- I tend to fear that they're looking for a particular answer, rather than a particular process.
The CyberNinjas in particular are troubling because they've already made a dumb, high-profile mistake: they accused the Maricopa board of deleting files, then withdrew their accusation when the board explained that they were looking in the wrong place. My fear is that their eventual report will contain other mistakes that are similarly dumb but harder to check on.
Fox made an early call when it was likely but not as assured as would normally be required. Remember that their election desk is separate from their opinion media. The desk has no reason to oppose a Biden win. Similarly their public polls for prominent races are usually considered quite good and with minimal relative bias. My understanding is that they determined that the likelihood of the call being right vs wrong meant it was more protective of their reputation to just stick with it than say we called too early and then later call it again with the same result.
Consider how few people understood that media calls in elections are projections by that particular outlet not decisions by election officials. They are correct like 99% or more of the time because the media is very conservative about making a call. However they are not reporting final results they are making a prediction.
Trump had a whole spiel about votes counted after election night as if that wasn't totally normal and many people believed it.
It's not "exit polls." Exit polls are used by campaigns well after the fact to figure out why they won or lost certain races and to figure out how demographic trends are moving.
In principle, such audits are fine if they are undertaken by good-faith, reasonably competent actors who can be reasonably trusted not to make the post-audit state of the relevant election artifacts (ballots, machines) worse, i.e. not to make future audits of the same artifacts harder or impossible as a result of the audits.
Cyber Ninjas, the company conducting the audit in Maricopa, is not a good-faith or competent actor and can't be trusted not to poison the artifacts. Its CEO is a conspiracy theorist, it doesn't have any election auditing expertise, and apparently it has already compromised the security of the county's voting machines as a side effect of its actions. The choice of Cyber Ninjas to conduct the audit thus lends credibility to the Democratic view that the Republicans who wanted the audit are clowns acting in bad faith.
Is there well-attested evidence that would lead one to doubt the empirical claims that underpin that view? Or do you accept those empirical claims and judge the audit worthwhile anyway?
If, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, an organization with no election audit experience, headed by a Democratic partisan conspiracy theorist (Michael Moore or Naomi Wolf, say), had sought to examine ballots for secret watermarks and traces of bamboo fibers because they thought those would demonstrate Chinese or Russian interference: yes, I certainly would have opposed that and considered it a bad-faith exercise that shouldn't be allowed. There's no legitimate reason to believe that such tactics will turn up any important information, and no reason to trust the security promises of actors of that sort on either left or right.
Well, that opinion is based on updating from the previous times I have spent more time than I should have digging into a fraud allegation.
But by no means do I think the left has staked a defensible position. A photo ID is not an unreasonable requirement to vote. Instead of taking a position that we should use the honor system, they should have instead said "yes, lets use photo ID, and lets set aside some money for compliance assistance! (As is done with every other new regulation for businesses)" They have forgotten reversed stupidity is not intelligence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence)
<quote>such audits are legally possible; and if the political opponent wants to throw money at some hopeless endeavor, why not let them have at it?</quote>
I think even legal or pseudo legal actions can have harmful consequences. The Jan 6th insurrection was due in part because of congress persons commitment to pseudo-legal challenges to the election. So that would be a reason not to let them have at it.
In the broad strokes, sure what is legal, but on the other hand i think we've gotten too abstract for me to understand what we are talking about.
Why did you not then stop at 'such audits are legally possible'. You continued with 'why not let them have at it'.
So I don't think even you think 'is it legal' is the only way of evaluating actions. Otherwise, your post would have been "is this legal? yes. </end>"
In addition there is also the issue of the law not always being 'black ink', and having gray areas, as well as issues of pseudo legality, contradictions, etc.
...
I'm not sure what you are getting at w/ the Texas case. Yes, I read all of that when the case(s) were happening. Texas had no standing according to 9 justices of the supreme court. I tend to agree. Where the case was in PA, the plantiff did have standing, and I actually though it was the only of the 50ish cases that had a solid argument. The problem was they weren't asking the law be fixed for future elections, they wanted the previous one invalidated. The court pointed to precedence where an objection had to be timely, and a person wasn't allowed to 'gamble on the outcome' of an election, and then object after the fact.
IMO this was an own goal, as had they asked only to change the law for future elections, they probably would have won, and that would have been huge in public opinion. They would actually have a court win, the court would have agreed the election was illegal, and the legislature would have had more cover for any pseudo legal objections.
I feel obliged to note that it is possible to have over 50% above average (i.e. mean) on a measure if the measure has a long "bad" tail. For instance, 90%+ of people have been convicted of less crimes than average.
Obviously, some of your questions don't suffer from this (e.g. church-going; the low-end tail is truncated at 0), but some of them do.
(Also, the within-group thing gets really complicated and probably useless because you're actually asking two questions with "sexist vs. average self-described progressive" - "how sexist are you" and "which people self-describe as progressive" - and then asking them to do at least some sort of mathematics with those; you need to split the question up so you're not lumping all three errors together.)
For the second one, the problem is that "what percentage of people self-identify as progressives, and how are their views distributed compared to people in general" is a highly non-trivial question for a layman (or at least I can't imagine most go around actually asking that in as many words), and even if you get that and the "where are you in relation to society" one right you've then got to do maths to figure out "where are you in relation to self-identified progressives".
Related: Most people have fewer friends than their friends. So if you have X friends, and your friends have on average Y friends, then for most people X < Y. That seems quite counterintuitive, but it follows from pure math.
I don't want to question that over-confidence and other psychological effects play a role. But the base line to a lot of question might not be 50% if you start thinking about it.
Parrhesia mentions different definitions. I think this plays a big role. Consider "good driving". Everyone has a different definition. For some, it means sticking to the driving rules all the time. For some, it means avoiding dangerous situations. For some, it means coming from A to B as fast as possible. Now imagine a society where people care a lot about being "good drivers", where they optimize really hard for it, and where they are really good a optimizing. But everyone optimizes her own definition. How many people will end up driving better than the average, according to her own definition? Probably 100%.
If you believe that example, you should probably believe the same about being racist, being more environmental-friendly, being more ethical, ... Just stronger, because there most people actually DO optimize, and the definitions differ a lot.
I think the answer to the question "Do you have more/less friends than the average person" is also "less" for most people.
But for a question like you formulated, I can only compare myself to the other people that I know, i.e., my friends. I don't know how many friends an average person has. I can only estimate that for my friends/acquaintances.
The total number of cross-political friendships is fixed; with perfect information and some consistent measure of conservatism you'd find that the total number of conservative friendships of progressives equals the total number of progressive friendships of conservatives.
If there's an apparent imbalance in those numbers, the explanation is that either people on each side have different average definitions or there's a large-scale asymmetry in information (e.g. if a progressive and a conservative are friends, but the conservative hides his views and the progressive doesn't hide hers, then the conservative will correctly count it as cross-political but the progressive will miss it).
Median = 50% below, 50% above. Average = mean. Mean =/= median in the general case (it does, trivially, for symmetric distributions).
"Average amount of using racial slur X" = (#times racial slur X is used per year)/(#people). But (#times person Y uses racial slur X per year) has a long tail above (you can say a word a great many times in a day) and a truncated tail below (you cannot say a word less than zero times per day, and that's only slightly less than the mode as most people use racial slurs rarely). This asymmetry means the mean is higher than the median (as the median doesn't care about tail length and the mean does) - as such, the majority of people use a given racial slur less than the average.
What is an "average person"? The obvious way to define that is "a person that does things at the average rate", which puts things straight back where we started.
A better formulation would involve the median instead of the mean. E.g. "Are you more or less patriotic than the *median* self-described conservative". Probably along with clarifications about the very real difference between the median and the mean. Another option is, perhaps, "Are you more patriotic than 50% of self-described conservatives?"
I absolutely do not find it to be at all questionable. Lots of red tribers in the closet right now because they don't want to be kicked out of polite society and/or fired.
Anecdotally, I'm working for a company in the south where the upper management is mostly conservative, and I'm "in the closet" about voting Democrat for the same reason.
I think which set of political positions constitute "polite society" depends a lot on where in the country you are.
I went back home to a cousin's New Year's Eve party a few years back. Topics of conversation included a goodly bit about Obama and whether he would come for the guns before he had to leave office, and a conversation about guns in church, which kind of guns are good to carry into church so one can be ready, and the merits of various churches vis a vis allowing congregants to pack heat. I think all of it could be read as virtue signaling love for guns and some of it as virtue signaling readiness to fight to protect gun owning from the rapacious liberal feds.
I was well known as the city cousin, so people more or less knew where I was at, but if I were still living and working in that town, I'm sure that at best I would be relatively private about such things.
If you are talking about signaling to the outgroup, this works the other way as well. I have liberal family members in conservative areas, and they have to be really careful about not expressing their political views at work, where everyone is conservative.
Which shows that there is a purpose to wearing masks other than virtue signaling: normalizing mask-wearing so that people won't forgo wearing a mask simply to avoid social discomfort. And that's on top of the purpose of, you know, not spreading disease.
This is so true. I was in NC when the mask mandate was lifted and mask wearing went from 50% compliance to less than 20% immediately. I instantly started feeling self-conscious about wearing a mask in a store.
" Right-leaning people do this sort of social signaling as well but not to the same extent because virtue signaling your right wing beliefs doesn't work as well and may be detrimental to your social standing". Are you sure? A lot of people signal their patriotism, they're church attendance and so on. Possibly , conservative signals are common, but lacking in salience because they're common.fir instance, standing for the national anthem us the expected default.
Do you think that people who principally do not stand during national anthems would stand if no one were looking?
The dichotomy between pure signaling and having genuine emotional experience seems to be a false one. Lots of people really care about racial inequality, sexism and other social justice themes it's still a signal of a loyalty to a tribe when they talk about such issues. Same with the church, there are lots of true believers and the fact that they go to the church is still a signal no matter what kind of intrinsic religious experience they have.
We may talk about true and false signaling, like how some signals correspond to the inner state of the signaler and some do not. But then the progressives with "in this house" signs are probably do true signaling as they are proud to be part of their group similarly to how a patriot is proud to be part of a country.
I've seen American and Confederate flags on country roads. I'm not remembering any "in this house" signs, but I do recall seeing a Biden flag in rural mountain Arkansas, in an area where the few houses often flew flags, and all of the other political flags were Trump flags. I think the right model for the "in this house" sign is the political flag, which certainly seems popular, even in areas where they aren't that likely to be seen.
Yeah I think that people living with 'east coast elites' will see this as true. I live in 'Trump country' and there is plenty of signalling. American flags (and others) and still Trump campaign yard signs. Virtue signalling will be detrimental if the virtue you are signalling is in the minority.
One of the recent right-leaning virtue signals is being annoyed about virtue signaling and therefore virtue signaling the absence of virtue signaling.
It seems to be more widespread in intellectual places like this blog, anecdotally, I've seen more instances of it in ACX, then the examples of traditional left-wing signaling of being a good ally to lgbt+, feminism e.t.c.
When you tell everyone what a great ally to minorities you are - at least it's likely that you are indeed an ally to minorities. When you wear a badge of a donor - at least you donated and did some good. I'm not even sure that being humble about your good deeds is a better strategy from the utilitarian perspective. People who do good deserve credits - this seems fair.
But this meta-virtue-signaling seems to be of the worst possible kind. When you boast that you do not boast you are not only boasting but also lying. That's a signal completely without substance.
And yeah I appreciate the irony. Right now I'm meta-meta-virtue signaling of how I do not signal the absence of virtue signaling. How virtuous of me!
While I don't go full-on Chesterton's Fence, we might want to consider why some religions (at least Judaism and Christianity) recommend giving charity but not making it public.
There are some reasons, such as not humiliating the recipients and not making charity into a status competition.
I agree. There are indeed reasons for modesty. I have a very strong intuition that's it is a good quality and obviously it wouldn't existed without reasons. However, the more I think about it, the more these reasons seem to be not really persuading.
It understandable why religious deontology or virtue ethics may value humbleness. Ironically, doing good deeds and not taking credits is a stronger signal of personal virtue than doing good deeds and telling about it as one may claim that it was done only for the bragging rights. But this Chesterton's Fence doesn't look important.
What is the strongest consequentialist argument? Why would it be bad if charity was more of a status competition? Some people will do charity not due to personal virtue but eager to get more status and as a result... we will get more charity? This seems good actually.
When I look into this pro-modesty intuition of mine it seems to be working similar to any-capitalist one. The same one which is offended by the thoughts that big farma is going to earn lots of money from handling the pandemic. It seems more virtuous to help people not for money but just for the sake of helping. But our society creates lots of market pressure in this regard and as a result we have not just some separate acts of kindness but high quality services. While not perfect, this seems to be a good thing. So why not apply the same optimization pattern to charity?
When I'm thinking about a world which status games are centered not around having mostly useless luxury goods but around effective altruism... it seems to be so much better than the current one! Its practically an utopia! Am I missing something?
There's always Goodhart's Law-- if charity is a status competition, then people might prefer showy charity over what's actually helpful.
I've definitely seen people talk about how good it was to receive charity in a way that didn't humiliate them-- perhaps this should go into the hedonic calculation.
So what we need is to make effective charity being the most high status? I agree, there is a failure mode here but it seems fixable. And less bad than the ones we are currently facing with capitalism.
I don't get why it would be more humiliating to receive charity knowing that it grants status to the giver. If anything it should feel more liberating as you are not just consuming someones resources but give back status for them.
I think we can harness this to augment Universal Basic Income. A major criticism of UBI is that a big chunk of money is going to people who don't need it. A possible solution would be to create a "signage" program that would let those who donate their UBI share to charity to advertise it.
It would take both a physical front-yard sign ("My UBI Goes to African Fighting Malaria!") and an online badge that goes on social media. If you are in an affluent neighborhood the social pressure to donate your UBI would probably convince 90% of the households.
I think you are right for lower-income areas, where (say) $750 / month is a huge amount. For other areas it would not be that painful, especially considering the tax deduction and the fact that it would replace some/all of their charitable giving.
Costly signaling, by definition, is costly. The term "signaling" has expanded in meaning to include less costly signaling, but costly signaling is the original meaning. And the concept of costly signaling was developed because it's something that frequently occurs.
"A major criticism of UBI is that a big chunk of money is going to people who don't need it." That's not much of a criticism. UBI has to come from somewhere, which presumably means income tax (there are other possibilities such as an oil-rich country funding it through exports, or Georgian land tax, but income tax is the main method of revenue generation for most countries), and the tax structure can be set up so that the net flow from person to government is positive for people above a particular income level. Making receiving UBI dependent on being socially shamed would be quite problematic, and would not be consistent with the worldview that most supporters of UBI hold.
Y'know, I don't think of myself as particularly left-wing, but were I on UBI - or even just working an ordinary job - and I saw the smug, self-regarding boasting you describe above of "I don't need any UBI, I am a smart and productive citizen unlike you leeches, therefore I can self-aggrandise by playing Lady Bountiful to the Poor Benighted Heathen, now don't you feel ashamed for sucking up that money for your own selfish purposes unlike a Virtuous Person like me?", I'd be up for burning down their house (maybe not with them still in it) and then going "feel like bragging now?"
If you will only donate to charity so long as you can brag about it and get pats on the back, then your donations are worthless.
I'm so ticked off about this, I'm even having to go full KJV:
6 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Both you and Parrhesia are ascribing views to me that I do not hold.
1) I do not and would not "socially shame" anyone without a badge. The point of this is that (if sufficiently rich) they would feel social pressure to donate the UBI. I am sure some household (the _very_ rich) would not put up a sign even though donating.
2) I silently donate to charities (well, silently until now.)
3) You would burn down a house because somebody cut their eyes at you? I don't know what to say to that.
(1) The point of your thought experiment is that the self-satisfied can have a way of signalling their holier-than-thouness. I don't mind if someone puts up signs on their lawn advocating charitable donations. I don't mind if they hire a brass band to march up and down the road oompah-ing about "give, give, give!" (though the Noise Abatement Society might). I don't mind if they string a banner across the front of the house reading "I donate to Against Malaria, you could too! Ask me how!"
I *do* object to swanking about the amount of money you give. "I give ALL my UBI", oh really? And how am I, someone who needs it to live, supposed to feel about that? Then again, in those kind of neighbourhoods, I don't suppose that the sort of people who do need UBI to help pay bills are allowed, unless they're coming there to work in service roles of some kind. Another sample of philanthropy being about loving your fellow-man in the abstract, and the further away the better, but less so when it comes to concrete matters of your fellow-citizens living in the less salubrious parts of town.
(2) Perhaps I am jaundiced, having had to write begging letters to billionaires (and damn it, I don't know how SSC/ACX/TheMotte manage to do it; every time I think "well I just have an ordinary, boring, job" then it happens "feck it, I *did* write a begging letter to a billionaire as part of my job!"). One of the times I felt disgusted with myself, but at least now I know I could never do a job working for any kind of charity, effectively altruistic or no, requiring me to flatter, ooze, and stroke the egos of the highly wealthy who won't donate unless they get the trumpets played signalling their generosity. I'm all the way with the Widow's Mite here, and your suggestion of a sign on the lawn has me wanting to hammer next to it another sign reading "Do you want a cookie for that, Scrooge McDuck?"
(3) Not for looking at me funny but there are some temptations too strong for weakened human will to resist. I'm generally conservative, would have thought at my mildest I'm a centrist (though that, today, is a dirty word apparently) and think that Marxbro is a pest and I have half a mind to think him a troll.
All that being said, if it's on one side somebody showing off to their equally fortunate neighbours, who apparently have to have it made a status contest in order to donate of their surplus or else they can't be natively generous, and Marxbro on the other side, I'm lining up with Marxbro.
I have much more respect for someone who says "Fuck no, I'm keeping my surplus UBI for hookers and blow" than someone who does the Uriah Heep "I'm ever so humble and since *I* don't need this, I am bestowing it upon the Benighted Heathen. Would that you all were as open-handed as I!"
You want praise for your goodness? Do you want a cookie for that, Scrooge McDuck?
That's rather strong, and some people do mean this kind of behaviour in the well-intentioned "giving example" manner.
To which I still tend to say phooey, but then I am a horrible person. I am irresistibly reminded in all this of Mrs. Jellyby, who I feel would be very enthusiastic about signs on the lawn - while her home and children fell to bits around her:
"But no, they knew nothing whatever about Mrs. Jellyby. "In-deed! Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire and casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs. Jellyby's biography, "is a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry—AND the natives—and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population. Mr. Jarndyce, who is desirous to aid any work that is considered likely to be a good work and who is much sought after by philanthropists, has, I believe, a very high opinion of Mrs. Jellyby."
...We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as we came into Mrs. Jellyby's presence, one of the poor little things fell downstairs—down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great noise.
Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing—received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer than Africa!
...In half an hour after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby appeared; and in the course of an hour the various things necessary for breakfast straggled one by one into the dining-room. I do not doubt that Mrs. Jellyby had gone to bed and got up in the usual manner, but she presented no appearance of having changed her dress. She was greatly occupied during breakfast, for the morning's post brought a heavy correspondence relative to Borrioboola-Gha, which would occasion her (she said) to pass a busy day. The children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress; and Peepy was lost for an hour and a half, and brought home from Newgate market by a policeman. The equable manner in which Mrs. Jellyby sustained both his absence and his restoration to the family circle surprised us all."
But Mrs. Jellyby is not alone in her benevolence (with other people's money):
"Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this rapacious benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce, to be almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself. We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all. We were therefore curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a type of the former class, and were glad when she called one day with her five young sons.
"These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and nine-pence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never, through life, to use tobacco in any form."
We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and shrivelled—though they were certainly that too—but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable."
If you donate to the Against Malaria Foundation just so you can brag about it, and the nets they buy with your donation stop 10 people from getting malaria, is their not-getting-malaria worthless?
If you donate to a famine-relief charity just to make people pat you on the back, and three people who would have starved to death live on because the money from your donation fed them, are their lives worthless?
If you donate to the local cute-puppy-saving charity just so that people will associate your name with cute puppies, and the money you give lets them save ten cute puppies from the puppy-mincing machine, are the puppies any less cute for it?
If you only donate to charity for the bragging rights, then your donations are worthless _as evidence of what a fine person you are_. They are not worthless _as contributions to the charitable cause you are supporting_.
Now. Suppose ConnGator inspires the creation of a programme whereby rich people can get more ego-stroking when they donate to charity. The result is that rich people get more ego-stroking and charities get more money. I agree with you that it's pretty contemptible if someone donates to charities but cares more about getting their own ego stroked than they do about the good the charity does. But I think it's _even worse_ if you would prefer that good not to be done in order to make sure rich people don't get their egos stroked. They're prepared to do some good they don't really care about in order to make their own lives a bit more pleasant. You are prepared to do _harm_ in order to make their lives less pleasant, and I think that is far more worthy of contempt.
That bible quote makes it clear that the purpose of Christian charity is improving one's soul rather than actually making the recipient's lives better.
What it says is: (1) If you make charitable donations but your only purpose is to make yourself look good, don't expect God to reward you for it; (2) so, _do_ make charitable donations but _don't_ make them in public, and then God will reward you.
This doesn't say that the _only_ purpose of charity is to get God to reward you. But it says that if you want God to reward you then you should do whatever donating you do in private rather than in public.
This may not be a bad thing to have people believe: if a given rich person believes that making public donations will get human adulation and making private donations will get divine reward, the likely result is that they make the same donations but more privately, and maybe that's better.
You potentially get ugly results when this idea is _not_ accepted by the rich people but _is_ accepted by people who are able to influence the rich people. E.g., if ConnGator and Deiseach were two votes on a committee trying to decide whether to institute an ego-stroking-for-billionaire-charity programme, Deiseach's vote might doom the programme, and then billionaires might give less, and that would be bad. In practice, most people have little influence on the charitable behaviour of the wealthy, and the main ugly effect of this idea is on (for want of a better term) Deiseach's own soul: concerned that rich people might taint their souls by valuing public approbation, she's made _herself_ care more about the state of rich people's souls than about the millions of people their donations might help. (That's the kindest way of looking at it. I fear that actually it's not so much that Deiseach wants their souls to be in good shape, but that she actively wants them to suffer because she doesn't like their attitude.)
> major criticism of UBI is that a big chunk of money is going to people who don't need it
That's a misconception. To fund UBI sensibly, one must raise taxes a lot on the lower classes, e.g. maybe today the full-time minimum-wage worker gets $15,000/yr and pays $500 in taxes. With a modest UBI of $500/mo ($6000/yr), the taxes are likely to jump to somewhere in the neighborhood of $4500/yr, so on net the worker earns a modest $2000 more. If you earned more, say, $50,000, your net income is probably not affected significantly after UBI (you get a $6000 UBI but your income taxes also go up by ~$6000). I would expect a small tax increase on the upper classes to bump living standards of the lower classes, but cutting back or reducing other programs (welfare, unemployment insurance, maybe even social security) might be sufficient to cover the remainder of the cost of UBI.
Programs like UI and Welfare pay more, but are temporary, burdensome for the recipient, stigmatized and/or full of holes (not everyone is covered). Better, says I, to have a program that pays less but actually covers everyone, is not demeaning, and runs efficiently because it doesn't require policing or "welfare offices".
"Left-leaning people avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, disbelieving in science and so forth."
There are characteristically leftist forms of science denial: Haidt lists IQ, heritability, sex differences, evolution and stereotype accuracy as typical places of leftist science denial.
Thinking your opponents are science deniers is easy, because they are. Everyone just picks the parts where their camp is supported by the research and their opponents are not. A little selective forgetting of their own camp's crimes and you have a mostly-honest and very convenient accusation of science denialism.
Mostly, everyone has freaking redwoods in their eye sockets and should try to get them looked at. The easiest person to fool is always yourself.
"Left-leaning people avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, disbelieving in science and so forth."
It's gone to the stage that "transphobia" has now become one of those meaningless boo-words like "racist" or "Nazi".
So am I a transphobe by these lights? Well, guess I'm a transphobe, then! Somehow the disapprobation of "do you want to be considered - gasp! - a *Trump supporter*???" fails to strike me with the appropriate degree of horror to change my sentiments in line with Pride Month. Alas for the obduracy of the fallen heart!
I've been mildly hassled for listening to detrans videos. (People who transitioned to the other gender, but found that it was making their lives worse and have returned to their previous gender.)
My current opinion is that transition is really great some of the time. Literally the most increase in happiness I've seen in adults.
Unfortunately, in the current era, there is sufficient pressure to transition that people who have problems which won't be solved by transition attempt it.
I wouldn't be surprised if some people who are unhappy with transition would be satisfied if the hormones were more competently handled (with more knowledge than is currently available), but this is just a guess.
I have no idea what gender/sex actually is, just that it's important to people.
Specific to "50% of drivers" item, I think the main problem there is that the median driver is actually pretty good, but goes unnoticed. Instead people are biased to recall the 5% (or whatever) that tailgated, drove 55 in the fast lane, didn't check their blindspots, etc., because these are the cars on the road that demand our attention. John Q Driver who was behind you following at a safe distance doesn't.
Second, more speculatively, I think a non-trivial amount of people are biased by the 50% number. In school, 50% is failing, bad bad bad. Obviously the metric is different (absolute vs relative score), but maybe that gets lost if you aren't paying too much attention to some random survey question and don't routinely use such quantitative thinking in your day to day.
I've heard that a lot of the driving thing might actually be better explained by availability bias than by social desirability bias. Driving errors are the sort of thing that other people notice more than yourself, so people assume they are better than average. Kahneman mentions, somewhere in "Thinking, Fast and Slow", that if you ask people "what fraction of the dishes do you put away in the household" people strongly overestimate. But if you also ask "what fraction of arguments do you start in the household" people also strongly overestimate. People notice the dishes they put away, and they notice the things they conceive of as arguments that they started, but they don't notice the ones from their partner, even though one is positive and the other is negative.
I have no difficulty whatsoever in believing that "Most drivers are above average." Most people whom I know have no tickets, no points (if that's a thing in your region), no DWIs, wouldn't consider driving impaired. . . .
But I know a very few people who are Constantly getting tickets, have more than one DWI, have had suspended licenses, have done repeated remedial driving courses etc, with no discernible effect on their "on the ragged edge of legal" driving status. My experience is that there are a very few drivers who are astonishingly bad at it.
Occasionally the NYPost or Daily News tabloids will pick up the story of some few drivers who owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid traffic or parking fines, which given their sample size of "Population of Drivers in Greater NYC," suggests my anecdote isn't too far removed from the truth of the matter, at least in NYC, though that figure is perhaps skewed by the "immune from arrest" diplomatic corps.
I very nearly wrote a review of Mike Lindell's autobiography "What Are The Odds," which is subtitled "From Crack Addict To CEO." But in the end the idea of spending hours of my time reading and writing about a man who would choose a hologram of his own face for his first book seemed like low-hanging fruit. Yes he is a terrible man, but is he worth the effort?
I've really enjoyed the book reviews. IRL conversations with other ACX readers suggest they've really enjoyed them as well. Far from wishing the competition over sooner, I'm sad I soon won't be getting such a volume of interesting precis.
Yes, I agree. It's been great both in terms of reading about various books that may or may not have been brought to my attention in other ways, and also to hear the 'voices' of the various other reviewers.
It's been a really worthwhile undertaking by all concerned. Thanks to Scott and the participants for making the not-inconsiderable effort.
I find them individually interesting, but the sum total is a lot of time to catch up on, and I'm falling behind. The fact that they're all available on Google Docs, and I haven't bothered to read those, tells me that more of them appearing on ACX is probably a bit much.
Part of me almost wants to see Scott start a new side Substack (not paid) to put reader-submitted effortposts up, for things like the book review contests. Link new posts in each open thread, and split up the content thusly.
I've liked several of the book reviews individually, but find the contest very tiring. It's been extended multiple times already, every book review includes the disclaimer about voting, and by the time the contest actually happens, I might've already forgotten my opinions about most of the reviews I've read.
Put differently, the voting system doesn't seem to work with such a long-running contest. If the contest were <2 weeks long and featured <8 reviews, I suppose one could then vote on the contestants with some confidence, but otherwise I suspect the voting process will be dominated by other distorting effects (like whichever review was the first / last to be featured on ACX).
I wouldn't mind seeing more guest book reviews in the future, I'd just prefer them to be more spread out and to not all involve the "call to action" of voting on them in the indeterminate future.
I'm keeping a very brief note of my views on each review, but I agree with Nancy - don't feel obligated to do it. Pick your favourite and vote for that, or if you find "well X was my favourite but now Y is", go with Y. This is a fun activity for the hive-mind, not a serious task to be undertaken for the social weal.
I mostly agree but I'm also close to exhausted by it - having a five-article contest every 6-12 months would be a better place in terms of how much I'd enjoy reading without feeling overdone. Twenty in that period was interesting but a lot.
I like the idea in theory (and considered writing a review), but ultimately I don't subscribe to a lot of blogs and I read ACX because of Scott's writing. They reviews are better than the average blog I see linked to, but I don't read the average blog. I feel the same way when Matt Yglesias's intern or one of Andrew Gelman's colleagues writes a post on their blogs.
Again, I don't mind that it's happening (it's not hard to delete the emails with book review contest in the title), but I'm not actually reading them.
I read a few, and they seem to have fallen into the same issue that a lot of rationalists do. It takes a very very good writer to keep his audience engaged after 2,000 words: as most people are not even good writers, sticking to clear, concise prose is almost always a winning move. The fact that Scott himself is a rare counterexample shouldn't confuse people who talk about statistics so often.
What's the deal with "objective" theories of value (like the labour theory of value)? What question is these theories supposed to answer? Are they fundamentally ethical, in that they say what the price *should* be, or what the "fair" or "just" price is? Or can they be used to make predictions about real prices, and if so how?
I always read the Labor Theory of Value as a desperation move when you don't have a clue what's going it (it is, after all, absolute garbage, and it's interesting to speculate what Marx would have written had he accepted the supply and demand model, which was pretty new at his time but out there).
Like phlogiston or élan vital - you have no idea, so you just make something up that sounds nice but that posterity will find completely stupid and pointless.
And LTV can be used to make predictions, it's just that those predictions (like how automation will cause poverty and that this increased poverty among the masses will inevitably lead to revolution) turn out to be completely and utterly wrong.
There is some debate about whether Marx actually believed in LTV, after all he never referred to his theories with those terms. It's possible that he merely used his theories to illustrate what was wrong with the economics of his time and not as an objective universal theory of value.
"Like phlogiston or élan vital - you have no idea, so you just make something up that sounds nice but that posterity will find completely stupid and pointless."
This is a really unfair description of phlogiston, and perhaps of elan vital as well. Phlogiston was a well-developed scientific theory that had gone through several rounds of revision to explain more and more phenomena. It's just that post-Lavoisier scientists didn't bother learning the theory, and so invented something stupid for it to mean.
They are not meant to make predictions about the monetary prices of goods and services, but they are not exactly ethical either. It's more that they are one of the axioms of an ethical theory, so they're used to construct an ethical theory, but aren't an ethical theory themselves.
So the ethical theory is that prices that are above the labor value is due to rent seeking (and therefor immoral)? It seems kind of circular to me then: why can't we just say that rent seeking is immoral without needing a labor theory of value?
I think that traditional economists don't consider "owning the means of production and receiving some of the value of what it produces" to be a form of rent seeking. We don't normally call a factory owner a rent-seeker. The capitalist adds value in the form of "making business decisions" or "assuming the risk" or something like that. The labor theory would disagree with that.
Yes, but *Marxists* seem to think that claiming a portion of the economic surplus based on owning some of the capital that went into producing it is illegitimate.
I would say this depends on how difficult it is to accumulate the capital if you start with having none.
If the situation is more like "anyone can put aside a part of their salary, and if you keep doing this for ten years, you too can build a factory -- much faster if you pool money with your friends", then taking the profit is fair. You had an alternative, but you decided to not wait those ten years, and instead used the money of someone else who did.
If the situation is more like "if you don't have capital, it is impossible to save money, because the salary barely covers your survival", then the capitalist is simply taking a reward for being born in a rich family. You have two classes -- those born with capital, and those born without -- with no way for the latter to join the former. That isn't fair.
Real life is somewhere in between, and it depends on who you are. It is easier to accumulate capital for a software developer than for a factory worker.
The part of "making business decision" is in theory independent from "providing the capital". The capitalist can hire a CEO, right?
Ethical implications are (normally) not used as an argument in favor of a theory of value, so they're not circular. A theory of value also doesn't say whether something is immoral, only if it's valuable. You can make an ethical theory that says "rent seeking is immoral", but people will ask you why you think that. By providing some (hopefully non-normative) axioms for your theory you can strengthen your theory and usually make it apply to a wider variety of cases. So if ethical implications aren't used to argue for a theory of value, what is? Mostly the usual philosophical suspects: internal consistency, doesn't clash with observations, intuitively plausible etc...
The idea that labor is an integral part of a good's value seems rather obvious to me. Does LTV assert that *only* labor has a legitimate claim to part of a good's value, and that capital has no legitimate claim?
In my understanding of LTV: Let's say that someone spends 50000 hours of socially necessary labor time (HSLTs) on building a machine that makes shoes, and this machine can make a million shoes before being worn down, for a HSLT of 0.05 per made shoe. Someone then spends 0.3 HSLT on making a shoe with help from the machine, using 0.1 HSLT of leather as input. The value of the shoe is then 0.3-0.1+0.05=0.25 HSLT. That the machine was "capital" and if a capitalist owned it or not doesn't really factor.
Labor Theories of Value were generally accepted at the time. Adam Smith departing from them was an innovation (Smith thought labor might determine prices in technologically unsophisticated societies, but it doesn't once you end up with machines and wealth accumulation.) That's why Marx doesn't really go into or describe it much, it was considered an orthodoxy when he wrote, even if it isn't now.
Harvey also mentioned that even many Marxists no longer accepted it, but that he thought there was some truth to the idea in explaining durable relative price differences (why shoes cost more than shirts, in his words.)
I think, perhaps, the most charitable interpretation of the labor theory of value and surplus value is that it has a rhetorical function of arguing, within a Lockean idea of there being a just distribution of ownership, that the distribution of ownership that capitalism produces was not in fact just in terms of who produces what value.
I once read an account in a history of economics book that made an objective theory of value seem reasonable under very specific circumstances (these circumstances happen to be those that people like Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and friend were facing in their time).
The idea is that during those days, for all intents and purposes, labor supply was perfectly elastic, because so many people were moving from rural to urban areas. If you raised wages, more people would come to the city and depress those wages down. How far down? Basically, until the subsistence wage, w* . Now imagine, to simplify things, that labor is the only input in production and that each worker produces one unit. Then the cost if producing one unit is equal to w*. With this, you can add some notion of competition to argue that firms will charge p = w*. Charge more and no one buys from you, charge less and you loose money. The result: the price is equal to the cost of subsistence which is, arguably, an objective value.
This, of course, leaves lots of things unexplained (like the famous paradox of the value of water vs. diamonds), but as a first attempt towards a theory of value it doesn't strike me as particularly misguided, specially since the assumptions of the theory, i.e., infinitely elastic labor supply and a high participation of labor in production, seemed to be roughly true at the time.
The question it's trying to answer is obviously the value of goods and services. The LTV is supposed to establish the value of goods and services independent of a free market. Which gets to its point: if you can create an objective measure of value, you don't need a free market and central planning like Communism becomes possible.
In a prior thread someone brought up Tim Scott as a likely Republican nominee for 2024. I didn't know much about him at the time but I've been looking a bit more into him ever since.
Prediction: if Tim Scott is the 2024 nominee then we will see a quick but stealthy reversal of the trend that Scott noted in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ ; we will be back to wall-to-wall religious wars again. At a vague guess, "Christians are responsible for violence against LGBT people" will be the leading narrative.
I hope so! At least the irrationality of explicitly religious conflict can be reasonably moderated by separation of church and state (in the U.S.). Not so much with Wokeism.
I've been thinking for a while the answer is probably agency: being able to make decisions for things you find important. I think culture in general is mostly people reacting rationally to the incentives that exist in society they grew up in, before age 25. I think it is 70% that and 30% other stuff. Thus I am biased to thinking that this question will be similar.
This question probably first entered my brain when I found it that in Japan people tend to dislike Bart for his troublemaking ways. But over here in North America, there was Bartmania. There is also a stereotype that being a good kid was cool immediately post war, but by the 60's that was seen as "square" and some kind of rule breaker has been cool since. I wondered what is different that changed that.
I have been thinking for a while now that the core thing is likely agency. You have none as a baby but are expected to get to the normal adult amount by age 18 or so. I suspect then that coolness comes from having more agency than those your age, and uncoolness from having less. Since starting this paragraph it has occurred to me that when I was in school a few kids were lame simply for having overbearing parents. There is also an episode of the Simpson where Bart is teaching Martin how to be cool and one of the lessons is that the potential for mischief varies inversely with one's proximity to the authority figure. I think that rule is coming very close to realizing that agency is the key thing.
I think this can explain why cool went from a good kid at the start of the post-war period to various kinds of rulebreaker. Parents and school stopped rewarding being a good kid with extra agency, mostly for the sake of fairness, while certain kinds of rule breaking have seen their punishments get weaker and/or inconsistently enforced. I think breaking a rule and getting away with it (or with a 'slap on the wrist') is an expression of agency. If you were a kid going to school when I did (90s and 2000s) rule breaking was the only way to have more agency than your peers. I think that is why the culture has shifted to one where troublemakers are generally cool.
To be clear, not all troublemaking is cool. It has to be the kind where you get away with it. For Bart, it seemed like making jokes in class or talking back to the teacher often got nothing more than his name said in a harsh tone. The adult isn't stopping him, so this displays more agency than he should have, so he is cool. When I was a teen, weed served a similar purpose. It was something you can do than was unlikely to get you in trouble but still counted as breaking a rule. Since Canada has legalized marijuana, weed use amongst teens has halved: it no longer makes you cool.
Another big example is in Scott's Review of [On the Road](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/) from 2014. I recently read this the first time a week ago, which has brought this topic back onto my mind. To summarize the relevant part of this book and review: the main character is a causes major problems for everyone, always gets away with it, is seen by a messiah for it by the narrator, and Scott really dislikes them both for it. I think the many people would think the main character was cool. The Wikipedia article suggests that was the reception. The book is listed as a defining work for two cultural movements.
I wonder if we wanted to change this so being a good kid, tries in school; kind to others; follows the rules, to be cool again we'd have to change the incentives so that these kids get more agency again. Once, and only once, I got to leave elementary school 15 minutes early because I had been good that day where the class as a whole was worse than usual. Would making small but desirable privileges like that a common thing be able to shift the culture back? Based on my theory that coolness is to do with agency, I think it would. I think a lot of punishments would have to become stricter as well. Having rules that aren't enforced or have punishments that are easily ignored would keep the incentives against this shit strong.
Has anybody examined this? Or is there a better idea on what 'coolness' is that I haven't heard of? Also, I mentioned at the start that in Japan Bart was not seen as cool like he was in North America. If there are some people who grew up in Japan reading this, was good behavior rewarded as a child? Does it seem like American kids could get away with more at school than you could. Bart Simpson often wasn't too far off from what some kids could get away with in school.
It's an interesting question how to shape what "cool" means.
I think there is an additional aspect of being cool in puberty: that there is an outgroup which is not cool. This seems to be important for identity-finding. Often, this is parents or teachers, so cool things are things which are disliked by the adults. It can also be other peer groups at school, or in society. But generally, if adults try to shape what is cool, that could backfire.
> But generally, if adults try to shape what is cool, that could backfire.
I'm aware that adults trying to make specific things cool can backfire. There is an episode of South Park (Chinpokomon) where the adults intentionally use this to kill a trend they don't like.
I think trying to shape it by changing the incentives could be indirect enough to avoid that problem. It could also be the case that since in our current environment being a troublemaker is cool then authority figures become uncool. This is getting pretty speculative on my end.
Conspicuous disregard for another group's values is cool because it signals a degree of independence from them. Makes sense for teens to play that game with authority figures.
I think one of the things you’re dropping is that physical attractiveness is a necessary condition. Bart can perhaps get away without it because he’s a cartoon character, but I can’t think of a single person I’ve gone to school with who was cool but not attractive.
Also, I suspect that having agency is actually also just a US thing. Rather, I might claim it’s fulfillment of cultural ideals. In the US (or at least the white American culture I’m familiar with) that tends to be rugged individualism, athleticism, and raw charisma. If you look at it as just fulfillment of culture, it makes a lot of sense why “good kids” would be cool post WW2 (the nation had just come together, lots of people were in the military, etc.), why “squares” were uncool (all the young people were doing social justice stuff, which definitely did not conform with authority figures), and why we have the definition we have now.
I think physical attractiveness helps. It helps a lot. But it is not necessary or sufficient. There were a couple ugly people in the "coolest clique" at the two highschools I went to. Likewise there were some unpopular attractive people. For the second tier of coolest kids, attractiveness was less important still.
Plus, even if it just attractiveness, which I know isn't what you're saying, why isn't the behavior of the attractive people a random sampling of the behaviors seen in school. In my school experience the attractive people were mostly acting with a lot of agency. They were unaffected affecters as the user meta put it. Those that did not were the ones who were uncool despite the advantage their attractiveness provided.
I appreciate the focus on agency in your theory, but the connection to "cool" seems tenuous to me. Agency is more likely to predict who is going to develop the next great startup than who's going to win the popularity contest in high school.
First, you do need to define cool. I'm assuming you mean cool in the high school sense of the "cool kids" as defined by perception of cool by the peer group. In this case, we need to disregard what adults consider cool, or what is popular in media (Sheldon from Big Bang Theory is popular and has agency and a certain coolness, but it wouldn't get him too far as a kid in an average high school). Think about the "precocious kid". Often, that's the kid with the most agency, but usually not the most coolness in the eyes of peers.
