> No property owner was harmed or lost property values in this exercise.
The amount of economic ignorance in this sentence is truly depressing. You made your properties less desirable to developers. That, by definition, made them less valuable, which cost everyone who owned those houses money. It's one thing if you guys said "we like our neighborhood the way it is, don't want it to change, and are willing to give up higher property prices to keep it that way." It's entirely another to pretend that that tradeoff doesn't exist...
If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on.
There's a legitimate argument from externalities. I have an interest in nobody within half a kilometre of me working with thioacetone, for instance, as the compound is so horrifically smelly that people will vomit and faint at that distance (fumehoods have little effect).
The usual way to deal with this is zoning; in location A, you're not allowed to build a plant using thioacetone, and in location B, you're told in advance that people are allowed to build a plant using thioacetone (and thus if you have any brains you don't live there). However, zoning is only useful if it is enforced.
Yes, that’s right. Zoning is public land use regulation enforced by public law enforcement and land use agencies. HOAs are private land use regulation enforced through contract. Homeowners are free to contract with each other (with some limits) in lieu of public land use restrictions.
A lot of racial covenants were written into HOA laws in the 1950’s and before. Because these agreements are legally permanent, a lot of these racial covenants are still on the books at HOAs, with an agreement that they won’t be enforced. They are awful, and they’re still out there.
"If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on."
Well, it should be actually all the people. Not, like, ten nimbys who are the only people who show up at the committee meetings. It should be at least 51% of all the people who live in that neighborhood.
If the city has a reasonable georgist-land-tax, then that's probably a sufficient criterion.
The answer to this question feels like a policy setting rather than a moral law. Ideally the local government would have a specific answer to that question.
Some local government areas would have a policy saying "Build whatever you want on your own land". Other local government areas can have a policy saying "You can't build anything unless you get at least 90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it". Most areas could have something somewhere in between. People could choose whether they wanted to live in a pro-development area or an anti-development area, and we could see in the long run which areas wind up nicer and which wind up awful.
Personally I'd love to live in an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
> an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
If this is 20 minutes walking distance, I could see the pleasure of such an area. But basically by definition, it's impossible for there to be very much of this sort of land area (if you have too much of it then your location is not near a downtown core of a major city, but at best a weird suburban splotch that is surrounded by denser areas).
We have a version of this in my small upstate NY village. Current zoning code says you cannot cover more than 10% of your land with built structure (excluding driveways) yet less than 5% of the currently built structure adheres to that requirement. Essentially this means if you want to replace that falling down deck in back of your house, you need to go through planning board which then refers you to a zoning board which may or may not approve it based upon, you guessed it, the opinion of the neighbors. Because of rapidly escalating prices lately, it's not uncommon for applicants at the zoning board of appeals to 'lawyer up.' This is in a village of less than 3,000. So, while we don't require "90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it," essentially we require 100% of the neighbors within 200 feet to agree to it or you will be forced to modify your plans to suit your neighbors whims which is how the un-elected boards get away with all this. I'm told that changing the code is "too hard" as there are too many moneyed interests that like it the way it is (recent lakefront estate went on the market for $15m) yet the political interests all say that affordable housing is in the top 3 of local concerns.
if it's the wrong sort of people moving in then you don't really have anything you can do
even burning crosses aren't going to reverse the economic changes that prompted the move
if it's illegal activity and/or vagrants you need to become a bigger nuisance to the police and the municipal authorities than dealing with the issue is
this has three stages and you have to be persistent and go through all of them
1. they'll humor you but practically ignore you - someone will show up when you call but explain they don't have the legal authority to do anything - they're lying
2.they'll start harassing and threatening to prosecute you for wasting police resources - ignore it
3. if you have karened strongly and longly enough they will finally remove the hobo camp/crack house/brothel and it would help if you and all the other people from the neighborhood are there to cheer them on - giving the police positive reinforcement helps shorten the process the next time
you should always be able to do what you can to change the character in your prefered direction. but things like 'character of the neighborhood' are nowhere near as permanent as people think. they will inevitably change,.. your neighborhoods character has probably only been that way for no longer than one and a half generations ( exceptions of course)
If it's a new building going in. The neighborhood might ask for changes to the facade that tries to keep the same 'character'. I've seen that work in small town USA.
It should be decided by people who don't live or have interests in the neighborhood. There's a tradeoff between the aesthetic value of the neighborhood's current character and the economic value of letting the neighborhood grow/change. Only an outsider can make an objective choice about which has more value.
I actually have no problem with a community deciding to stop development to save the character of a neighbourhood, basically ever. I just wish that, when doing so, they would be honest about the fact that this is going to dramatically increase the price of housing (at least, in communities with increasing demand, which is most urban areas), and have negative consequences for young families and the poor trying to live in the area. That's not a tradeoff I personally would ever make, but I don't have a problem really with any community deciding to make it. The problem is when communities make that tradeoff but then lie to themselves about why the community is expensive and start doing a bunch of other things to try and fix the problem that won't ever work because they aren't addressing the root cause.
I think there are at least two components to the "character of a neighborhood". One is the physical infrastructure (i.e., buildings, streets, bike lanes, sidewalks, green spaces, signage, etc.) and the other is the social character (i.e., who are the residents, what businesses are present, what languages are spoken, what is the level of wealth, etc.).
These two characters usually interface in a way with regional economic conditions, such that no one of these can change without one of the others changing. If the overall metro grows so that this neighborhood is now more central than it used to be, it will be in higher demand, so that if the physical infrastructure remains the same, then the social character will drastically change.
The problem I see is that people sometimes see the change in the physical infrastructure as a symptom of a single overall concept of "change in character", and assume that if they can stop the change of physical infrastructure, then they can also stop the change of the social character. But sometimes you may need to *accelerate* the change of physical infrastructure to have any hope of keeping the social character. If a neighborhood comes into higher demand, you may need to build lots of big apartment buildings in order to maintain some residences that are still affordable for the working-class residents of the previous incarnation of the neighborhood, and lots of storefronts near these apartments in order for the affordable diners and hardware stores that cater to these residents to be able to remain while a new set of businesses catering to the new residents also come in.
There are some cases when it seems to me that the physical infrastructure is absolutely worthy of preservation, even if it means the destruction of the social character of the neighborhood. The historic cores of Florence, Venice, and Amsterdam are worth preserving as a museum, even if they become places of tourism rather than sites of commerce and daily life as they used to be. But I think in most cases, the social character of a neighborhood is far more morally valuable than the physical infrastructure, and it would be nice if preservation laws were able to more effectively target that. However, this is an extremely difficult problem - it's hard to know how to change physical infrastructure in light of changing economic conditions in such a way that an existing community is able to remain in place, while it's much easier to know how to keep physical infrastructure the same, regardless of its effects on anything else.
Basically its numerically impossible for low density suburbs to contain a tax base that can pay for the upkeep of all their sprawled out infrastructure. I
So its one thing to want to control the character of a neighborhood. It's something else entirely to demand everyone subsidize a bunch of insolvent organizational systems and pretend its all just perfectly natural and organic because its your "preference."
Zoning seems like one of those powers that will just never be used responsibly once it exists. Yes, there might be cases where people have legitimate compelling interests to control what gets built in their neighborhood.
I don't want to watch a video when I can read text instead. How is zoning a "Ponzi scheme"? It seems to me like there are suburbs which have been around longer than any Ponzi scheme.
Presumably there is a level of services required in some suburbs that is beyond the level of the tax base in that same suburb to provide. In that case, a nearby city/the state provide the services at a loss while recouping the money from other taxpayers?
My local small town does not have all the services that a