Next, we'd need to define agency. There's agency vis-a-vis parents, and agency vis-a-vis society. In a high school environment, kids have their own complex culture and social rules entirely detached from the "home life". Other kids don't really care about a given kid's agency as related to her home life. What Kimmy thinks of Jenny is way more important than what Mrs. Kline thinks of her daughter.
The coolness status is based on the social dynamic between kids and kid groups. In such an environment, too much agency can be a hurdle in the popularity contest. Like in most societies, avoiding playing by the social rules leads to some kind of punitive response. Most cool kids are good at exhibiting desired social signaling with a small dose of signaling of agency (and not the other way around). Unfortunately, Ferris Bueller is a rare outlier. And he's not even real.
In general, I think that the "kids defined by rebellion against parents" narrative is overrated. Kids don't care about parents. They care about other kids. There's a ton of complexity in what defines kid culture. Contemporary Media is a huge piece of it, but also a chaos theory of viral trends plays into it. Generational conflicts can play a role, but I don't think it would rank as primary/defining.
I just realized that I left out the agency category in regard to institutions. I would say that the social culture of kids is so strong that even the agency vis-a-vis school is mostly drowned out. It's just not that big a priority compared with who made out with whom. Which is wild, considering that the institutions are the setting for a significant majority of the kids' lives. As a result, you can have cool kids who do well in school and cool kids who barely pass. Outside of outlier school environments (competitive private schools), it really doesn't matter.
I don't think we should get distracted by the word "cool" here; the question "What do kids find cool?" is just a specific case of the question "What do humans find high-status?" It's a special case, and that's largely because children don't have access to most of the ways of being high-status (kids don't have important jobs or high salaries) so they need to rely more heavily on basics like looks and behaviour.
Certainly it can be high status to demonstrate power over the forces that cow most children by breaking rules and getting away with it; this has pretty terrible consequences since (as more aware children will realise) many of these rules exist for very good reasons. Any adult who took up smoking as a teenager to seem cool will probably regret it by now.
One thing that might actually be useful is more pointless rules. School uniforms, for instance, give kids a whole set of rules that they can visibly disobey without doing themselves any actual harm.
But if the thrust of the overall comment is "Can we prevent kids from breaking rules by punishing them more predictably and more severely" then I'd say yes, we definitely can, though I'm not sure to what extent this is actually mediated by coolness.
> Any adult who took up smoking as a teenager to seem cool will probably regret it by now.
This is a solid example.
I notice that of the people in the highest status clique in highschool, a disproportionate amount have crappy adult lives. They disproportionately transitioned to harder drugs. They disproportionately have abusive relationships with drugs and alcohol. They disproportionately have trouble keeping a job. They disproportionately lost custody of their kids.
They kept doing the specific behaviors that made them cool as a teen and carried them into adult life. The difference is that adult life rewards and punishes these behaviors very differently from how school does. So while these behaviors led to high status in their teens led to low status in adulthood. In retrospect, I think to some degree the changes I talked about reduce that gap.
> But if the thrust of the overall comment is "Can we prevent kids from breaking rules by punishing them more predictably and more severely"
I think that is part of it. I think I talked about punishment more than reward which would make it seem like I consider it more important. I do think adding reward is more important. Maybe it would help if I mentioned some rewards for good behavior schools could (re)introduce:
* being able to leave class early if you are done your work
* choosing where you sit while everyone else has assigned seating
* choosing who to work with on group work while everyone else is assigned, or getting to choose first before making it a free-for-all
* being allowed to get up and go to the bathroom without needing to ask permission first
* being allowed to have food or a drink at your desk
* to end with a bold one, which should be hard to earn if it is offered: being granted a small number of classes you can skip consequence free as long as you provide advance notice
Again, I think rewarding positive behavior with perks that allow students greater agency than their peers is more important that just clamping down on the gaps in enforcement.
> I don't think we should get distracted by the word "cool" here
Thanks. I was surprised by this. I though, if anything, that people would take issue with what I meant by good behavior. I think the definition I gave in my original post isn't very good. I'd like to replace it with "either socially constructive behavior or behavior that sets themselves up for success in adulthood".
Basically I want to know if there is anything we as adults can change about the system to make those two behaviors cool for kids. Currently I think rewarding them with increased agency stands the best chance of working.
I think that you hit the nail on the head with agency as the central ingredient. And I think the cultural reason is that in the west we tend to provide children with a sheltered upbringing that denies them any responsibility and agency. I think that if we could give young people more responsibilities and opportunities to prove their worth to society, they would not need to rebel in order to achieve agency and thus rule-breaking would become less cool.
> But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
Since reading this I've been wondering a few things: do high-trust societies have mechanisms to protect themselves from people who will exploit this trust? If so, what are they and why did they not work in the US (and I think it Canada as well)? If not, are high trust societies doomed to rot from the inside after a few generations?
That's the million dollar question. I think there's no clear answer. This paper speculates that trust in Scandinavian countries become high during the viking age or even earlier: https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/haechi/2018_001.html
*Building* a high-trust society is much harder than maintaining one. What we seem to have is, as near as I can tell,
1. Adopt and sincerely believe a religion that tells people an omniscient deity is watching and will punish them most hellaciously if they betray people's trust, or
2. Have your society conquered by the British Empire, which will, import honest British civil servants to run the place, and spend a century or so training promising and trustworthy locals to fill out that civil service. Then the Brits get bored or frustrated with it all and go home.
3. We're still looking for this one. So if you've inherited a high-trust society and not currently ruled by true believers and/or British imperialists, do try not to break it.
I know nothing about history, but this seems a little too pessimistic. If David Friedman could write Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, could it really be impossible to write High Trust Societies Very Different From Ours?
Wait, has 2 *ever* worked? I don't think of Israel, India, South Africa, etc. as high trust societies. I think of Sweden, Japan, Singapore (I guess that's a former British colony), among others.
The cases of Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea suggest that "Be a small country in a geopolitically important location and your bloc will move heaven and earth to turn you into a high-trust economic powerhouse".
Thinking further, that didn't work out too well for East Germany, North Korea, etc, so perhaps we should add that you should have been on the right side of the cold war.
I can't find a good metric for social trust per se, but if we take Transparency Internationa's "Corruption Perceptions Index" - https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/nzl - the forty-two former British Colonies, Protectorates, and Mandates that were under British control for at least fifty years have an average score of 49.0, compared to a global average of 43.3 (higher is better, standard deviation 18.9)
10 out of 42 have a score at least a full standard deviation above the mean, with only two (Zimbabwe and Sudan) coming in 1SD below the mean. Of the ten most honest former colonies, six* have had majority-nonwhite populations all along, so it isn't just a matter of the British swarming the territory with high-trust Europeans and crowding out the natives.
Looking at it from the opposite direction, of the 31 nations that TI scores at least 1SD above average, I get twelve that were ruled by the British for at least 50 years (including Actual Britain), sixteen more whose people mostly followed Abrahamic faiths for the past 500 years, and three outliers - Taiwan, Japan, and Bhutan. What can we learn from the last three?
* Singapore, Hong Kong, UAE, Seychelles, Barbados, and Bahamas.
Humans seem to be naturally tribal, and form corrupt, low trust societies. You only trust people in your extended family or tribe. The Catholic church (for who knows what reason) forbade cousin marriages from the middle ages until about 1500. This caused large extended families and tribes to get broken up and perhaps led to nuclear families. Still, the Catholic church was very corrupt. This lead to the Protestant Reformation -- basically an anti corruption movement. The Protestant Reformation was in north west Europe, and it seems that the Protestant countries of Europe (and some places colonized by them) are generally the most high trust, low corruption countries. Catholic counties tend to be more corrupt than Protestant countries. Eastern Orthodox countries more corrupt still. Muslim countries even more corrupt.
You still have to get a dispensation from the bishop even today if you want to marry your first cousin or near relations, so it didn't just stop in 1500. An aunt of mine had to get such a dispensation when she wanted to marry a cousin.
I've read some push-back on that theory. Common Law marriages were an alternative to marriage by a priest for regular folks, and Roman law had already prohibited marriages within certain degrees of consanguinity and served as the ancestor for most medieval legal systems on the continent. The people most affected by it were the aristocracy, who could and did also pay for dispensations.
As for why they did it, they had a big material reason for doing so. People who balked at marriage were more likely to donate their money upon death to the Church, and they could collect dispensation payments to waive the rule.
If I speculate, I would guess that high-trust societies were local: People knew that they would live in the same village for generations and that reputation was long-lasting (even inherited). Culture developed based on this. But then industrialization (interstates, banking, telephones etc.) de-localized life ad the old culture didn't work anymore.
Cultural homogeneity is probably key. How can you enforce social norms if everyone has different norms? Japan is a high trust society, and they aggressively limit immigration and they punish social devience. I think collectivist societies have stronger mechanism for punishing those who exploit trust. The more you depend on others, the more you have to play by the rules of the group.
How high trust were they pre-independence? AIUI they implemented some rather coercive post-independence policies (e.g. forced housing integration) designed to defuse tensions that might result from heterogeneity.
Canada is also higher-trust than any other country I've lived in (UK, India, family/friends in USA and France), and is the last culturally homogenous of these. It's a stereotype, but I never locked my doors when I lived in Canada, and can feel my trust in strangers ebbing away the longer I live in the UK.
On the other hand, I question whether Singapore is all that culturally non-homogeneous. It's certainly racially non-homogeneous, and I know that in the west people tend to use one as a euphemism for the other, but I'm wondering how deep the inhomogeneity really goes. (Disclaimer: I've been to Singapore three times, but for a grand total of about two weeks, so I don't really claim any deep understanding of the society.)
If you look at languages, it's 36% Mandarin, 30% English, 12% Malay, 8% Hokkien, 4% Cantonese, 3% Tamil, 3% Teochew, and 3% Other. If you look at religions, it's 33% Buddhist, 19% Christian, 19% Atheist/Non-religious, 14% Muslim, 10% Taoist, 5% Hindu. There are surely aspects of shared culture separate from language and religion (a love for the taste of durian and a hate for its smell; the shared ideology of standing on the right and walking on the left on the escalators in the MRT; etc). But basically anywhere else in the world, we would count this sort of racial, linguistic, and religious diversity as the definition of cultural non-homogeneity. It would be really interesting if we could find a more relevant definition of "culture" that gets the trust high even when languages, religions, and races differ this much!
Wish I had a link but the economist Noah Smith, who lived there a while, considers Japan to be a low-trust society. It's at least not obvious that Japan is a high-trust society.
High trust societies form when people who cooperate significantly and visibly outcompete people who defect. Not every time, but enough that the pattern is obvious. There's any number of ways this can be accomplished or break down, not all of which are dominated by one political faction or another. Powerful business, for example, tend to break down trust because they can use their power to become successful despite defecting. But likewise countercultural groups that are popular on the left can do the same.
To eliminate or reduce a behavior, it must be punished. In modern society, the punishment is typically taken away from the hands of individuals, and must be addressed using the law.
One problem is that the law is slow to adapt. When someone invents a new form of bad behavior, it is no longer enough that a group of neighbors agree that "this guy is obviously hurting us"; it will take years or decades until the bad behavior is addressed by a new law. (The new bad behavior might be a modification of an already illegal behavior that avoids the legal definition because of some technicality.)
Another problem is that applying the law is costly, and therefore the law does not concern itself with trivialities. Doing the same triviality over and over again for thousand times may drive your neighbors crazy, but from the point of the law nothing happened.
This is a tradeoff. If you allow individuals to punish people who (from the perspective of the law) merely annoy them, you get a society with less creative evil, but probably with all kinds of prejudice and discrimination.
>it will take years or decades until the bad behavior is addressed by a new law.
In a low-trust society, the bad behavior will probably *never* be addressed by a new law, because the miscreants will bribe the police and courts to ignore whatever law you pass. If you're looking for a bright, clear dividing line between high-trust and low-trust societies, it's "can you reasonably expect to bribe a policeman to let you break the law?".
I would have read this the other way, societies that have highly structured rule-making and enforcement down to very fine-grained details (like HOA communities) being low-trust.
That is a bizarre, but interesting, take on On the Road. Few of the characters in On the Road exist in a high-trust society. The main character is a reform school kid whose father was a jailbird. Most of the characters are criminals or junkies or both from the start.
The criminals and junkies are portrayed romantically or comically (Dean shuffles his feet like Groucho Marx). They are conmen but these guys aren't Bernie Madoff or Jeffrey Epstein conning the faculty of MIT, they are conning drunks in bars and poolhalls, mostly hanging out with the exact sort of drug-using, high-discount-rate, low-trust people they are, the kind of people who have always existed in the American landscape.
The novel is interesting because the point of view is so original and because the prose is so lyrical. As in works by, say, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller or The Marx Brothers, up is down and down is up, in the sense that you are meant to root for the thieves, drunks and rapists. It is a novel, after all, by which I mean it is the sort of story, unlike a journalistic one, which tells you that the world is not what it seems.
That Scott refers to the narrator as "Jack Kerouac" instead of "Sal Paradise" indicates he interprets On the Road as a work of non-fiction instead of as a novel.
This novel doesn't have anything to say about the collapse of a high-trust society, or at least no more to say about it than The Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers or a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon (works of American culture in which the viewer also tends to root for the cheaters and thieves).
I don't doubt there's a lot of truth in both of those statements, yet that doesn't change the nature of the book from experimental art into a work of journalism.
I suggest the best way to read On the Road is to think of Sal Paradise as Don Quixote. Or just reread Scott's review imagining the narrator as Don Quixote. Of course the interpretations of the narrator are false. There may be a 1-to-1 analogue of Dean Moriarty to Neil Cassidy in the sense there is a 1-to-1 analogue of giants to windmills in Cervantes' great work, but does that does not mean the windmills are giants or that the author (as opposed to the narrator) thinks they are.
Scott's comic description of the novel is great, and--in fact--spot on. It's a funny novel, much like say, Rabelais' Gargantua. The protagonist is horrible yet somehow lovable in spite of it all. It's dark comedy.
So I've said that Scott's conclusion about the novel (that it is a picture of a high-trust society turning into a low-trust society) couldn't be more wrong, yet his description of it (as a comic noir) couldn't be more right. What I need to add for that to make entire sense is that Scott maps (in a mathematical sense) Kerouac's romantic tone to a comic tone, and it lands. Not that there's no comic tone in the original (it's all there but subtle), but Scott translates it into a denser comic space, boldening the humor.
I remember the original thread (because I'm so damn old...) and I think people hit it on the head pretty well in the comments then.
Antisocial drifters who show up, cause trouble and run off before said trouble can catch up to them are a problem at least as old as civilization itself. Cheap cars and the highway network changed the speed of running off and thus the certainty of escaping pursuit, so that the old mechanisms of dealing with anonymous drifters were overwhelmed. Now, thanks to the internet, it seems like things may have swung back the other way and while the norms people are trying to enforce don't seem quite as neighborly one could imagine that if those technologies had developed in the reverse order things might have turned out differently.
That said, I don't think you can put the collapse of American society entirely at Jack Kerouac's feet. He certainly wasn't helping matters, but between technological changes incentivizing antisocial behavior and a concerted High Modernist push to undermine traditional norms in favor of 'scientific' central planning the writing was on the wall.
I think "actually a good use of your time" is probably the first place to start. It's likely usually morally better not to start an argument unless someone's actually going to develop in some way as a result.
An important dimension here is level of belief. For example, should I be engaged in casual conversation with an acquaintance, I'm not going to (intentionally) challenge his worldview-level beliefs, but I might challenge lower level beliefs, like "bureaucracies can/should be trusted to run themselves", or "real analysis is better than complex analysis".
Important clarification: This makes it seem like epistemic status is the crucial piece, whereas the rest of your comment implies that the centrality of a belief to one's worldview is actually the crucial piece.
New York stopped requiring students to wear masks in class last week, then another part of New York sneeringly overruled the first part and decided that no, students DO still have to wear masks during school. My question is about social media.
My wife is a member of a Facebook moms group specific to our town. Shit EXPLODED. Dozens of moms (literally dozens - multiples of twelve. Of moms) posted screaming curse filled rants against the reinstatement of a mask mandate that had been lifted for an entire weekend. Many threatened the school board and particularly the superintendent that they would organize and withhold taxes or something if the school followed the requirements of the DOE, and that they were sending they’re sending their children to school maskless so fuck you. Other people screamed back at them, calling them ignorant garbage and telling them to stop literally murdering people by suggesting they would not mask their kids in the future.
Some moms screamingly compared the lifting then reinstating of the mask requirement to Nazi camps. The Jewish mom screamed that those moms were evil moronic f*cks that should have horrible things happen to them. And so on and so on. Scream-response scream.
At one point a few nearby towns said “fuck it” and told their students they could come in without a mask anyway. Then they took it back when Cuomo threatened to have them all shot. You can imagine the howls during that period.
All this and more went on for days. It’s probably still going on; my wife left the group because it got so nasty.
I’m not on social media. I’m not really capturing how awful and unhinged everyone was - I wish I’d written down some of the posts to use as examples - but those of you who are on FB or Twitter can fill in the blanks. My question is: don’t these people have to meet each other in person? Often? Don’t some of their kids play together? Don’t they talk to the superintendent at some point? It’s not anonymous. You’ll know exactly who the person is who called you an ignorant shit in front of hundreds of people. We all know the name of the mom who called people who don’t put their kids in masks “cunts”. What happens in real life after these blow ups? Isn’t there SOME kind of impact to real life relationships for bad behavior online? I’m completely at sea here.
Guessing they were semi-aware of consequences, but felt righteous enough to let emotion take the wheel. Victimhood is one hell of a drug. Especially with one's kids involved.
It’s hard and possibly dangerous to confront someone in real life, especially over “which side is murdering children?” You might not see a blow up, but I would expect the group to socially split by not inviting each other to events, not talking etc
The problem is that the classrooms do not automatically split the same way.
If we could somehow magically make two copies of each school, and say "everyone who wears the mask goes to school A, everyone who doesn't goes to school B", all moms could be happy -- they would believe the other group to be idiots, but the kind of idiots who don't endanger my children, so who cares.
That sounds like it would be difficult, but maybe. What messes me up, though, is there wasn’t an equivalent to this when I was in school. There were issues that divided up the community, sure, but dozens of moms swearing at each other just wasn’t even close to a thing. I don’t understand how the district can function like this, and it bothers me that I don’t understand. :)
My kids are leaving the district to go to Catholic school, but I don’t see any particular reason why things would be different there. How do you all keep from shooting each other when you finally meet in real life? I’m not on social media, but I’m not sure I would quickly forgive people cursing me out in any context.
> My question is: don’t these people have to meet each other in person? Often?
That's a question only you can answer, but I suspect that they don't.
I grew up as the internet was only just getting wound up, so I didn't have to deal with social media drama as a kid, but the moms in my suburban neighborhood were almost entirely isolated into mutually-exclusive cliques of 3-5 catty middle-aged women. They might see each other infrequently in church / synagogue or at the PTA provided they attended either, but it was easy for them to avoid each other the rest of the time. I suspect that Facebook hasn't changed that much: if my experience is a guide, these are likely women who are acquaintances at best.
I was hanging out with some friends recently. Somehow the topic of standardized tests came up. I lamented that colleges are starting to ignore SAT scores for reasons of "equity."
The friends I was talking to, surprisingly, both said that standardized tests are useless and don't tell you anything. And they said that rich people can afford tutors for their kids so it just means you can "buy" higher scores. I doubt many people here agree with that point of view, but I'm curious if anyone does (and what evidence they have.)
I'm sensitive (and biased) about the issue because I grew up in a small town with bad schools. I also got crappy grades (i'd like to have an excuse for it, but mostly: I was lazy). The fact that I got good test scores was the only reason I got into a decent college. And I was able to do well in the years since.
I wondered if the current (what I call) attack on standardized tests comes from people in the opposite position I was in. The current "critique" of the media is that it's a bunch of upper-class white kids that went to exclusive schools that now run our news rooms.
What if those people were the mirror of me: good schools, good grades, low test scores (relatively, anyway). Wouldn't those people have a "stake" in downplaying the importance of these tests? Like, "How can I be part of the intellectual elite if I only got 1200 on the SAT? It must be the tests that are wrong!"
Standardized tests are a reasonably good predictor of academic performance. Money can buy you a few points, *maybe* enough to get you into a top school in marginal cases but it doesn't fill those schools with the privileged elite and crowd out everyone else. But money absolutely does buy your way into prime extracurricular activities and whatever else is going to be used in place of standardized testing. For smart kids from poor schools, standardized testing is their best shot for getting into a good college - even if they did get good grades, because nobody trusts good grades from a poor school.
Nonetheless, the prevailing media and public narrative is what you describe your friends as believing, and it does seem to constitute an attack on standardized testing. A successful one to the extent that the entire UC system is planning to do away with standardized testing.
The result of this is that professors and college administrators will have much more power to arbitrarily decide who goes to what school. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's a strong demographic and cultural overlap between them and the reporters and thought leaders selling the "standardized tests have got to go" narrative. They can admit more of the right sort of people (i.e. people like them), and more of whatever underprivileged oppressed group they want to help, and much less of the Wrong Sort of People that they are presently stuck having admit because they keep acing the SATs. And if anyone criticizes them for this, they point to the currently-popular oppressed group that they are helping and asking what sort of bigot wants to use an obsolete bureaucratic ritual to throw these nice underprivileged kids out of school. You don't want to look like a bigot, do you?
The biggest losers will probably be the homeschooled. Other losers, probably Asians, possibly Jewish kids, probably smart white-trash kids who didn't go to the right schools or do the right extracurriculars, possibly nerdy kids in general.
The strange thing about this: wouldn't private tutoring also be able to "buy" a few GPA points, too? I mean, just having someone proof-read a paper before submission (I would think) would have substantive effect.
> Other losers... probably smart white-trash kids who didn't go to the right schools or do the right extracurriculars
That was me. I guess that's the reason I care about this issue.
Same, got a ceiling score on my SAT from about $100 worth of study books, ended up going to a top school, and now work at a FAANG.
Also was a national/international finalist of one of the big science fairs and had a personal coding project that made a few thousand dollars in ad revenue before college, so my test scores weren't the only thing I had, but where I grew up there weren't many opportunities to do impressive/upper-class extracurriculars, and AP Calc BC was as far as things went on the honors track.
The way I see it, standardized testing as a major part of admission allows for elite residential college to serve a purpose as a finishing school for high-potential lower-class strivers who otherwise would never have any exposure to the connections that make high-paying jobs easier to find.
And the studies are clear -- what school you go to doesn't really matter... as long as you're already immersed in that upper-class culture growing up (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-matter-where-you-go-college/577816/). We owe it to those who aren't born into that culture to not shut out their opportunities to ascend in social class without having to answer to arbitrary gatekeepers that, in practice, will end up excluding them from these opportunities altogether.
I don't think grinds drag your grades up a whole lot, but even a modest increase can help and result in higher points on the final exam. Grinds, from my limited experience, are more about "Susie is weak in biology, she needs extra help there" than "Johnny is a perpetual F student, can we bump him up to at least C?"
Grinds are a handy earner for teaching graduates who might not have a job yet, or college students looking to earn a few bob before the big exams. There are also dedicated grind schools, who do 'repeat years' (i.e. if you failed or simply didn't get enough points when you sat the Leaving Cert for the course you wanted, you repeat the year, sit the exam again, and hope you get the points this time) but they are an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the ordinary school system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinds
"But money absolutely does buy your way into prime extracurricular activities and whatever else is going to be used in place of standardized testing."
From what I've read about American university entrance procedures, this seems correct. Along with whatever grades are necessary for the particular course, you need to show 'leadership' and 'service to the community' and whatever the popular shibboleths of the day are, so if you don't have a tidy life story of "me and my sixteen siblings who lived in an orange crate were encouraged by my parents, who died of black-lung and phossy jaw when I was nine, to study hard at school but also to give back to our community, which is where I developed my interest in street busking performing protest songs, graffiti art painting rainbows everywhere for Pride Month, and helping three-legged puppies over stiles" to appeal to the administrator responsible for juggling this year's admissions demographics so they hit the targets, will instead have a raft of such extracurriculars crafted to appeal ("forget building houses for the poor in Honduras, now they want saving rare yams eaten by one tribe in Botswana!")
I understand your cynicism but I still feel good about the kid that was accepted at an Ivy on the basis of a letter of recommendation from his high school janitor.
It's heart-warming and I like the story, but again my hard cold heart asks "and how many parents, hearing that story, got their kids to get letters of recommendation from janitors, catering assistants, etc."?
Also phossy jaw - the fruits of reading a ton of 19th century fiction and the reading up on 'what the heck was that all about?' which that necessitated. 😁
The past was horrible, in many ways, which is why I am - to carry over from our education book review thread - sceptical about "let kids learn from adults in the everyday world like they used to, apprenticed to work or learning from their parents while helping them work". Yeah, I'm thinking that the people recommending that don't have in mind "working in cotton mills and losing fingers" or "mud larks".
Yes the past was horrible. The present needs some work too.
I also understand your point about let the kids learn with the adults. I spent my 20’s working with some nine fingered millwrights.
I can’t get to the “This all just maya” and none of it matters state of mind either. I’ve been practicing Theravada mediation for a few years, but the ultimate nature of reality continues to elude me.
I’m beginning to fear that I may have to settle for being able to make tailgaters burst into flame.
Well, it wasn't all an idyll of kids toddling round on the farm helping Mama churn butter and Papa herd sheep, then industriously teaching themselves to read and write by the fireside.
Do you? This sounds like the kind of arbitrary, capricious decision that is everything that's wrong with the whole "holistic admissions" system.
I mean, good work by the student who correctly figured out that giving the admissions officer an opportunity to write a self-congratulatory LinkedIn post (or the higher-status equivalent of this, a New York Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/check-this-box-if-youre-a-good-person.html ) was a sure-fire ticket to admission (one time only), but it doesn't scale.
I feel bad for all the borderline-literate high school janitors in the US who are currently being pestered for letters of recommendation by students trying to repeat this particular stunt.
Yes I do feel good about it. Partly because there are so few contemporary stories to feel good about.
I’ve run into some pretty sharp janitors too. I’m sure you don’t think that they are all barely literate. We can’t generalize about cognitive skills based on occupation. Hell, we just had a president that would fall into the category of barely literate
But then I can enjoy watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” every couple years too. I guess I’ve become pessimism saturated and will take my pleasures where I can.
I ran into this a couple jobs back, where the senior management couldn't wrap their well-educated brains around the idea that their Colombian immigrant "Janitor" owned a building services company with dozens of clients and far wealthier than they, and the Only reason he was personally in our building was that we were small and not worth it for him to send a crew, and that any additional work would indeed cost them money.
Their two-faced racism towards him and his crew was a shock at the time. Now I've determined it to be "routine"
I feel good about it the first time it happens, because it shows the "holistic" admissions system is capable of actually being such, of acting on evidence that doesn't correspond to entries on the unwritten bingo card, and because it means the UMC-liberal bubble isn't completely locking out other views.
As you note, if it leads to "get a janitor to write you a letter of recommendation" becoming a box on the Admissions Bingo card, that will be a loss.
I noticed he was very ready to blame everything on Trump, even though it's blatantly obvious that giving up the SAT is a way to bring in more minorities in a way which would be anathema to Trump supporters.
I think the basic version of the counter point is that yes, standardized tests correlate with wealth, but most other factors are much more highly correlated with wealth, making standardized tests an unusually good way for underprivileged kids to get into good school. Which is true at the same time the correlation between higher scores and wealth is true. So this takes something like two chunks of information to reason about instead of just one, which make it totally unsuitable for a bumper-sticker style policy position, hence the argument you were having.
This is definitely a political topic. Up-front problems with standardised tests:
(1) "Teaching to the test", that is, schooling becomes all about passing the final exam, so the students are, if able, given a list of 'model' answers to copy and reproduce on the final exam, and if less able, are spoon-fed pre-digested pap. Nobody bothers to read the texts, they copy the answers out of the various notes that online and dead-tree educational publishers provide.
(2) It's not fair to judge an entire X years of learning on a (one day/two day/two weeks/however long the standard exams in your country take) final test that is inevitably stressful and doesn't examine the student's grasp of the subject, just how well they can parrot off the 'model answers'
(3) The objections above about tutoring and grinds
All that being said, yeah, and so what? Standardised tests are perhaps a poor metric, but they're one of the best we've got. Assessment on projects and work done over the year(s) also needs a standard of assessment, where there is a national qualification and inspectors that visit schools to check the students' work, else you get teachers assessing their own students, being pressurised by the administration/parents to give little Johnny A+ when he didn't deserve it, etc.
University entrance exams used to be the Matriculation which you sat separately and were set by each university. Now the Leaving Cert results are accepted in place of that.
However, some of that *is* here already, with recommendations about coursework assessment over the year rather than one final exam. Because we are still such a majority white country, the racial (rather than socio-economic class) angle hasn't been played up yet, but with our demographics changing I have no doubt that hobbyhorse will be imported from the States along with the other progressive talking-points by our activist groups.
I don't think it's so much people with "good schools, good grades, didn't do so well on the final exam as expected" as it is a way for the liberal types who are aware they are doing well in the system and feel uncomfortable about that to try and advocate for equal access. I'm not accusing them of insincerity, just that they will always be assured that they - and their children - will come out okay under whatever system (unless the kid is a complete dumb-bell who can't make it to college unless Daddy pays over millions in endowments or alumni donations) but this *sounds* fairer - the kids who might fail to do well in the once-off final exam can have their work properly, and more fairly, assessed over the year and so get their rightful bite at the cherry.
What my cynical stony heart says is that "stupid and rich will succeed where stupid and poor fail, no matter what the testing or assessment regime" but that's a different problem.
Are there ways a solar system could be arranged that would make it significantly easier for a civilisation that evolved there to engage in interstellar travel?
Suppose we construct a binary system with the two stars very close and therefore orbiting quickly around one another. Would a (powered?) slingshot manoeuvre around one of the suns provide enough of a boost to be a useful start to an interstellar voyage?
As a bonus, let's also throw in a terrestrial planet of a few earth masses a little way out from the habitable planet, so that you can gravity assist your perihelion down to where you need it for the stellar slingshot.
Most you can get for free out of a very close binary of Sun-likes is probably on the order of 1,000 km/s or even a bit less (close binaries make a lot of simplifying assumptions not work and I'm not particularly keen on graphing this out), and you'd have to sungraze for that. Oberth effect helps, of course.
A close binary brown dwarf can give a slightly smaller boost, and has the advantage of not incinerating your ship. A close binary *white* dwarf can give a fair bit more, although at that point you're starting to run into "this system is going to inspiral and explode as a supernova" (also, tidal forces will rip your ship apart; this is also non-negligible for the brown dwarf case).
Note that you need a similarly-optimal system on the receiving end unless you have some other way of slowing down.
The accretion disk of a black hole could plausibly create a habitable zone, if you want to ramp you slingshot up to eleven. Also blackholes can orbit each other if you want to take it up to a million (hope you have some sci-fi technology to protect yourself from tidal forces and radiation). But still, space is enormous so it's still going to take a lot of time.
What might be more helpful for an alien civilization is if they evolved cryoprotectants similar to wood frogs that lets them be frozen during the winter. This way they can more easily develop technologies to cryogenically freeze themselves for their long journeys.
A black hole would let you do a nice slingshot via the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect. You want to get as close as you can to the massive body, and you can "afford" to get closer to a black hole without being roasted by solar radiation.
There are other reasons why getting that close to a black hole isn't good for your health. And you still need to slow down at your destination, with no black hole to help you. So you'll still need interstellar-grade propulsion technology, doubly so if you're ever planning to come home. Oberth effect and the like are only a marginal advantage here.
But if we can use the environment about the event horizon and accretion disk to facilitate e.g. antimatter production, that might be a bigger assist.
Having an outer solar system gas giant with some huge ice/rock rings would be the best. Lots of easily available material for building starships out of, as well as potential fuel for fusion reactors.
You could also use the gas giant itself to slow down incoming starships, which could aerobrake in its atmosphere on multiple long passes to bleed off velocity.
This lines up nicely with another question I've wondered about. If chemosynthetic life developed in the H2O/ammonia "mantle" (sometimes called an "ocean") on Europa or Titan, would that life have developed sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation? would it have conceptualized the possibility of space outside the solid walls? would they detect the planets and sun and stars?
(I recall Douglas Adams having a thought experiment like this about a planet Krikkit that developed inside a dust cloud and didn't see the stars.)
I haven't thought about this in any detail, but my gut reaction is no.
Interstellar travel will very likely involve moving at relativistic velocities. In order for a slingshot maneuver to provide a significant benefit, the thing you're slingshotting off of would also have to be moving relativistically (relative to the center of mass of the solar system). I guess Bob Jacobs's idea of an accretion disk might work, but I don't that would be a stable enough place for intelligent life to develop.
What would probably be more useful is getting an easier start. Multiple small planets in the inhabitable zone, each of which has multiple habitable moons. This would make early space travel easier and provide lots of incentives for people to thoroughly develop the technology. Only once short-distance space travel becoming routine is interstellar travel likely to happen.
There are limits on how small an object can get and still have a warm atmosphere (without it escaping), which is in turn required for liquid water on the surface (as, at low pressure, water is either in the form of ice or vapour). Liquid water on the surface isn't a requirement of intelligent life, of course - you can have a subsurface ocean - but then you've got to mine your way through kilometres of ice to get to space and because all species are aquatic you've got to fill your spacecraft with water (which is a lot of mass).
Also, complicated structures like a planet with multiple moons of similar mass to itself tend to be dynamically unstable (i.e. on a geologically-short timescale some of them will collide with each other, get flung into interstellar space, or fall into the sun).
Are we going to get the full results of the book review voting? I mean from the runners-up list? I'm fascinated by what it shows - did the good reviews get a lot of votes? Were the less good reviews recipients of lots of votes by readers annoyed that they had to plough through something unenjoyable. Etc etc.
It would seem quite un ACXish for Scott to say "Oh, these two won the vote, so lets just move on.." Am I alone in being interested in how the whole voting thing panned out? Did any reviews receive no votes at all? Did the two that were promoted to finalist receive the most votes as well as the highest average?
I'm seeking advice on a cybersecurity question. I'm the IT administrator for a small non-profit organization. For the past three years or so, we've had cyber insurance through a major insurance company. This year, they're imposing these requirements on us (see below) before they'll renew the policy. To my mind, point #2 below seems unreasonable. If I'm inside the network and SSHing into a Linux host, do I _really_ need two-factor authentication to get in to the host? I'm not even sure how I would implement that. I've reached out to the networking engineer we use for bigger projects, but I haven't heard back yet.
1. Multi-Factor authentication is required for all remote access to the network provided to employees, contractors, and 3rd party service providers.
2. In addition to remote access, multi-factor authentication is required for the following, including such access provided to 3rd party service providers:
a. All internal & remote admin access to directory services (active directory, LDAP, etc.).
b. All internal & remote admin access to network backup environments.
c. All internal & remote admin access to network infrastructure (firewalls, routers, switches, etc.).
d. All internal & remote admin access to the organization’s endpoints/servers.
I don't have the requisite technical knowledge (I was a Chief Privacy Officer, but didn't deal with the hardware). Our university implemented Duo, which was VERY user-friendly, and I think wasn't terribly expensive. In general you will make the auditors very happy and it's probably really a good idea. Sorry....
We use Duo for my job as well, it took about 5 minutes to set up on my phone, logging in with a push takes ~10 seconds. I guess way whatever the license fee is against how much your premiums would go up otherwise?
As you can see by my picture, I'm an expert in the field. :)
This two-factor requirement can be a pain (which is why it's limited to admin/privileged use), but it's generally reasonable from a risk perspective. That's because the vast majority of ways organizations are seriously damaged by a cyber intrusion are because of authentication which is susceptible to interception, replay attacks, and tokenization failures., which in turn allows an intruder to convert one point of penetration into owning the entire infrastructure. Usual two-factor authentication (like a key fob number generator) seriously reduces those risks, because it's able to make every login unique.
As a solution, what you're looking for is implementing a single-sign-on solution with built-in two-factor authentication integration. Something like BoKS/Keon, which will already have existing well-defined integrations to use across *nix/Windows/vpn/network/etc... devices, combined with SecureID tokens (https://www.securid.com/en-us/products/multi-factor-authentication), or even just the tokens, depending on your exact environment.
That said, depending on how the insurance requirements are worded, you can potentially get away with things like using key & password authentication for SSH and call those two of your three factors. But still, if someone owns your end user device, they can easily steal the key while using a keylogger to capture your password and then they have your ongoing admin access on every server you used that on.
So ideally, you'll comply in such a way that your infrastructure is actually secure.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not familiar with the technologies you mentioned. What do you think of Duo? Also, our Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches don't seem to support 2FA, at least not as far as I can tell. Not sure what to do about those.
I'm a great fan of Duo. Most universities use it--it's cheap (relatively) and extremely user friendly. Of course, the original developers were once students at my university (many years ago), and I met them when they were starting the company and they seemed like nice guys. FWIW.
Thanks. I appreciate the feedback from you and Geoff. I have two Linux hosts that act as backup repositories for Veeam (which we use for nightly backups of our VMware environment). If I implement Duo (or other 2FA system) on the Linux hosts, how would that affect the automated Veeam backup system? This is all new to me, so forgive me if my questions are basic.
Generally speaking, the requirements for 2FA are for human accounts.
Service accounts used for machine-to-machine communications like a backup process would utilize, are generally not required to use 2FA. Instead, you lock those down by only granting them the permissions needed to execute exactly what they're designed to do and nothing more.
In general you run either a proxy or a certificate authority that understands 2FA. You perform one authentication with the proxy or CA, and this gives you "session" credentials good for the workday. Maybe more Silicon Valley hipster than small nonprofit, but Tailscale (peer to peer VPN) and Teleport (smart proxy) are two popular solutions for guarding network and SSH resources behind a 2FA-enabled web single sign on like OneLogin/Okta/Azure AD.
I know that math is *virtuous*. And I know that some kinds of math are useful in some contexts. How can I know these contexts aren't as depressingly narrow as the math-deniers assert?
Only in part playing devil's advocate here. I overtly believe in the usefulness of math, but on second glance that belief looks a lot like Belief As Attire. And I think that's a big source of math-related akrasia for me.
Engaging in mathematical pursuits feels to me like an expression of personal virtue in the same way that engaging in carpentry and building a fine rocking chair might feel virtuous to someone else: "In doing this, I have done something good, and I am satisfied." At the same time, most of what I would consider *mathematics* is not terribly useful, except for doing more mathematics, or occasionally theoretical physics.
My influence here is likely more linguistic: I studied Latin extensively in high school, and "virtue" of course comes from *virtus, virtutis*, my sense of which conforms to what you understood of what I expressed. Upon further reflection, there's another layer for me: I think/believe that there is moral virtue to be found in the expression/application/utilization of excellence, in applying oneself, and achieving what one can. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify my thoughts on this (to myself, and to others)!
If the smart fraction of the US population is generously defined as those who are 'proficient' or 'advanced' on the US NAEP mathematics and reading tests, the 2019 NAEP test results for 17 year old high school seniors can give us some insight.
Fun fact: One of my old roommates was in the roofing. He was roofing materials salesman, and one evening he was doing some paperwork and struggling to calculate how much to charge for a non-rectangular roof.
I looked at it and saw it was a right triangle. I suggested 1/2 base times height and he was delighted that it worked.
I assume you're asking on the personal and not civilizational level? In that case, arithmetic is necessary to get your finances right and generally think numerically about the world. Probability theory is necessary so you don't say (and think) stupid things like "but there's still some chance astrology works" and also do any useful planning. Statistics are necessary so you can read studies on whatever you care about properly. Formal logic is necessary because come on how do you even do any reasoning without it? Mathematical analysis is necessary so you can think meaningfully about infinities and also understand how different physical quantities relate to each other (e.g. why constant increase in number of cases is ok but constant increase in percentage points is a problem) which helps to make sense of the world in general. And if you want to *ever* say *anything* about neural networks and/or AI, you need to know enough calculus to roughly understand how those work to avoid looking a complete fool.
Beyond that, there's probably some areas which are helpful for your profession.
It seems to me, math is useful pretty much if-and-only-if you frequently deal with large (in terms of the number of things/objects to consider), complicated problems, requiring some level of precision. Also taking into account, that the problem you need to solve hasn't already been totally automated.
For most people, I'd say the size and complexity of the problem of dealing with money is enough to say that arithmetic is useful, and maybe even basic algebra. Math above that level isn't useful to most people; they won't deal with the problems that are solved by them.
Most people won't directly _use_ mathematics beyond arithmetic in their day to day lives, in the sense that you'll never see them pull out a pad and pencil and figure out the indefinite integral of x*sin(x) or diagonalise a matrix. So in this sense most people learn too much mathematics.
But on the other sense, having reasonable mathematical intuitions about things is hyper-important, and most people seem to be deeply lacking in mathematical intuition. Something I've observed in discussions about the pandemic is that most people seem to lack an intuitive grasp of what exponential growth or decay looks like; and this probably goes a long way to explaining why many people make terrible financial decisions too.
Ordinary people also seem to lack an intuitive feeling for large numbers, believing that everything that ends with "-illion" is just about equally large. And don't get me started on statistics.
Yes. Math teaches you how to identify, get around, or even avoid problems that show up everywhere.
Imagine you run a food business. Not really necessary to know math right? But if you knew math, you could organise your cooking tasks algorithmically. If you knew math, you could have saved yourself counting the amount of chicken that can fit in a bowl by just estimating and comparing the volumes. If you knew math, you could calculate the probability distribution and expected number of customers that walk into your establishment.
This is true even for complicated subjects like real analysis or abstract algebra, which at first seem pretty abstract, but then you start to see the real world analogies which ultimately is what they were based on. It quite literally changes and orients your mind. It's a skill just like learning how to read, but for whatever reason has been put by most people into a separate category where only genuises need it.
Abstract algebra taught me that our every day transactions, such as trying to find an X, as in 10 apple + X = 100 apples, is actually only a part of a bigger abstraction and if you learn the rules of these abstractions, you know what makes sense to divide and what doesn't, what a 'variable' or unknown value X could be analogous to in the real world, and the basic philosophical structures like transitivity or commutativity which may or may not be applicable to every type of logical system. It just gives a different perspective to things we take for granted. Of course, it also happens to be very useful in cryptography.
Real analysis gives the same type of appreciation, but for different structures. You have to construct the real numbers from first principle, not just believe that they exist. Because we use real numbers so often, this gives you an understanding of their rules and limitations so you don't make mistakes in real life.
Admittedly, you'll never need to prove anything in real life like you have to prove theorems in these subjects, but i do think it makes you a better problem solver in general.
If you have no knowledge of "tedious and boring" math facts, then you have no basis on which to tell if the answer in your calculator is correct or not.
On the other hand I've had the following conversation with my kids Many times:
"I think you might have punched in the numbers wrong."
"Huh?"
"Your answer is wrong, you probably swapped a pair if digits or mixed up a 2 and a 5"
"So what's the answer?"
"I don't know, but one of your multiplicands is even, so your answer must be even and your numbers are smaller than n and m, so the answer has to be less than mn and your number's ten times larger. Check back and see whether your finger slipped."
This followed by disbelief in my apparent Magical Math Power which consisted of, "Some poor first grade teacher making us learn it."
Computation is very useful, and even with a computer available knowing how to compute formulae in your head or by hand develops good intuitions which can help you avoid embarrassing computer errors. If you can do a Fermi estimate or sanity-check the results from something you absent-mindedly punched into a calculator you'll make a lot fewer costly mistakes. That principle applies even to a garbageman.
Real Math™ is extraordinarily useful to society, and can pay reasonably well, but most people don't have any use for it themselves. I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually needed to derive a formula outside of a classroom. If you're not in applied math or a highly mathematical field like physics or maybe computer science it's just not applicable to your life at all.
Interesting model. What characterizes Real Math and how is it different from Computation?
My concept of math is something like "an exploration of tautologies that are useful for deriving implications from observations". Is Real Math exploring the tautologies, i.e. generating new mathematical knowledge/frameworks, and Computation is applying them?
Yeah, that's more sophisticated than how I would have phrased it but more-or-less what I was aiming at.
'Computation' to me is the kind of math you learn in highschool math or physics, or at any level of chemistry. You look at your problem, find an appropriate formula to solve it, apply that formula and (hopefully) make sure that the answer makes sense given your understanding of the system. You're not doing any mathematical inference, just looking through your mental toolbox for a model and plugging numbers.
'Real Math™' to me is the difficult and somewhat mysterious process that mathematicians use to prove something and then derive a model from that proof. I've tried it and learned that I'm awful at it, but luckily I both don't actually have to do it and have institutional access to people who can if the need suddenly arose. I'm told by mathematicians that it's sublimely beautiful and will gladly take their word for it.
Are there any SSC/ACT readers interested or involved in drug development?
I'm the president of a preclinical biotech company called Highway Pharmaceuticals (highwaypharm.com) . We're focused on reusing and recombining generics to treat autoimmune diseases that are difficult or impossible to treat with biologics, including diseases like progressive multiple sclerosis.
We've recently had some promising preclinical results and I'm trying to plan out my IND submissions. I'd love to talk to anyone who's been down this road before (or at least knows the path). Feel free to reply below or contact me through highwaypharm.com .
I can't help myself, but since you're in Boston I'd suggest talking to the local startup incubators. You're smack in the middle of a huge biotech and finance hub so money and expertise should be available. If you're affiliated with an institution you should also have a tech transfer or entrepreneurship office.
People of a certain political persuasion sometimes say that there is a supply/demand problem with White Supremacy. WS is something that all right-thinking people abhor, and there is much merit in fighting it, so there is great demand for white supremacists to fight. Unfortunately there are almost no white supremacists around, hence the supply/demand problem.
Now in a market economy, this problem should theoretically be solved by a substantial rise in the price paid to those who can deliver WS, which will then induce an increase in WS.
Questions:
1) is this happening?
1a) if not, why not? And if it's regulated out of existence, would a more libertarian nation then produce more WS?
2) is there a way to stop it from happening, other than reducing demand?
Hmmm... so we need an untraceable black market paying people to pretend to be WS in order for this to manifest? That sounds hard, but not impossible; I wonder if we'll ever see it.
Because it's not actually a market, and the analogy to a market makes for an amusing bon mot but doesn't actually give a model of the world that stands up to scrutiny. Sorry to spoil the fun.
The market analogy is that you get paid to do it, and the prospect of that creates demand. Right now engaging in white supremacy mostly gets you called awful names, fired, deplatformed, punched, and all manner of other nasty stuff.
The market analogy is predicated on an exchange of benefits, in this case it's a benefit for one bunch of people and abuse for the other.
A closer example would be something like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug: There is a huge demand for black woke academics (if women and/or queer, all the better), and they get afforded status. Thus, people started pretending to be black to reap benefits.
Some takes on the recent prevalence of transpeople note the same: Nowadays it's high status to be trans in some circles, and lo and behold we have tons of people coming out despite not really showing signs beforehand.
You could make a web page with WS beliefs, and put many advertisements on it. Everyone would link it as an example of the greatest evil, and many people would click the link. The income from ads would be "something worthwhile".
The problem with this plan is that in current years, your web page would immediately get cancelled.
Interesting. Do you think this model has been put into practice, resulting in any of the standard WS websites? Could we view the nazification of 4chan as a manifestation of this?
I think the key is to define *institutions* as white supremacist; since institutions are a lot more durable than any individual, this sidesteps the problem of destroying all of your targets. Of course, this works only as long as there are institutions that are plausibly outside of your control.
I think you can do away with the last caveat there. Stalin found plenty of "cosmopolitan", "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" activity within the Soviet state apparatus even though it was entirely controlled by his own party which in turn was unquestionably under his command.
That's right. It's always struck me as… shall we say "curious" that we don't speak more about the rampant antisemitism all the way to the very top of the Soviet communist party.
That's kind of my point - they don't seem to be, yet I can't see a reason why not. Fighting WS gets you social status, and paying for social status is standard as hell in America.
There's nothing to pay for. You can attack white supremacy online for free. I guess I could hire Richard Spencer to let me punch him, but that would amount to paying him to be white supremacist, which sends the wrong signal.
That an interesting point. They're buying the fight against white supremacy, even though nobody's selling it. They're just selling plane tickets, and antifa is a tiny part of the plane ticket market.
Nobody's selling real white supremacy, but extreme-left media can certainly sell the threat, the outrage, and the prospect of getting to carry out righteous violence against someone who supposedly deserves it.
I think some of the other commenters here are pretty much on point; you can't create a supply of white supremacists, but you can create a supply of scapegoat enemies that will work just as good for certain purposes.
(I don't know whether this is happening. This is just fun amateur economics speculation.)
People are paying money to have someone fight the type of people who want to fight WS.
Pretty much everyone I see flirting with WS also has a bunch of youtube videos 'owning' feminists, libs, sjws, etc., and people who hate those groups will pay well for that content. Flirting with WS just gets more of those people to notice and fight with you, which boosts your cred among people who hate them.
This seems deeply confused about how...people...work.
Slightly more seriously, I think the closest thing you could get to a market for white supremacy would be in works of fiction, including roleplay related to sex work. Are more fictional villains flying the banner of white supremacy, or something that looks sufficiently similar that the audience is meant to acknowledge this as an acceptable substitute? Are there more games about beating up white supremacists? Are more sex workers being asked to roleplay a racial or social justice dynamic, in private sessions or in pornography?
With video gaming, hunting Nazis is so old hat at this point that I expect the drift is in the opposite direction. I suppose a film like _Get Out_ would qualify, and provide a possible answer to the initial question: if you can acquire social status from fighting fictional white supremacists, you don't need the real item.
1) I would say yes, sort of. My impression is that there is a cadre right-wing pundits who flirt as hard as they can with WS in order to boost their careers through notoriety and free publicity, without going far enough that they get pushed off of every platform or assaulted in the street. I have seen weak second-hand evidence that many of these people express far more extreme beliefs than they actually privately hold, as a branding tactic, but can't confirm that of course.
Amusing thought, but this might be taking market-thinking somewhat to the extreme.
Aside from full-time twitter gladiators, most people who hate white supremacists (defined as those who appear to believe that whites are intrinsically superior and therefore deserve to lead society) do actually hate them beyond optics and performance and tend to be happier when there are fewer of them around, fewer of them to interact with, fewer of them voting, hiring, teaching, winning elections, occasionally indulging in violence, etc.
Now that voting is coming up I've been thinking a bit on a somewhat meta-level question on how I am going to pick which reviews to vote for. I have not read most of the books in question myself, so I cannot fairly judge how accurately or completely the books were represented by their reviewers. Also there has already been significant selection applied in that the posted finalists are the top ~15 reviews out of more than 100, so while some may be better than others none are really badly written. That means if I just pick the ones I enjoyed the most, or the ones I think I learned the most from, then my decision will be affected more by which book was reviewed than by the quality of the review. I am not entirely happy with this prospect, because it seems like the judging should be on how well you write a review, not on whether you picked a book that lots of readers will like, but I'm not sure how to avoid it. Does anyone else have thoughts along these lines?
Please keep discussion on the meta-level of the process of judging and do not discuss the merits of specific reviews or which reviews you plan to vote for in order to avoid influencing other people's votes directly.
I've been thinking that the most important strategic choice is of what book to review.
I don't have a problem with that, since best book review seems to be about which reviews are most interesting/enjoyable/informative for ACX readers rather than judging the abstract ability to review books.
Judging the abstract ability would probably mean everyone reviewing the same book, and very few people would tolerate reading a large number of those reviews.
Good post, and somewhat similar to an interesting post I read (by Scott?) about statistical abuse.
Relatedly, I posted a libertarianish version of one of those In This House We Believe lists to my family Discord channel that included "We believe in replicated science". Way better than just "science", I think.
It's a definite improvement. One day far in the future when I'm smarter I want to look at potential ways things could replicate and still be pretty bad, but I'm not there yet.
Thanks! I think the Covid article was the one I got the most pushback on; the FDA is "science" for a lot of people, and the way they do things is default-correct in a circular sense for some of them.
I was also really annoyed by Sullivan's rude absolutes. I also lean towards Caplan, but I think there's a very interesting and important discussion about cultural "tipping points" that the podcast completely avoided. Presumably large immigration could change a countries culture dramatically in damaging ways, and if and how this happens is a lot more interesting then if some native people will really dislike the immigrants or just claim they do.
I also hate the politics argument in general: "Your idea would be unpopular" or "Your idea will trigger a backlash" isn't a good argument in this kind of discussion: the point of the discussion is to make the idea popular so that it doesn't trigger a backlash.
They go together. Low trust leads to low trustworthiness (if they're going to screw me over, I should get them first), and of course low trustworthiness leads to low trust.
I think of trustworthiness as causing trust, though I realize it isn't completely reliable that way.
In any case, it seems to me that if you want more trust, you need more trustworthiness. And a society where people didn't trust each other but were reliable would be better than one where people were very trusting but unreliable.
You might like to take a look at the China History Podcast, starting with episode 14 where the author starts going through the dynasties for about 30 episodes. It's not the best history podcast, but I find it pretty decent
These don't quite fit any of your categories, but you might be interested in the great classical Chinese epics Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh. There are good English translations available.
The only really famous/bestselling English-language historical fiction set in China is by Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth) and it's pretty depressing. Also, people talk about the Judge Dee novels, and they seem interesting, but I haven't read them.
Also doesn't exactly fit any of your categories but: I like Peter Hessler's books, especially River Town. Also enjoyed "China's Second Continent", about China/Africa relations, and if you're interested in translated Chinese works, another good option is the recent translation of Jin Yong's "Legends of the Condor Heroes" series, which mostly fits under your (a).
You might enjoy Dream of the Red Chamber. I have not read it myself but it's pretty famous in China and supposed to be semi-autobiographical, following a family in Qing China.
Off-the-cuff review: I tried to read it myself (fulltext English translation: https://archive.org/stream/TheStoneAndTheDreamOfTheRedChamberInTheMansions/The%20Dream%20of%20the%20Red%20Chamber%20%28Stone%29_djvu.txt ), but gave up somewhere around ~chapter 8. The book starts off with some mythology about how the main characters(?) originated as a stone and flower respectively and then were incarnated as people (a motif which is very occasionally riffed upon later), but the vast majority of the book consists of a series of minor conflicts in and around members of Rongguo and Ningguo Houses, two aristocratic-ish families, as they go about their daily lives. Apparently the last forty chapters are missing and there is huge speculation about their contents (including some fanfiction that tries to fill in the ending), but as I gave upon the book I don't think I'd personally miss it.
Personally, the mythological frame text is quite fun, but most of the novel is a giant series of minor family conflicts involving a far-too-large cast of characters (is this a characteristic of Russian novels?) which makes the overall plot structure of the book close-to-nonexistent. The prose style, including the way that the author constantly sprinkles vocabulary words throughout the text, is especially annoying.
"Send it from a different address than you used originally, in case the problem was that your emails end up in my spam filter."
You should also request a set phrase, such as "Book Review Contest", be put in the subject line. That way even if they get sent to your spam folder, a keyword search will find them.
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)
A topic that has been on my mind lately, and I'm curious if anyone here has some interesting thoughts:
How can you gain familiarity, competence, or even expertise in an area, without becoming jaded or desensitized to what you find interesting or enjoyable about it? Or phrased another way, how can you maintain a sense of wonder and/or excitement about something even while losing your naivity and "beginner's eyes" towards it?
"Area" above is very broadly defined. I think this question is relevant to everything from technical work, to hobbies, to sexuality, to building and maintaining friendships.
If I had an intuition about this problem, I think it would be super useful to me, because I'm increasingly worried about the long-term unsustainability of constantly searching out novelty and escalation in each area of my life.
This is indeed a thorny problem. For myself, I actually managed to maintain my excitement for playing and composing music in spite of formal education and several decades of experience by carefully sandboxing the analytical side needed to understand what you're doing or hearing from the experience of listening to music.
It worked swimmingly without much leakage for the most part (until I got disillusioned by music via the backdoor by thinking too much about social signalling theory) but I had the fortune of catching myself listening for the wrong things in some of my favourite music a couple of years after I got serious about the technical side of music making and making a solemn vow never to do that again lest I soil the experiential side with needless interpretation and analysis.
In other areas I haven't faired so well. For anything that requires engaging either your analytical side or maintaining belief in some particular story or interpretation it tends to go down the tubes for me as well, because increased understanding either forces you into a problem-solving mindset which runs counter to the directness necessary to thoroughly enjoy an experience or it ruins your naivety and makes you a tad cynical about what you're doing.
I've grappled with this problem. The best I can advise is to practice multidisciplinarity.
The experimental novelist Thalia Field teaches a graduate class at Brown University called Foreign Home. The idea is to make students learn two new arts they've never tried before, then reflect on their main art through insights from the other two. You acquire "beginner's eyes" by starting brand new art practices unfamiliar to you, then turn those eyes toward your old, familiar practice. It works.
Anything deep enough to be worth your time will always have new sources of wonder and excitement. Every new thing you learn in another field will reflect back on your main field in interesting ways. (I didn't have to learn much about pencil sketching to have insights from it that added significantly to my fiction writing.)
I am wondering whether this is specific to highly creative endeavours?
My experience with science is that, while discovering new fields very clearly helped me keep my interest and motivation, it also very much reduced my efficiency.
I first heard this problem described in an essay by C. S. Lewis called “Talking about Bicyles” (published in Present Concerns). Lewis identifies four ages—unenchantment, enchantment, disenchantment, and reenchantment—that occur in most human activities, whether riding a bicycle, falling in love, beginning a career, learning a language, joining the military or a monastery. In between first hearing the music that sets your heart singing and actually performing on an instrument come scales and time signatures and years of laborious practice; after vows of eternal love come morning breath and petty disagreements about the dishes.
The foundation of reasonable dealings with disenchantment, it seems to me, is acceptance of it as a natural and necessary part of a given endeavor, and commitment and perseverance in light of it. The pursuit of enchantment iself, a thing that by its nature must be fleeting, is pure tragicomedy—imagine a several-times divorced person convinced that now, having found the right partner at last, they will be in love (with the love of newlyweds) forever. Realistically, doesn’t love have to pass through periods of difficulty, disappointment, or frustration to become mature and tested? Excitement and interest will ebb and flow, but if I know that periods of low excitement are normal and have faith that the hard work of gaining competence will open up new kinds of enjoyment, low excitement need not mean jadedness.
Another image for the relationship between enchantment and disenchantment (inspired again, this time less directly, from Lewis): the fact that mountains look blue in the distance is just as real and important in our experience of mountains as the fact that they look green and brown close up. In first excitement, or in nostalgia, we see the romantic peaks and crags of the mountain range, and in the day-to-day work we see obstacles to the path and tricky footing and oaks or pines or poison ivy along the way, but it is really the same place all along, and you need to experience it in both perspectives to know that place.
I myself haven’t yet persevered in any important endeavor long enough to speak with authority about reenchantment. But I’ll hesitantly point to some of the cheesy, conventional wisdom about reinforcing positive emotions by making a disciplined habit of explicitly articulating them—(in marriage) scheduling regular time to focus on the relationship and talk about feelings, dreams, memories from courtship, etc., rather than chores and kids, (in life) keeping a gratitude journal and writing down specific things you’re thankful for. In my studies, when I am deeply disenchanted and research seems like a horrible hopeless slog, I’ve found it helpful to begin writing days by journaling freely about the writing process—how I’m feeling, what I want to accomplish, how the task in front of me into the larger picture of my dissertation and career and vocation, why my subject matters. By default, I forget the love that first drew me to my work and the sense of purpose that should animate it, but re-articulating those ideas often re-motivates me and sometimes even reawakens pleasure and excitement in the work. Talking with other people about aspects of my field that I find fascinating or think are important for everyone to know, including teaching introductory classes, has an even stronger effect—I get to see through the other person's "beginner's eyes," and I remind myself of a bigger picture that includes material I've mastered and exciting open questions, not just the particular problem I'm beating my head against.
Low dose THC alway works for me. Not high enough to be confused certainly, but a mild buzz always makes me approach things in new way. I always ingest a bit before golf or softball too. It seems to improve my focus and appreciation for thinking while in motion.
Others seem to be responding with pretty involved activities like master level art and music.
My read of your question is more about something you do for entertainment that's more interactive than just watching a movie. My response is more related to hobbies or games.
I'm the kind of person who likes to go all in on something when I'm excited about it. What that typically meant was reading lots of other people's perspectives on it, and absorbing it all. While that often increased my initial excitement and made we want to enjoy that activity more, it also significantly accelerates the discovery of downsides and my eventual disillusionment. What I've been trying to do more lately is discover something on my own, and learning at my own pace. (Hobby/enthusiast instead of expert/pro). I try to avoid spoilers, quick hacks, detailed discussions, how-to guides and so on.
We're naturally inclined towards the things that excite us about the activity and not the downsides, so we continue to maintain that excitement for far longer. There may be frustrating aspects of the activity, but those will be nuisances that we see sometimes but don't fully explore. We'll also have the sudden jumps of excitement when we figure out something new or get past a roadblock that has been impeding our progress.
A downside of this approach is that you could get really stuck on a roadblock and end up quitting out of frustration, which you could have solved with a 2 minute YouTube video on how to do it better. That being, your mileage may vary. For more complicated tasks (I'm picturing back yard astronomy, woodworking, garage metalworking, or other crafts), you may not be able to get very far and may waste a lot of money going down the wrong path.
For things like sexuality and friendships, something similar may apply. Having sex with a lot of different people (or watching a lot of porn) may teach you a lot about sex quickly and give you a lot of immediate gratification, but then you get burned out faster. Having sex with a single person that you know for a long time can help you appreciate incremental differences and nuance more. (Adjust as appropriate for friendships...)
Three Venus missions for NASA and ESA! That's good stuff - we've neglected exploration of Venus compared to Mars for a long time, because they thought Mars might have life and it was easier to do a lander there.
You can do a lander on Venus, but it requires either making it out of materials that can stand up to 500 C temperatures and 95 atm pressure (the former is a much bigger problem than the latter), or using active cooling. Active cooling would probably require a multi-kilowatt nuclear power source, AKA expensive.
There's some research and models in the past couple years that suggest that Venus might have had an ocean and possibly been habitable for longer than we thought. Given how similar in size and mass it is to Earth, it'd be good to figure out if it was always screwed from the beginning, or if it started out like Earth but became uninhabitable over time.
I wonder whether you could make some kind of airship (or a submarine, depending on how you feel about supercritical atmospheres) that spends most of its time a few dozen km up where temperatures are high but tolerable before venturing down to the surface for maybe an hour at a time to take samples and photographs.
Yeah. The thing is, that each component of the application is plausibly justifiable (e.g. the NIH doesn't want you abusing animals), but put together it adds up to quite a lot of paperwork.
You did pick a fairly brutal one. My girlfriend got funded for one on her second attempt, but most of the rest of my friends failed even on their second or third attempts even after taking our institution's course on F31 applications. I got a small training grant elsewhere and had already realized I don't intend to pursue a career in academia so didn't feel as much pressure to go for it.
For your eRA commons account, yes your institution needs to help with that but most of the steps are still something you need to do personally. I had my lab's admin walk me through the process: don't be afraid to lean on your institution for bureaucratic stuff like this! That's literally what they're there for.
>Since my current stipend is more than the NIH funding level, I won’t actually benefit financially from this, since my advisor will just reduce the amount he’s paying from existing funding.
This is likely not true. Check with your institution, but a lot of them will kick back about $1-3K to you as a reward for bringing in grant money.
Washington, DC SSC/ASX Meetup next weekend, Saturday 6/19, starting at 7PM. The address is 1002 N St NW, near the Mt. Vernon Square metro station. Follow the sign for "Free Utility". The event will be mostly outside, but the house will be open in case of rain.
For further details, join our Facebook group or Google listserv:
I know I'm a couple of months late on the charter city thread, but after reading it..... why don't these charter cities just use the US commercial code, or something similar from another 1st world country like the UK or Germany? The US has the Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, which seems like it would be a great starting point. They could use arbitration to resolve business disputes, arbitration is big business these days and tons of law firms offer it. Maybe a few attorneys would be willing to offer free or reduced services as a charity in the city's beginning years- a number of firms already make their attorneys do x amount of pro bono work, here's a developing country trying to get off the ground, etc.
Prospera seems to be fairly radical- they have a brand new political system, elements of which have never been tried anywhere, some elements of their commercial code seem to have never been tried anywhere, etc. Plus the usual blockchain nonsense, of course. Without weighing in on the specifics- basic intellectual humility tells us that some of these brand new political & commercial codes are not going to work out, or won't work as intended. 'Let's create a radical brand new society with various rules I just made up' is usually a left-wing exercise, of course with a poor track record.
I like the charter city concept and would like to see it succeed- I guess I just don't understand the reasoning for a new legal system when there are perfectly functional alternatives that work right now, today. The Uniform Commercial Code currently runs a $22 trillion economy, whereas whatever Prospera just made up currently runs, uh, absolutely nothing. Which one do you think would be a better choice? (But blockchain etc. etc., of course). I guess I just don't understand the motivation to reinvent the wheel, existing legal systems are one of the big reasons why the 1st world is the 1st world presently. And fast, fair arbitration from experienced US attorneys to resolve disputes- just seems like those are all strengths Honduras could be absorbing
I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in checking out / helping with feedback on our app Meetminder, which lets you ask Friends ( colleagues, friends, and family members ) if they'd like to join your account so that you can see their Zoom status. You can also enter their meeting times and provide an external reminder if they're supposed to be in a Zoom meeting but aren't ( according to their Zoom status ).
I think it's time for Scott to write a post about open borders. He has hinted in the past that he may be in favor of it, saying he has mixed feelings. I'm dying to hear his thoughts on this.
After 4 elections in 2 years, Naftali Bennet became Prime Minister of Israel, replacing Benjamin Netanyahu who served in office the longest ever in Israel's history, both consecutively and total (his first term was 1996-1999, second 2009-2021). Yair Lapid became the Alternate Prime Minister of Israel, replacing Benny Gantz.
Bennet will serve until 2023, and will then be replaced by Lapid who will serve untill 2025. That is, if the coalition they formed won't collapse:
Bennet-Lapid coalition is made of several (usually) opposing parties, with quite different ideologies across multiple subjects: national (it's the first time in Israel's history that an Arab party is part of the coalition), religional (it's the first time in Israel's history that an orthodox politician serves as prime minister), judicial, economical, and what not.
This Coalition is made of 61 members (so the Opposition is 59 members). This means that it hangs on a whisker, and is therefore likely it will have hard time passing fundamental legistlations, which may in the near future lead to yet another, 5th, elections. The Opposition, led by Netanyahu (currently. this may change if he will lose his party's planned primaries), is going to make the Coalition's time as hard as they can, so that such 5th elections is not far fetched.
Read: fifth elections in 2+<time to next elections> years.
But yeah, this is more of a public sense, that the elections' "counter" should be incremented until this political deadlock is somehow solved.
This public sense stems from the following:
The straightforward coalition that was "supposed" to be formed is a right or right-center coalition. Netanyahu is seen as the only right-wing leader that can form such coalition (for reasons). However, he has lost credibility with some of his potential ally parties, and therefore can't form such coalition.
The other practical coalition is one formed by a mix of left, center and right parties - which is exactly what has happened. Many people believe that such mix can't be kept together for too long, taking as evidence similar past coalitions.
I think that if the current coalition will be able to successfully face the fudamental legislation of passing national budget + some other fundamental legistlation, the counter will be gone.
Previously I discussed how the Dutch formation process was interrupted by an accidental leak of a talking point where they wanted to find a new job for a 'difficult' representative, Pieter Omtzigt, who helped uncover a major government scandal and otherwise has a much more critical disposition than most representatives in the respectable parties. Back then it seemed that this might result in the PM, "Teflon Mark" Rutte, to not be able to form a new executive, although it was hard to imagine an alternative, to him or his party. A complicating factor was that the representative in question was at home with a burn out.
Since then, the focus has increasingly shifted to Omtzigt's party, who seemed paralyzed in the formation process. They've been investigating the election loss and the issues in the party. The representative, Omtzigt, was asked to write down his point of view. He wrote a 76 page document, which was leaked, with various accusations. One claim was that a few large donors, whose contribution was not made public, may have had influence on the party program, which was changed in a way that is not consistent, but to the advantage of those donors.
A second claim was that Omtzigt was promised the party leadership, but was passed by. A bit of history: Omtzigt's party decided to hold elections for the party leadership, where Omtzigt was one of the candidates. Unlike American primaries, the only people who could vote are (paid) members of the political party, which is a tiny (and decreasing) part of the people who vote for the party in the general elections. These party leader elections were a mess, where the first election attempt was canceled because the online election could easily be manipulated. During the second attempt, people were told that they had voted for someone else than who they had voted for, including Omtzigt's wife. The party claimed that their audits showed that these votes were counted properly and the election results stood. Omtzigt lost by 49.3% to 50.7% of the votes. The winner was the minister (= secretary of state) for healthcare and thus responsible for COVID vaccinations. His predecessor suffered from a burn out and he it didn't take that long for the successor to decide that he couldn't combine the job of minister with the party leadership. Perhaps the amount of criticism he got due to his performance as minister also played a role, making him fear that if he acted a party leader during the election, his party would be held responsible for the COVID failures. Omtzigt then wasn't promoted to party leader, as he claims he was promised, nor were new elections held. Instead, another person was made leader.
He claims that the ministers of his own party, who were/are part of the executive, refused to defend him. He also claims that the ministers are way more concerned with their own image than with governing well (that was the impression I got too, from the notes of the ministerial meetings that were released).
Omtzigt provided screenshots of Whatsapp conversations between others where people were extremely rude and unprofessional about him. He was called a tuberculosis dog, crazy, a 'fucking glans with Nazi posters', a psychopath and accused of emotional lability. He claims that after the national elections, he was blamed for the loss in a Zoom call. Omtzigts party is calls itself Christian and has very old voters, who may not appreciate this.
The first poster states: 'Justice, also for the little man.' The second states: 'Time for a new social contract.'
After this memo with grievances was leaked, Omtzigt announced that he would leave his party, but will keep his seat. It's unclear whether he will start his own political party, which seems to have a lot of potential, although it is hard to build up a party from scratch.
Meanwhile, it's unclear how well the formation process is going. There is no observable progress. So major COVID-related decisions are made by an executive with merely a caretaker mandate.
My perception is that the level of competence is decreasing, which is supported by the fact that the average Dutch politician now leaves after 6 years, shorter than it has ever been. The result is that most politicians seem to be easily 'played' by the few experienced ones. By the time they catch onto some of the many tricks that are being played, they leave again.
What's the best source that explains how to do “good” science that avoids all the pitfalls that we’re now aware of as a result of the "replication crisis"? I’ve found a few websites that kind of have what I’m looking for, but none of them seem to have the completeness that I think the best reference source might have.
Thanks for the link, I've added it to my to-read list. But from the blurb, I think it's not exactly what I'm looking for. I'm trying to find more of a how-to guide for scientists who want to do good science
First of two culture-war adjacent questions. For both of these, I am looking for falsifiable answers, and less opinions. (Can't tell people how to answer, but this is what I am asking for.)
I have heard repeated references by liberals/progressives regarding the fossilization of race barriers in the USA under the 'one drop rule.' Wikipedia gives a historical perspective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) but is pretty scant on the recent use of this rule. I find references to modern activists decrying the historical use of the concept, and using it themselves to classify people into different racial categories.
What I don't find is anyone on the conservative side (USA) using this categorization to define themselves or others, or endorsing it for modern use.
Does anyone have examples of modern conservative (the more mainstream the better, race essentialists are acceptable but should be identified as such) pundits or columnists using this to describe people? (For this, I'd say 'modern' is...within the last 20 years.)
I don't think I have exactly what you're looking for, but...
Barack Obama is black. Everyone agrees he's black. His mother was white, but mixed race is black.
More broadly, you see a lot of color variation among African-Americans that you don't see in the part of Africa that their ancestors came from. That's because African-Americans have varying amounts of white blood.
The strict one-drop rule doesn't hold up today; if you look pure white you're white, even if you have a distant black ancestor. But the basic idea remains that mixed race is black.
I wouldn't say "everyone agrees that he's black"; I don't agree that he's black, but I wouldn't say so publically and non-anonymously because... well, it's not an argument worth having.
On the other hand there's plenty of people with the same ancestral mix who are typically identified more accurately as "mixed race"; well-known examples include Rashida Jones and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Notably, due to the vagaries of genetics both these women don't really _look_ black in terms of their facial features or hair and can easily pass for well-tanned white people, while Barack Obama has "black" facial features and hair. Also it may be the way they choose to brand themselves, since a Chicago politician has a lot to gain from being "black" while a good-looking white-passing actress is better off being ethnically ambiguous to maximise the roles they can get.
On this note, though, I don't think I've heard anyone refer to Harry and Meghan's mixed-race (0.25*black +0.75*white) children as being "black", suggesting that the "one drop" rule really isn't all that widespread.
Markle and Jones are distinctly black, imo. You can make an argument that historically they'd have been called "high yellow" or something but that is still considered black. Of course they are also mixed. Mixed is a distinct descriptor from black, though. Asian and white is mixed. As is asian and black. Or middle eastern and black/asian/white.
It is true that mixed race people can play other races. Vin Diesel is black/italian but he mostly gets cast as hispanic. But Markle or Diesel or Jones can't play full on white characters. If they are cast that way people might overlook it but they and the people making casting decisions know that it is something that must be consciously overlooked.
I had the same response as Bullseye-- this isn't exactly what you were asking for, but it's the response that comes to mind...we don't even need to look to "conservative" pundits, even liberal Americans will describe people of mixed black/white ancestry as "black".
What exactly do you mean by "endorsing it for modern use"? Endorsing it as a way of describing people? In general I don't feel like I understand exactly what you're trying to get at with your question. Would a link to a Fox News pundit mentioning that Barack Obama is "black" (to use Bullseye's example) be the "falsifiable answer" you are looking for?
I agree w/ Bullseye that most importantly this is mainly a trope of the past.
I could agree with you in the sense that liberal people today do want to "claim" their different ancestries, even if they only make up a small portion of the ancestry tree. I think they would argue that claiming/being proud of having a black ancestor today is very different from being assigned to a lower class based on a black ancestor the way people were many years ago. I expect they wouldn't describe what they're doing today as applying the One Drop Rule, since it commonly refers to an excuse to discriminate against someone.
My impression from reading some people is that there is a constant pressure (systemic racism, whatever) internal to Caucasians/Euro-descent Americans, and most common on the right, that pushes African Americans away and will not allow a colorblind society (regardless of what people advocating for a color blind society say, this pressure is always there.)
And that the one-drop-rule was given as an example of this, and a reminder that people were always going to be judged and assigned positions based on 'the color of their skin'.
Which I was following (as a line of argument) until I tried to think of the last time I had heard someone on the right talk about ancestry or skin color - it's overwhelmingly been culture and actions that have drawn ire, in my experience. The left talks a lot about ancestry and color, not so much about actions, it seemed to me, and I was looking for examples to disprove this theory.
Mixed-race people being black isn't something that people talk about much, because everyone seems to already know. It seems really weird to me that we're even having this conversation. Are you from a part of the country that doesn't have black people? (One aspect of this that isn't common knowledge is that race mixing accounts for the color variation in African Americans. But it logically follows from the rule having existed in centuries past.)
Also, from your description of conservative media, it sounds like they don't talk about this because they don't talk about race at all.
'It is known', you mean? But haven't we just discussed how 'mixed = black' isn't accurate?
No, I'm from the part of the country where there are many African American, and Hispanic, and Euro-descent people, (where Italians and Poles and Irish still stick out a little) and where racial group identification for mixed race people is communicated by dress & manner.
I'm not sure what to say about your thought on conservative media. Again, mostly they talk about what a person has or has not done or said, not who their parents are or what their genetic background is.
Second CW question - this one's a bit technical and I would appreciate input from medical specialists, especially epi and OB/GYN.
Katie Herzog recently authored a post for Bari Weiss's Substack - https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak - concerning the impact of Woke disruption of the free exchange of ideas on medicine education & practice in America. Among the topics discussed was black-white differences in maternal mortality: "But this is an example of how system-wide bias can harm black mothers, who are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women even when you control for factors like income and education, which often make racial disparities disappear."
(Herzog also interviewed the presenter of a recent inflammatory anti-white psychology lecture here: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white. I am not always a fan of Herzog, but she tries harder than many less leftist columnists/writers I have read.)
In the 200 + comments on the substack article, there was very little grappling with this difference in outcomes. When I went and looked it up (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6835a3.htm) (there are other studies out there) it turns out that there are significant differences between different racial groups not only in death rates, but between causes of death in different groups. Specifically, it seems that Asian/PI women have slightly higher death rates, Hispanic women slightly lower, American Indians markedly higher, and AA women highest of all, compared to white/Euro descent women. This seemed to hold across all economic/education groups and across time.
In addition, the causes of excess death for African American women (over Euro-descent women) weren't the infection or even hemorrhage that I expected for neglect or distain for the people being treated, but cardiovascular conditions. Hispanic women had higher rates of both infection and hemorrhage.
To me, this doesn't sound like a difference in how the women are being treated, but in baseline tendencies towards different diseases in different populations. And if that's true, then "attacking racism" isn't going to stop women from dying. Nor is assuming that there are no biological differences between different genetic groups (aka 'races'.)
Are there physicians in the commentariat, or well-read laymen, who can speak to this?
Women in general have far fewer heart attacks than men, and there are lots of tales of women having heart attacks being misdiagnosed, due to the differences in presentation that are common. If black women have more heart attacks during pregnancy & delivery, I could easily imagine that this is the driver- basically a form of soft sexism, not soft racism, but appearing racially-driven due to the "hidden" selection-effect of the pregnancy cohort.
This makes sense! And it wouldn't take a much greater genetic tendency towards heart disease (and I would really like to see cohorts broken down by bloodwork/bmi/heart risk scores before and after pregnancy) to show up in maternal deaths, because those are so rare.
A thought on unconscious bias and racism. My understanding of proponents' case for this is that we can recognise unconscious bias through scientific testing, a finding which is contentious and disputed, and on which I can offer no informed opinion. But there seems to be an interesting train of thought available from looking at this from a deliberately -naive viewpoint.
Due to the potential significance of the argument and the lack of certainty about the theories ability to provide experimental verification, the debate about unconscious bias tends to immediately descend into standard culture war rhetoric with proponents of unconscious bias arguing that those denying it's efficacy are either ignoring or covering up their own racism, whilst opponents conversely argue that the proponents are pushing a theory with no real evidence for political purposes. It's a typical intransigent argument where both sides assume bad faith on the part of the other: not a particularly useful use of anyone's time to be honest.
But what if we assume good faith should apply? That both sides mean what they say? That become a bit more interesting. In the first place, we can accept the view that some people don't treat others differently on the basis of skin colour, which ties in with the lack of evidence for first-order racism on the part of conservatives in the main. Rather than having a pointless playground "you're a racist", "am not" debate you can at least examine whether the policies your opponent favour might be racist in some way without just assuming they are because of unconscious bias, which might open up the door to more rational arguments (I did say might...).
But the really fun bit of taking people's pronouncements about unconscious bias at face value is simply that it must prove one side of the debate is racist, but that side is the proponents of unconscious bias not the opponents. If these people are content that unconscious bias testing can show that people are racist, in that they make decisions on the basis of skin colour, then their reaction to this has been to think that the accusation sounds right and not to say "hang on; i don't think like that'. So to take support for the contention that unconscious bias testing reveals people are inherently racist in good faith means accepting that the person making this contention is aware that they are in fact racist, for if they feel themselves not to be racist the test must be to some degree be invalid.
The weird thing here though is that for some reason we then let the debate on race be run by the people who are happy they are racist, and who have to assume bad faith on the part of those who oppose them on the basis that these opponents do not see themselves as racist. This seems more than a little bit worrying: if we accept what people say to be broadly true, then the people who do label a human as different due to skin colour are the ones controlling racial politics.
Most of the white woke will acknowledge that they're racist. The position is that everyone is racist, and the best we're likely to be able to do is to be aware of it and work on it.
Well yes. My point though is that if we take their self-assessment as racist at face value, why should we not take their political opponents' self-assessment equally seriously. They seem happy they are not racist, and it seems rather perverse to assume they are wrong and that we can assume their motives from a group who acknowledge they are racist and are therefore actually different from those who don't see this in themselves. It only makes sense if you assume bad faith, which is not a good way to do anything.
Incidentally, when you say "white woke" does that mean somehow "black woke" or "Asian woke" are not racist? Which would be a wonderfully racist approach to the problems they are trying to solve.
A woke person saying "I am racist" is very much like a Christian saying "I am a sinner". Everyone is a sinner, so anyone claiming not to be is either lying or so deep in sin that they can't see it.
To your first point, what Bullseye says probably says it well enough. To your incidental, it's that wouldn't feel qualified to speak for black or Asian people, but do feel qualified to do so for the "white woke". I'm not fully sure I personally qualify as part of that group, but I am sure my wife and a good many of my friends do, which makes me feel comfortable speaking on their (possibly our) behalf.
So you're saying that to a white woke person (from a UK perspective there seems to be few non-white woke people) the realisation of their own racism is of such central significance that they believe it has to be projected onto others? I'm not sure I'd buy the original sin comparison mind you: it is not a universal feature of Christianity that it seeks to change the world to address the presence of sin, whereas for woke folk (sorry - can't resist a bad rhyme) the ablution of their own racism seems to be secondary to accusing others. What would be the woke equivalence of personal penance for example?
There are plenty of non-white woke folk. For someone I know on facebook, you can google Traci Blackmon. She's a reasonably public person. (I'd put a link in but I can't check if I have it right and can't fix it if I don't) Cori Bush, my congresswoman, of recent "birthing people" fame is another. She came up through the protest ranks after Ferguson. The rest of the squad is pretty well known, I have thought. There are more whose names I can't come up with right now, and for each of the ones who are internet famous, there are many more who aren't.
Wokeness isn't a religion so reactions will vary. Pick some other human universal if you like. Say, too much sugar is bad for you and will cause your teeth to rot. If other people confidently proclaim that that may be true for the sugar woke, but they should stop projecting their weird obsession with sugar on to other people, I might humor such a person, but I wouldn't believe them. The sugar woke community would pass around tips for cutting down on sugary foods and good dental hygiene, and the anti-woke would likely mock them.
To predict the next couple of steps as this is a dead thread other than the two of us, you might say something like:
Yes, but your example fails because sugar really is bad but most people really aren't racist.
I would then reply with something like: *gestures vaguely at entire world*, and then maybe try to analogize some of the more famous racist results and events of the past few years.
I doubt you'll find it convincing, but looping back to the original thrust here, when a woke person says they're racist, they're not really talking about a failing that is only personal. Of course they are racist. Of course sugar rots their teeth. That's true for everyone. The question is, what do I do with that information? They're talking about something they consider universal, and then (probably) talking about things they can do to mitigate it, in themselves and in the society built in the context of that universal.
From what I understand, each Bitcoin is encoded with the history of all its past transactions, hence why it is commonly compared to a "ledger." This feature makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit Bitcoins, but it also slows down the Bitcoin exchange network since verifying the authenticity of any one Bitcoin requires sifting through its transaction record. The problem gets worse as time passes, and the Bitcoins' transaction histories get longer as they are traded back and forth more.
Couldn't this problem be solved if the Bitcoin network periodically deleted past transaction histories? I guess the process would involve having one of your Bitcoins, let's call it "Bitcoin ABC" scanned by some kind of central authority that would verify its transaction history was authentic and that it was a valid Bitcoin. Bitcoin ABC would then be deleted and you would be given a new Bitcoin called "Bitcoin XYZ" with no transaction history since you were its first owner, and the entire Bitcoin network would be alerted to what had happened.
The whole network would speed up as people traded in their old Bitcoins this way.
All the problems with bitcoin are because of the tradeoffs needed to avoid needing 'some kind of central authority'. What would prevent the authority from secretly printing its own bitcoin XYZs?
Solving new blocks does not take more time due to the length of the blockchain. Even if that was the case, cryptocurrencies make their blocks way more difficult than the baseline _on purpose_ - the entire point of Proof of Work is burning enough computing power to make matching that collective pool of computing power impossible / not worth it for an attacker.
The only affected metric is the storage requirements and ramp-up time for new full nodes entering the network.
I'm in SF starting Tuesday, then in NYC and Boston - would love to meet with people, especially if you do biology or something related to it - alexey@guzey.com!
Scott's post on cows vs. chickens mentioned that a burger's worth of cow produced <10kg of CO2 equivalent, which costs <10 cents to offset. It feels like there should be lots of people out there who like meat and would eat more of it (and a more expensive variety) if it didn't seem like a Terrible Antisocial Thing that will Destroy Humanity. So, where's the beef company prominently marketing how they're carbon-neutral (or, better yet, carbon-negative)? It exists for ice cream, my local store recently started carrying a brand like that.
Am I wrong about how many people know and care about the impact of cows on greenhouse gases? Or, are carbon-offset burgers a thing (just not a thing I've seen)? For that matter, why don't e.g. tree nuts say "carbon-negative" on the packaging, the way I've seen sugar packaging say "contains no saturated fats"?
Oh, I see -- I guess it makes sense that if you were to go after the "good for the planet" credits, you'd go for "regenerative grass-fed" as opposed to the "carbon-offset but otherwise a regular feed lot system".
I think you interpreted my comments as being more cynical than they were meant to be. I'm in no way trying to suggest that the farmers in question aren't genuine in their desire to help the environment, or that it isn't a good project. It's just that I'm not especially surprised by the existence of people who are genuinely motivated to produce more sustainable meat, and are able to sell it.
The part that was *surprising* to me was the seeming absence of people who would be willing to pay the seemingly tiny cost of carbon-offsetting and then advertise it heavily to reap the benefits of the eco-conscious consumers. It seems likely that the eco-conscious consumers are already provided for by the people who do more than just buy carbon offsets, which is nice in one sense (yay for farmers doing more than just buying carbon offsets) and not so nice in another (clearly there aren't enough eco-conscious consumers).
"It feels like there should be lots of people out there who like meat and would eat more of it (and a more expensive variety) if it didn't seem like a Terrible Antisocial Thing that will Destroy Humanity."
I have my doubts. Looks to me like if social capital can't be gained from fighting for [abstract, far-away, non-practical issue X], most people will prefer not having to account for X over doing so successfully.
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Also, by introducing/emphasizing a moral issue to collective awareness, you're forcing people to have a stance toward it. "Look, you can offset your carbon footprint!" doesn't offer the neutral+positive choices ("Ok" | "Ok I'm in!"), because on the social level, an unjustified "Ok" looks worse than the pre-choice uncertain state did.
I expect creating that sort of psychological cost for a big share of your customers is bad for business.
Many folks I read are getting increasingly concerned about the possible spread of the COVID "delta" variant worldwide in the coming months, including in the US. If you are a USian who (by your own estimation) follows COVID news more closely than most:
(a) how concerned (or not) are you about the delta variant's impact here and why?
(b) how, if at all, do you anticipate adjusting your personal plans for the coming months as a result of this concern?
(c) what is your % estimate, if you have one, of the probability that the spread of "delta COVID" will cause the reimposition of onerous social distancing restrictions (e.g. indoor dining bans, large gathering bans, schools closing or moving to "hybrid") in at least one US state by the end of 2021?
Even among the people I know who haven't broken out of their shut-in habits from covid, they haven't ever mentioned "delta" or "variant" or "mutation" as a reason not to get out of the house.
(a) 1% chance I'll need to care.
(b) None at all. I might wear masks indoors, but I had sort of kept that up, anyway.
(c) 10% that some state will try it, justified or not.
Not an american but I expect vaccination to beat B.1.617.2 in [most of] the USA.
The UK and USA are at similar points regarding vaccination and the UK has a higher prevalence of the delta variant. Political discussions here are about delaying reopening for another month, rather than reimposing any restrictions.
With the unvaccinated proportion of the population decreasing more or less linearly, the increased virality needed to overcome the effects of vaccination increase hyperbolically.
I comment on Scott's On the Road review below, but I want to make a separate, generalization about it here, because it's relevant, at least to me, in many discussions about novels or art.
In that review Scott says:
- But from a modern perspective, if Jack and Dean tried the same thing today, they’d be one of about a billion college students and aimless twenty-somethings with exactly the same idea, posting their photos to Instagram tagged “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t seem like a good stopping-point for a philosophy.
Before going further I want to point out I'm a huge fan of Scott's writing and thinking and I wouldn't be here otherwise. (I mean here in this comment section. I'd probably still be here on this planet in this same house in this same room.)
It's the word "philosophy" that bugs me. No doubt there are plenty of artists who consider themselves to have "a philosophy", but in my experience artists (including novelists) are different animals from intellectuals who have a philosophy about things. Artists are people who have to forget about having a philosophy.
Consider the case of an actor. A good actor has probably figured out various methods that work for them to be good at what they do. Maybe they follow The Method or maybe they do various other things that work for them to give good performances. They could have a Philosophy of Acting, but that's not the same as a philosophy of living. If they do have a philosophy of living, they aren't likely to be able to express that philosophy -- at least not articulately -- through their acting.
OK, sure, but actors have to read the lines of others. Of course they can't express their philosophy of living through their art.
Now consider the case of stand up comedians. A stand up comedian can write their own material. They can explain their philosophy of life through their comedy, right?
Well, no, they can't, because a stand up comedian needs to be funny -- that's their one job -- and they can't be funny and express their philosophy because philosophy isn't funny. (Admittedly, the recent bull market for political comedy has convinced a lot of comedians that perhaps they are also philosophers, but it hasn't worked out well, at least not for people who like actual comedy.)
So what about the case of the novelist? Don't they have considerably more latitude than the actor or stand up comedian in what they write? Can't they tell you their philosophy within the 1378 pages of their Magnum Opus?
Not if it's a novel they can't. Because a novelist is bound in the same way as a stand up comic or an actor. They have one job. They must not tell you, the reader, what to think.
"Well, no, they can't, because a stand up comedian needs to be funny -- that's their one job -- and they can't be funny and express their philosophy because philosophy isn't funny. (Admittedly, the recent bull market for political comedy has convinced a lot of comedians that perhaps they are also philosophers, but it hasn't worked out well, at least not for people who like actual comedy.)"
This feels like a no-true-Scotsman thing, I'm afraid - on observing that there are lots of comedians whose work is heavily influenced by their worldviews and who are financially and critically successful, at least by the standards of comedians, you declare that they aren't doing "actual" comedy.
Similarly, lots of novels obviously /do/ express the author's worldview and philosophy. You may think they /shouldn't/, but that's certainly not a common opinion, and even if it were correct, it would merely mean that the fact that they do is a failing, not that they don't.
Hard, hard disagree in two and a half out of three examples.
First, the half. Actors (some actors) due have very strong beliefs about what they're doing and how they're doing. There are certainly schools of philosophy when it comes to acting. That said, you'd be hard put to know whether your star is a disciple of Stanislavski just by watching their performance, so their ability to convey this philosophy, through the work itself, is limited.
For stand up comics, I think a couple of counterexamples will suffice. Both Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan do successful political stand up. I've recently (last 6 months) watch specials from them both, and laughed out loud during each. (I liked Chappelle better than Rogan, as there were parts of Rogan that I didn't care for, but the audience was laughing even for those parts.
For novels, just recently in the book review contest, we had not one but two reviews of Atlas Shrugged, which is certainly philosophical and has been wildly successful. I would also want to name check Heinlein. In fact, to be specific you can call out Starship Troopers and follow it with The Forever War, which together form a short back and forth between the authors about war and its effects. For something more directly personal, I really enjoy the novels of both John Ringo and Tom Kratman, each of whom is not only political, but of a politics I really dislike. Each is nonetheless successful enough as a novelist to keep me coming back, even though I would likely leave any polity they took over. (Especially Kratman.)
Can't believe how long it took me to think of this- isn't Myers-Briggs basically just an Implicit Association Test? In which case would it be weird to think of personality types as a kind of bias?
This gels with my personal experience in which people who encounter types wildly different from their own tend to think of each other as abnormal, mentally ill, losers, etc. Literally beyond understanding.
I don't think it's an implicit association test. It's a poor approximation of Big 5 personality types, which are basically born out of the observation that if you generalize a person's answers to questions like "are you lazy?" and "do you do a thorough job?" you don't actually lose much information, if you boil that down into a trait like "conscientiousness."
It's less "implicit association", and just many adjectives or traits having some relationship or cluster of association to them, which can be thought of as an underlying trait.
We found out how hard it is to be a professional academic historian, and how little most Americans know about this. Croatians have a better excuse for their ignorance.
A tale of fraud and murder.
A Croatian historian was targeted by a scammer who promised him at entry to a good job at an American university and eventually killed him.
The writer of the article was a friend of the historian and testified at the trial. This is where it comes out that educated Americans don't necessarily know what an archive is.
"I explained how historians can’t get academic jobs through individual merits in the U.S. or Europe. You need networks. I talked about “markets,” the expectations of what CVs (the academic term for resumes) should look like, and how getting noticed by universities is dependent not just on productivity but also on references from people of great esteem. With every explanation I gave, another question came up. What is a postdoc? What is an editor? What is a letter of recommendation? How does anyone get paid?
The questions kept coming because the answers I was giving made no sense to how people imagined someone survived as a professional historian. Weren’t historians like artists or writers? Wasn’t their worth and position dependent on the quality of what they produced? Or maybe they were like journalists, paid per column or through working on producing publications? Or maybe historians were like teachers, their employment opportunities dependent on the degrees they had obtained?"
While I expect horror at the ignorance shown at the trial, I'm also unnerved at how much judges would need to know to do their jobs adequately. I remember the complaints about judges and legislators of a certain age who had no idea about computers and the internet.
Which is fair in a way, but the world is large. How can anyone know enough? Should there be courses on "The World and How to Know Sort of Enough About It?". If not courses, some ideas about how to get a range of knowledge?
Seems part and parcel of specialization of labor. The judge and lawyers, up until the very moment that the case came up, had no reason to ever know the ins and outs of academic publishing. The jury never had a reason to know and likely don't know any more now than they did pre-trial.
That said, it was a very interesting read. Especially because the normal trans-atlantic weirdness seems dialed up to 11 for the murder victim: do Croatian academics really think you can wire some rando a few grand and land a professorship at CUNY including housing? We have a few grad students from the Balkans but they all seem pretty acculturated to academic life.
Seeing some noise in the Aviation business about "Hydrogen fuel."
I observe that there's no such thing as a "Hydrogen well," so I wonder, given the hostility towards nuclear energy, whether fueling an airliner with Hydrogen might be a net negative in terms of emissions, at least until we get sensible about nuclear, and certainly in terms of the overall energy budget compared with Petroleum.
Leaving aside the difficulty of containing Hydrogen—it has a nasty habit of migrating through many things that can hold Methane just fine. Can we create a reliable Hydrogen tank that isn't too heavy to fly?
My knowledge of the difficulties of isolating and storing Hydrogen is about twenty years out of date. Do we have a better approach now than "Burn fossil fuels to generate electricity for electrolysis?" That was "always" understood as a huge net negative, but technology naturally marches on.
In the rocketry business we can definitely build lightweight, reliable tanks for liquid hydrogen. But handling extreme cryogens like hydrogen is an enormous PITA for reasons that go well beyond the weight of the tanks. Some of that we can address by just letting a bit of the hydrogen boil off to keep the rest cool, but there are reasons that might not work as well at commercial airports as it does at rocket launch sites, and it only solves some of the problems.
Then there's the problem where, when hydrogen burns, it burns really really hot without really producing a visible flame and, hey, why did I suddenly catch on fire just because I walked next to the refuelling station?
My really short form analysis, which leaves out a lot of edge conditions, is that the main benefit of hydrogen is that it "burns clean," but you can get most of the benefits just by using hydrocarbons with the advantage of a distribution network already built for it.
And you can manufacture hydrocarbons using energy input, the same way you manufacture hydrogen, to be carbon-neutral.
Hydrogen has a few advantages such that our whole system might be a few percentage points more efficient if we put all our effort into building a hydrogen distribution network.
It's largely (but not completely) a solution chasing a problem.
Looks mildly interesting, although the front-page is the opposite of explaining-what-this-website-is-for. (It looks like this is powered by Notion - https://www.notion.so - so I'm wondering whether you have a relationship with this company beyond just using its weird proprietary word processor.)
No real relation with Notion (although I used to work for a competitor); it's just more convenient to use it to publish to the web than the "vi/Git repo/Github" toolchain I was trying to use before. There are some tools that can publish Notion pages as a white-label site, but they're $5/domain/month and I'm not sure the cross-domain links will work.
Can anyone explain how something like sexual orientation can be encoded in genes at a basic, mechanistic level.
Obviously there's a cultural/psychological/environmental component to why people are attracted to whoever they're attracted to, but my understanding is that most biologists would consider it a given that genetics play a very large if not predominant role. It's easy to visualize genes encoding proteins that determine the properties of biological structures ("make an eye", "make three fingers") But something in my brain can't quite grok the idea of how genes can encode "become sexually aroused at the sight of a woman/man's genatalia" to become hard wired into the neurology. How can specific *visual* trigger become encoded into genes?
Complex mating behaviors can be fairly straightforwardly caused by single gene changes: for an insect example, the switch from 'virgin' to 'mated' behaviors in fruit fly is regulated by a single key gene (homothorax). Hth is normally repressed via a microRNA mechanism until the virgin female detects a chemical present in semen, after which the repression ends and the mated female undergoes a series of behavioral changes including a lack of receptivity to mating. If you mutate homothorax in females to remove the miRNA binding sites, they'll behave exactly as though they've already mated despite never having done so.
Obviously human behavior and genetics are both more complex than a fruit fly, but in principle I don't see why our mating behaviors couldn't be governed by that sort of epigenetic mechanism. Who knows, maybe someday we'll find that binding sites on the 3' end of some transcript is responsible for male homosexuality in humans.
I am currently looking for a collaborator on a small, independent web-scraping and automation project in Python I am working on. I will gladly split the profits of this project (the client is paying a flat fee) with any collaborators based on a mutually agreeable metric. However, for reasons outlined below, I would prefer someone who is equally interested in working on and completing a project as they are in the profit.
I have a moderate amount of development experience from a highly self-taught background and have done numerous similar projects before, but this almost exclusively involves working on my own projects with relatively minimal collaboration. This experience has led to fairly regular contracts doing similar work, but developing software on my own has major drawbacks.
For the sake of my knowledge and career development, I would prefer to offload a portion of this project to a more experienced developer with a more traditional background so that I can gain different perspectives on how to plan and implement projects of this type. In some sense, I'm looking to hire someone who can serve as my boss and a mentor. Note that I'm not expecting a superstar, just someone who has experience taking projects from start to finish, and adept at following good practices.
If interested, my email address is below; the password is 7NjyA3xQYE. The link will expire in one week.
This may be the most trivial question I've asked this community, but I'm kind of stumped: does anyone know an almond butter with the consistency of supermarket peanut butter?
Normally it has that sort of oil-and-bits-of-nuts texture that expensive peanut butter has, but harder to stir. I've been looking in vain for something like Jiff but made with almonds or another hypoallergenic nut.
“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
Random physics-related-question: Has anyone noticed how gravity and electromagnetism look extremely similar superficially but have extremely different explanations/mechanisms in the modern version? More specifically, in classical physics, gravity and electromagnetism are both 1/d^2 laws of attractive/repulsive conservative forces*. However, in modern particle physics, we have two *completely different* explanations of the two phenomena; gravity is explained as a result of the bending of spacetime, whereas electromagnetism is explained as a result of electrically-charged particles passing virtual photons between each other. How do we know that these mechanisms are assigned to the right force? (If I were an early-20th-century physicist, I would have considered it totally plausible that gravity consists of massive particles passing gravitons between each other and that electromagnetism consists of electrically-charged particles bending the fabric of spacetime.)
*Minor point: Electromagnetism also involves magnetism, which is a rotation-y force that can't do work, and though an analogue of this doesn't exist for gravity in classical-physics-as-generally understood, it turns that an analogue for gravity does exist in the low-energy limit as a consequence of general relativity, and this is known by the extremely uncreative name of "gravitomagnetism".
There is a way of modelling EM as a bendy space time thingy, called Kaluza Klein theory. (But you need an extra dimension). You can also give a uniform treatment of all forces as bison exchanges, but you shouldn't , because you need to assume a space time background.
> I hope this letter finds you in good health. Unfortunately, the topic of this letter is grim. Your $4.4million dollar donation to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is being misused, and you are now among a class of persons being defrauded and mislead by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.
> The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), claim to be organizations dedicated to AGI safety and the art of human rationality. However, these organizations are not what they make themselves out to be, and MIRI is in fact defrauding its donors through misleading promises and an ongoing cover-up of statutory rape, blackmail, and fraud.
An amusing collection of gossip with a flair for dramatic, I mean, this quote is just great:
> The four protesters were then brutally assaulted by the police and tortured for days until they could make bail.
So, despite the assorted accusations of years-long misconduct only the anti-MIRI camp merited any attention from the authorities, all of this taking place in California, the hotbed of wokeness. Looks like cancel culture truly is the only hope.
> So, despite the assorted accusations of years-long misconduct only the anti-MIRI camp merited any attention from the authorities, all of this taking place in California, the hotbed of wokeness.
Yep! That's what happens. There's a difference between "common knowledge within the rationalist community" and "a national newspaper wrote about it." The latter is more likely to capture a prosecutor's interest.
Moreover, the former young teenagers involved are in their 20s now and don't want to go to the authorities. In my opinion, they were groomed. One of the ones who was 14 having sex with 30 year olds still says, "it was my decision! It was good for me!" It's horrifying. They would also face significant stigmatization from the community for "causing drama." The rationalist community is not that woke.
Well, with the age of consent being 14 or lower in some territories I'm finding it hard to get particularly horrified by this. Althrough, if true, this would lower my opinion of senior MIRI staff, choosing to risk everything for illegal affairs doesn't seem too rational. But then again, I never considered them likely to succeed anyway, so whether or not they get cancelled isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.
I wouldn't let a 14 year old get a tattoo or even stay out until twelve at night, much less "oh well you're mature enough to risk sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy, and huge emotional turmoil for a chicken hawk".
It's also a matter of the ratio of ages; 30 and 14 is a 16 year age gap. Make it 35 and 19, still 16 year gap, but you can say "well it may not be a good idea, but the younger partner is technically an adult".
Go back a bit earlier in the lives of both parties to 25 and 9, still the same age gap, but I don't think many people would feel comfortable with "this is my girlfriend who is smart and mature enough to make her own decisions with no input or influence or manipulation by me at all!", even if older person followed up with "oh we're not fucking yet, I'm going to wait until they're legally old enough in Israel, Angola, Bolivia, and Cape Verde!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_of_consent
Sure, most 14 year olds are better off when parents make such decisions for them. Most would be at 18 too, I'd say. Neither number is based on anything objective though, just a cultural/political compromise reached at a particular time and place. Claims that they represent some sort of separation in the fabric of morality which divides normal behavior from unspeakable monstrosity seem therefore unfounded. Of course, otherwise you have to deal with specifics of particular cases, and who has the time for that?
It's possible, but a 30 year old person of whatever gender fucking a 14 year old person of whatever gender is not really there in a mentoring, caring, guiding light of the younger person's life, they just want to fuck young hot totty.
Is the then-30 year old still involved in the former-14 year old's life, or have they moved on to the next 14 year old? That's the iron criterion for me as to whether it was "they truly loved me!" or "no kid, they're an ephebophile who was using you".
Evolution/God made us interested in sex at a young age for a reason. And that reason was to encourage teenage pregnancies that ruin lives (if the other person is below age 18), to suffer horrible abuse from an evil adult (if the other person is above age 17), or to enjoy "young love", a wonderful experience that we can spend our lives looking back on with happiness and contentment (if sex-positive people are the ones rushing to judgement).
So, at the end of March, after 1 year with the bars shut down either entirely; or operating under restrictions that made their "meet new people and possibly flirt with them" function impossible; I asked what people thought would be required before I could walk up to a girl in a bar, smile at her and invite her out onto a dance floor.
The responses I got were basically: "When enough people have been vaccinated that they feel safe." My country is now over 60% vaccinated, over 71% vaccinated amongst people over 12; but there is still zero movement towards that goal; politicians are talking about plans that stretch into September with no changes to the restrictions on bars even being contemplated during the summer.
Is this ever gonna end? Or is it just people trying to force everyone into a digital Brave New World I want no part of?
Anyone have any guesses about what it will take now?
I'm pretty sure anyone who is sitting at a bar, particularly unmasked, feels safe having brief conversations with strangers. What does it matter how many other people are still masked up, locked down, and socially distancing themselves away from your flirtations out of fear?
When the bars are even allowed to have people in them, you're not allowed to sit or stand at the bar, you must sit at a table, and you're not allowed to approach other people's tables. So, unless you want to conduct your flirtations at shouting volumes, no go.
I have now learned of the position Applied Futurist, due to a seminar being touted by the firm that provides my workplace's cloud accounting software package. Turning theory into practice!
"Tom Cheesewright is the Applied Futurist, helping people and organisations around the world to see the future more clearly, share their vision, and respond with innovation. Tom will help you and your audience to connect tomorrow’s world to today’s experience, and make sense of what’s happening next, and why. Tom’s clients include global 500 corporations, government departments, industry bodies and charities. Using a unique set of tools that he developed, and now teaches and licenses to others, Tom finds the critical intersections between today’s macro trends and the existing stresses in each client’s organisation and sector. These are the points at which the greatest change will take place. Tom is a frequent presence in the media, his face, voice, and unusual name recognisable from weekly appearances on TV and radio including BBC Breakfast, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, 5live, Radio 4, and TalkRadio, and in The Guardian, The Times, and The Evening Standard. Tom’s first book, High Frequency Change, was published in 2019 by LID Publishing and has been shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020 in the ‘Leadership for the Future’ category. Tom’s second book, Future-Proof Your Business, is out now for Kindle as part of the Penguin Business Experts series. The print edition will be in stores Summer 2020."
Can we genetically engineer human brains to be much more intelligent than regular brains?
Michio Kaku says "No" in his book "The Future of the Mind." Here's the relevant passage:
'So from an evolutionary and biological point of view, evolution is no longer selecting for more intelligent people, at least not as rapidly as it did thousands of years ago.
There are also indications from the laws of physics that we have reached the maximum natural limit of intelligence, so that any enhancement of our intelligence would have to come from external means. Physicists who have studied the neurology of the brain conclude
that there are trade-offs preventing us from getting much smarter. Every time we envision a brain that is larger, or denser, or more complex, we bump up against these negative trade-offs.
The first principle of physics that we can apply to the brain is the conservation of matter and energy; that is, the law stating that the total amount of matter and energy in a system remains constant. In particular, in order to carry out its incredible feats of mental gymnastics, the brain
has to conserve energy, and hence it takes many shortcuts. As we saw in Chapter 1, what we see with our eyes is actually cobbled together using energy-saving tricks. It would take too much time and energy for a thoughtful analysis of every crisis, so the brain saves energy by making
snap judgments in the form of emotions. Forgetting is an alternative way of saving energy. The conscious brain has access to only a tiny portion of the memories that have an impact on the brain.
So the question is: Would increased brain size or density of neurons give us more intelligence?
Probably not. “Cortical gray matter neurons are working with axons that are pretty close to the physical limit,” says Dr. Simon Laughlin of Cambridge University. There are several ways in which one can increase the intelligence of the brain using the laws of physics, but each has its
own problems:
• One can increase brain size and extend the length of neurons. The problem here is that the brain now consumes more energy. This generates more heat in the process, which is detrimental to our survival. If the brain uses up more energy, it gets hotter, and tissue damage results if the body temperature becomes too high. (The chemical reactions of the human body and our metabolism require temperatures to be in a precise range.) Also, longer neurons means
that it takes longer for signals to go across the brain, which slows down the thinking process.
• One can pack more neurons into the same space by making them thinner. But if neurons become thinner and thinner, the complex chemical/electrical reactions that must take place inside the axons fail, and eventually they begin to misfire more easily. Douglas Fox,
writing in Scientific American, says, “You might call it the mother of all limitations: the proteins that neurons use to generate electrical pulses, called ion channels, are inherently unstable.”
• One can increase the speed of the signal by making the neurons thicker. But this also increases energy consumption and generates more heat. It also increases the size of the brain, which increases the time it takes for the signals to reach their destination.
• One can add more connections between neurons. But this again increases energy consumption and heat generation, making the brain larger and slower in the process.
So each time we tinker with the brain, we are checkmated. The laws of physics seem to indicate that we have maxed out the intelligence that we humans can attain in this way. Unless we can suddenly increase the size of our skulls or the very nature of neurons in our brains, it seems we
are at the maximum level of intelligence. If we are to increase our intelligence, it has to be done by making our brains more efficient (via drugs, genes, and possibly TES-type machines).'
I don't think Kaku proves that "the laws of physics" cap the human brain at its present size and intelligence level. Moreover, his bullet-pointed assertions seem to be contradicted by the facts that some animals, specifically elephants and many whales, DO have larger brains than humans, and that birds have smaller, more densely packed neurons in their brains. If Kaku is right, then why don't elephants and whales have problems with their brains overheating? Do birds have problems with their neurons misfiring because they are smaller than ours? If so, the problems don't seem that bad, judging by the success of bird species and their high intelligence.
Steven Hsu even says that genetic engineering could create humans with IQs of 1,000:
'The Social Science Genome Association Consortium, an international collaboration involving dozens of university labs, has identified a handful of regions of human DNA that affect cognitive ability. They have shown that a handful of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in human DNA are statistically correlated with intelligence, even after correction for multiple testing of 1 million independent DNA regions, in a sample of over 100,000 individuals.
If only a small number of genes controlled cognition, then each of the gene variants should have altered IQ by a large chunk—about 15 points of variation between two individuals. But the largest effect size researchers have been able to detect thus far is less than a single point of IQ. Larger effect sizes would have been much easier to detect, but have not been seen.
This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total.1
Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails. A person with more than the average number of positive (IQ-increasing) variants will be above average in ability. The number of positive alleles above the population average required to raise the trait value by a standard deviation—that is, 15 points—is proportional to the square root of the number of variants, or about 100. In a nutshell, 100 or so additional positive variants could raise IQ by 15 points.
Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.'
I'm a split-the-difference sort of person, so I vote for some improvement, but not that drastic. All the positive variants aren't necessarily going to work well with each other.
Sidetrack: Flightless birds didn't opt into[1] taking advantage of their size to use brain efficiency to become extremely smart. I wonder why.
Most of the limitations from the "laws of physics" seem to come down to energy usage. That's probably true in the ancestral environment, but I wouldn't mind having superhuman intelligence if the cost was "eat more sugar and don't spend too long outdoors in summer". I don't see why there any need to bring "conservation of matter" into it, as if you would need perpetual motion or something.
Packing more neurons into the same space sounds like what computer chip makers have been working on for the last few decades. Doing it on neurons sounds incredibly difficult but not necessarily impossible (for millions of scientists over a century).
IQ of 1000 is so high as to be pretty much meaningless, given that no-one has ever had much more than 200 (=1 in 130 billion). IQ 1000 implies being the best at IQ tests of population of 1.24 x10^784. It's not a linear measure and you can't just stack up 100 things that boost IQ by 15.
>One can pack more neurons into the same space by making them thinner. But...
>One can increase the speed of the signal by making the neurons thicker. But...
Can we make some of the neurons thinner and others thicker, use the skinny neurons to do lots of low-reliability processing and the fat ones for error-checking and for fast cross-brain communication?
>Who is right? Kaku or Hsu?
I'm betting on *mostly* Kaku, but there are things evolution can't do very well because the intermediate states are all inferior and the gap is too big to leap in one burst of mutation (sorry, X-men). Nature sucks at evolving wheels, for example. And maybe it sucks at evolving mixed neuronal architecture because you need simultaneous "make some but not all neurons a different size" and "use the different neurons for the right thing" mutations, so we're stuck at a local optimum for single-thickness neurons.
So I suspect focused cleverness can beat evolution, if not in that specific way, but I'd be surprised if it gave us even 100 more IQ points out of anything resembling a human brain.
I don't think we can genetically engineer a race of super-geniuses, but claiming that we've hit the limit because of laws of physics just seems very wrong. Like, even being able to figure out the physical question to ask would require several books.
> evolution is no longer selecting for more intelligent people
> There are also indications from the laws of physics that we have reached the maximum natural limit of intelligence
Oh, please.
Software developer here. For a developer to efficiently improve a program, it is frequently necessary to engage in a task called "refactoring", which means changing the structure of the program in a way that *doesn't change its behavior*. We do this in order to make it easier to improve the program.
The evolutionary process never performs refactoring.
What are the implications of this? Well, for starters, DNA code is more incomprehensible than the worst "spaghetti code" ever produced by the worst human developers. And so scientists spend their lives trying to answer rather basic questions that anybody debugging human software could figure out in an afternoon (though to be fair, our debugging tools are way better than geneticists').
Since scientists are stuck on pretty basic questions like "how do we stop cancer", I think it's underappreciated that the absence of refactoring probably has massive implications for how evolution works in practice. A simple-sounding change ("change eye color to blue") may be readily discovered by evolution, while another ("shift this tissue down below this organ") may be completely impractical without a refactoring that hasn't happened in any vertebrate species since the dawn of time.
If we observe evolution hasn't done something for thousands or millions of years, that's no evidence at all against it being possible. Evolution will never give us perfect memories or 16-bit multiplier circuits or internal FM radios, either.
Taking off on a tangent here, but I was wondering if Scott has ever grappled with David Deutsch's critique of libertarianism. I ran across a recent podcast (here: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-deutsch/) in which he said the following:
"I think the libertarian movement has, first of all, a revolutionary political agenda. Even if it’s not revolutionary, even if they say, “We want to implement it over a period of 100 years,” they know what they want to implement; they know what the endpoint is going to be in 100 years’ time. They don’t take into account, first of all, that there are going to be errors in whatever they set up. That the correction of those errors is more important than getting it right in the first place — much more important.
Secondly, they don’t take into account that the relevant knowledge is contained in institutions, an inexplicit knowledge that people share. By institutions, I don’t mean buildings like the Supreme Court building or something. I mean the manner of thinking: in the case of the Supreme Court, the manner of thinking that’s shared by hundreds of millions of Americans, that makes them not just behave in a certain way but expect society, the government, the legal system, the state — they expect certain things of those things. It’s those expectations that make up 90 percent of the institution of the Supreme Court.
Libertarians think that’s unimportant and basically want to throw it away, by and large. No doubt there are libertarians who agree with me on this."
I'm interested in the notion of error correction and institutional memory. Do either of those ideas as espoused by Deutsch pose a challenge to most modern libertarian objectives?
I would think that if you're planning to implement something over 100 years, that's a pretty good sign that you're going to integrate it with the existing institutional knowledge base and do lots of trial-and-error along the way. See, e.g., the adoption of socialism by various western democracies over the past 100 years.
There are, of course, libertarians who don't plan to wait 100 years and would do the job with one constitutional convention of they had the chance; possibly they'd botch it very badly. But then the quick-and-dirty socialist transformations aren't nearly as good an advertisement for that system as is e.g. Sweden.
In commercial/private space, audits/quality control checks of the product are considered necessary and relatively routine. And it's done all the time with coding. There are processes and generally accepted procedures for this.
We should have a process by which the election authority can say - with pride and confidence - "We are strongly convinced that while there might have been some errors and fraudulent ballots cast, the combined errors and fraud were much less than the difference between the winner and the loser of the election. Here, let us show you our methods of ensuring this."
We don't have that. And - for this election at least - there was much less "I will show you how good we ran the election and how secure our numbers are!" and much less "how dare you question us!"
> We should have a process by which the election authority can say - with pride and confidence - "We are strongly convinced that while there might have been some errors and fraudulent ballots cast, the combined errors and fraud were much less than the difference between the winner and the loser of the election. Here, let us show you our methods of ensuring this."
This exists, though; you can go on azsos.gov and read about it.
One might symmetrically ask: what kind of audit would convince a person who believed there was fraud that there really wasn't any? We know the answer isn't "a hand audit conducted by Republicans", because Arizona has already had one of those. If people can't write down an answer to that question in advance -- ideally, in advance of the disputed election, or study, or whatever, but at least in advance of the audit's outcome -- I tend to fear that they're looking for a particular answer, rather than a particular process.
The CyberNinjas in particular are troubling because they've already made a dumb, high-profile mistake: they accused the Maricopa board of deleting files, then withdrew their accusation when the board explained that they were looking in the wrong place. My fear is that their eventual report will contain other mistakes that are similarly dumb but harder to check on.
Fox made an early call when it was likely but not as assured as would normally be required. Remember that their election desk is separate from their opinion media. The desk has no reason to oppose a Biden win. Similarly their public polls for prominent races are usually considered quite good and with minimal relative bias. My understanding is that they determined that the likelihood of the call being right vs wrong meant it was more protective of their reputation to just stick with it than say we called too early and then later call it again with the same result.
Consider how few people understood that media calls in elections are projections by that particular outlet not decisions by election officials. They are correct like 99% or more of the time because the media is very conservative about making a call. However they are not reporting final results they are making a prediction.
Trump had a whole spiel about votes counted after election night as if that wasn't totally normal and many people believed it.
It's not "exit polls." Exit polls are used by campaigns well after the fact to figure out why they won or lost certain races and to figure out how demographic trends are moving.
Arizona's SOS was counting and reporting ballots.
In principle, such audits are fine if they are undertaken by good-faith, reasonably competent actors who can be reasonably trusted not to make the post-audit state of the relevant election artifacts (ballots, machines) worse, i.e. not to make future audits of the same artifacts harder or impossible as a result of the audits.
Cyber Ninjas, the company conducting the audit in Maricopa, is not a good-faith or competent actor and can't be trusted not to poison the artifacts. Its CEO is a conspiracy theorist, it doesn't have any election auditing expertise, and apparently it has already compromised the security of the county's voting machines as a side effect of its actions. The choice of Cyber Ninjas to conduct the audit thus lends credibility to the Democratic view that the Republicans who wanted the audit are clowns acting in bad faith.
Is there well-attested evidence that would lead one to doubt the empirical claims that underpin that view? Or do you accept those empirical claims and judge the audit worthwhile anyway?
If, in the aftermath of the 2016 election, an organization with no election audit experience, headed by a Democratic partisan conspiracy theorist (Michael Moore or Naomi Wolf, say), had sought to examine ballots for secret watermarks and traces of bamboo fibers because they thought those would demonstrate Chinese or Russian interference: yes, I certainly would have opposed that and considered it a bad-faith exercise that shouldn't be allowed. There's no legitimate reason to believe that such tactics will turn up any important information, and no reason to trust the security promises of actors of that sort on either left or right.
My priors are that it is another Gish Gallop trap.
Well, that opinion is based on updating from the previous times I have spent more time than I should have digging into a fraud allegation.
But by no means do I think the left has staked a defensible position. A photo ID is not an unreasonable requirement to vote. Instead of taking a position that we should use the honor system, they should have instead said "yes, lets use photo ID, and lets set aside some money for compliance assistance! (As is done with every other new regulation for businesses)" They have forgotten reversed stupidity is not intelligence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence)
<quote>such audits are legally possible; and if the political opponent wants to throw money at some hopeless endeavor, why not let them have at it?</quote>
I think even legal or pseudo legal actions can have harmful consequences. The Jan 6th insurrection was due in part because of congress persons commitment to pseudo-legal challenges to the election. So that would be a reason not to let them have at it.
In the broad strokes, sure what is legal, but on the other hand i think we've gotten too abstract for me to understand what we are talking about.
Why did you not then stop at 'such audits are legally possible'. You continued with 'why not let them have at it'.
So I don't think even you think 'is it legal' is the only way of evaluating actions. Otherwise, your post would have been "is this legal? yes. </end>"
In addition there is also the issue of the law not always being 'black ink', and having gray areas, as well as issues of pseudo legality, contradictions, etc.
...
I'm not sure what you are getting at w/ the Texas case. Yes, I read all of that when the case(s) were happening. Texas had no standing according to 9 justices of the supreme court. I tend to agree. Where the case was in PA, the plantiff did have standing, and I actually though it was the only of the 50ish cases that had a solid argument. The problem was they weren't asking the law be fixed for future elections, they wanted the previous one invalidated. The court pointed to precedence where an objection had to be timely, and a person wasn't allowed to 'gamble on the outcome' of an election, and then object after the fact.
IMO this was an own goal, as had they asked only to change the law for future elections, they probably would have won, and that would have been huge in public opinion. They would actually have a court win, the court would have agreed the election was illegal, and the legislature would have had more cover for any pseudo legal objections.
Do you have a link to your blog post? I'd be interested to read it.
Much obliged, I left a comment on your SubStack
I feel obliged to note that it is possible to have over 50% above average (i.e. mean) on a measure if the measure has a long "bad" tail. For instance, 90%+ of people have been convicted of less crimes than average.
Obviously, some of your questions don't suffer from this (e.g. church-going; the low-end tail is truncated at 0), but some of them do.
(Also, the within-group thing gets really complicated and probably useless because you're actually asking two questions with "sexist vs. average self-described progressive" - "how sexist are you" and "which people self-describe as progressive" - and then asking them to do at least some sort of mathematics with those; you need to split the question up so you're not lumping all three errors together.)
I answered the first one above.
For the second one, the problem is that "what percentage of people self-identify as progressives, and how are their views distributed compared to people in general" is a highly non-trivial question for a layman (or at least I can't imagine most go around actually asking that in as many words), and even if you get that and the "where are you in relation to society" one right you've then got to do maths to figure out "where are you in relation to self-identified progressives".
Related: Most people have fewer friends than their friends. So if you have X friends, and your friends have on average Y friends, then for most people X < Y. That seems quite counterintuitive, but it follows from pure math.
I don't want to question that over-confidence and other psychological effects play a role. But the base line to a lot of question might not be 50% if you start thinking about it.
Parrhesia mentions different definitions. I think this plays a big role. Consider "good driving". Everyone has a different definition. For some, it means sticking to the driving rules all the time. For some, it means avoiding dangerous situations. For some, it means coming from A to B as fast as possible. Now imagine a society where people care a lot about being "good drivers", where they optimize really hard for it, and where they are really good a optimizing. But everyone optimizes her own definition. How many people will end up driving better than the average, according to her own definition? Probably 100%.
If you believe that example, you should probably believe the same about being racist, being more environmental-friendly, being more ethical, ... Just stronger, because there most people actually DO optimize, and the definitions differ a lot.
I think the answer to the question "Do you have more/less friends than the average person" is also "less" for most people.
But for a question like you formulated, I can only compare myself to the other people that I know, i.e., my friends. I don't know how many friends an average person has. I can only estimate that for my friends/acquaintances.
The total number of cross-political friendships is fixed; with perfect information and some consistent measure of conservatism you'd find that the total number of conservative friendships of progressives equals the total number of progressive friendships of conservatives.
If there's an apparent imbalance in those numbers, the explanation is that either people on each side have different average definitions or there's a large-scale asymmetry in information (e.g. if a progressive and a conservative are friends, but the conservative hides his views and the progressive doesn't hide hers, then the conservative will correctly count it as cross-political but the progressive will miss it).
Median = 50% below, 50% above. Average = mean. Mean =/= median in the general case (it does, trivially, for symmetric distributions).
"Average amount of using racial slur X" = (#times racial slur X is used per year)/(#people). But (#times person Y uses racial slur X per year) has a long tail above (you can say a word a great many times in a day) and a truncated tail below (you cannot say a word less than zero times per day, and that's only slightly less than the mode as most people use racial slurs rarely). This asymmetry means the mean is higher than the median (as the median doesn't care about tail length and the mean does) - as such, the majority of people use a given racial slur less than the average.
What is an "average person"? The obvious way to define that is "a person that does things at the average rate", which puts things straight back where we started.
A better formulation would involve the median instead of the mean. E.g. "Are you more or less patriotic than the *median* self-described conservative". Probably along with clarifications about the very real difference between the median and the mean. Another option is, perhaps, "Are you more patriotic than 50% of self-described conservatives?"
"[...] because virtue signaling your right wing beliefs doesn't work as well and may be detrimental to your social standing."
I'd find this surprising if true.
I absolutely do not find it to be at all questionable. Lots of red tribers in the closet right now because they don't want to be kicked out of polite society and/or fired.
Oh, that's true. I was thinking about ingroup-to-ingroup communication only.
Anecdotally, I'm working for a company in the south where the upper management is mostly conservative, and I'm "in the closet" about voting Democrat for the same reason.
I think which set of political positions constitute "polite society" depends a lot on where in the country you are.
+1
I went back home to a cousin's New Year's Eve party a few years back. Topics of conversation included a goodly bit about Obama and whether he would come for the guns before he had to leave office, and a conversation about guns in church, which kind of guns are good to carry into church so one can be ready, and the merits of various churches vis a vis allowing congregants to pack heat. I think all of it could be read as virtue signaling love for guns and some of it as virtue signaling readiness to fight to protect gun owning from the rapacious liberal feds.
I was well known as the city cousin, so people more or less knew where I was at, but if I were still living and working in that town, I'm sure that at best I would be relatively private about such things.
If you are talking about signaling to the outgroup, this works the other way as well. I have liberal family members in conservative areas, and they have to be really careful about not expressing their political views at work, where everyone is conservative.
Virtue signaling is relative. Is wearing/not wearing a mask virtue signaling or vice signaling? It depends on where you are.
I walked into a cafe in Clayton, Georgia, last August and was the only one with a mask. Felt extremely uncomfortable.
Which shows that there is a purpose to wearing masks other than virtue signaling: normalizing mask-wearing so that people won't forgo wearing a mask simply to avoid social discomfort. And that's on top of the purpose of, you know, not spreading disease.
This is so true. I was in NC when the mask mandate was lifted and mask wearing went from 50% compliance to less than 20% immediately. I instantly started feeling self-conscious about wearing a mask in a store.
" Right-leaning people do this sort of social signaling as well but not to the same extent because virtue signaling your right wing beliefs doesn't work as well and may be detrimental to your social standing". Are you sure? A lot of people signal their patriotism, they're church attendance and so on. Possibly , conservative signals are common, but lacking in salience because they're common.fir instance, standing for the national anthem us the expected default.
What is standing for the national anthem, if not a signal? It might be a *weak* signal....
How much of a signal church going is depends on be ostentatious it is.
Do you think that people who principally do not stand during national anthems would stand if no one were looking?
The dichotomy between pure signaling and having genuine emotional experience seems to be a false one. Lots of people really care about racial inequality, sexism and other social justice themes it's still a signal of a loyalty to a tribe when they talk about such issues. Same with the church, there are lots of true believers and the fact that they go to the church is still a signal no matter what kind of intrinsic religious experience they have.
We may talk about true and false signaling, like how some signals correspond to the inner state of the signaler and some do not. But then the progressives with "in this house" signs are probably do true signaling as they are proud to be part of their group similarly to how a patriot is proud to be part of a country.
I've seen American and Confederate flags on country roads. I'm not remembering any "in this house" signs, but I do recall seeing a Biden flag in rural mountain Arkansas, in an area where the few houses often flew flags, and all of the other political flags were Trump flags. I think the right model for the "in this house" sign is the political flag, which certainly seems popular, even in areas where they aren't that likely to be seen.
Yeah I think that people living with 'east coast elites' will see this as true. I live in 'Trump country' and there is plenty of signalling. American flags (and others) and still Trump campaign yard signs. Virtue signalling will be detrimental if the virtue you are signalling is in the minority.
One of the recent right-leaning virtue signals is being annoyed about virtue signaling and therefore virtue signaling the absence of virtue signaling.
It seems to be more widespread in intellectual places like this blog, anecdotally, I've seen more instances of it in ACX, then the examples of traditional left-wing signaling of being a good ally to lgbt+, feminism e.t.c.
When you tell everyone what a great ally to minorities you are - at least it's likely that you are indeed an ally to minorities. When you wear a badge of a donor - at least you donated and did some good. I'm not even sure that being humble about your good deeds is a better strategy from the utilitarian perspective. People who do good deserve credits - this seems fair.
But this meta-virtue-signaling seems to be of the worst possible kind. When you boast that you do not boast you are not only boasting but also lying. That's a signal completely without substance.
And yeah I appreciate the irony. Right now I'm meta-meta-virtue signaling of how I do not signal the absence of virtue signaling. How virtuous of me!
While I don't go full-on Chesterton's Fence, we might want to consider why some religions (at least Judaism and Christianity) recommend giving charity but not making it public.
There are some reasons, such as not humiliating the recipients and not making charity into a status competition.
I agree. There are indeed reasons for modesty. I have a very strong intuition that's it is a good quality and obviously it wouldn't existed without reasons. However, the more I think about it, the more these reasons seem to be not really persuading.
It understandable why religious deontology or virtue ethics may value humbleness. Ironically, doing good deeds and not taking credits is a stronger signal of personal virtue than doing good deeds and telling about it as one may claim that it was done only for the bragging rights. But this Chesterton's Fence doesn't look important.
What is the strongest consequentialist argument? Why would it be bad if charity was more of a status competition? Some people will do charity not due to personal virtue but eager to get more status and as a result... we will get more charity? This seems good actually.
When I look into this pro-modesty intuition of mine it seems to be working similar to any-capitalist one. The same one which is offended by the thoughts that big farma is going to earn lots of money from handling the pandemic. It seems more virtuous to help people not for money but just for the sake of helping. But our society creates lots of market pressure in this regard and as a result we have not just some separate acts of kindness but high quality services. While not perfect, this seems to be a good thing. So why not apply the same optimization pattern to charity?
When I'm thinking about a world which status games are centered not around having mostly useless luxury goods but around effective altruism... it seems to be so much better than the current one! Its practically an utopia! Am I missing something?
There's always Goodhart's Law-- if charity is a status competition, then people might prefer showy charity over what's actually helpful.
I've definitely seen people talk about how good it was to receive charity in a way that didn't humiliate them-- perhaps this should go into the hedonic calculation.
So what we need is to make effective charity being the most high status? I agree, there is a failure mode here but it seems fixable. And less bad than the ones we are currently facing with capitalism.
I don't get why it would be more humiliating to receive charity knowing that it grants status to the giver. If anything it should feel more liberating as you are not just consuming someones resources but give back status for them.
I think we can harness this to augment Universal Basic Income. A major criticism of UBI is that a big chunk of money is going to people who don't need it. A possible solution would be to create a "signage" program that would let those who donate their UBI share to charity to advertise it.
It would take both a physical front-yard sign ("My UBI Goes to African Fighting Malaria!") and an online badge that goes on social media. If you are in an affluent neighborhood the social pressure to donate your UBI would probably convince 90% of the households.
I think you are right for lower-income areas, where (say) $750 / month is a huge amount. For other areas it would not be that painful, especially considering the tax deduction and the fact that it would replace some/all of their charitable giving.
Costly signaling, by definition, is costly. The term "signaling" has expanded in meaning to include less costly signaling, but costly signaling is the original meaning. And the concept of costly signaling was developed because it's something that frequently occurs.
"A major criticism of UBI is that a big chunk of money is going to people who don't need it." That's not much of a criticism. UBI has to come from somewhere, which presumably means income tax (there are other possibilities such as an oil-rich country funding it through exports, or Georgian land tax, but income tax is the main method of revenue generation for most countries), and the tax structure can be set up so that the net flow from person to government is positive for people above a particular income level. Making receiving UBI dependent on being socially shamed would be quite problematic, and would not be consistent with the worldview that most supporters of UBI hold.
I would only consider it socially shameful if a person making six figures did not donate it.
Also, don't European countries get a ton of revenue through the VAT?
Y'know, I don't think of myself as particularly left-wing, but were I on UBI - or even just working an ordinary job - and I saw the smug, self-regarding boasting you describe above of "I don't need any UBI, I am a smart and productive citizen unlike you leeches, therefore I can self-aggrandise by playing Lady Bountiful to the Poor Benighted Heathen, now don't you feel ashamed for sucking up that money for your own selfish purposes unlike a Virtuous Person like me?", I'd be up for burning down their house (maybe not with them still in it) and then going "feel like bragging now?"
Sweet Lord, some things really do make me understand "A la lanterne!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_la_lanterne
Substack, gimme an edit button!
If you will only donate to charity so long as you can brag about it and get pats on the back, then your donations are worthless.
I'm so ticked off about this, I'm even having to go full KJV:
6 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.
2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth:
4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
Both you and Parrhesia are ascribing views to me that I do not hold.
1) I do not and would not "socially shame" anyone without a badge. The point of this is that (if sufficiently rich) they would feel social pressure to donate the UBI. I am sure some household (the _very_ rich) would not put up a sign even though donating.
2) I silently donate to charities (well, silently until now.)
3) You would burn down a house because somebody cut their eyes at you? I don't know what to say to that.
(1) The point of your thought experiment is that the self-satisfied can have a way of signalling their holier-than-thouness. I don't mind if someone puts up signs on their lawn advocating charitable donations. I don't mind if they hire a brass band to march up and down the road oompah-ing about "give, give, give!" (though the Noise Abatement Society might). I don't mind if they string a banner across the front of the house reading "I donate to Against Malaria, you could too! Ask me how!"
I *do* object to swanking about the amount of money you give. "I give ALL my UBI", oh really? And how am I, someone who needs it to live, supposed to feel about that? Then again, in those kind of neighbourhoods, I don't suppose that the sort of people who do need UBI to help pay bills are allowed, unless they're coming there to work in service roles of some kind. Another sample of philanthropy being about loving your fellow-man in the abstract, and the further away the better, but less so when it comes to concrete matters of your fellow-citizens living in the less salubrious parts of town.
(2) Perhaps I am jaundiced, having had to write begging letters to billionaires (and damn it, I don't know how SSC/ACX/TheMotte manage to do it; every time I think "well I just have an ordinary, boring, job" then it happens "feck it, I *did* write a begging letter to a billionaire as part of my job!"). One of the times I felt disgusted with myself, but at least now I know I could never do a job working for any kind of charity, effectively altruistic or no, requiring me to flatter, ooze, and stroke the egos of the highly wealthy who won't donate unless they get the trumpets played signalling their generosity. I'm all the way with the Widow's Mite here, and your suggestion of a sign on the lawn has me wanting to hammer next to it another sign reading "Do you want a cookie for that, Scrooge McDuck?"
(3) Not for looking at me funny but there are some temptations too strong for weakened human will to resist. I'm generally conservative, would have thought at my mildest I'm a centrist (though that, today, is a dirty word apparently) and think that Marxbro is a pest and I have half a mind to think him a troll.
All that being said, if it's on one side somebody showing off to their equally fortunate neighbours, who apparently have to have it made a status contest in order to donate of their surplus or else they can't be natively generous, and Marxbro on the other side, I'm lining up with Marxbro.
I have much more respect for someone who says "Fuck no, I'm keeping my surplus UBI for hookers and blow" than someone who does the Uriah Heep "I'm ever so humble and since *I* don't need this, I am bestowing it upon the Benighted Heathen. Would that you all were as open-handed as I!"
You want praise for your goodness? Do you want a cookie for that, Scrooge McDuck?
That's rather strong, and some people do mean this kind of behaviour in the well-intentioned "giving example" manner.
To which I still tend to say phooey, but then I am a horrible person. I am irresistibly reminded in all this of Mrs. Jellyby, who I feel would be very enthusiastic about signs on the lawn - while her home and children fell to bits around her:
"But no, they knew nothing whatever about Mrs. Jellyby. "In-deed! Mrs. Jellyby," said Mr. Kenge, standing with his back to the fire and casting his eyes over the dusty hearth-rug as if it were Mrs. Jellyby's biography, "is a lady of very remarkable strength of character who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects at various times and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa, with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry—AND the natives—and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population. Mr. Jarndyce, who is desirous to aid any work that is considered likely to be a good work and who is much sought after by philanthropists, has, I believe, a very high opinion of Mrs. Jellyby."
...We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark; and as we came into Mrs. Jellyby's presence, one of the poor little things fell downstairs—down a whole flight (as it sounded to me), with a great noise.
Mrs. Jellyby, whose face reflected none of the uneasiness which we could not help showing in our own faces as the dear child's head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing—received us with perfect equanimity. She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer than Africa!
...In half an hour after our arrival, Mrs. Jellyby appeared; and in the course of an hour the various things necessary for breakfast straggled one by one into the dining-room. I do not doubt that Mrs. Jellyby had gone to bed and got up in the usual manner, but she presented no appearance of having changed her dress. She was greatly occupied during breakfast, for the morning's post brought a heavy correspondence relative to Borrioboola-Gha, which would occasion her (she said) to pass a busy day. The children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress; and Peepy was lost for an hour and a half, and brought home from Newgate market by a policeman. The equable manner in which Mrs. Jellyby sustained both his absence and his restoration to the family circle surprised us all."
But Mrs. Jellyby is not alone in her benevolence (with other people's money):
"Among the ladies who were most distinguished for this rapacious benevolence (if I may use the expression) was a Mrs. Pardiggle, who seemed, as I judged from the number of her letters to Mr. Jarndyce, to be almost as powerful a correspondent as Mrs. Jellyby herself. We observed that the wind always changed when Mrs. Pardiggle became the subject of conversation and that it invariably interrupted Mr. Jarndyce and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all. We were therefore curious to see Mrs. Pardiggle, suspecting her to be a type of the former class, and were glad when she called one day with her five young sons.
"These, young ladies," said Mrs. Pardiggle with great volubility after the first salutations, "are my five boys. You may have seen their names in a printed subscription list (perhaps more than one) in the possession of our esteemed friend Mr. Jarndyce. Egbert, my eldest (twelve), is the boy who sent out his pocket-money, to the amount of five and threepence, to the Tockahoopo Indians. Oswald, my second (ten and a half), is the child who contributed two and nine-pence to the Great National Smithers Testimonial. Francis, my third (nine), one and sixpence halfpenny; Felix, my fourth (seven), eightpence to the Superannuated Widows; Alfred, my youngest (five), has voluntarily enrolled himself in the Infant Bonds of Joy, and is pledged never, through life, to use tobacco in any form."
We had never seen such dissatisfied children. It was not merely that they were weazened and shrivelled—though they were certainly that too—but they looked absolutely ferocious with discontent. At the mention of the Tockahoopo Indians, I could really have supposed Egbert to be one of the most baleful members of that tribe, he gave me such a savage frown. The face of each child, as the amount of his contribution was mentioned, darkened in a peculiarly vindictive manner, but his was by far the worst. I must except, however, the little recruit into the Infant Bonds of Joy, who was stolidly and evenly miserable."
If you donate to the Against Malaria Foundation just so you can brag about it, and the nets they buy with your donation stop 10 people from getting malaria, is their not-getting-malaria worthless?
If you donate to a famine-relief charity just to make people pat you on the back, and three people who would have starved to death live on because the money from your donation fed them, are their lives worthless?
If you donate to the local cute-puppy-saving charity just so that people will associate your name with cute puppies, and the money you give lets them save ten cute puppies from the puppy-mincing machine, are the puppies any less cute for it?
If you only donate to charity for the bragging rights, then your donations are worthless _as evidence of what a fine person you are_. They are not worthless _as contributions to the charitable cause you are supporting_.
Now. Suppose ConnGator inspires the creation of a programme whereby rich people can get more ego-stroking when they donate to charity. The result is that rich people get more ego-stroking and charities get more money. I agree with you that it's pretty contemptible if someone donates to charities but cares more about getting their own ego stroked than they do about the good the charity does. But I think it's _even worse_ if you would prefer that good not to be done in order to make sure rich people don't get their egos stroked. They're prepared to do some good they don't really care about in order to make their own lives a bit more pleasant. You are prepared to do _harm_ in order to make their lives less pleasant, and I think that is far more worthy of contempt.
That bible quote makes it clear that the purpose of Christian charity is improving one's soul rather than actually making the recipient's lives better.
I don't think that's _quite_ right.
What it says is: (1) If you make charitable donations but your only purpose is to make yourself look good, don't expect God to reward you for it; (2) so, _do_ make charitable donations but _don't_ make them in public, and then God will reward you.
This doesn't say that the _only_ purpose of charity is to get God to reward you. But it says that if you want God to reward you then you should do whatever donating you do in private rather than in public.
This may not be a bad thing to have people believe: if a given rich person believes that making public donations will get human adulation and making private donations will get divine reward, the likely result is that they make the same donations but more privately, and maybe that's better.
You potentially get ugly results when this idea is _not_ accepted by the rich people but _is_ accepted by people who are able to influence the rich people. E.g., if ConnGator and Deiseach were two votes on a committee trying to decide whether to institute an ego-stroking-for-billionaire-charity programme, Deiseach's vote might doom the programme, and then billionaires might give less, and that would be bad. In practice, most people have little influence on the charitable behaviour of the wealthy, and the main ugly effect of this idea is on (for want of a better term) Deiseach's own soul: concerned that rich people might taint their souls by valuing public approbation, she's made _herself_ care more about the state of rich people's souls than about the millions of people their donations might help. (That's the kindest way of looking at it. I fear that actually it's not so much that Deiseach wants their souls to be in good shape, but that she actively wants them to suffer because she doesn't like their attitude.)
> major criticism of UBI is that a big chunk of money is going to people who don't need it
That's a misconception. To fund UBI sensibly, one must raise taxes a lot on the lower classes, e.g. maybe today the full-time minimum-wage worker gets $15,000/yr and pays $500 in taxes. With a modest UBI of $500/mo ($6000/yr), the taxes are likely to jump to somewhere in the neighborhood of $4500/yr, so on net the worker earns a modest $2000 more. If you earned more, say, $50,000, your net income is probably not affected significantly after UBI (you get a $6000 UBI but your income taxes also go up by ~$6000). I would expect a small tax increase on the upper classes to bump living standards of the lower classes, but cutting back or reducing other programs (welfare, unemployment insurance, maybe even social security) might be sufficient to cover the remainder of the cost of UBI.
Programs like UI and Welfare pay more, but are temporary, burdensome for the recipient, stigmatized and/or full of holes (not everyone is covered). Better, says I, to have a program that pays less but actually covers everyone, is not demeaning, and runs efficiently because it doesn't require policing or "welfare offices".
"Left-leaning people avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, disbelieving in science and so forth."
There are characteristically leftist forms of science denial: Haidt lists IQ, heritability, sex differences, evolution and stereotype accuracy as typical places of leftist science denial.
Thinking your opponents are science deniers is easy, because they are. Everyone just picks the parts where their camp is supported by the research and their opponents are not. A little selective forgetting of their own camp's crimes and you have a mostly-honest and very convenient accusation of science denialism.
Mostly, everyone has freaking redwoods in their eye sockets and should try to get them looked at. The easiest person to fool is always yourself.
"Left-leaning people avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, disbelieving in science and so forth."
It's gone to the stage that "transphobia" has now become one of those meaningless boo-words like "racist" or "Nazi".
So am I a transphobe by these lights? Well, guess I'm a transphobe, then! Somehow the disapprobation of "do you want to be considered - gasp! - a *Trump supporter*???" fails to strike me with the appropriate degree of horror to change my sentiments in line with Pride Month. Alas for the obduracy of the fallen heart!
I've been mildly hassled for listening to detrans videos. (People who transitioned to the other gender, but found that it was making their lives worse and have returned to their previous gender.)
My current opinion is that transition is really great some of the time. Literally the most increase in happiness I've seen in adults.
Unfortunately, in the current era, there is sufficient pressure to transition that people who have problems which won't be solved by transition attempt it.
I wouldn't be surprised if some people who are unhappy with transition would be satisfied if the hormones were more competently handled (with more knowledge than is currently available), but this is just a guess.
I have no idea what gender/sex actually is, just that it's important to people.
Specific to "50% of drivers" item, I think the main problem there is that the median driver is actually pretty good, but goes unnoticed. Instead people are biased to recall the 5% (or whatever) that tailgated, drove 55 in the fast lane, didn't check their blindspots, etc., because these are the cars on the road that demand our attention. John Q Driver who was behind you following at a safe distance doesn't.
Second, more speculatively, I think a non-trivial amount of people are biased by the 50% number. In school, 50% is failing, bad bad bad. Obviously the metric is different (absolute vs relative score), but maybe that gets lost if you aren't paying too much attention to some random survey question and don't routinely use such quantitative thinking in your day to day.
I've heard that a lot of the driving thing might actually be better explained by availability bias than by social desirability bias. Driving errors are the sort of thing that other people notice more than yourself, so people assume they are better than average. Kahneman mentions, somewhere in "Thinking, Fast and Slow", that if you ask people "what fraction of the dishes do you put away in the household" people strongly overestimate. But if you also ask "what fraction of arguments do you start in the household" people also strongly overestimate. People notice the dishes they put away, and they notice the things they conceive of as arguments that they started, but they don't notice the ones from their partner, even though one is positive and the other is negative.
I have no difficulty whatsoever in believing that "Most drivers are above average." Most people whom I know have no tickets, no points (if that's a thing in your region), no DWIs, wouldn't consider driving impaired. . . .
But I know a very few people who are Constantly getting tickets, have more than one DWI, have had suspended licenses, have done repeated remedial driving courses etc, with no discernible effect on their "on the ragged edge of legal" driving status. My experience is that there are a very few drivers who are astonishingly bad at it.
Occasionally the NYPost or Daily News tabloids will pick up the story of some few drivers who owe hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid traffic or parking fines, which given their sample size of "Population of Drivers in Greater NYC," suggests my anecdote isn't too far removed from the truth of the matter, at least in NYC, though that figure is perhaps skewed by the "immune from arrest" diplomatic corps.
I very nearly wrote a review of Mike Lindell's autobiography "What Are The Odds," which is subtitled "From Crack Addict To CEO." But in the end the idea of spending hours of my time reading and writing about a man who would choose a hologram of his own face for his first book seemed like low-hanging fruit. Yes he is a terrible man, but is he worth the effort?
Yes, but what about the book?
I've really enjoyed the book reviews. IRL conversations with other ACX readers suggest they've really enjoyed them as well. Far from wishing the competition over sooner, I'm sad I soon won't be getting such a volume of interesting precis.
Yes, I agree. It's been great both in terms of reading about various books that may or may not have been brought to my attention in other ways, and also to hear the 'voices' of the various other reviewers.
It's been a really worthwhile undertaking by all concerned. Thanks to Scott and the participants for making the not-inconsiderable effort.
I find them individually interesting, but the sum total is a lot of time to catch up on, and I'm falling behind. The fact that they're all available on Google Docs, and I haven't bothered to read those, tells me that more of them appearing on ACX is probably a bit much.
Part of me almost wants to see Scott start a new side Substack (not paid) to put reader-submitted effortposts up, for things like the book review contests. Link new posts in each open thread, and split up the content thusly.
The subreddit might be the closest we have to something like that, maybe worth checking out.
I've liked several of the book reviews individually, but find the contest very tiring. It's been extended multiple times already, every book review includes the disclaimer about voting, and by the time the contest actually happens, I might've already forgotten my opinions about most of the reviews I've read.
Put differently, the voting system doesn't seem to work with such a long-running contest. If the contest were <2 weeks long and featured <8 reviews, I suppose one could then vote on the contestants with some confidence, but otherwise I suspect the voting process will be dominated by other distorting effects (like whichever review was the first / last to be featured on ACX).
I wouldn't mind seeing more guest book reviews in the future, I'd just prefer them to be more spread out and to not all involve the "call to action" of voting on them in the indeterminate future.
There was a reminder to take notes about your opinions. I didn't do it either.
This is a contest, not an obligation. Read the reviews and discuss them or not, as you please.
I could see having a separate substack for them.
I'm keeping a very brief note of my views on each review, but I agree with Nancy - don't feel obligated to do it. Pick your favourite and vote for that, or if you find "well X was my favourite but now Y is", go with Y. This is a fun activity for the hive-mind, not a serious task to be undertaken for the social weal.
I mostly agree but I'm also close to exhausted by it - having a five-article contest every 6-12 months would be a better place in terms of how much I'd enjoy reading without feeling overdone. Twenty in that period was interesting but a lot.
This. Scott, could you please move to mini-contests?
I agree. That would be much better.
I've mostly just skipped past the reviews.
I like the idea in theory (and considered writing a review), but ultimately I don't subscribe to a lot of blogs and I read ACX because of Scott's writing. They reviews are better than the average blog I see linked to, but I don't read the average blog. I feel the same way when Matt Yglesias's intern or one of Andrew Gelman's colleagues writes a post on their blogs.
Again, I don't mind that it's happening (it's not hard to delete the emails with book review contest in the title), but I'm not actually reading them.
No accounting for taste I guess.
I read a few, and they seem to have fallen into the same issue that a lot of rationalists do. It takes a very very good writer to keep his audience engaged after 2,000 words: as most people are not even good writers, sticking to clear, concise prose is almost always a winning move. The fact that Scott himself is a rare counterexample shouldn't confuse people who talk about statistics so often.
What's the deal with "objective" theories of value (like the labour theory of value)? What question is these theories supposed to answer? Are they fundamentally ethical, in that they say what the price *should* be, or what the "fair" or "just" price is? Or can they be used to make predictions about real prices, and if so how?
I always read the Labor Theory of Value as a desperation move when you don't have a clue what's going it (it is, after all, absolute garbage, and it's interesting to speculate what Marx would have written had he accepted the supply and demand model, which was pretty new at his time but out there).
Like phlogiston or élan vital - you have no idea, so you just make something up that sounds nice but that posterity will find completely stupid and pointless.
And LTV can be used to make predictions, it's just that those predictions (like how automation will cause poverty and that this increased poverty among the masses will inevitably lead to revolution) turn out to be completely and utterly wrong.
There is some debate about whether Marx actually believed in LTV, after all he never referred to his theories with those terms. It's possible that he merely used his theories to illustrate what was wrong with the economics of his time and not as an objective universal theory of value.
"Like phlogiston or élan vital - you have no idea, so you just make something up that sounds nice but that posterity will find completely stupid and pointless."
This is a really unfair description of phlogiston, and perhaps of elan vital as well. Phlogiston was a well-developed scientific theory that had gone through several rounds of revision to explain more and more phenomena. It's just that post-Lavoisier scientists didn't bother learning the theory, and so invented something stupid for it to mean.
They are not meant to make predictions about the monetary prices of goods and services, but they are not exactly ethical either. It's more that they are one of the axioms of an ethical theory, so they're used to construct an ethical theory, but aren't an ethical theory themselves.
So the ethical theory is that prices that are above the labor value is due to rent seeking (and therefor immoral)? It seems kind of circular to me then: why can't we just say that rent seeking is immoral without needing a labor theory of value?
I think that traditional economists don't consider "owning the means of production and receiving some of the value of what it produces" to be a form of rent seeking. We don't normally call a factory owner a rent-seeker. The capitalist adds value in the form of "making business decisions" or "assuming the risk" or something like that. The labor theory would disagree with that.
Yes, but *Marxists* seem to think that claiming a portion of the economic surplus based on owning some of the capital that went into producing it is illegitimate.
I would say this depends on how difficult it is to accumulate the capital if you start with having none.
If the situation is more like "anyone can put aside a part of their salary, and if you keep doing this for ten years, you too can build a factory -- much faster if you pool money with your friends", then taking the profit is fair. You had an alternative, but you decided to not wait those ten years, and instead used the money of someone else who did.
If the situation is more like "if you don't have capital, it is impossible to save money, because the salary barely covers your survival", then the capitalist is simply taking a reward for being born in a rich family. You have two classes -- those born with capital, and those born without -- with no way for the latter to join the former. That isn't fair.
Real life is somewhere in between, and it depends on who you are. It is easier to accumulate capital for a software developer than for a factory worker.
The part of "making business decision" is in theory independent from "providing the capital". The capitalist can hire a CEO, right?
Ethical implications are (normally) not used as an argument in favor of a theory of value, so they're not circular. A theory of value also doesn't say whether something is immoral, only if it's valuable. You can make an ethical theory that says "rent seeking is immoral", but people will ask you why you think that. By providing some (hopefully non-normative) axioms for your theory you can strengthen your theory and usually make it apply to a wider variety of cases. So if ethical implications aren't used to argue for a theory of value, what is? Mostly the usual philosophical suspects: internal consistency, doesn't clash with observations, intuitively plausible etc...
I think I get it now, thanks!
Glad I could help!
The idea that labor is an integral part of a good's value seems rather obvious to me. Does LTV assert that *only* labor has a legitimate claim to part of a good's value, and that capital has no legitimate claim?
In my understanding of LTV: Let's say that someone spends 50000 hours of socially necessary labor time (HSLTs) on building a machine that makes shoes, and this machine can make a million shoes before being worn down, for a HSLT of 0.05 per made shoe. Someone then spends 0.3 HSLT on making a shoe with help from the machine, using 0.1 HSLT of leather as input. The value of the shoe is then 0.3-0.1+0.05=0.25 HSLT. That the machine was "capital" and if a capitalist owned it or not doesn't really factor.
According to David Harvey:
Labor Theories of Value were generally accepted at the time. Adam Smith departing from them was an innovation (Smith thought labor might determine prices in technologically unsophisticated societies, but it doesn't once you end up with machines and wealth accumulation.) That's why Marx doesn't really go into or describe it much, it was considered an orthodoxy when he wrote, even if it isn't now.
Harvey also mentioned that even many Marxists no longer accepted it, but that he thought there was some truth to the idea in explaining durable relative price differences (why shoes cost more than shirts, in his words.)
I think, perhaps, the most charitable interpretation of the labor theory of value and surplus value is that it has a rhetorical function of arguing, within a Lockean idea of there being a just distribution of ownership, that the distribution of ownership that capitalism produces was not in fact just in terms of who produces what value.
I hadn't seen you here in a while and had gotten worried you'd been banned or self-exiled.
I once read an account in a history of economics book that made an objective theory of value seem reasonable under very specific circumstances (these circumstances happen to be those that people like Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus and friend were facing in their time).
The idea is that during those days, for all intents and purposes, labor supply was perfectly elastic, because so many people were moving from rural to urban areas. If you raised wages, more people would come to the city and depress those wages down. How far down? Basically, until the subsistence wage, w* . Now imagine, to simplify things, that labor is the only input in production and that each worker produces one unit. Then the cost if producing one unit is equal to w*. With this, you can add some notion of competition to argue that firms will charge p = w*. Charge more and no one buys from you, charge less and you loose money. The result: the price is equal to the cost of subsistence which is, arguably, an objective value.
This, of course, leaves lots of things unexplained (like the famous paradox of the value of water vs. diamonds), but as a first attempt towards a theory of value it doesn't strike me as particularly misguided, specially since the assumptions of the theory, i.e., infinitely elastic labor supply and a high participation of labor in production, seemed to be roughly true at the time.
The question it's trying to answer is obviously the value of goods and services. The LTV is supposed to establish the value of goods and services independent of a free market. Which gets to its point: if you can create an objective measure of value, you don't need a free market and central planning like Communism becomes possible.
In a prior thread someone brought up Tim Scott as a likely Republican nominee for 2024. I didn't know much about him at the time but I've been looking a bit more into him ever since.
Prediction: if Tim Scott is the 2024 nominee then we will see a quick but stealthy reversal of the trend that Scott noted in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/ ; we will be back to wall-to-wall religious wars again. At a vague guess, "Christians are responsible for violence against LGBT people" will be the leading narrative.
I hope so! At least the irrationality of explicitly religious conflict can be reasonably moderated by separation of church and state (in the U.S.). Not so much with Wokeism.
I feel like the left isnt going to give up on racial/gender issues so easily.
FWIW, the juxtaposition of two "Scott"s confused me about who had made the point in the linked article.
What is it that kids/teens find cool?
I've been thinking for a while the answer is probably agency: being able to make decisions for things you find important. I think culture in general is mostly people reacting rationally to the incentives that exist in society they grew up in, before age 25. I think it is 70% that and 30% other stuff. Thus I am biased to thinking that this question will be similar.
This question probably first entered my brain when I found it that in Japan people tend to dislike Bart for his troublemaking ways. But over here in North America, there was Bartmania. There is also a stereotype that being a good kid was cool immediately post war, but by the 60's that was seen as "square" and some kind of rule breaker has been cool since. I wondered what is different that changed that.
I have been thinking for a while now that the core thing is likely agency. You have none as a baby but are expected to get to the normal adult amount by age 18 or so. I suspect then that coolness comes from having more agency than those your age, and uncoolness from having less. Since starting this paragraph it has occurred to me that when I was in school a few kids were lame simply for having overbearing parents. There is also an episode of the Simpson where Bart is teaching Martin how to be cool and one of the lessons is that the potential for mischief varies inversely with one's proximity to the authority figure. I think that rule is coming very close to realizing that agency is the key thing.
I think this can explain why cool went from a good kid at the start of the post-war period to various kinds of rulebreaker. Parents and school stopped rewarding being a good kid with extra agency, mostly for the sake of fairness, while certain kinds of rule breaking have seen their punishments get weaker and/or inconsistently enforced. I think breaking a rule and getting away with it (or with a 'slap on the wrist') is an expression of agency. If you were a kid going to school when I did (90s and 2000s) rule breaking was the only way to have more agency than your peers. I think that is why the culture has shifted to one where troublemakers are generally cool.
To be clear, not all troublemaking is cool. It has to be the kind where you get away with it. For Bart, it seemed like making jokes in class or talking back to the teacher often got nothing more than his name said in a harsh tone. The adult isn't stopping him, so this displays more agency than he should have, so he is cool. When I was a teen, weed served a similar purpose. It was something you can do than was unlikely to get you in trouble but still counted as breaking a rule. Since Canada has legalized marijuana, weed use amongst teens has halved: it no longer makes you cool.
Another big example is in Scott's Review of [On the Road](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/) from 2014. I recently read this the first time a week ago, which has brought this topic back onto my mind. To summarize the relevant part of this book and review: the main character is a causes major problems for everyone, always gets away with it, is seen by a messiah for it by the narrator, and Scott really dislikes them both for it. I think the many people would think the main character was cool. The Wikipedia article suggests that was the reception. The book is listed as a defining work for two cultural movements.
I wonder if we wanted to change this so being a good kid, tries in school; kind to others; follows the rules, to be cool again we'd have to change the incentives so that these kids get more agency again. Once, and only once, I got to leave elementary school 15 minutes early because I had been good that day where the class as a whole was worse than usual. Would making small but desirable privileges like that a common thing be able to shift the culture back? Based on my theory that coolness is to do with agency, I think it would. I think a lot of punishments would have to become stricter as well. Having rules that aren't enforced or have punishments that are easily ignored would keep the incentives against this shit strong.
Has anybody examined this? Or is there a better idea on what 'coolness' is that I haven't heard of? Also, I mentioned at the start that in Japan Bart was not seen as cool like he was in North America. If there are some people who grew up in Japan reading this, was good behavior rewarded as a child? Does it seem like American kids could get away with more at school than you could. Bart Simpson often wasn't too far off from what some kids could get away with in school.
It's an interesting question how to shape what "cool" means.
I think there is an additional aspect of being cool in puberty: that there is an outgroup which is not cool. This seems to be important for identity-finding. Often, this is parents or teachers, so cool things are things which are disliked by the adults. It can also be other peer groups at school, or in society. But generally, if adults try to shape what is cool, that could backfire.
> But generally, if adults try to shape what is cool, that could backfire.
I'm aware that adults trying to make specific things cool can backfire. There is an episode of South Park (Chinpokomon) where the adults intentionally use this to kill a trend they don't like.
I think trying to shape it by changing the incentives could be indirect enough to avoid that problem. It could also be the case that since in our current environment being a troublemaker is cool then authority figures become uncool. This is getting pretty speculative on my end.
Conspicuous disregard for another group's values is cool because it signals a degree of independence from them. Makes sense for teens to play that game with authority figures.
I think one of the things you’re dropping is that physical attractiveness is a necessary condition. Bart can perhaps get away without it because he’s a cartoon character, but I can’t think of a single person I’ve gone to school with who was cool but not attractive.
Also, I suspect that having agency is actually also just a US thing. Rather, I might claim it’s fulfillment of cultural ideals. In the US (or at least the white American culture I’m familiar with) that tends to be rugged individualism, athleticism, and raw charisma. If you look at it as just fulfillment of culture, it makes a lot of sense why “good kids” would be cool post WW2 (the nation had just come together, lots of people were in the military, etc.), why “squares” were uncool (all the young people were doing social justice stuff, which definitely did not conform with authority figures), and why we have the definition we have now.
I think physical attractiveness helps. It helps a lot. But it is not necessary or sufficient. There were a couple ugly people in the "coolest clique" at the two highschools I went to. Likewise there were some unpopular attractive people. For the second tier of coolest kids, attractiveness was less important still.
Plus, even if it just attractiveness, which I know isn't what you're saying, why isn't the behavior of the attractive people a random sampling of the behaviors seen in school. In my school experience the attractive people were mostly acting with a lot of agency. They were unaffected affecters as the user meta put it. Those that did not were the ones who were uncool despite the advantage their attractiveness provided.
I appreciate the focus on agency in your theory, but the connection to "cool" seems tenuous to me. Agency is more likely to predict who is going to develop the next great startup than who's going to win the popularity contest in high school.
First, you do need to define cool. I'm assuming you mean cool in the high school sense of the "cool kids" as defined by perception of cool by the peer group. In this case, we need to disregard what adults consider cool, or what is popular in media (Sheldon from Big Bang Theory is popular and has agency and a certain coolness, but it wouldn't get him too far as a kid in an average high school). Think about the "precocious kid". Often, that's the kid with the most agency, but usually not the most coolness in the eyes of peers.
Next, we'd need to define agency. There's agency vis-a-vis parents, and agency vis-a-vis society. In a high school environment, kids have their own complex culture and social rules entirely detached from the "home life". Other kids don't really care about a given kid's agency as related to her home life. What Kimmy thinks of Jenny is way more important than what Mrs. Kline thinks of her daughter.
The coolness status is based on the social dynamic between kids and kid groups. In such an environment, too much agency can be a hurdle in the popularity contest. Like in most societies, avoiding playing by the social rules leads to some kind of punitive response. Most cool kids are good at exhibiting desired social signaling with a small dose of signaling of agency (and not the other way around). Unfortunately, Ferris Bueller is a rare outlier. And he's not even real.
In general, I think that the "kids defined by rebellion against parents" narrative is overrated. Kids don't care about parents. They care about other kids. There's a ton of complexity in what defines kid culture. Contemporary Media is a huge piece of it, but also a chaos theory of viral trends plays into it. Generational conflicts can play a role, but I don't think it would rank as primary/defining.
I just realized that I left out the agency category in regard to institutions. I would say that the social culture of kids is so strong that even the agency vis-a-vis school is mostly drowned out. It's just not that big a priority compared with who made out with whom. Which is wild, considering that the institutions are the setting for a significant majority of the kids' lives. As a result, you can have cool kids who do well in school and cool kids who barely pass. Outside of outlier school environments (competitive private schools), it really doesn't matter.
Introspection tells me I find a kind of Casual Forcefulness cool. Being an unaffected affecter. Does sound a whole lot like agency.
I don't think we should get distracted by the word "cool" here; the question "What do kids find cool?" is just a specific case of the question "What do humans find high-status?" It's a special case, and that's largely because children don't have access to most of the ways of being high-status (kids don't have important jobs or high salaries) so they need to rely more heavily on basics like looks and behaviour.
Certainly it can be high status to demonstrate power over the forces that cow most children by breaking rules and getting away with it; this has pretty terrible consequences since (as more aware children will realise) many of these rules exist for very good reasons. Any adult who took up smoking as a teenager to seem cool will probably regret it by now.
One thing that might actually be useful is more pointless rules. School uniforms, for instance, give kids a whole set of rules that they can visibly disobey without doing themselves any actual harm.
But if the thrust of the overall comment is "Can we prevent kids from breaking rules by punishing them more predictably and more severely" then I'd say yes, we definitely can, though I'm not sure to what extent this is actually mediated by coolness.
> Any adult who took up smoking as a teenager to seem cool will probably regret it by now.
This is a solid example.
I notice that of the people in the highest status clique in highschool, a disproportionate amount have crappy adult lives. They disproportionately transitioned to harder drugs. They disproportionately have abusive relationships with drugs and alcohol. They disproportionately have trouble keeping a job. They disproportionately lost custody of their kids.
They kept doing the specific behaviors that made them cool as a teen and carried them into adult life. The difference is that adult life rewards and punishes these behaviors very differently from how school does. So while these behaviors led to high status in their teens led to low status in adulthood. In retrospect, I think to some degree the changes I talked about reduce that gap.
> But if the thrust of the overall comment is "Can we prevent kids from breaking rules by punishing them more predictably and more severely"
I think that is part of it. I think I talked about punishment more than reward which would make it seem like I consider it more important. I do think adding reward is more important. Maybe it would help if I mentioned some rewards for good behavior schools could (re)introduce:
* being able to leave class early if you are done your work
* choosing where you sit while everyone else has assigned seating
* choosing who to work with on group work while everyone else is assigned, or getting to choose first before making it a free-for-all
* being allowed to get up and go to the bathroom without needing to ask permission first
* being allowed to have food or a drink at your desk
* to end with a bold one, which should be hard to earn if it is offered: being granted a small number of classes you can skip consequence free as long as you provide advance notice
Again, I think rewarding positive behavior with perks that allow students greater agency than their peers is more important that just clamping down on the gaps in enforcement.
> I don't think we should get distracted by the word "cool" here
Thanks. I was surprised by this. I though, if anything, that people would take issue with what I meant by good behavior. I think the definition I gave in my original post isn't very good. I'd like to replace it with "either socially constructive behavior or behavior that sets themselves up for success in adulthood".
Basically I want to know if there is anything we as adults can change about the system to make those two behaviors cool for kids. Currently I think rewarding them with increased agency stands the best chance of working.
I think that you hit the nail on the head with agency as the central ingredient. And I think the cultural reason is that in the west we tend to provide children with a sheltered upbringing that denies them any responsibility and agency. I think that if we could give young people more responsibilities and opportunities to prove their worth to society, they would not need to rebel in order to achieve agency and thus rule-breaking would become less cool.
I recently read Scott's book review of (On the Road)[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/]. There is a key quote I want to talk about:
> But On The Road is, most importantly, a picture of a high-trust society collapsing. And it’s collapsing precisely because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour.
Since reading this I've been wondering a few things: do high-trust societies have mechanisms to protect themselves from people who will exploit this trust? If so, what are they and why did they not work in the US (and I think it Canada as well)? If not, are high trust societies doomed to rot from the inside after a few generations?
Also: do we have any ideas on how societies become high trust societies in the first place?
That's the million dollar question. I think there's no clear answer. This paper speculates that trust in Scandinavian countries become high during the viking age or even earlier: https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/haechi/2018_001.html
*Building* a high-trust society is much harder than maintaining one. What we seem to have is, as near as I can tell,
1. Adopt and sincerely believe a religion that tells people an omniscient deity is watching and will punish them most hellaciously if they betray people's trust, or
2. Have your society conquered by the British Empire, which will, import honest British civil servants to run the place, and spend a century or so training promising and trustworthy locals to fill out that civil service. Then the Brits get bored or frustrated with it all and go home.
3. We're still looking for this one. So if you've inherited a high-trust society and not currently ruled by true believers and/or British imperialists, do try not to break it.
I know nothing about history, but this seems a little too pessimistic. If David Friedman could write Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, could it really be impossible to write High Trust Societies Very Different From Ours?
I would very much like to read that book, and hope it is chock full of obscure but useful examples.
In the meantime, Scott's review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/
Wait, has 2 *ever* worked? I don't think of Israel, India, South Africa, etc. as high trust societies. I think of Sweden, Japan, Singapore (I guess that's a former British colony), among others.
Once in a while we do!
Looking through this list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_that_have_gained_independence_from_the_United_Kingdom has me thinking that 2 doesn't work very well. The only country that jumps out at me (other than Singapore) is Hong Kong.
The cases of Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea suggest that "Be a small country in a geopolitically important location and your bloc will move heaven and earth to turn you into a high-trust economic powerhouse".
Thinking further, that didn't work out too well for East Germany, North Korea, etc, so perhaps we should add that you should have been on the right side of the cold war.
Communism doesn't exactly promote high trust.
I can't find a good metric for social trust per se, but if we take Transparency Internationa's "Corruption Perceptions Index" - https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/nzl - the forty-two former British Colonies, Protectorates, and Mandates that were under British control for at least fifty years have an average score of 49.0, compared to a global average of 43.3 (higher is better, standard deviation 18.9)
10 out of 42 have a score at least a full standard deviation above the mean, with only two (Zimbabwe and Sudan) coming in 1SD below the mean. Of the ten most honest former colonies, six* have had majority-nonwhite populations all along, so it isn't just a matter of the British swarming the territory with high-trust Europeans and crowding out the natives.
Looking at it from the opposite direction, of the 31 nations that TI scores at least 1SD above average, I get twelve that were ruled by the British for at least 50 years (including Actual Britain), sixteen more whose people mostly followed Abrahamic faiths for the past 500 years, and three outliers - Taiwan, Japan, and Bhutan. What can we learn from the last three?
* Singapore, Hong Kong, UAE, Seychelles, Barbados, and Bahamas.
Humans seem to be naturally tribal, and form corrupt, low trust societies. You only trust people in your extended family or tribe. The Catholic church (for who knows what reason) forbade cousin marriages from the middle ages until about 1500. This caused large extended families and tribes to get broken up and perhaps led to nuclear families. Still, the Catholic church was very corrupt. This lead to the Protestant Reformation -- basically an anti corruption movement. The Protestant Reformation was in north west Europe, and it seems that the Protestant countries of Europe (and some places colonized by them) are generally the most high trust, low corruption countries. Catholic counties tend to be more corrupt than Protestant countries. Eastern Orthodox countries more corrupt still. Muslim countries even more corrupt.
"The Catholic church (for who knows what reason) forbade cousin marriages from the middle ages until about 1500."
For who knows what reason? GOOD JOB WE HAVE AN ENCYLOPAEDIA ENTRY ON THAT VERY POINT! 😁 https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04264a.htm
You still have to get a dispensation from the bishop even today if you want to marry your first cousin or near relations, so it didn't just stop in 1500. An aunt of mine had to get such a dispensation when she wanted to marry a cousin.
I've read some push-back on that theory. Common Law marriages were an alternative to marriage by a priest for regular folks, and Roman law had already prohibited marriages within certain degrees of consanguinity and served as the ancestor for most medieval legal systems on the continent. The people most affected by it were the aristocracy, who could and did also pay for dispensations.
As for why they did it, they had a big material reason for doing so. People who balked at marriage were more likely to donate their money upon death to the Church, and they could collect dispensation payments to waive the rule.
If I speculate, I would guess that high-trust societies were local: People knew that they would live in the same village for generations and that reputation was long-lasting (even inherited). Culture developed based on this. But then industrialization (interstates, banking, telephones etc.) de-localized life ad the old culture didn't work anymore.
Cultural homogeneity is probably key. How can you enforce social norms if everyone has different norms? Japan is a high trust society, and they aggressively limit immigration and they punish social devience. I think collectivist societies have stronger mechanism for punishing those who exploit trust. The more you depend on others, the more you have to play by the rules of the group.
Cultural homogeneity seems necessary but not sufficient.
Singapore is high trust but very much *not* culturally homogeneous.
How high trust were they pre-independence? AIUI they implemented some rather coercive post-independence policies (e.g. forced housing integration) designed to defuse tensions that might result from heterogeneity.
Canada is also higher-trust than any other country I've lived in (UK, India, family/friends in USA and France), and is the last culturally homogenous of these. It's a stereotype, but I never locked my doors when I lived in Canada, and can feel my trust in strangers ebbing away the longer I live in the UK.
Interesting point, might disprove me.
On the other hand, I question whether Singapore is all that culturally non-homogeneous. It's certainly racially non-homogeneous, and I know that in the west people tend to use one as a euphemism for the other, but I'm wondering how deep the inhomogeneity really goes. (Disclaimer: I've been to Singapore three times, but for a grand total of about two weeks, so I don't really claim any deep understanding of the society.)
If you look at languages, it's 36% Mandarin, 30% English, 12% Malay, 8% Hokkien, 4% Cantonese, 3% Tamil, 3% Teochew, and 3% Other. If you look at religions, it's 33% Buddhist, 19% Christian, 19% Atheist/Non-religious, 14% Muslim, 10% Taoist, 5% Hindu. There are surely aspects of shared culture separate from language and religion (a love for the taste of durian and a hate for its smell; the shared ideology of standing on the right and walking on the left on the escalators in the MRT; etc). But basically anywhere else in the world, we would count this sort of racial, linguistic, and religious diversity as the definition of cultural non-homogeneity. It would be really interesting if we could find a more relevant definition of "culture" that gets the trust high even when languages, religions, and races differ this much!
Wish I had a link but the economist Noah Smith, who lived there a while, considers Japan to be a low-trust society. It's at least not obvious that Japan is a high-trust society.
I can't find anything supporting this via Google. Even if you don't have the link, can you remember where you read it? On his blog?
You want to read Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneider (I'm sure that's spelled wrong).
High trust societies form when people who cooperate significantly and visibly outcompete people who defect. Not every time, but enough that the pattern is obvious. There's any number of ways this can be accomplished or break down, not all of which are dominated by one political faction or another. Powerful business, for example, tend to break down trust because they can use their power to become successful despite defecting. But likewise countercultural groups that are popular on the left can do the same.
To eliminate or reduce a behavior, it must be punished. In modern society, the punishment is typically taken away from the hands of individuals, and must be addressed using the law.
One problem is that the law is slow to adapt. When someone invents a new form of bad behavior, it is no longer enough that a group of neighbors agree that "this guy is obviously hurting us"; it will take years or decades until the bad behavior is addressed by a new law. (The new bad behavior might be a modification of an already illegal behavior that avoids the legal definition because of some technicality.)
Another problem is that applying the law is costly, and therefore the law does not concern itself with trivialities. Doing the same triviality over and over again for thousand times may drive your neighbors crazy, but from the point of the law nothing happened.
This is a tradeoff. If you allow individuals to punish people who (from the perspective of the law) merely annoy them, you get a society with less creative evil, but probably with all kinds of prejudice and discrimination.
>it will take years or decades until the bad behavior is addressed by a new law.
In a low-trust society, the bad behavior will probably *never* be addressed by a new law, because the miscreants will bribe the police and courts to ignore whatever law you pass. If you're looking for a bright, clear dividing line between high-trust and low-trust societies, it's "can you reasonably expect to bribe a policeman to let you break the law?".
I would have read this the other way, societies that have highly structured rule-making and enforcement down to very fine-grained details (like HOA communities) being low-trust.
Thank you so much for pointing to this review! I missed it the first time around.
That is a bizarre, but interesting, take on On the Road. Few of the characters in On the Road exist in a high-trust society. The main character is a reform school kid whose father was a jailbird. Most of the characters are criminals or junkies or both from the start.
The criminals and junkies are portrayed romantically or comically (Dean shuffles his feet like Groucho Marx). They are conmen but these guys aren't Bernie Madoff or Jeffrey Epstein conning the faculty of MIT, they are conning drunks in bars and poolhalls, mostly hanging out with the exact sort of drug-using, high-discount-rate, low-trust people they are, the kind of people who have always existed in the American landscape.
The novel is interesting because the point of view is so original and because the prose is so lyrical. As in works by, say, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller or The Marx Brothers, up is down and down is up, in the sense that you are meant to root for the thieves, drunks and rapists. It is a novel, after all, by which I mean it is the sort of story, unlike a journalistic one, which tells you that the world is not what it seems.
That Scott refers to the narrator as "Jack Kerouac" instead of "Sal Paradise" indicates he interprets On the Road as a work of non-fiction instead of as a novel.
This novel doesn't have anything to say about the collapse of a high-trust society, or at least no more to say about it than The Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers or a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon (works of American culture in which the viewer also tends to root for the cheaters and thieves).
The wikipedia page makes it seem that the characters are all direct analogs to a real life person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road#Characters
Wikipedia also provides a quote from the author which implies he thought most characters weren't changed too much from the real person.
I don't doubt there's a lot of truth in both of those statements, yet that doesn't change the nature of the book from experimental art into a work of journalism.
I suggest the best way to read On the Road is to think of Sal Paradise as Don Quixote. Or just reread Scott's review imagining the narrator as Don Quixote. Of course the interpretations of the narrator are false. There may be a 1-to-1 analogue of Dean Moriarty to Neil Cassidy in the sense there is a 1-to-1 analogue of giants to windmills in Cervantes' great work, but does that does not mean the windmills are giants or that the author (as opposed to the narrator) thinks they are.
Scott's comic description of the novel is great, and--in fact--spot on. It's a funny novel, much like say, Rabelais' Gargantua. The protagonist is horrible yet somehow lovable in spite of it all. It's dark comedy.
So I've said that Scott's conclusion about the novel (that it is a picture of a high-trust society turning into a low-trust society) couldn't be more wrong, yet his description of it (as a comic noir) couldn't be more right. What I need to add for that to make entire sense is that Scott maps (in a mathematical sense) Kerouac's romantic tone to a comic tone, and it lands. Not that there's no comic tone in the original (it's all there but subtle), but Scott translates it into a denser comic space, boldening the humor.
I remember the original thread (because I'm so damn old...) and I think people hit it on the head pretty well in the comments then.
Antisocial drifters who show up, cause trouble and run off before said trouble can catch up to them are a problem at least as old as civilization itself. Cheap cars and the highway network changed the speed of running off and thus the certainty of escaping pursuit, so that the old mechanisms of dealing with anonymous drifters were overwhelmed. Now, thanks to the internet, it seems like things may have swung back the other way and while the norms people are trying to enforce don't seem quite as neighborly one could imagine that if those technologies had developed in the reverse order things might have turned out differently.
That said, I don't think you can put the collapse of American society entirely at Jack Kerouac's feet. He certainly wasn't helping matters, but between technological changes incentivizing antisocial behavior and a concerted High Modernist push to undermine traditional norms in favor of 'scientific' central planning the writing was on the wall.
When is it OK to challenge someone’s beliefs?
https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/when-is-it-ok-to-challenge-someones
The word "OK" is under-defined here.
Do you mean "morally acceptable", or "socially acceptable" or "actually a good use of your time"?
Morally acceptable.
I think "actually a good use of your time" is probably the first place to start. It's likely usually morally better not to start an argument unless someone's actually going to develop in some way as a result.
An important dimension here is level of belief. For example, should I be engaged in casual conversation with an acquaintance, I'm not going to (intentionally) challenge his worldview-level beliefs, but I might challenge lower level beliefs, like "bureaucracies can/should be trusted to run themselves", or "real analysis is better than complex analysis".
> level of belief
Important clarification: This makes it seem like epistemic status is the crucial piece, whereas the rest of your comment implies that the centrality of a belief to one's worldview is actually the crucial piece.
It's generally considered inappropriate to try to suddenly convert people to $YOUR_RELIGION.
New York stopped requiring students to wear masks in class last week, then another part of New York sneeringly overruled the first part and decided that no, students DO still have to wear masks during school. My question is about social media.
My wife is a member of a Facebook moms group specific to our town. Shit EXPLODED. Dozens of moms (literally dozens - multiples of twelve. Of moms) posted screaming curse filled rants against the reinstatement of a mask mandate that had been lifted for an entire weekend. Many threatened the school board and particularly the superintendent that they would organize and withhold taxes or something if the school followed the requirements of the DOE, and that they were sending they’re sending their children to school maskless so fuck you. Other people screamed back at them, calling them ignorant garbage and telling them to stop literally murdering people by suggesting they would not mask their kids in the future.
Some moms screamingly compared the lifting then reinstating of the mask requirement to Nazi camps. The Jewish mom screamed that those moms were evil moronic f*cks that should have horrible things happen to them. And so on and so on. Scream-response scream.
At one point a few nearby towns said “fuck it” and told their students they could come in without a mask anyway. Then they took it back when Cuomo threatened to have them all shot. You can imagine the howls during that period.
All this and more went on for days. It’s probably still going on; my wife left the group because it got so nasty.
I’m not on social media. I’m not really capturing how awful and unhinged everyone was - I wish I’d written down some of the posts to use as examples - but those of you who are on FB or Twitter can fill in the blanks. My question is: don’t these people have to meet each other in person? Often? Don’t some of their kids play together? Don’t they talk to the superintendent at some point? It’s not anonymous. You’ll know exactly who the person is who called you an ignorant shit in front of hundreds of people. We all know the name of the mom who called people who don’t put their kids in masks “cunts”. What happens in real life after these blow ups? Isn’t there SOME kind of impact to real life relationships for bad behavior online? I’m completely at sea here.
Guessing they were semi-aware of consequences, but felt righteous enough to let emotion take the wheel. Victimhood is one hell of a drug. Especially with one's kids involved.
It’s hard and possibly dangerous to confront someone in real life, especially over “which side is murdering children?” You might not see a blow up, but I would expect the group to socially split by not inviting each other to events, not talking etc
The problem is that the classrooms do not automatically split the same way.
If we could somehow magically make two copies of each school, and say "everyone who wears the mask goes to school A, everyone who doesn't goes to school B", all moms could be happy -- they would believe the other group to be idiots, but the kind of idiots who don't endanger my children, so who cares.
That sounds like it would be difficult, but maybe. What messes me up, though, is there wasn’t an equivalent to this when I was in school. There were issues that divided up the community, sure, but dozens of moms swearing at each other just wasn’t even close to a thing. I don’t understand how the district can function like this, and it bothers me that I don’t understand. :)
My kids are leaving the district to go to Catholic school, but I don’t see any particular reason why things would be different there. How do you all keep from shooting each other when you finally meet in real life? I’m not on social media, but I’m not sure I would quickly forgive people cursing me out in any context.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
> My question is: don’t these people have to meet each other in person? Often?
That's a question only you can answer, but I suspect that they don't.
I grew up as the internet was only just getting wound up, so I didn't have to deal with social media drama as a kid, but the moms in my suburban neighborhood were almost entirely isolated into mutually-exclusive cliques of 3-5 catty middle-aged women. They might see each other infrequently in church / synagogue or at the PTA provided they attended either, but it was easy for them to avoid each other the rest of the time. I suspect that Facebook hasn't changed that much: if my experience is a guide, these are likely women who are acquaintances at best.
I was hanging out with some friends recently. Somehow the topic of standardized tests came up. I lamented that colleges are starting to ignore SAT scores for reasons of "equity."
The friends I was talking to, surprisingly, both said that standardized tests are useless and don't tell you anything. And they said that rich people can afford tutors for their kids so it just means you can "buy" higher scores. I doubt many people here agree with that point of view, but I'm curious if anyone does (and what evidence they have.)
I'm sensitive (and biased) about the issue because I grew up in a small town with bad schools. I also got crappy grades (i'd like to have an excuse for it, but mostly: I was lazy). The fact that I got good test scores was the only reason I got into a decent college. And I was able to do well in the years since.
I wondered if the current (what I call) attack on standardized tests comes from people in the opposite position I was in. The current "critique" of the media is that it's a bunch of upper-class white kids that went to exclusive schools that now run our news rooms.
What if those people were the mirror of me: good schools, good grades, low test scores (relatively, anyway). Wouldn't those people have a "stake" in downplaying the importance of these tests? Like, "How can I be part of the intellectual elite if I only got 1200 on the SAT? It must be the tests that are wrong!"
What do you all think?
We discussed this at length on DSL recently, at https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,3479
Also on Scott Aaronson's blog: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4816
And Freddie de Boer: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-at-the-sats
Standardized tests are a reasonably good predictor of academic performance. Money can buy you a few points, *maybe* enough to get you into a top school in marginal cases but it doesn't fill those schools with the privileged elite and crowd out everyone else. But money absolutely does buy your way into prime extracurricular activities and whatever else is going to be used in place of standardized testing. For smart kids from poor schools, standardized testing is their best shot for getting into a good college - even if they did get good grades, because nobody trusts good grades from a poor school.
Nonetheless, the prevailing media and public narrative is what you describe your friends as believing, and it does seem to constitute an attack on standardized testing. A successful one to the extent that the entire UC system is planning to do away with standardized testing.
The result of this is that professors and college administrators will have much more power to arbitrarily decide who goes to what school. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's a strong demographic and cultural overlap between them and the reporters and thought leaders selling the "standardized tests have got to go" narrative. They can admit more of the right sort of people (i.e. people like them), and more of whatever underprivileged oppressed group they want to help, and much less of the Wrong Sort of People that they are presently stuck having admit because they keep acing the SATs. And if anyone criticizes them for this, they point to the currently-popular oppressed group that they are helping and asking what sort of bigot wants to use an obsolete bureaucratic ritual to throw these nice underprivileged kids out of school. You don't want to look like a bigot, do you?
The biggest losers will probably be the homeschooled. Other losers, probably Asians, possibly Jewish kids, probably smart white-trash kids who didn't go to the right schools or do the right extracurriculars, possibly nerdy kids in general.
That'll be some nice afternoon reading, thanks!
> Money can buy you a few points...
The strange thing about this: wouldn't private tutoring also be able to "buy" a few GPA points, too? I mean, just having someone proof-read a paper before submission (I would think) would have substantive effect.
> Other losers... probably smart white-trash kids who didn't go to the right schools or do the right extracurriculars
That was me. I guess that's the reason I care about this issue.
Same, got a ceiling score on my SAT from about $100 worth of study books, ended up going to a top school, and now work at a FAANG.
Also was a national/international finalist of one of the big science fairs and had a personal coding project that made a few thousand dollars in ad revenue before college, so my test scores weren't the only thing I had, but where I grew up there weren't many opportunities to do impressive/upper-class extracurriculars, and AP Calc BC was as far as things went on the honors track.
The way I see it, standardized testing as a major part of admission allows for elite residential college to serve a purpose as a finishing school for high-potential lower-class strivers who otherwise would never have any exposure to the connections that make high-paying jobs easier to find.
And the studies are clear -- what school you go to doesn't really matter... as long as you're already immersed in that upper-class culture growing up (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-matter-where-you-go-college/577816/). We owe it to those who aren't born into that culture to not shut out their opportunities to ascend in social class without having to answer to arbitrary gatekeepers that, in practice, will end up excluding them from these opportunities altogether.
I don't think grinds drag your grades up a whole lot, but even a modest increase can help and result in higher points on the final exam. Grinds, from my limited experience, are more about "Susie is weak in biology, she needs extra help there" than "Johnny is a perpetual F student, can we bump him up to at least C?"
Grinds are a handy earner for teaching graduates who might not have a job yet, or college students looking to earn a few bob before the big exams. There are also dedicated grind schools, who do 'repeat years' (i.e. if you failed or simply didn't get enough points when you sat the Leaving Cert for the course you wanted, you repeat the year, sit the exam again, and hope you get the points this time) but they are an addition to, rather than a replacement for, the ordinary school system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinds
"But money absolutely does buy your way into prime extracurricular activities and whatever else is going to be used in place of standardized testing."
From what I've read about American university entrance procedures, this seems correct. Along with whatever grades are necessary for the particular course, you need to show 'leadership' and 'service to the community' and whatever the popular shibboleths of the day are, so if you don't have a tidy life story of "me and my sixteen siblings who lived in an orange crate were encouraged by my parents, who died of black-lung and phossy jaw when I was nine, to study hard at school but also to give back to our community, which is where I developed my interest in street busking performing protest songs, graffiti art painting rainbows everywhere for Pride Month, and helping three-legged puppies over stiles" to appeal to the administrator responsible for juggling this year's admissions demographics so they hit the targets, will instead have a raft of such extracurriculars crafted to appeal ("forget building houses for the poor in Honduras, now they want saving rare yams eaten by one tribe in Botswana!")
Jebus, ‘phossy jaw’. Had never heard of that one. Didn’t even think it was real till I read the Wikipedia article.
I understand your cynicism but I still feel good about the kid that was accepted at an Ivy on the basis of a letter of recommendation from his high school janitor.
It's heart-warming and I like the story, but again my hard cold heart asks "and how many parents, hearing that story, got their kids to get letters of recommendation from janitors, catering assistants, etc."?
Also phossy jaw - the fruits of reading a ton of 19th century fiction and the reading up on 'what the heck was that all about?' which that necessitated. 😁
The past was horrible, in many ways, which is why I am - to carry over from our education book review thread - sceptical about "let kids learn from adults in the everyday world like they used to, apprenticed to work or learning from their parents while helping them work". Yeah, I'm thinking that the people recommending that don't have in mind "working in cotton mills and losing fingers" or "mud larks".
Yes the past was horrible. The present needs some work too.
I also understand your point about let the kids learn with the adults. I spent my 20’s working with some nine fingered millwrights.
I can’t get to the “This all just maya” and none of it matters state of mind either. I’ve been practicing Theravada mediation for a few years, but the ultimate nature of reality continues to elude me.
I’m beginning to fear that I may have to settle for being able to make tailgaters burst into flame.
Twenties is reasonable age to start working with sharp buzzy things 😀 But the good old days when kids could start work at age four in the cotton mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule_scavenger, until bleeding hearts introduced the likes of the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_Morals_of_Apprentices_Act_1802
Well, it wasn't all an idyll of kids toddling round on the farm helping Mama churn butter and Papa herd sheep, then industriously teaching themselves to read and write by the fireside.
And yes, I had to Google mudlarks too. :)
I perhaps should update my references? I begin to feel like Drusilla in season two of "Angel":
Drusilla:
I saw you coming, my lovely. The moon showed me. It told me to come into the twentieth century.
Angel:
It's the twenty-first century, Dru.
Drusilla:
Hmm, I'm still lagging.
Do you? This sounds like the kind of arbitrary, capricious decision that is everything that's wrong with the whole "holistic admissions" system.
I mean, good work by the student who correctly figured out that giving the admissions officer an opportunity to write a self-congratulatory LinkedIn post (or the higher-status equivalent of this, a New York Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/opinion/check-this-box-if-youre-a-good-person.html ) was a sure-fire ticket to admission (one time only), but it doesn't scale.
I feel bad for all the borderline-literate high school janitors in the US who are currently being pestered for letters of recommendation by students trying to repeat this particular stunt.
Yes I do feel good about it. Partly because there are so few contemporary stories to feel good about.
I’ve run into some pretty sharp janitors too. I’m sure you don’t think that they are all barely literate. We can’t generalize about cognitive skills based on occupation. Hell, we just had a president that would fall into the category of barely literate
But then I can enjoy watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” every couple years too. I guess I’ve become pessimism saturated and will take my pleasures where I can.
I ran into this a couple jobs back, where the senior management couldn't wrap their well-educated brains around the idea that their Colombian immigrant "Janitor" owned a building services company with dozens of clients and far wealthier than they, and the Only reason he was personally in our building was that we were small and not worth it for him to send a crew, and that any additional work would indeed cost them money.
Their two-faced racism towards him and his crew was a shock at the time. Now I've determined it to be "routine"
I feel good about it the first time it happens, because it shows the "holistic" admissions system is capable of actually being such, of acting on evidence that doesn't correspond to entries on the unwritten bingo card, and because it means the UMC-liberal bubble isn't completely locking out other views.
As you note, if it leads to "get a janitor to write you a letter of recommendation" becoming a box on the Admissions Bingo card, that will be a loss.
Motherf*cker! Janitor at my school was literally my high school job. It never even occurred to me to use it as an admissions strategy.
>Also on Scott Aaronson's blog:
I noticed he was very ready to blame everything on Trump, even though it's blatantly obvious that giving up the SAT is a way to bring in more minorities in a way which would be anathema to Trump supporters.
I think the basic version of the counter point is that yes, standardized tests correlate with wealth, but most other factors are much more highly correlated with wealth, making standardized tests an unusually good way for underprivileged kids to get into good school. Which is true at the same time the correlation between higher scores and wealth is true. So this takes something like two chunks of information to reason about instead of just one, which make it totally unsuitable for a bumper-sticker style policy position, hence the argument you were having.
This is definitely a political topic. Up-front problems with standardised tests:
(1) "Teaching to the test", that is, schooling becomes all about passing the final exam, so the students are, if able, given a list of 'model' answers to copy and reproduce on the final exam, and if less able, are spoon-fed pre-digested pap. Nobody bothers to read the texts, they copy the answers out of the various notes that online and dead-tree educational publishers provide.
(2) It's not fair to judge an entire X years of learning on a (one day/two day/two weeks/however long the standard exams in your country take) final test that is inevitably stressful and doesn't examine the student's grasp of the subject, just how well they can parrot off the 'model answers'
(3) The objections above about tutoring and grinds
All that being said, yeah, and so what? Standardised tests are perhaps a poor metric, but they're one of the best we've got. Assessment on projects and work done over the year(s) also needs a standard of assessment, where there is a national qualification and inspectors that visit schools to check the students' work, else you get teachers assessing their own students, being pressurised by the administration/parents to give little Johnny A+ when he didn't deserve it, etc.
Our final year exam is the Leaving Certificate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_Certificate_(Ireland) It's taking place now, and we're getting what is traditionally called "Leaving Cert weather" - when the students are all indoors doing the two exams (one for Junior Cert, 15-16 year old students, and one for Leaving Cert, for 17-18 year olds) then we get the good summer weather in June. Here's this year's timetable: https://www.schooldays.ie/articles/Leaving-Certificate-examination-timetable-2021
University entrance exams used to be the Matriculation which you sat separately and were set by each university. Now the Leaving Cert results are accepted in place of that.
Because we have three versions of the Leaving Cert now (the traditional heavily academic one, the Vocational Programme one which includes a focus on preparation for work https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/state_examinations/leaving_certificate_vocational_programme.html and the Leaving Cert Applied which is least academic and heavily oriented towards practical subjects https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/state_examinations/leaving_certificate_applied.html), we don't (yet) have the same outcry about standardised testing.
However, some of that *is* here already, with recommendations about coursework assessment over the year rather than one final exam. Because we are still such a majority white country, the racial (rather than socio-economic class) angle hasn't been played up yet, but with our demographics changing I have no doubt that hobbyhorse will be imported from the States along with the other progressive talking-points by our activist groups.
I don't think it's so much people with "good schools, good grades, didn't do so well on the final exam as expected" as it is a way for the liberal types who are aware they are doing well in the system and feel uncomfortable about that to try and advocate for equal access. I'm not accusing them of insincerity, just that they will always be assured that they - and their children - will come out okay under whatever system (unless the kid is a complete dumb-bell who can't make it to college unless Daddy pays over millions in endowments or alumni donations) but this *sounds* fairer - the kids who might fail to do well in the once-off final exam can have their work properly, and more fairly, assessed over the year and so get their rightful bite at the cherry.
What my cynical stony heart says is that "stupid and rich will succeed where stupid and poor fail, no matter what the testing or assessment regime" but that's a different problem.
Here's a random thought I had last week:
Are there ways a solar system could be arranged that would make it significantly easier for a civilisation that evolved there to engage in interstellar travel?
Suppose we construct a binary system with the two stars very close and therefore orbiting quickly around one another. Would a (powered?) slingshot manoeuvre around one of the suns provide enough of a boost to be a useful start to an interstellar voyage?
As a bonus, let's also throw in a terrestrial planet of a few earth masses a little way out from the habitable planet, so that you can gravity assist your perihelion down to where you need it for the stellar slingshot.
Depends what you mean by "useful".
Most you can get for free out of a very close binary of Sun-likes is probably on the order of 1,000 km/s or even a bit less (close binaries make a lot of simplifying assumptions not work and I'm not particularly keen on graphing this out), and you'd have to sungraze for that. Oberth effect helps, of course.
A close binary brown dwarf can give a slightly smaller boost, and has the advantage of not incinerating your ship. A close binary *white* dwarf can give a fair bit more, although at that point you're starting to run into "this system is going to inspiral and explode as a supernova" (also, tidal forces will rip your ship apart; this is also non-negligible for the brown dwarf case).
Note that you need a similarly-optimal system on the receiving end unless you have some other way of slowing down.
The accretion disk of a black hole could plausibly create a habitable zone, if you want to ramp you slingshot up to eleven. Also blackholes can orbit each other if you want to take it up to a million (hope you have some sci-fi technology to protect yourself from tidal forces and radiation). But still, space is enormous so it's still going to take a lot of time.
What might be more helpful for an alien civilization is if they evolved cryoprotectants similar to wood frogs that lets them be frozen during the winter. This way they can more easily develop technologies to cryogenically freeze themselves for their long journeys.
A black hole would let you do a nice slingshot via the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect. You want to get as close as you can to the massive body, and you can "afford" to get closer to a black hole without being roasted by solar radiation.
There are other reasons why getting that close to a black hole isn't good for your health. And you still need to slow down at your destination, with no black hole to help you. So you'll still need interstellar-grade propulsion technology, doubly so if you're ever planning to come home. Oberth effect and the like are only a marginal advantage here.
But if we can use the environment about the event horizon and accretion disk to facilitate e.g. antimatter production, that might be a bigger assist.
Possibly fake answer: sure! If there was a wormhole in your solar system leading to where you wanted to go, interstellar flight would be a lot faster
Having an outer solar system gas giant with some huge ice/rock rings would be the best. Lots of easily available material for building starships out of, as well as potential fuel for fusion reactors.
You could also use the gas giant itself to slow down incoming starships, which could aerobrake in its atmosphere on multiple long passes to bleed off velocity.
This lines up nicely with another question I've wondered about. If chemosynthetic life developed in the H2O/ammonia "mantle" (sometimes called an "ocean") on Europa or Titan, would that life have developed sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation? would it have conceptualized the possibility of space outside the solid walls? would they detect the planets and sun and stars?
(I recall Douglas Adams having a thought experiment like this about a planet Krikkit that developed inside a dust cloud and didn't see the stars.)
I haven't thought about this in any detail, but my gut reaction is no.
Interstellar travel will very likely involve moving at relativistic velocities. In order for a slingshot maneuver to provide a significant benefit, the thing you're slingshotting off of would also have to be moving relativistically (relative to the center of mass of the solar system). I guess Bob Jacobs's idea of an accretion disk might work, but I don't that would be a stable enough place for intelligent life to develop.
What would probably be more useful is getting an easier start. Multiple small planets in the inhabitable zone, each of which has multiple habitable moons. This would make early space travel easier and provide lots of incentives for people to thoroughly develop the technology. Only once short-distance space travel becoming routine is interstellar travel likely to happen.
There are limits on how small an object can get and still have a warm atmosphere (without it escaping), which is in turn required for liquid water on the surface (as, at low pressure, water is either in the form of ice or vapour). Liquid water on the surface isn't a requirement of intelligent life, of course - you can have a subsurface ocean - but then you've got to mine your way through kilometres of ice to get to space and because all species are aquatic you've got to fill your spacecraft with water (which is a lot of mass).
Also, complicated structures like a planet with multiple moons of similar mass to itself tend to be dynamically unstable (i.e. on a geologically-short timescale some of them will collide with each other, get flung into interstellar space, or fall into the sun).
Regarding 4, Freud was definitely not a responsible user of cocaine. See for example https://narratively.com/when-sigmund-freud-got-hooked-on-cocaine/ for some stories of his abuses.
Are we going to get the full results of the book review voting? I mean from the runners-up list? I'm fascinated by what it shows - did the good reviews get a lot of votes? Were the less good reviews recipients of lots of votes by readers annoyed that they had to plough through something unenjoyable. Etc etc.
It would seem quite un ACXish for Scott to say "Oh, these two won the vote, so lets just move on.." Am I alone in being interested in how the whole voting thing panned out? Did any reviews receive no votes at all? Did the two that were promoted to finalist receive the most votes as well as the highest average?
I'm seeking advice on a cybersecurity question. I'm the IT administrator for a small non-profit organization. For the past three years or so, we've had cyber insurance through a major insurance company. This year, they're imposing these requirements on us (see below) before they'll renew the policy. To my mind, point #2 below seems unreasonable. If I'm inside the network and SSHing into a Linux host, do I _really_ need two-factor authentication to get in to the host? I'm not even sure how I would implement that. I've reached out to the networking engineer we use for bigger projects, but I haven't heard back yet.
1. Multi-Factor authentication is required for all remote access to the network provided to employees, contractors, and 3rd party service providers.
2. In addition to remote access, multi-factor authentication is required for the following, including such access provided to 3rd party service providers:
a. All internal & remote admin access to directory services (active directory, LDAP, etc.).
b. All internal & remote admin access to network backup environments.
c. All internal & remote admin access to network infrastructure (firewalls, routers, switches, etc.).
d. All internal & remote admin access to the organization’s endpoints/servers.
I don't have the requisite technical knowledge (I was a Chief Privacy Officer, but didn't deal with the hardware). Our university implemented Duo, which was VERY user-friendly, and I think wasn't terribly expensive. In general you will make the auditors very happy and it's probably really a good idea. Sorry....
We use Duo for my job as well, it took about 5 minutes to set up on my phone, logging in with a push takes ~10 seconds. I guess way whatever the license fee is against how much your premiums would go up otherwise?
'weigh' ugh
As you can see by my picture, I'm an expert in the field. :)
This two-factor requirement can be a pain (which is why it's limited to admin/privileged use), but it's generally reasonable from a risk perspective. That's because the vast majority of ways organizations are seriously damaged by a cyber intrusion are because of authentication which is susceptible to interception, replay attacks, and tokenization failures., which in turn allows an intruder to convert one point of penetration into owning the entire infrastructure. Usual two-factor authentication (like a key fob number generator) seriously reduces those risks, because it's able to make every login unique.
As a solution, what you're looking for is implementing a single-sign-on solution with built-in two-factor authentication integration. Something like BoKS/Keon, which will already have existing well-defined integrations to use across *nix/Windows/vpn/network/etc... devices, combined with SecureID tokens (https://www.securid.com/en-us/products/multi-factor-authentication), or even just the tokens, depending on your exact environment.
That said, depending on how the insurance requirements are worded, you can potentially get away with things like using key & password authentication for SSH and call those two of your three factors. But still, if someone owns your end user device, they can easily steal the key while using a keylogger to capture your password and then they have your ongoing admin access on every server you used that on.
So ideally, you'll comply in such a way that your infrastructure is actually secure.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not familiar with the technologies you mentioned. What do you think of Duo? Also, our Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches don't seem to support 2FA, at least not as far as I can tell. Not sure what to do about those.
I'm a great fan of Duo. Most universities use it--it's cheap (relatively) and extremely user friendly. Of course, the original developers were once students at my university (many years ago), and I met them when they were starting the company and they seemed like nice guys. FWIW.
Agree with Geoff. Duo is fine and fairly user-friendly.
This (https://community.ui.com/questions/EdgeSwitch-user-account-login-using-Duo-RADIUS-and-802-1X-using-FreeRADIUS/707037ec-f949-4695-b8a5-b71099ba4ee1) sounds like someone who got Duo working with 2FA by using radius authentication for them and implementing Duo on the radius server.
Thanks. I appreciate the feedback from you and Geoff. I have two Linux hosts that act as backup repositories for Veeam (which we use for nightly backups of our VMware environment). If I implement Duo (or other 2FA system) on the Linux hosts, how would that affect the automated Veeam backup system? This is all new to me, so forgive me if my questions are basic.
Generally speaking, the requirements for 2FA are for human accounts.
Service accounts used for machine-to-machine communications like a backup process would utilize, are generally not required to use 2FA. Instead, you lock those down by only granting them the permissions needed to execute exactly what they're designed to do and nothing more.
Agree here. Only use 2FA for accounts that might be subject to phishing, to make human spoofing harder.
In general you run either a proxy or a certificate authority that understands 2FA. You perform one authentication with the proxy or CA, and this gives you "session" credentials good for the workday. Maybe more Silicon Valley hipster than small nonprofit, but Tailscale (peer to peer VPN) and Teleport (smart proxy) are two popular solutions for guarding network and SSH resources behind a 2FA-enabled web single sign on like OneLogin/Okta/Azure AD.
I know I'm late. Oh well.
Any admin-access that isn't from the console requires TFA by PCI. Whether or not it's "reasonable" it's what a lot of the industry is moving towards.
There are straight-forward Unix-based implementations that work with login scripts that work with Google Authenticator or the other TOTP-based phone programs. Here's a step-by-step guide for one example https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-multi-factor-authentication-for-ssh-on-ubuntu-16-04
Is math really useful?
I know that math is *virtuous*. And I know that some kinds of math are useful in some contexts. How can I know these contexts aren't as depressingly narrow as the math-deniers assert?
Only in part playing devil's advocate here. I overtly believe in the usefulness of math, but on second glance that belief looks a lot like Belief As Attire. And I think that's a big source of math-related akrasia for me.
Engaging in mathematical pursuits feels to me like an expression of personal virtue in the same way that engaging in carpentry and building a fine rocking chair might feel virtuous to someone else: "In doing this, I have done something good, and I am satisfied." At the same time, most of what I would consider *mathematics* is not terribly useful, except for doing more mathematics, or occasionally theoretical physics.
My influence here is likely more linguistic: I studied Latin extensively in high school, and "virtue" of course comes from *virtus, virtutis*, my sense of which conforms to what you understood of what I expressed. Upon further reflection, there's another layer for me: I think/believe that there is moral virtue to be found in the expression/application/utilization of excellence, in applying oneself, and achieving what one can. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify my thoughts on this (to myself, and to others)!
I meant virtuous in a broader "socially desirable/esteemed" sense.
The degree likely varies with social context.
Useful for what? Making predictions? [Tetlock found that knowledge of statistical models make you a better predictor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecaster). Making money? [Math is correlated with it](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/will-studying-math-make-you-richer/281104/). Happiness? [Some have found a small correlation](https://towardsdatascience.com/correlation-between-happiness-internet-usage-and-mathematics-3f23e539b5fb). Of course these are all correlations so be careful not to make any sweeping conclusions.
Does anyone know if there's a way to write hypertext in substack comments?
Oh wow, this extension does indeed fix it! Thanks a bunch!
If the smart fraction of the US population is generously defined as those who are 'proficient' or 'advanced' on the US NAEP mathematics and reading tests, the 2019 NAEP test results for 17 year old high school seniors can give us some insight.
'Smart Fraction'
Mathematics
===========
Asian 50%
White 32%
Hispanic 12%
Black 7%
Reading
=======
Asian 49%
White 47%
Hispanic 25%
Black 17%
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=12
Fun fact: One of my old roommates was in the roofing. He was roofing materials salesman, and one evening he was doing some paperwork and struggling to calculate how much to charge for a non-rectangular roof.
I looked at it and saw it was a right triangle. I suggested 1/2 base times height and he was delighted that it worked.
He was a college graduate. Sigh.
I assume you're asking on the personal and not civilizational level? In that case, arithmetic is necessary to get your finances right and generally think numerically about the world. Probability theory is necessary so you don't say (and think) stupid things like "but there's still some chance astrology works" and also do any useful planning. Statistics are necessary so you can read studies on whatever you care about properly. Formal logic is necessary because come on how do you even do any reasoning without it? Mathematical analysis is necessary so you can think meaningfully about infinities and also understand how different physical quantities relate to each other (e.g. why constant increase in number of cases is ok but constant increase in percentage points is a problem) which helps to make sense of the world in general. And if you want to *ever* say *anything* about neural networks and/or AI, you need to know enough calculus to roughly understand how those work to avoid looking a complete fool.
Beyond that, there's probably some areas which are helpful for your profession.
It would be good if estimation were taught in addition to arithmetic. I gather it is in some schools, but certainly not in all of them.
It seems to me, math is useful pretty much if-and-only-if you frequently deal with large (in terms of the number of things/objects to consider), complicated problems, requiring some level of precision. Also taking into account, that the problem you need to solve hasn't already been totally automated.
For most people, I'd say the size and complexity of the problem of dealing with money is enough to say that arithmetic is useful, and maybe even basic algebra. Math above that level isn't useful to most people; they won't deal with the problems that are solved by them.
Most people won't directly _use_ mathematics beyond arithmetic in their day to day lives, in the sense that you'll never see them pull out a pad and pencil and figure out the indefinite integral of x*sin(x) or diagonalise a matrix. So in this sense most people learn too much mathematics.
But on the other sense, having reasonable mathematical intuitions about things is hyper-important, and most people seem to be deeply lacking in mathematical intuition. Something I've observed in discussions about the pandemic is that most people seem to lack an intuitive grasp of what exponential growth or decay looks like; and this probably goes a long way to explaining why many people make terrible financial decisions too.
Ordinary people also seem to lack an intuitive feeling for large numbers, believing that everything that ends with "-illion" is just about equally large. And don't get me started on statistics.
Yes. Math teaches you how to identify, get around, or even avoid problems that show up everywhere.
Imagine you run a food business. Not really necessary to know math right? But if you knew math, you could organise your cooking tasks algorithmically. If you knew math, you could have saved yourself counting the amount of chicken that can fit in a bowl by just estimating and comparing the volumes. If you knew math, you could calculate the probability distribution and expected number of customers that walk into your establishment.
This is true even for complicated subjects like real analysis or abstract algebra, which at first seem pretty abstract, but then you start to see the real world analogies which ultimately is what they were based on. It quite literally changes and orients your mind. It's a skill just like learning how to read, but for whatever reason has been put by most people into a separate category where only genuises need it.
Examples of real analysis or abstract algebra making the real world easier to understand?
Abstract algebra taught me that our every day transactions, such as trying to find an X, as in 10 apple + X = 100 apples, is actually only a part of a bigger abstraction and if you learn the rules of these abstractions, you know what makes sense to divide and what doesn't, what a 'variable' or unknown value X could be analogous to in the real world, and the basic philosophical structures like transitivity or commutativity which may or may not be applicable to every type of logical system. It just gives a different perspective to things we take for granted. Of course, it also happens to be very useful in cryptography.
Real analysis gives the same type of appreciation, but for different structures. You have to construct the real numbers from first principle, not just believe that they exist. Because we use real numbers so often, this gives you an understanding of their rules and limitations so you don't make mistakes in real life.
Admittedly, you'll never need to prove anything in real life like you have to prove theorems in these subjects, but i do think it makes you a better problem solver in general.
If you have no knowledge of "tedious and boring" math facts, then you have no basis on which to tell if the answer in your calculator is correct or not.
On the other hand I've had the following conversation with my kids Many times:
"I think you might have punched in the numbers wrong."
"Huh?"
"Your answer is wrong, you probably swapped a pair if digits or mixed up a 2 and a 5"
"So what's the answer?"
"I don't know, but one of your multiplicands is even, so your answer must be even and your numbers are smaller than n and m, so the answer has to be less than mn and your number's ten times larger. Check back and see whether your finger slipped."
This followed by disbelief in my apparent Magical Math Power which consisted of, "Some poor first grade teacher making us learn it."
Are we talking Real Math™ or computation?
Computation is very useful, and even with a computer available knowing how to compute formulae in your head or by hand develops good intuitions which can help you avoid embarrassing computer errors. If you can do a Fermi estimate or sanity-check the results from something you absent-mindedly punched into a calculator you'll make a lot fewer costly mistakes. That principle applies even to a garbageman.
Real Math™ is extraordinarily useful to society, and can pay reasonably well, but most people don't have any use for it themselves. I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually needed to derive a formula outside of a classroom. If you're not in applied math or a highly mathematical field like physics or maybe computer science it's just not applicable to your life at all.
Interesting model. What characterizes Real Math and how is it different from Computation?
My concept of math is something like "an exploration of tautologies that are useful for deriving implications from observations". Is Real Math exploring the tautologies, i.e. generating new mathematical knowledge/frameworks, and Computation is applying them?
Yeah, that's more sophisticated than how I would have phrased it but more-or-less what I was aiming at.
'Computation' to me is the kind of math you learn in highschool math or physics, or at any level of chemistry. You look at your problem, find an appropriate formula to solve it, apply that formula and (hopefully) make sure that the answer makes sense given your understanding of the system. You're not doing any mathematical inference, just looking through your mental toolbox for a model and plugging numbers.
'Real Math™' to me is the difficult and somewhat mysterious process that mathematicians use to prove something and then derive a model from that proof. I've tried it and learned that I'm awful at it, but luckily I both don't actually have to do it and have institutional access to people who can if the need suddenly arose. I'm told by mathematicians that it's sublimely beautiful and will gladly take their word for it.
Are there any SSC/ACT readers interested or involved in drug development?
I'm the president of a preclinical biotech company called Highway Pharmaceuticals (highwaypharm.com) . We're focused on reusing and recombining generics to treat autoimmune diseases that are difficult or impossible to treat with biologics, including diseases like progressive multiple sclerosis.
We've recently had some promising preclinical results and I'm trying to plan out my IND submissions. I'd love to talk to anyone who's been down this road before (or at least knows the path). Feel free to reply below or contact me through highwaypharm.com .
I can't help myself, but since you're in Boston I'd suggest talking to the local startup incubators. You're smack in the middle of a huge biotech and finance hub so money and expertise should be available. If you're affiliated with an institution you should also have a tech transfer or entrepreneurship office.
People of a certain political persuasion sometimes say that there is a supply/demand problem with White Supremacy. WS is something that all right-thinking people abhor, and there is much merit in fighting it, so there is great demand for white supremacists to fight. Unfortunately there are almost no white supremacists around, hence the supply/demand problem.
Now in a market economy, this problem should theoretically be solved by a substantial rise in the price paid to those who can deliver WS, which will then induce an increase in WS.
Questions:
1) is this happening?
1a) if not, why not? And if it's regulated out of existence, would a more libertarian nation then produce more WS?
2) is there a way to stop it from happening, other than reducing demand?
Right, that's my point of confusion. There's a demand for it, but nobody seems to be incentivizing its production. Why not?
Hmmm... so we need an untraceable black market paying people to pretend to be WS in order for this to manifest? That sounds hard, but not impossible; I wonder if we'll ever see it.
Because it's not actually a market, and the analogy to a market makes for an amusing bon mot but doesn't actually give a model of the world that stands up to scrutiny. Sorry to spoil the fun.
Why isn't it a market?
(Genuine question)
The market analogy is that you get paid to do it, and the prospect of that creates demand. Right now engaging in white supremacy mostly gets you called awful names, fired, deplatformed, punched, and all manner of other nasty stuff.
The market analogy is predicated on an exchange of benefits, in this case it's a benefit for one bunch of people and abuse for the other.
A closer example would be something like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug: There is a huge demand for black woke academics (if women and/or queer, all the better), and they get afforded status. Thus, people started pretending to be black to reap benefits.
Some takes on the recent prevalence of transpeople note the same: Nowadays it's high status to be trans in some circles, and lo and behold we have tons of people coming out despite not really showing signs beforehand.
You could make a web page with WS beliefs, and put many advertisements on it. Everyone would link it as an example of the greatest evil, and many people would click the link. The income from ads would be "something worthwhile".
The problem with this plan is that in current years, your web page would immediately get cancelled.
Interesting. Do you think this model has been put into practice, resulting in any of the standard WS websites? Could we view the nazification of 4chan as a manifestation of this?
Viewing "the Nazification of 4chan" as an example would be counterproductive, because it didn't happen.
It could also be solved by widening the definition of White Supremacy until you get an adequate supply of it.
I think the key is to define *institutions* as white supremacist; since institutions are a lot more durable than any individual, this sidesteps the problem of destroying all of your targets. Of course, this works only as long as there are institutions that are plausibly outside of your control.
I think you can do away with the last caveat there. Stalin found plenty of "cosmopolitan", "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" activity within the Soviet state apparatus even though it was entirely controlled by his own party which in turn was unquestionably under his command.
"Cosmopolitan" typically meaning "Jew" in this context. It was pure luck that Stalin died before he had time to launch a planned, large-scale pogrom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan
That's right. It's always struck me as… shall we say "curious" that we don't speak more about the rampant antisemitism all the way to the very top of the Soviet communist party.
The logic is obvious:
1. The system is perfect. This is not open to debate.
2. However, everyone can see that the system isn't working out so well in practice.
3. Since the system is definitionally perfect, the only possible explanation is traitors and saboteurs. These must be eliminated.
4. GOTO 1.
Luckily a certain other totalitarian regime spectacularly made antisemitism its main feature, and in general monopolized the "pure evil" stereotype.
Only if you don't care about having the genuine article. Is this the case? If so, that's more mercenary than I would have predicted.
Right. I think that's what's happening now. Anyone who voted for Trump is a racist. (Along with many of us who didn't vote for him.)
Are people paying money for the privilege of fighting white supremacy? I don't think supply and demand apply here.
That's kind of my point - they don't seem to be, yet I can't see a reason why not. Fighting WS gets you social status, and paying for social status is standard as hell in America.
There's nothing to pay for. You can attack white supremacy online for free. I guess I could hire Richard Spencer to let me punch him, but that would amount to paying him to be white supremacist, which sends the wrong signal.
Could you count antifas putting in their time and money to take planes and busses to "punch nazis"?
That an interesting point. They're buying the fight against white supremacy, even though nobody's selling it. They're just selling plane tickets, and antifa is a tiny part of the plane ticket market.
Nobody's selling real white supremacy, but extreme-left media can certainly sell the threat, the outrage, and the prospect of getting to carry out righteous violence against someone who supposedly deserves it.
I think some of the other commenters here are pretty much on point; you can't create a supply of white supremacists, but you can create a supply of scapegoat enemies that will work just as good for certain purposes.
(I don't know whether this is happening. This is just fun amateur economics speculation.)
People are paying money to have someone fight the type of people who want to fight WS.
Pretty much everyone I see flirting with WS also has a bunch of youtube videos 'owning' feminists, libs, sjws, etc., and people who hate those groups will pay well for that content. Flirting with WS just gets more of those people to notice and fight with you, which boosts your cred among people who hate them.
This seems deeply confused about how...people...work.
Slightly more seriously, I think the closest thing you could get to a market for white supremacy would be in works of fiction, including roleplay related to sex work. Are more fictional villains flying the banner of white supremacy, or something that looks sufficiently similar that the audience is meant to acknowledge this as an acceptable substitute? Are there more games about beating up white supremacists? Are more sex workers being asked to roleplay a racial or social justice dynamic, in private sessions or in pornography?
With video gaming, hunting Nazis is so old hat at this point that I expect the drift is in the opposite direction. I suppose a film like _Get Out_ would qualify, and provide a possible answer to the initial question: if you can acquire social status from fighting fictional white supremacists, you don't need the real item.
A market for (evidence of) white supremacy would be one way of explaining faked hate crimes.
1) I would say yes, sort of. My impression is that there is a cadre right-wing pundits who flirt as hard as they can with WS in order to boost their careers through notoriety and free publicity, without going far enough that they get pushed off of every platform or assaulted in the street. I have seen weak second-hand evidence that many of these people express far more extreme beliefs than they actually privately hold, as a branding tactic, but can't confirm that of course.
Fair point.
Amusing thought, but this might be taking market-thinking somewhat to the extreme.
Aside from full-time twitter gladiators, most people who hate white supremacists (defined as those who appear to believe that whites are intrinsically superior and therefore deserve to lead society) do actually hate them beyond optics and performance and tend to be happier when there are fewer of them around, fewer of them to interact with, fewer of them voting, hiring, teaching, winning elections, occasionally indulging in violence, etc.
That's a hopeful thought.
> the average coca tea drinker in Peru might get about 4 mg *of caffeine*, whereas the average addict gets about 900 mg a day.
Pretty sure that's supposed to be "of cocaine"
Now that voting is coming up I've been thinking a bit on a somewhat meta-level question on how I am going to pick which reviews to vote for. I have not read most of the books in question myself, so I cannot fairly judge how accurately or completely the books were represented by their reviewers. Also there has already been significant selection applied in that the posted finalists are the top ~15 reviews out of more than 100, so while some may be better than others none are really badly written. That means if I just pick the ones I enjoyed the most, or the ones I think I learned the most from, then my decision will be affected more by which book was reviewed than by the quality of the review. I am not entirely happy with this prospect, because it seems like the judging should be on how well you write a review, not on whether you picked a book that lots of readers will like, but I'm not sure how to avoid it. Does anyone else have thoughts along these lines?
Please keep discussion on the meta-level of the process of judging and do not discuss the merits of specific reviews or which reviews you plan to vote for in order to avoid influencing other people's votes directly.
I've been thinking that the most important strategic choice is of what book to review.
I don't have a problem with that, since best book review seems to be about which reviews are most interesting/enjoyable/informative for ACX readers rather than judging the abstract ability to review books.
Judging the abstract ability would probably mean everyone reviewing the same book, and very few people would tolerate reading a large number of those reviews.
My plan was for my vote to mean "would like to read more reviews like this one" -- which would include both book choice and reviewer's writing.
Shameless plug: I wrote this article that's probably pretty generally in line with what y'all are generally into.
https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-being-antiscience-xkcd-jellybeans
Good post, and somewhat similar to an interesting post I read (by Scott?) about statistical abuse.
Relatedly, I posted a libertarianish version of one of those In This House We Believe lists to my family Discord channel that included "We believe in replicated science". Way better than just "science", I think.
It's a definite improvement. One day far in the future when I'm smarter I want to look at potential ways things could replicate and still be pretty bad, but I'm not there yet.
Good post, and I really enjoyed the Covid trolley problem as well! https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/the-fda-could-be-better-but-nobody
Thanks! I think the Covid article was the one I got the most pushback on; the FDA is "science" for a lot of people, and the way they do things is default-correct in a circular sense for some of them.
There's usually talk about high trust societies, but maybe the important thing is high trustworthiness societies.
That podcast was frustrating! "You don't understand culture!" "That kind of culture isn't that important!" "You don't understand culture!" ad nauseam.
I was also really annoyed by Sullivan's rude absolutes. I also lean towards Caplan, but I think there's a very interesting and important discussion about cultural "tipping points" that the podcast completely avoided. Presumably large immigration could change a countries culture dramatically in damaging ways, and if and how this happens is a lot more interesting then if some native people will really dislike the immigrants or just claim they do.
I also hate the politics argument in general: "Your idea would be unpopular" or "Your idea will trigger a backlash" isn't a good argument in this kind of discussion: the point of the discussion is to make the idea popular so that it doesn't trigger a backlash.
3... But they don't vote for the same American political parties in the same proportion as the existing Americans do, and that's a huge thing.
They go together. Low trust leads to low trustworthiness (if they're going to screw me over, I should get them first), and of course low trustworthiness leads to low trust.
Yes, but I feel that "trust" addresses the emotion, while "trustworthiness" addresses the condition which causes the emotion.
I don't get the distinction. In business I had/have vendors who I trust and those I don't. (All based on past experience.)
I think of trustworthiness as causing trust, though I realize it isn't completely reliable that way.
In any case, it seems to me that if you want more trust, you need more trustworthiness. And a society where people didn't trust each other but were reliable would be better than one where people were very trusting but unreliable.
Since I've been on a Chinese history Wikipedia article binge lately, does anyone have strong recommendations for books about either
(a) historical fiction set in china
(b) recent-ish history of China (1975-today)
(C) historical survey on pre-modern Chinese history (what's the deal with all the different dynasties)?
You might like to take a look at the China History Podcast, starting with episode 14 where the author starts going through the dynasties for about 30 episodes. It's not the best history podcast, but I find it pretty decent
These don't quite fit any of your categories, but you might be interested in the great classical Chinese epics Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh. There are good English translations available.
The only really famous/bestselling English-language historical fiction set in China is by Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth) and it's pretty depressing. Also, people talk about the Judge Dee novels, and they seem interesting, but I haven't read them.
Also doesn't exactly fit any of your categories but: I like Peter Hessler's books, especially River Town. Also enjoyed "China's Second Continent", about China/Africa relations, and if you're interested in translated Chinese works, another good option is the recent translation of Jin Yong's "Legends of the Condor Heroes" series, which mostly fits under your (a).
You might enjoy Dream of the Red Chamber. I have not read it myself but it's pretty famous in China and supposed to be semi-autobiographical, following a family in Qing China.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber
Off-the-cuff review: I tried to read it myself (fulltext English translation: https://archive.org/stream/TheStoneAndTheDreamOfTheRedChamberInTheMansions/The%20Dream%20of%20the%20Red%20Chamber%20%28Stone%29_djvu.txt ), but gave up somewhere around ~chapter 8. The book starts off with some mythology about how the main characters(?) originated as a stone and flower respectively and then were incarnated as people (a motif which is very occasionally riffed upon later), but the vast majority of the book consists of a series of minor conflicts in and around members of Rongguo and Ningguo Houses, two aristocratic-ish families, as they go about their daily lives. Apparently the last forty chapters are missing and there is huge speculation about their contents (including some fanfiction that tries to fill in the ending), but as I gave upon the book I don't think I'd personally miss it.
Personally, the mythological frame text is quite fun, but most of the novel is a giant series of minor family conflicts involving a far-too-large cast of characters (is this a characteristic of Russian novels?) which makes the overall plot structure of the book close-to-nonexistent. The prose style, including the way that the author constantly sprinkles vocabulary words throughout the text, is especially annoying.
"Send it from a different address than you used originally, in case the problem was that your emails end up in my spam filter."
You should also request a set phrase, such as "Book Review Contest", be put in the subject line. That way even if they get sent to your spam folder, a keyword search will find them.
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)
A topic that has been on my mind lately, and I'm curious if anyone here has some interesting thoughts:
How can you gain familiarity, competence, or even expertise in an area, without becoming jaded or desensitized to what you find interesting or enjoyable about it? Or phrased another way, how can you maintain a sense of wonder and/or excitement about something even while losing your naivity and "beginner's eyes" towards it?
"Area" above is very broadly defined. I think this question is relevant to everything from technical work, to hobbies, to sexuality, to building and maintaining friendships.
If I had an intuition about this problem, I think it would be super useful to me, because I'm increasingly worried about the long-term unsustainability of constantly searching out novelty and escalation in each area of my life.
This is indeed a thorny problem. For myself, I actually managed to maintain my excitement for playing and composing music in spite of formal education and several decades of experience by carefully sandboxing the analytical side needed to understand what you're doing or hearing from the experience of listening to music.
It worked swimmingly without much leakage for the most part (until I got disillusioned by music via the backdoor by thinking too much about social signalling theory) but I had the fortune of catching myself listening for the wrong things in some of my favourite music a couple of years after I got serious about the technical side of music making and making a solemn vow never to do that again lest I soil the experiential side with needless interpretation and analysis.
In other areas I haven't faired so well. For anything that requires engaging either your analytical side or maintaining belief in some particular story or interpretation it tends to go down the tubes for me as well, because increased understanding either forces you into a problem-solving mindset which runs counter to the directness necessary to thoroughly enjoy an experience or it ruins your naivety and makes you a tad cynical about what you're doing.
*fared
I've grappled with this problem. The best I can advise is to practice multidisciplinarity.
The experimental novelist Thalia Field teaches a graduate class at Brown University called Foreign Home. The idea is to make students learn two new arts they've never tried before, then reflect on their main art through insights from the other two. You acquire "beginner's eyes" by starting brand new art practices unfamiliar to you, then turn those eyes toward your old, familiar practice. It works.
Anything deep enough to be worth your time will always have new sources of wonder and excitement. Every new thing you learn in another field will reflect back on your main field in interesting ways. (I didn't have to learn much about pencil sketching to have insights from it that added significantly to my fiction writing.)
This sounds like sage advice, thanks for that
I am wondering whether this is specific to highly creative endeavours?
My experience with science is that, while discovering new fields very clearly helped me keep my interest and motivation, it also very much reduced my efficiency.
I first heard this problem described in an essay by C. S. Lewis called “Talking about Bicyles” (published in Present Concerns). Lewis identifies four ages—unenchantment, enchantment, disenchantment, and reenchantment—that occur in most human activities, whether riding a bicycle, falling in love, beginning a career, learning a language, joining the military or a monastery. In between first hearing the music that sets your heart singing and actually performing on an instrument come scales and time signatures and years of laborious practice; after vows of eternal love come morning breath and petty disagreements about the dishes.
The foundation of reasonable dealings with disenchantment, it seems to me, is acceptance of it as a natural and necessary part of a given endeavor, and commitment and perseverance in light of it. The pursuit of enchantment iself, a thing that by its nature must be fleeting, is pure tragicomedy—imagine a several-times divorced person convinced that now, having found the right partner at last, they will be in love (with the love of newlyweds) forever. Realistically, doesn’t love have to pass through periods of difficulty, disappointment, or frustration to become mature and tested? Excitement and interest will ebb and flow, but if I know that periods of low excitement are normal and have faith that the hard work of gaining competence will open up new kinds of enjoyment, low excitement need not mean jadedness.
Another image for the relationship between enchantment and disenchantment (inspired again, this time less directly, from Lewis): the fact that mountains look blue in the distance is just as real and important in our experience of mountains as the fact that they look green and brown close up. In first excitement, or in nostalgia, we see the romantic peaks and crags of the mountain range, and in the day-to-day work we see obstacles to the path and tricky footing and oaks or pines or poison ivy along the way, but it is really the same place all along, and you need to experience it in both perspectives to know that place.
I myself haven’t yet persevered in any important endeavor long enough to speak with authority about reenchantment. But I’ll hesitantly point to some of the cheesy, conventional wisdom about reinforcing positive emotions by making a disciplined habit of explicitly articulating them—(in marriage) scheduling regular time to focus on the relationship and talk about feelings, dreams, memories from courtship, etc., rather than chores and kids, (in life) keeping a gratitude journal and writing down specific things you’re thankful for. In my studies, when I am deeply disenchanted and research seems like a horrible hopeless slog, I’ve found it helpful to begin writing days by journaling freely about the writing process—how I’m feeling, what I want to accomplish, how the task in front of me into the larger picture of my dissertation and career and vocation, why my subject matters. By default, I forget the love that first drew me to my work and the sense of purpose that should animate it, but re-articulating those ideas often re-motivates me and sometimes even reawakens pleasure and excitement in the work. Talking with other people about aspects of my field that I find fascinating or think are important for everyone to know, including teaching introductory classes, has an even stronger effect—I get to see through the other person's "beginner's eyes," and I remind myself of a bigger picture that includes material I've mastered and exciting open questions, not just the particular problem I'm beating my head against.
Woahh, that was a very interesting question and a wonderful answer, thank you so much!
Low dose THC alway works for me. Not high enough to be confused certainly, but a mild buzz always makes me approach things in new way. I always ingest a bit before golf or softball too. It seems to improve my focus and appreciation for thinking while in motion.
Your mileage may vary.
Others seem to be responding with pretty involved activities like master level art and music.
My read of your question is more about something you do for entertainment that's more interactive than just watching a movie. My response is more related to hobbies or games.
I'm the kind of person who likes to go all in on something when I'm excited about it. What that typically meant was reading lots of other people's perspectives on it, and absorbing it all. While that often increased my initial excitement and made we want to enjoy that activity more, it also significantly accelerates the discovery of downsides and my eventual disillusionment. What I've been trying to do more lately is discover something on my own, and learning at my own pace. (Hobby/enthusiast instead of expert/pro). I try to avoid spoilers, quick hacks, detailed discussions, how-to guides and so on.
We're naturally inclined towards the things that excite us about the activity and not the downsides, so we continue to maintain that excitement for far longer. There may be frustrating aspects of the activity, but those will be nuisances that we see sometimes but don't fully explore. We'll also have the sudden jumps of excitement when we figure out something new or get past a roadblock that has been impeding our progress.
A downside of this approach is that you could get really stuck on a roadblock and end up quitting out of frustration, which you could have solved with a 2 minute YouTube video on how to do it better. That being, your mileage may vary. For more complicated tasks (I'm picturing back yard astronomy, woodworking, garage metalworking, or other crafts), you may not be able to get very far and may waste a lot of money going down the wrong path.
For things like sexuality and friendships, something similar may apply. Having sex with a lot of different people (or watching a lot of porn) may teach you a lot about sex quickly and give you a lot of immediate gratification, but then you get burned out faster. Having sex with a single person that you know for a long time can help you appreciate incremental differences and nuance more. (Adjust as appropriate for friendships...)
Three Venus missions for NASA and ESA! That's good stuff - we've neglected exploration of Venus compared to Mars for a long time, because they thought Mars might have life and it was easier to do a lander there.
You can do a lander on Venus, but it requires either making it out of materials that can stand up to 500 C temperatures and 95 atm pressure (the former is a much bigger problem than the latter), or using active cooling. Active cooling would probably require a multi-kilowatt nuclear power source, AKA expensive.
There's some research and models in the past couple years that suggest that Venus might have had an ocean and possibly been habitable for longer than we thought. Given how similar in size and mass it is to Earth, it'd be good to figure out if it was always screwed from the beginning, or if it started out like Earth but became uninhabitable over time.
I wonder whether you could make some kind of airship (or a submarine, depending on how you feel about supercritical atmospheres) that spends most of its time a few dozen km up where temperatures are high but tolerable before venturing down to the surface for maybe an hour at a time to take samples and photographs.
If anyone is interested learning what it's like applying for an NIH grant, I'm documenting my experience here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/applying-for-nih-funding-part-1
That's insane but sadly not surprising. I'm sorry you have to go trough it. Good luck and thanks for documenting!
Yeah. The thing is, that each component of the application is plausibly justifiable (e.g. the NIH doesn't want you abusing animals), but put together it adds up to quite a lot of paperwork.
It's also deliberately difficult. The F31 is supposed to be like an R1 so that it's a good demonstration of real grant-writing ability.
Good luck on your F31!
You did pick a fairly brutal one. My girlfriend got funded for one on her second attempt, but most of the rest of my friends failed even on their second or third attempts even after taking our institution's course on F31 applications. I got a small training grant elsewhere and had already realized I don't intend to pursue a career in academia so didn't feel as much pressure to go for it.
For your eRA commons account, yes your institution needs to help with that but most of the steps are still something you need to do personally. I had my lab's admin walk me through the process: don't be afraid to lean on your institution for bureaucratic stuff like this! That's literally what they're there for.
>Since my current stipend is more than the NIH funding level, I won’t actually benefit financially from this, since my advisor will just reduce the amount he’s paying from existing funding.
This is likely not true. Check with your institution, but a lot of them will kick back about $1-3K to you as a reward for bringing in grant money.
Washington, DC SSC/ASX Meetup next weekend, Saturday 6/19, starting at 7PM. The address is 1002 N St NW, near the Mt. Vernon Square metro station. Follow the sign for "Free Utility". The event will be mostly outside, but the house will be open in case of rain.
For further details, join our Facebook group or Google listserv:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dc-slatestarcodex/join
https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
I know I'm a couple of months late on the charter city thread, but after reading it..... why don't these charter cities just use the US commercial code, or something similar from another 1st world country like the UK or Germany? The US has the Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, which seems like it would be a great starting point. They could use arbitration to resolve business disputes, arbitration is big business these days and tons of law firms offer it. Maybe a few attorneys would be willing to offer free or reduced services as a charity in the city's beginning years- a number of firms already make their attorneys do x amount of pro bono work, here's a developing country trying to get off the ground, etc.
Prospera seems to be fairly radical- they have a brand new political system, elements of which have never been tried anywhere, some elements of their commercial code seem to have never been tried anywhere, etc. Plus the usual blockchain nonsense, of course. Without weighing in on the specifics- basic intellectual humility tells us that some of these brand new political & commercial codes are not going to work out, or won't work as intended. 'Let's create a radical brand new society with various rules I just made up' is usually a left-wing exercise, of course with a poor track record.
I like the charter city concept and would like to see it succeed- I guess I just don't understand the reasoning for a new legal system when there are perfectly functional alternatives that work right now, today. The Uniform Commercial Code currently runs a $22 trillion economy, whereas whatever Prospera just made up currently runs, uh, absolutely nothing. Which one do you think would be a better choice? (But blockchain etc. etc., of course). I guess I just don't understand the motivation to reinvent the wheel, existing legal systems are one of the big reasons why the 1st world is the 1st world presently. And fast, fair arbitration from experienced US attorneys to resolve disputes- just seems like those are all strengths Honduras could be absorbing
I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in checking out / helping with feedback on our app Meetminder, which lets you ask Friends ( colleagues, friends, and family members ) if they'd like to join your account so that you can see their Zoom status. You can also enter their meeting times and provide an external reminder if they're supposed to be in a Zoom meeting but aren't ( according to their Zoom status ).
Here's the link. Thoughts welcome!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hjA1hpS_gv8DlIpEQcKERpczYY7QDOXDBfFl2djNi8M/edit?usp=sharing
I think it's time for Scott to write a post about open borders. He has hinted in the past that he may be in favor of it, saying he has mixed feelings. I'm dying to hear his thoughts on this.
I will 2nd this.
Does anybody here understand Israeli politics?
ELI5 todays developments.
After 4 elections in 2 years, Naftali Bennet became Prime Minister of Israel, replacing Benjamin Netanyahu who served in office the longest ever in Israel's history, both consecutively and total (his first term was 1996-1999, second 2009-2021). Yair Lapid became the Alternate Prime Minister of Israel, replacing Benny Gantz.
Bennet will serve until 2023, and will then be replaced by Lapid who will serve untill 2025. That is, if the coalition they formed won't collapse:
Bennet-Lapid coalition is made of several (usually) opposing parties, with quite different ideologies across multiple subjects: national (it's the first time in Israel's history that an Arab party is part of the coalition), religional (it's the first time in Israel's history that an orthodox politician serves as prime minister), judicial, economical, and what not.
This Coalition is made of 61 members (so the Opposition is 59 members). This means that it hangs on a whisker, and is therefore likely it will have hard time passing fundamental legistlations, which may in the near future lead to yet another, 5th, elections. The Opposition, led by Netanyahu (currently. this may change if he will lose his party's planned primaries), is going to make the Coalition's time as hard as they can, so that such 5th elections is not far fetched.
Thank you, this is an excellent summary!
Basic question: What would make the next elections the "fifth" elections?
Read: fifth elections in 2+<time to next elections> years.
But yeah, this is more of a public sense, that the elections' "counter" should be incremented until this political deadlock is somehow solved.
This public sense stems from the following:
The straightforward coalition that was "supposed" to be formed is a right or right-center coalition. Netanyahu is seen as the only right-wing leader that can form such coalition (for reasons). However, he has lost credibility with some of his potential ally parties, and therefore can't form such coalition.
The other practical coalition is one formed by a mix of left, center and right parties - which is exactly what has happened. Many people believe that such mix can't be kept together for too long, taking as evidence similar past coalitions.
I think that if the current coalition will be able to successfully face the fudamental legislation of passing national budget + some other fundamental legistlation, the counter will be gone.
Previously I discussed how the Dutch formation process was interrupted by an accidental leak of a talking point where they wanted to find a new job for a 'difficult' representative, Pieter Omtzigt, who helped uncover a major government scandal and otherwise has a much more critical disposition than most representatives in the respectable parties. Back then it seemed that this might result in the PM, "Teflon Mark" Rutte, to not be able to form a new executive, although it was hard to imagine an alternative, to him or his party. A complicating factor was that the representative in question was at home with a burn out.
Since then, the focus has increasingly shifted to Omtzigt's party, who seemed paralyzed in the formation process. They've been investigating the election loss and the issues in the party. The representative, Omtzigt, was asked to write down his point of view. He wrote a 76 page document, which was leaked, with various accusations. One claim was that a few large donors, whose contribution was not made public, may have had influence on the party program, which was changed in a way that is not consistent, but to the advantage of those donors.
A second claim was that Omtzigt was promised the party leadership, but was passed by. A bit of history: Omtzigt's party decided to hold elections for the party leadership, where Omtzigt was one of the candidates. Unlike American primaries, the only people who could vote are (paid) members of the political party, which is a tiny (and decreasing) part of the people who vote for the party in the general elections. These party leader elections were a mess, where the first election attempt was canceled because the online election could easily be manipulated. During the second attempt, people were told that they had voted for someone else than who they had voted for, including Omtzigt's wife. The party claimed that their audits showed that these votes were counted properly and the election results stood. Omtzigt lost by 49.3% to 50.7% of the votes. The winner was the minister (= secretary of state) for healthcare and thus responsible for COVID vaccinations. His predecessor suffered from a burn out and he it didn't take that long for the successor to decide that he couldn't combine the job of minister with the party leadership. Perhaps the amount of criticism he got due to his performance as minister also played a role, making him fear that if he acted a party leader during the election, his party would be held responsible for the COVID failures. Omtzigt then wasn't promoted to party leader, as he claims he was promised, nor were new elections held. Instead, another person was made leader.
He claims that the ministers of his own party, who were/are part of the executive, refused to defend him. He also claims that the ministers are way more concerned with their own image than with governing well (that was the impression I got too, from the notes of the ministerial meetings that were released).
Omtzigt provided screenshots of Whatsapp conversations between others where people were extremely rude and unprofessional about him. He was called a tuberculosis dog, crazy, a 'fucking glans with Nazi posters', a psychopath and accused of emotional lability. He claims that after the national elections, he was blamed for the loss in a Zoom call. Omtzigts party is calls itself Christian and has very old voters, who may not appreciate this.
The 'Nazi' posters in question might be these semi-retro posters: https://twitter.com/PieterOmtzigt/status/1367926327274274817
https://twitter.com/PieterOmtzigt/status/1367926995284279302/photo/1
The first poster states: 'Justice, also for the little man.' The second states: 'Time for a new social contract.'
After this memo with grievances was leaked, Omtzigt announced that he would leave his party, but will keep his seat. It's unclear whether he will start his own political party, which seems to have a lot of potential, although it is hard to build up a party from scratch.
Meanwhile, it's unclear how well the formation process is going. There is no observable progress. So major COVID-related decisions are made by an executive with merely a caretaker mandate.
My perception is that the level of competence is decreasing, which is supported by the fact that the average Dutch politician now leaves after 6 years, shorter than it has ever been. The result is that most politicians seem to be easily 'played' by the few experienced ones. By the time they catch onto some of the many tricks that are being played, they leave again.
What's the best source that explains how to do “good” science that avoids all the pitfalls that we’re now aware of as a result of the "replication crisis"? I’ve found a few websites that kind of have what I’m looking for, but none of them seem to have the completeness that I think the best reference source might have.
Might be a little out of date but Goldacre's Bad Science was quite edifying as I recall https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3272165-bad-science
Thanks for the link, I've added it to my to-read list. But from the blurb, I think it's not exactly what I'm looking for. I'm trying to find more of a how-to guide for scientists who want to do good science
First of two culture-war adjacent questions. For both of these, I am looking for falsifiable answers, and less opinions. (Can't tell people how to answer, but this is what I am asking for.)
I have heard repeated references by liberals/progressives regarding the fossilization of race barriers in the USA under the 'one drop rule.' Wikipedia gives a historical perspective (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule) but is pretty scant on the recent use of this rule. I find references to modern activists decrying the historical use of the concept, and using it themselves to classify people into different racial categories.
What I don't find is anyone on the conservative side (USA) using this categorization to define themselves or others, or endorsing it for modern use.
Does anyone have examples of modern conservative (the more mainstream the better, race essentialists are acceptable but should be identified as such) pundits or columnists using this to describe people? (For this, I'd say 'modern' is...within the last 20 years.)
I don't think I have exactly what you're looking for, but...
Barack Obama is black. Everyone agrees he's black. His mother was white, but mixed race is black.
More broadly, you see a lot of color variation among African-Americans that you don't see in the part of Africa that their ancestors came from. That's because African-Americans have varying amounts of white blood.
The strict one-drop rule doesn't hold up today; if you look pure white you're white, even if you have a distant black ancestor. But the basic idea remains that mixed race is black.
>>>mixed race is black.
Okay. According to who? Who made up/is enforcing that rule?
I wouldn't say "everyone agrees that he's black"; I don't agree that he's black, but I wouldn't say so publically and non-anonymously because... well, it's not an argument worth having.
On the other hand there's plenty of people with the same ancestral mix who are typically identified more accurately as "mixed race"; well-known examples include Rashida Jones and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Notably, due to the vagaries of genetics both these women don't really _look_ black in terms of their facial features or hair and can easily pass for well-tanned white people, while Barack Obama has "black" facial features and hair. Also it may be the way they choose to brand themselves, since a Chicago politician has a lot to gain from being "black" while a good-looking white-passing actress is better off being ethnically ambiguous to maximise the roles they can get.
On this note, though, I don't think I've heard anyone refer to Harry and Meghan's mixed-race (0.25*black +0.75*white) children as being "black", suggesting that the "one drop" rule really isn't all that widespread.
Markle and Jones are distinctly black, imo. You can make an argument that historically they'd have been called "high yellow" or something but that is still considered black. Of course they are also mixed. Mixed is a distinct descriptor from black, though. Asian and white is mixed. As is asian and black. Or middle eastern and black/asian/white.
It is true that mixed race people can play other races. Vin Diesel is black/italian but he mostly gets cast as hispanic. But Markle or Diesel or Jones can't play full on white characters. If they are cast that way people might overlook it but they and the people making casting decisions know that it is something that must be consciously overlooked.
>Markle and Jones are distinctly black, imo.
FWIW, it had to be pointed out to me in both cases, and I make no pretense of generally not being able to see race.
>>>Markle and Jones are distinctly black.
Ummm. No. Never met them, so can't say how they would come across in person, but no, not obvious from photographs.
>>>can't play full on white characters
Well, Diesel doesn't like playing actual bad guys, so there's no real reason for him to try to play that type in Hollywood.
>>>consciously overlooked
...by some people. As has been pointed out, the 'obvious blackness' isn't obvious to all people.
I am really getting the impression that the left cares more about skin color than the rest of the world.
I had the same response as Bullseye-- this isn't exactly what you were asking for, but it's the response that comes to mind...we don't even need to look to "conservative" pundits, even liberal Americans will describe people of mixed black/white ancestry as "black".
What exactly do you mean by "endorsing it for modern use"? Endorsing it as a way of describing people? In general I don't feel like I understand exactly what you're trying to get at with your question. Would a link to a Fox News pundit mentioning that Barack Obama is "black" (to use Bullseye's example) be the "falsifiable answer" you are looking for?
That's my point - that this is a liberal, not conservative, trope.
Obama, in his political career, identifies as 'black' - not Kenyan-American, nor as mixed-race (like Tiger Woods tended to do.)
I was also more interested in people with less than 50% African ancestry being classified - over their preferences - as African-American/black.
I agree w/ Bullseye that most importantly this is mainly a trope of the past.
I could agree with you in the sense that liberal people today do want to "claim" their different ancestries, even if they only make up a small portion of the ancestry tree. I think they would argue that claiming/being proud of having a black ancestor today is very different from being assigned to a lower class based on a black ancestor the way people were many years ago. I expect they wouldn't describe what they're doing today as applying the One Drop Rule, since it commonly refers to an excuse to discriminate against someone.
Is that related to what you're getting at?
My impression from reading some people is that there is a constant pressure (systemic racism, whatever) internal to Caucasians/Euro-descent Americans, and most common on the right, that pushes African Americans away and will not allow a colorblind society (regardless of what people advocating for a color blind society say, this pressure is always there.)
And that the one-drop-rule was given as an example of this, and a reminder that people were always going to be judged and assigned positions based on 'the color of their skin'.
Which I was following (as a line of argument) until I tried to think of the last time I had heard someone on the right talk about ancestry or skin color - it's overwhelmingly been culture and actions that have drawn ire, in my experience. The left talks a lot about ancestry and color, not so much about actions, it seemed to me, and I was looking for examples to disprove this theory.
Mixed-race people being black isn't something that people talk about much, because everyone seems to already know. It seems really weird to me that we're even having this conversation. Are you from a part of the country that doesn't have black people? (One aspect of this that isn't common knowledge is that race mixing accounts for the color variation in African Americans. But it logically follows from the rule having existed in centuries past.)
Also, from your description of conservative media, it sounds like they don't talk about this because they don't talk about race at all.
>>>Everyone seems to already know.
'It is known', you mean? But haven't we just discussed how 'mixed = black' isn't accurate?
No, I'm from the part of the country where there are many African American, and Hispanic, and Euro-descent people, (where Italians and Poles and Irish still stick out a little) and where racial group identification for mixed race people is communicated by dress & manner.
I'm not sure what to say about your thought on conservative media. Again, mostly they talk about what a person has or has not done or said, not who their parents are or what their genetic background is.
Are you aware of the concept of "high yellow"?
That's a blast from the past! My grandparents (born in the 1920's, now all passed) used that term, said it was old fashioned.
Race has lost whatever genetic meaning it once had. It's now a 'social construct' which I think means you can define it however you want.
Second CW question - this one's a bit technical and I would appreciate input from medical specialists, especially epi and OB/GYN.
Katie Herzog recently authored a post for Bari Weiss's Substack - https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak - concerning the impact of Woke disruption of the free exchange of ideas on medicine education & practice in America. Among the topics discussed was black-white differences in maternal mortality: "But this is an example of how system-wide bias can harm black mothers, who are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women even when you control for factors like income and education, which often make racial disparities disappear."
(Herzog also interviewed the presenter of a recent inflammatory anti-white psychology lecture here: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white. I am not always a fan of Herzog, but she tries harder than many less leftist columnists/writers I have read.)
In the 200 + comments on the substack article, there was very little grappling with this difference in outcomes. When I went and looked it up (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6835a3.htm) (there are other studies out there) it turns out that there are significant differences between different racial groups not only in death rates, but between causes of death in different groups. Specifically, it seems that Asian/PI women have slightly higher death rates, Hispanic women slightly lower, American Indians markedly higher, and AA women highest of all, compared to white/Euro descent women. This seemed to hold across all economic/education groups and across time.
In addition, the causes of excess death for African American women (over Euro-descent women) weren't the infection or even hemorrhage that I expected for neglect or distain for the people being treated, but cardiovascular conditions. Hispanic women had higher rates of both infection and hemorrhage.
To me, this doesn't sound like a difference in how the women are being treated, but in baseline tendencies towards different diseases in different populations. And if that's true, then "attacking racism" isn't going to stop women from dying. Nor is assuming that there are no biological differences between different genetic groups (aka 'races'.)
Are there physicians in the commentariat, or well-read laymen, who can speak to this?
Women in general have far fewer heart attacks than men, and there are lots of tales of women having heart attacks being misdiagnosed, due to the differences in presentation that are common. If black women have more heart attacks during pregnancy & delivery, I could easily imagine that this is the driver- basically a form of soft sexism, not soft racism, but appearing racially-driven due to the "hidden" selection-effect of the pregnancy cohort.
This makes sense! And it wouldn't take a much greater genetic tendency towards heart disease (and I would really like to see cohorts broken down by bloodwork/bmi/heart risk scores before and after pregnancy) to show up in maternal deaths, because those are so rare.
A thought on unconscious bias and racism. My understanding of proponents' case for this is that we can recognise unconscious bias through scientific testing, a finding which is contentious and disputed, and on which I can offer no informed opinion. But there seems to be an interesting train of thought available from looking at this from a deliberately -naive viewpoint.
Due to the potential significance of the argument and the lack of certainty about the theories ability to provide experimental verification, the debate about unconscious bias tends to immediately descend into standard culture war rhetoric with proponents of unconscious bias arguing that those denying it's efficacy are either ignoring or covering up their own racism, whilst opponents conversely argue that the proponents are pushing a theory with no real evidence for political purposes. It's a typical intransigent argument where both sides assume bad faith on the part of the other: not a particularly useful use of anyone's time to be honest.
But what if we assume good faith should apply? That both sides mean what they say? That become a bit more interesting. In the first place, we can accept the view that some people don't treat others differently on the basis of skin colour, which ties in with the lack of evidence for first-order racism on the part of conservatives in the main. Rather than having a pointless playground "you're a racist", "am not" debate you can at least examine whether the policies your opponent favour might be racist in some way without just assuming they are because of unconscious bias, which might open up the door to more rational arguments (I did say might...).
But the really fun bit of taking people's pronouncements about unconscious bias at face value is simply that it must prove one side of the debate is racist, but that side is the proponents of unconscious bias not the opponents. If these people are content that unconscious bias testing can show that people are racist, in that they make decisions on the basis of skin colour, then their reaction to this has been to think that the accusation sounds right and not to say "hang on; i don't think like that'. So to take support for the contention that unconscious bias testing reveals people are inherently racist in good faith means accepting that the person making this contention is aware that they are in fact racist, for if they feel themselves not to be racist the test must be to some degree be invalid.
The weird thing here though is that for some reason we then let the debate on race be run by the people who are happy they are racist, and who have to assume bad faith on the part of those who oppose them on the basis that these opponents do not see themselves as racist. This seems more than a little bit worrying: if we accept what people say to be broadly true, then the people who do label a human as different due to skin colour are the ones controlling racial politics.
Most of the white woke will acknowledge that they're racist. The position is that everyone is racist, and the best we're likely to be able to do is to be aware of it and work on it.
Well yes. My point though is that if we take their self-assessment as racist at face value, why should we not take their political opponents' self-assessment equally seriously. They seem happy they are not racist, and it seems rather perverse to assume they are wrong and that we can assume their motives from a group who acknowledge they are racist and are therefore actually different from those who don't see this in themselves. It only makes sense if you assume bad faith, which is not a good way to do anything.
Incidentally, when you say "white woke" does that mean somehow "black woke" or "Asian woke" are not racist? Which would be a wonderfully racist approach to the problems they are trying to solve.
A woke person saying "I am racist" is very much like a Christian saying "I am a sinner". Everyone is a sinner, so anyone claiming not to be is either lying or so deep in sin that they can't see it.
To your first point, what Bullseye says probably says it well enough. To your incidental, it's that wouldn't feel qualified to speak for black or Asian people, but do feel qualified to do so for the "white woke". I'm not fully sure I personally qualify as part of that group, but I am sure my wife and a good many of my friends do, which makes me feel comfortable speaking on their (possibly our) behalf.
So you're saying that to a white woke person (from a UK perspective there seems to be few non-white woke people) the realisation of their own racism is of such central significance that they believe it has to be projected onto others? I'm not sure I'd buy the original sin comparison mind you: it is not a universal feature of Christianity that it seeks to change the world to address the presence of sin, whereas for woke folk (sorry - can't resist a bad rhyme) the ablution of their own racism seems to be secondary to accusing others. What would be the woke equivalence of personal penance for example?
There are plenty of non-white woke folk. For someone I know on facebook, you can google Traci Blackmon. She's a reasonably public person. (I'd put a link in but I can't check if I have it right and can't fix it if I don't) Cori Bush, my congresswoman, of recent "birthing people" fame is another. She came up through the protest ranks after Ferguson. The rest of the squad is pretty well known, I have thought. There are more whose names I can't come up with right now, and for each of the ones who are internet famous, there are many more who aren't.
Wokeness isn't a religion so reactions will vary. Pick some other human universal if you like. Say, too much sugar is bad for you and will cause your teeth to rot. If other people confidently proclaim that that may be true for the sugar woke, but they should stop projecting their weird obsession with sugar on to other people, I might humor such a person, but I wouldn't believe them. The sugar woke community would pass around tips for cutting down on sugary foods and good dental hygiene, and the anti-woke would likely mock them.
To predict the next couple of steps as this is a dead thread other than the two of us, you might say something like:
Yes, but your example fails because sugar really is bad but most people really aren't racist.
I would then reply with something like: *gestures vaguely at entire world*, and then maybe try to analogize some of the more famous racist results and events of the past few years.
I doubt you'll find it convincing, but looping back to the original thrust here, when a woke person says they're racist, they're not really talking about a failing that is only personal. Of course they are racist. Of course sugar rots their teeth. That's true for everyone. The question is, what do I do with that information? They're talking about something they consider universal, and then (probably) talking about things they can do to mitigate it, in themselves and in the society built in the context of that universal.
Wooh! I made comment of the week!
From what I understand, each Bitcoin is encoded with the history of all its past transactions, hence why it is commonly compared to a "ledger." This feature makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit Bitcoins, but it also slows down the Bitcoin exchange network since verifying the authenticity of any one Bitcoin requires sifting through its transaction record. The problem gets worse as time passes, and the Bitcoins' transaction histories get longer as they are traded back and forth more.
Couldn't this problem be solved if the Bitcoin network periodically deleted past transaction histories? I guess the process would involve having one of your Bitcoins, let's call it "Bitcoin ABC" scanned by some kind of central authority that would verify its transaction history was authentic and that it was a valid Bitcoin. Bitcoin ABC would then be deleted and you would be given a new Bitcoin called "Bitcoin XYZ" with no transaction history since you were its first owner, and the entire Bitcoin network would be alerted to what had happened.
The whole network would speed up as people traded in their old Bitcoins this way.
All the problems with bitcoin are because of the tradeoffs needed to avoid needing 'some kind of central authority'. What would prevent the authority from secretly printing its own bitcoin XYZs?
Some kind of mechanism would be created that would force other people with Bitcoin computers to verify the authenticity of the Bitcoin XYZs.
Solving new blocks does not take more time due to the length of the blockchain. Even if that was the case, cryptocurrencies make their blocks way more difficult than the baseline _on purpose_ - the entire point of Proof of Work is burning enough computing power to make matching that collective pool of computing power impossible / not worth it for an attacker.
The only affected metric is the storage requirements and ramp-up time for new full nodes entering the network.
There's also Zcash (https://z.cash ) which basically encrypts parts of transaction history that users don't want others to see.
I'm in SF starting Tuesday, then in NYC and Boston - would love to meet with people, especially if you do biology or something related to it - alexey@guzey.com!
Where's my carbon-offset burger?
Scott's post on cows vs. chickens mentioned that a burger's worth of cow produced <10kg of CO2 equivalent, which costs <10 cents to offset. It feels like there should be lots of people out there who like meat and would eat more of it (and a more expensive variety) if it didn't seem like a Terrible Antisocial Thing that will Destroy Humanity. So, where's the beef company prominently marketing how they're carbon-neutral (or, better yet, carbon-negative)? It exists for ice cream, my local store recently started carrying a brand like that.
Am I wrong about how many people know and care about the impact of cows on greenhouse gases? Or, are carbon-offset burgers a thing (just not a thing I've seen)? For that matter, why don't e.g. tree nuts say "carbon-negative" on the packaging, the way I've seen sugar packaging say "contains no saturated fats"?
Oh, I see -- I guess it makes sense that if you were to go after the "good for the planet" credits, you'd go for "regenerative grass-fed" as opposed to the "carbon-offset but otherwise a regular feed lot system".
I think you interpreted my comments as being more cynical than they were meant to be. I'm in no way trying to suggest that the farmers in question aren't genuine in their desire to help the environment, or that it isn't a good project. It's just that I'm not especially surprised by the existence of people who are genuinely motivated to produce more sustainable meat, and are able to sell it.
The part that was *surprising* to me was the seeming absence of people who would be willing to pay the seemingly tiny cost of carbon-offsetting and then advertise it heavily to reap the benefits of the eco-conscious consumers. It seems likely that the eco-conscious consumers are already provided for by the people who do more than just buy carbon offsets, which is nice in one sense (yay for farmers doing more than just buying carbon offsets) and not so nice in another (clearly there aren't enough eco-conscious consumers).
"It feels like there should be lots of people out there who like meat and would eat more of it (and a more expensive variety) if it didn't seem like a Terrible Antisocial Thing that will Destroy Humanity."
I have my doubts. Looks to me like if social capital can't be gained from fighting for [abstract, far-away, non-practical issue X], most people will prefer not having to account for X over doing so successfully.
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Also, by introducing/emphasizing a moral issue to collective awareness, you're forcing people to have a stance toward it. "Look, you can offset your carbon footprint!" doesn't offer the neutral+positive choices ("Ok" | "Ok I'm in!"), because on the social level, an unjustified "Ok" looks worse than the pre-choice uncertain state did.
I expect creating that sort of psychological cost for a big share of your customers is bad for business.
Can I get a side of crushed olivine with that burger?
Many folks I read are getting increasingly concerned about the possible spread of the COVID "delta" variant worldwide in the coming months, including in the US. If you are a USian who (by your own estimation) follows COVID news more closely than most:
(a) how concerned (or not) are you about the delta variant's impact here and why?
(b) how, if at all, do you anticipate adjusting your personal plans for the coming months as a result of this concern?
(c) what is your % estimate, if you have one, of the probability that the spread of "delta COVID" will cause the reimposition of onerous social distancing restrictions (e.g. indoor dining bans, large gathering bans, schools closing or moving to "hybrid") in at least one US state by the end of 2021?
Even among the people I know who haven't broken out of their shut-in habits from covid, they haven't ever mentioned "delta" or "variant" or "mutation" as a reason not to get out of the house.
(a) 1% chance I'll need to care.
(b) None at all. I might wear masks indoors, but I had sort of kept that up, anyway.
(c) 10% that some state will try it, justified or not.
Not an american but I expect vaccination to beat B.1.617.2 in [most of] the USA.
The UK and USA are at similar points regarding vaccination and the UK has a higher prevalence of the delta variant. Political discussions here are about delaying reopening for another month, rather than reimposing any restrictions.
With the unvaccinated proportion of the population decreasing more or less linearly, the increased virality needed to overcome the effects of vaccination increase hyperbolically.
I comment on Scott's On the Road review below, but I want to make a separate, generalization about it here, because it's relevant, at least to me, in many discussions about novels or art.
In that review Scott says:
- But from a modern perspective, if Jack and Dean tried the same thing today, they’d be one of about a billion college students and aimless twenty-somethings with exactly the same idea, posting their photos to Instagram tagged “holy”, “ecstatic”, and “angelic”. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t seem like a good stopping-point for a philosophy.
Before going further I want to point out I'm a huge fan of Scott's writing and thinking and I wouldn't be here otherwise. (I mean here in this comment section. I'd probably still be here on this planet in this same house in this same room.)
It's the word "philosophy" that bugs me. No doubt there are plenty of artists who consider themselves to have "a philosophy", but in my experience artists (including novelists) are different animals from intellectuals who have a philosophy about things. Artists are people who have to forget about having a philosophy.
Consider the case of an actor. A good actor has probably figured out various methods that work for them to be good at what they do. Maybe they follow The Method or maybe they do various other things that work for them to give good performances. They could have a Philosophy of Acting, but that's not the same as a philosophy of living. If they do have a philosophy of living, they aren't likely to be able to express that philosophy -- at least not articulately -- through their acting.
OK, sure, but actors have to read the lines of others. Of course they can't express their philosophy of living through their art.
Now consider the case of stand up comedians. A stand up comedian can write their own material. They can explain their philosophy of life through their comedy, right?
Well, no, they can't, because a stand up comedian needs to be funny -- that's their one job -- and they can't be funny and express their philosophy because philosophy isn't funny. (Admittedly, the recent bull market for political comedy has convinced a lot of comedians that perhaps they are also philosophers, but it hasn't worked out well, at least not for people who like actual comedy.)
So what about the case of the novelist? Don't they have considerably more latitude than the actor or stand up comedian in what they write? Can't they tell you their philosophy within the 1378 pages of their Magnum Opus?
Not if it's a novel they can't. Because a novelist is bound in the same way as a stand up comic or an actor. They have one job. They must not tell you, the reader, what to think.
"Well, no, they can't, because a stand up comedian needs to be funny -- that's their one job -- and they can't be funny and express their philosophy because philosophy isn't funny. (Admittedly, the recent bull market for political comedy has convinced a lot of comedians that perhaps they are also philosophers, but it hasn't worked out well, at least not for people who like actual comedy.)"
This feels like a no-true-Scotsman thing, I'm afraid - on observing that there are lots of comedians whose work is heavily influenced by their worldviews and who are financially and critically successful, at least by the standards of comedians, you declare that they aren't doing "actual" comedy.
Similarly, lots of novels obviously /do/ express the author's worldview and philosophy. You may think they /shouldn't/, but that's certainly not a common opinion, and even if it were correct, it would merely mean that the fact that they do is a failing, not that they don't.
Hard, hard disagree in two and a half out of three examples.
First, the half. Actors (some actors) due have very strong beliefs about what they're doing and how they're doing. There are certainly schools of philosophy when it comes to acting. That said, you'd be hard put to know whether your star is a disciple of Stanislavski just by watching their performance, so their ability to convey this philosophy, through the work itself, is limited.
For stand up comics, I think a couple of counterexamples will suffice. Both Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan do successful political stand up. I've recently (last 6 months) watch specials from them both, and laughed out loud during each. (I liked Chappelle better than Rogan, as there were parts of Rogan that I didn't care for, but the audience was laughing even for those parts.
For novels, just recently in the book review contest, we had not one but two reviews of Atlas Shrugged, which is certainly philosophical and has been wildly successful. I would also want to name check Heinlein. In fact, to be specific you can call out Starship Troopers and follow it with The Forever War, which together form a short back and forth between the authors about war and its effects. For something more directly personal, I really enjoy the novels of both John Ringo and Tom Kratman, each of whom is not only political, but of a politics I really dislike. Each is nonetheless successful enough as a novelist to keep me coming back, even though I would likely leave any polity they took over. (Especially Kratman.)
Can't believe how long it took me to think of this- isn't Myers-Briggs basically just an Implicit Association Test? In which case would it be weird to think of personality types as a kind of bias?
This gels with my personal experience in which people who encounter types wildly different from their own tend to think of each other as abnormal, mentally ill, losers, etc. Literally beyond understanding.
I don't think it's an implicit association test. It's a poor approximation of Big 5 personality types, which are basically born out of the observation that if you generalize a person's answers to questions like "are you lazy?" and "do you do a thorough job?" you don't actually lose much information, if you boil that down into a trait like "conscientiousness."
It's less "implicit association", and just many adjectives or traits having some relationship or cluster of association to them, which can be thought of as an underlying trait.
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/06/10/historian-murder-trial/ideas/essay/
We found out how hard it is to be a professional academic historian, and how little most Americans know about this. Croatians have a better excuse for their ignorance.
A tale of fraud and murder.
A Croatian historian was targeted by a scammer who promised him at entry to a good job at an American university and eventually killed him.
The writer of the article was a friend of the historian and testified at the trial. This is where it comes out that educated Americans don't necessarily know what an archive is.
"I explained how historians can’t get academic jobs through individual merits in the U.S. or Europe. You need networks. I talked about “markets,” the expectations of what CVs (the academic term for resumes) should look like, and how getting noticed by universities is dependent not just on productivity but also on references from people of great esteem. With every explanation I gave, another question came up. What is a postdoc? What is an editor? What is a letter of recommendation? How does anyone get paid?
The questions kept coming because the answers I was giving made no sense to how people imagined someone survived as a professional historian. Weren’t historians like artists or writers? Wasn’t their worth and position dependent on the quality of what they produced? Or maybe they were like journalists, paid per column or through working on producing publications? Or maybe historians were like teachers, their employment opportunities dependent on the degrees they had obtained?"
While I expect horror at the ignorance shown at the trial, I'm also unnerved at how much judges would need to know to do their jobs adequately. I remember the complaints about judges and legislators of a certain age who had no idea about computers and the internet.
Which is fair in a way, but the world is large. How can anyone know enough? Should there be courses on "The World and How to Know Sort of Enough About It?". If not courses, some ideas about how to get a range of knowledge?
Seems part and parcel of specialization of labor. The judge and lawyers, up until the very moment that the case came up, had no reason to ever know the ins and outs of academic publishing. The jury never had a reason to know and likely don't know any more now than they did pre-trial.
That said, it was a very interesting read. Especially because the normal trans-atlantic weirdness seems dialed up to 11 for the murder victim: do Croatian academics really think you can wire some rando a few grand and land a professorship at CUNY including housing? We have a few grad students from the Balkans but they all seem pretty acculturated to academic life.
Seeing some noise in the Aviation business about "Hydrogen fuel."
I observe that there's no such thing as a "Hydrogen well," so I wonder, given the hostility towards nuclear energy, whether fueling an airliner with Hydrogen might be a net negative in terms of emissions, at least until we get sensible about nuclear, and certainly in terms of the overall energy budget compared with Petroleum.
Leaving aside the difficulty of containing Hydrogen—it has a nasty habit of migrating through many things that can hold Methane just fine. Can we create a reliable Hydrogen tank that isn't too heavy to fly?
My knowledge of the difficulties of isolating and storing Hydrogen is about twenty years out of date. Do we have a better approach now than "Burn fossil fuels to generate electricity for electrolysis?" That was "always" understood as a huge net negative, but technology naturally marches on.
In the rocketry business we can definitely build lightweight, reliable tanks for liquid hydrogen. But handling extreme cryogens like hydrogen is an enormous PITA for reasons that go well beyond the weight of the tanks. Some of that we can address by just letting a bit of the hydrogen boil off to keep the rest cool, but there are reasons that might not work as well at commercial airports as it does at rocket launch sites, and it only solves some of the problems.
Then there's the problem where, when hydrogen burns, it burns really really hot without really producing a visible flame and, hey, why did I suddenly catch on fire just because I walked next to the refuelling station?
My really short form analysis, which leaves out a lot of edge conditions, is that the main benefit of hydrogen is that it "burns clean," but you can get most of the benefits just by using hydrocarbons with the advantage of a distribution network already built for it.
And you can manufacture hydrocarbons using energy input, the same way you manufacture hydrogen, to be carbon-neutral.
Hydrogen has a few advantages such that our whole system might be a few percentage points more efficient if we put all our effort into building a hydrogen distribution network.
It's largely (but not completely) a solution chasing a problem.
Hydrogen wins hands down on fuel specific energy but loses on fuel *system* specific energy for an airbreathing engine.
What do people think about The Sinclair Method of alcoholism treatment? It seems persuasive at first glance but I'd appreciate more views.
Scott wrote something up on alcoholism in general, that mentions the Sinclair Method for enabling moderate drinking for alcoholics: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/02/23/alcoholism/
The long awaited second part of the episode on the Great Library of Alexandria, over on History for Atheists Youtube channel! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yk9wDX5sp8
A thing I've been working on: http://yevaud.com/
There's ... quite a lot of different things there.
Looks mildly interesting, although the front-page is the opposite of explaining-what-this-website-is-for. (It looks like this is powered by Notion - https://www.notion.so - so I'm wondering whether you have a relationship with this company beyond just using its weird proprietary word processor.)
No real relation with Notion (although I used to work for a competitor); it's just more convenient to use it to publish to the web than the "vi/Git repo/Github" toolchain I was trying to use before. There are some tools that can publish Notion pages as a white-label site, but they're $5/domain/month and I'm not sure the cross-domain links will work.
I suppose it's easier to explain things with a Substack: https://yevaud.substack.com/about
Can anyone explain how something like sexual orientation can be encoded in genes at a basic, mechanistic level.
Obviously there's a cultural/psychological/environmental component to why people are attracted to whoever they're attracted to, but my understanding is that most biologists would consider it a given that genetics play a very large if not predominant role. It's easy to visualize genes encoding proteins that determine the properties of biological structures ("make an eye", "make three fingers") But something in my brain can't quite grok the idea of how genes can encode "become sexually aroused at the sight of a woman/man's genatalia" to become hard wired into the neurology. How can specific *visual* trigger become encoded into genes?
Complex mating behaviors can be fairly straightforwardly caused by single gene changes: for an insect example, the switch from 'virgin' to 'mated' behaviors in fruit fly is regulated by a single key gene (homothorax). Hth is normally repressed via a microRNA mechanism until the virgin female detects a chemical present in semen, after which the repression ends and the mated female undergoes a series of behavioral changes including a lack of receptivity to mating. If you mutate homothorax in females to remove the miRNA binding sites, they'll behave exactly as though they've already mated despite never having done so.
(Link to article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2020.06.004)
Obviously human behavior and genetics are both more complex than a fruit fly, but in principle I don't see why our mating behaviors couldn't be governed by that sort of epigenetic mechanism. Who knows, maybe someday we'll find that binding sites on the 3' end of some transcript is responsible for male homosexuality in humans.
I am currently looking for a collaborator on a small, independent web-scraping and automation project in Python I am working on. I will gladly split the profits of this project (the client is paying a flat fee) with any collaborators based on a mutually agreeable metric. However, for reasons outlined below, I would prefer someone who is equally interested in working on and completing a project as they are in the profit.
I have a moderate amount of development experience from a highly self-taught background and have done numerous similar projects before, but this almost exclusively involves working on my own projects with relatively minimal collaboration. This experience has led to fairly regular contracts doing similar work, but developing software on my own has major drawbacks.
For the sake of my knowledge and career development, I would prefer to offload a portion of this project to a more experienced developer with a more traditional background so that I can gain different perspectives on how to plan and implement projects of this type. In some sense, I'm looking to hire someone who can serve as my boss and a mentor. Note that I'm not expecting a superstar, just someone who has experience taking projects from start to finish, and adept at following good practices.
If interested, my email address is below; the password is 7NjyA3xQYE. The link will expire in one week.
https://pastebin.com/SNmnpshr
This may be the most trivial question I've asked this community, but I'm kind of stumped: does anyone know an almond butter with the consistency of supermarket peanut butter?
Normally it has that sort of oil-and-bits-of-nuts texture that expensive peanut butter has, but harder to stir. I've been looking in vain for something like Jiff but made with almonds or another hypoallergenic nut.
For no reason, here is a Vonnegut quote I like:
(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/606224-i-have-never-seen-a-more-sublime-demonstration-of-the)
“I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.
Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, thought mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filling off a gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information -
That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuehrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony -
That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love fora a blue vase -
That was how Rudolf Hess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers -
That was how Nazi Germany sense no important difference between civilization and hydrophobia -
That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time.”
Random physics-related-question: Has anyone noticed how gravity and electromagnetism look extremely similar superficially but have extremely different explanations/mechanisms in the modern version? More specifically, in classical physics, gravity and electromagnetism are both 1/d^2 laws of attractive/repulsive conservative forces*. However, in modern particle physics, we have two *completely different* explanations of the two phenomena; gravity is explained as a result of the bending of spacetime, whereas electromagnetism is explained as a result of electrically-charged particles passing virtual photons between each other. How do we know that these mechanisms are assigned to the right force? (If I were an early-20th-century physicist, I would have considered it totally plausible that gravity consists of massive particles passing gravitons between each other and that electromagnetism consists of electrically-charged particles bending the fabric of spacetime.)
*Minor point: Electromagnetism also involves magnetism, which is a rotation-y force that can't do work, and though an analogue of this doesn't exist for gravity in classical-physics-as-generally understood, it turns that an analogue for gravity does exist in the low-energy limit as a consequence of general relativity, and this is known by the extremely uncreative name of "gravitomagnetism".
There is a way of modelling EM as a bendy space time thingy, called Kaluza Klein theory. (But you need an extra dimension). You can also give a uniform treatment of all forces as bison exchanges, but you shouldn't , because you need to assume a space time background.
> as bison exchanges
I think there's a typo here.
Y'all are back in the news again https://fredwynne.medium.com/an-open-letter-to-vitalik-buterin-ce4681a7dbe
> I hope this letter finds you in good health. Unfortunately, the topic of this letter is grim. Your $4.4million dollar donation to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is being misused, and you are now among a class of persons being defrauded and mislead by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the Center for Applied Rationality.
> The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and its sister organization, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), claim to be organizations dedicated to AGI safety and the art of human rationality. However, these organizations are not what they make themselves out to be, and MIRI is in fact defrauding its donors through misleading promises and an ongoing cover-up of statutory rape, blackmail, and fraud.
An amusing collection of gossip with a flair for dramatic, I mean, this quote is just great:
> The four protesters were then brutally assaulted by the police and tortured for days until they could make bail.
So, despite the assorted accusations of years-long misconduct only the anti-MIRI camp merited any attention from the authorities, all of this taking place in California, the hotbed of wokeness. Looks like cancel culture truly is the only hope.
> So, despite the assorted accusations of years-long misconduct only the anti-MIRI camp merited any attention from the authorities, all of this taking place in California, the hotbed of wokeness.
Yep! That's what happens. There's a difference between "common knowledge within the rationalist community" and "a national newspaper wrote about it." The latter is more likely to capture a prosecutor's interest.
Moreover, the former young teenagers involved are in their 20s now and don't want to go to the authorities. In my opinion, they were groomed. One of the ones who was 14 having sex with 30 year olds still says, "it was my decision! It was good for me!" It's horrifying. They would also face significant stigmatization from the community for "causing drama." The rationalist community is not that woke.
Well, with the age of consent being 14 or lower in some territories I'm finding it hard to get particularly horrified by this. Althrough, if true, this would lower my opinion of senior MIRI staff, choosing to risk everything for illegal affairs doesn't seem too rational. But then again, I never considered them likely to succeed anyway, so whether or not they get cancelled isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.
I wouldn't let a 14 year old get a tattoo or even stay out until twelve at night, much less "oh well you're mature enough to risk sexually transmitted disease, pregnancy, and huge emotional turmoil for a chicken hawk".
It's also a matter of the ratio of ages; 30 and 14 is a 16 year age gap. Make it 35 and 19, still 16 year gap, but you can say "well it may not be a good idea, but the younger partner is technically an adult".
Go back a bit earlier in the lives of both parties to 25 and 9, still the same age gap, but I don't think many people would feel comfortable with "this is my girlfriend who is smart and mature enough to make her own decisions with no input or influence or manipulation by me at all!", even if older person followed up with "oh we're not fucking yet, I'm going to wait until they're legally old enough in Israel, Angola, Bolivia, and Cape Verde!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_age_of_consent
Sure, most 14 year olds are better off when parents make such decisions for them. Most would be at 18 too, I'd say. Neither number is based on anything objective though, just a cultural/political compromise reached at a particular time and place. Claims that they represent some sort of separation in the fabric of morality which divides normal behavior from unspeakable monstrosity seem therefore unfounded. Of course, otherwise you have to deal with specifics of particular cases, and who has the time for that?
Is it possible that underage sex isn't always bad for people?
It's possible, but a 30 year old person of whatever gender fucking a 14 year old person of whatever gender is not really there in a mentoring, caring, guiding light of the younger person's life, they just want to fuck young hot totty.
Is the then-30 year old still involved in the former-14 year old's life, or have they moved on to the next 14 year old? That's the iron criterion for me as to whether it was "they truly loved me!" or "no kid, they're an ephebophile who was using you".
How dare the question be asked.
Evolution/God made us interested in sex at a young age for a reason. And that reason was to encourage teenage pregnancies that ruin lives (if the other person is below age 18), to suffer horrible abuse from an evil adult (if the other person is above age 17), or to enjoy "young love", a wonderful experience that we can spend our lives looking back on with happiness and contentment (if sex-positive people are the ones rushing to judgement).
So, at the end of March, after 1 year with the bars shut down either entirely; or operating under restrictions that made their "meet new people and possibly flirt with them" function impossible; I asked what people thought would be required before I could walk up to a girl in a bar, smile at her and invite her out onto a dance floor.
The responses I got were basically: "When enough people have been vaccinated that they feel safe." My country is now over 60% vaccinated, over 71% vaccinated amongst people over 12; but there is still zero movement towards that goal; politicians are talking about plans that stretch into September with no changes to the restrictions on bars even being contemplated during the summer.
Is this ever gonna end? Or is it just people trying to force everyone into a digital Brave New World I want no part of?
Anyone have any guesses about what it will take now?
I'm pretty sure anyone who is sitting at a bar, particularly unmasked, feels safe having brief conversations with strangers. What does it matter how many other people are still masked up, locked down, and socially distancing themselves away from your flirtations out of fear?
When the bars are even allowed to have people in them, you're not allowed to sit or stand at the bar, you must sit at a table, and you're not allowed to approach other people's tables. So, unless you want to conduct your flirtations at shouting volumes, no go.
Wear a "vaccinated" t-shirt? Also a great conversation starter!
I have now learned of the position Applied Futurist, due to a seminar being touted by the firm that provides my workplace's cloud accounting software package. Turning theory into practice!
"Tom Cheesewright is the Applied Futurist, helping people and organisations around the world to see the future more clearly, share their vision, and respond with innovation. Tom will help you and your audience to connect tomorrow’s world to today’s experience, and make sense of what’s happening next, and why. Tom’s clients include global 500 corporations, government departments, industry bodies and charities. Using a unique set of tools that he developed, and now teaches and licenses to others, Tom finds the critical intersections between today’s macro trends and the existing stresses in each client’s organisation and sector. These are the points at which the greatest change will take place. Tom is a frequent presence in the media, his face, voice, and unusual name recognisable from weekly appearances on TV and radio including BBC Breakfast, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, 5live, Radio 4, and TalkRadio, and in The Guardian, The Times, and The Evening Standard. Tom’s first book, High Frequency Change, was published in 2019 by LID Publishing and has been shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020 in the ‘Leadership for the Future’ category. Tom’s second book, Future-Proof Your Business, is out now for Kindle as part of the Penguin Business Experts series. The print edition will be in stores Summer 2020."
Can we genetically engineer human brains to be much more intelligent than regular brains?
Michio Kaku says "No" in his book "The Future of the Mind." Here's the relevant passage:
'So from an evolutionary and biological point of view, evolution is no longer selecting for more intelligent people, at least not as rapidly as it did thousands of years ago.
There are also indications from the laws of physics that we have reached the maximum natural limit of intelligence, so that any enhancement of our intelligence would have to come from external means. Physicists who have studied the neurology of the brain conclude
that there are trade-offs preventing us from getting much smarter. Every time we envision a brain that is larger, or denser, or more complex, we bump up against these negative trade-offs.
The first principle of physics that we can apply to the brain is the conservation of matter and energy; that is, the law stating that the total amount of matter and energy in a system remains constant. In particular, in order to carry out its incredible feats of mental gymnastics, the brain
has to conserve energy, and hence it takes many shortcuts. As we saw in Chapter 1, what we see with our eyes is actually cobbled together using energy-saving tricks. It would take too much time and energy for a thoughtful analysis of every crisis, so the brain saves energy by making
snap judgments in the form of emotions. Forgetting is an alternative way of saving energy. The conscious brain has access to only a tiny portion of the memories that have an impact on the brain.
So the question is: Would increased brain size or density of neurons give us more intelligence?
Probably not. “Cortical gray matter neurons are working with axons that are pretty close to the physical limit,” says Dr. Simon Laughlin of Cambridge University. There are several ways in which one can increase the intelligence of the brain using the laws of physics, but each has its
own problems:
• One can increase brain size and extend the length of neurons. The problem here is that the brain now consumes more energy. This generates more heat in the process, which is detrimental to our survival. If the brain uses up more energy, it gets hotter, and tissue damage results if the body temperature becomes too high. (The chemical reactions of the human body and our metabolism require temperatures to be in a precise range.) Also, longer neurons means
that it takes longer for signals to go across the brain, which slows down the thinking process.
• One can pack more neurons into the same space by making them thinner. But if neurons become thinner and thinner, the complex chemical/electrical reactions that must take place inside the axons fail, and eventually they begin to misfire more easily. Douglas Fox,
writing in Scientific American, says, “You might call it the mother of all limitations: the proteins that neurons use to generate electrical pulses, called ion channels, are inherently unstable.”
• One can increase the speed of the signal by making the neurons thicker. But this also increases energy consumption and generates more heat. It also increases the size of the brain, which increases the time it takes for the signals to reach their destination.
• One can add more connections between neurons. But this again increases energy consumption and heat generation, making the brain larger and slower in the process.
So each time we tinker with the brain, we are checkmated. The laws of physics seem to indicate that we have maxed out the intelligence that we humans can attain in this way. Unless we can suddenly increase the size of our skulls or the very nature of neurons in our brains, it seems we
are at the maximum level of intelligence. If we are to increase our intelligence, it has to be done by making our brains more efficient (via drugs, genes, and possibly TES-type machines).'
I don't think Kaku proves that "the laws of physics" cap the human brain at its present size and intelligence level. Moreover, his bullet-pointed assertions seem to be contradicted by the facts that some animals, specifically elephants and many whales, DO have larger brains than humans, and that birds have smaller, more densely packed neurons in their brains. If Kaku is right, then why don't elephants and whales have problems with their brains overheating? Do birds have problems with their neurons misfiring because they are smaller than ours? If so, the problems don't seem that bad, judging by the success of bird species and their high intelligence.
Steven Hsu even says that genetic engineering could create humans with IQs of 1,000:
'The Social Science Genome Association Consortium, an international collaboration involving dozens of university labs, has identified a handful of regions of human DNA that affect cognitive ability. They have shown that a handful of single-nucleotide polymorphisms in human DNA are statistically correlated with intelligence, even after correction for multiple testing of 1 million independent DNA regions, in a sample of over 100,000 individuals.
If only a small number of genes controlled cognition, then each of the gene variants should have altered IQ by a large chunk—about 15 points of variation between two individuals. But the largest effect size researchers have been able to detect thus far is less than a single point of IQ. Larger effect sizes would have been much easier to detect, but have not been seen.
This means that there must be at least thousands of IQ alleles to account for the actual variation seen in the general population. A more sophisticated analysis (with large error bars) yields an estimate of perhaps 10,000 in total.1
Each genetic variant slightly increases or decreases cognitive ability. Because it is determined by many small additive effects, cognitive ability is normally distributed, following the familiar bell-shaped curve, with more people in the middle than in the tails. A person with more than the average number of positive (IQ-increasing) variants will be above average in ability. The number of positive alleles above the population average required to raise the trait value by a standard deviation—that is, 15 points—is proportional to the square root of the number of variants, or about 100. In a nutshell, 100 or so additional positive variants could raise IQ by 15 points.
Given that there are many thousands of potential positive variants, the implication is clear: If a human being could be engineered to have the positive version of each causal variant, they might exhibit cognitive ability which is roughly 100 standard deviations above average. This corresponds to more than 1,000 IQ points.'
Who is right? Kaku or Hsu?
I'm a split-the-difference sort of person, so I vote for some improvement, but not that drastic. All the positive variants aren't necessarily going to work well with each other.
Sidetrack: Flightless birds didn't opt into[1] taking advantage of their size to use brain efficiency to become extremely smart. I wonder why.
[1] I bet I'm not the only Tier Zoo fan here.
Most of the limitations from the "laws of physics" seem to come down to energy usage. That's probably true in the ancestral environment, but I wouldn't mind having superhuman intelligence if the cost was "eat more sugar and don't spend too long outdoors in summer". I don't see why there any need to bring "conservation of matter" into it, as if you would need perpetual motion or something.
Packing more neurons into the same space sounds like what computer chip makers have been working on for the last few decades. Doing it on neurons sounds incredibly difficult but not necessarily impossible (for millions of scientists over a century).
IQ of 1000 is so high as to be pretty much meaningless, given that no-one has ever had much more than 200 (=1 in 130 billion). IQ 1000 implies being the best at IQ tests of population of 1.24 x10^784. It's not a linear measure and you can't just stack up 100 things that boost IQ by 15.
As I understand it, a major constraint of intelligence is what will fit through the birth canal. And technology can fix that, at least in principle.
>One can pack more neurons into the same space by making them thinner. But...
>One can increase the speed of the signal by making the neurons thicker. But...
Can we make some of the neurons thinner and others thicker, use the skinny neurons to do lots of low-reliability processing and the fat ones for error-checking and for fast cross-brain communication?
>Who is right? Kaku or Hsu?
I'm betting on *mostly* Kaku, but there are things evolution can't do very well because the intermediate states are all inferior and the gap is too big to leap in one burst of mutation (sorry, X-men). Nature sucks at evolving wheels, for example. And maybe it sucks at evolving mixed neuronal architecture because you need simultaneous "make some but not all neurons a different size" and "use the different neurons for the right thing" mutations, so we're stuck at a local optimum for single-thickness neurons.
So I suspect focused cleverness can beat evolution, if not in that specific way, but I'd be surprised if it gave us even 100 more IQ points out of anything resembling a human brain.
I don't think we can genetically engineer a race of super-geniuses, but claiming that we've hit the limit because of laws of physics just seems very wrong. Like, even being able to figure out the physical question to ask would require several books.
> evolution is no longer selecting for more intelligent people
> There are also indications from the laws of physics that we have reached the maximum natural limit of intelligence
Oh, please.
Software developer here. For a developer to efficiently improve a program, it is frequently necessary to engage in a task called "refactoring", which means changing the structure of the program in a way that *doesn't change its behavior*. We do this in order to make it easier to improve the program.
The evolutionary process never performs refactoring.
What are the implications of this? Well, for starters, DNA code is more incomprehensible than the worst "spaghetti code" ever produced by the worst human developers. And so scientists spend their lives trying to answer rather basic questions that anybody debugging human software could figure out in an afternoon (though to be fair, our debugging tools are way better than geneticists').
Since scientists are stuck on pretty basic questions like "how do we stop cancer", I think it's underappreciated that the absence of refactoring probably has massive implications for how evolution works in practice. A simple-sounding change ("change eye color to blue") may be readily discovered by evolution, while another ("shift this tissue down below this organ") may be completely impractical without a refactoring that hasn't happened in any vertebrate species since the dawn of time.
If we observe evolution hasn't done something for thousands or millions of years, that's no evidence at all against it being possible. Evolution will never give us perfect memories or 16-bit multiplier circuits or internal FM radios, either.
What are the thoughts on this? Three cueing seems intuitively terrible to me but maybe I'm wrong: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
Taking off on a tangent here, but I was wondering if Scott has ever grappled with David Deutsch's critique of libertarianism. I ran across a recent podcast (here: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-deutsch/) in which he said the following:
"I think the libertarian movement has, first of all, a revolutionary political agenda. Even if it’s not revolutionary, even if they say, “We want to implement it over a period of 100 years,” they know what they want to implement; they know what the endpoint is going to be in 100 years’ time. They don’t take into account, first of all, that there are going to be errors in whatever they set up. That the correction of those errors is more important than getting it right in the first place — much more important.
Secondly, they don’t take into account that the relevant knowledge is contained in institutions, an inexplicit knowledge that people share. By institutions, I don’t mean buildings like the Supreme Court building or something. I mean the manner of thinking: in the case of the Supreme Court, the manner of thinking that’s shared by hundreds of millions of Americans, that makes them not just behave in a certain way but expect society, the government, the legal system, the state — they expect certain things of those things. It’s those expectations that make up 90 percent of the institution of the Supreme Court.
Libertarians think that’s unimportant and basically want to throw it away, by and large. No doubt there are libertarians who agree with me on this."
I'm interested in the notion of error correction and institutional memory. Do either of those ideas as espoused by Deutsch pose a challenge to most modern libertarian objectives?
I would think that if you're planning to implement something over 100 years, that's a pretty good sign that you're going to integrate it with the existing institutional knowledge base and do lots of trial-and-error along the way. See, e.g., the adoption of socialism by various western democracies over the past 100 years.
There are, of course, libertarians who don't plan to wait 100 years and would do the job with one constitutional convention of they had the chance; possibly they'd botch it very badly. But then the quick-and-dirty socialist transformations aren't nearly as good an advertisement for that system as is e.g. Sweden.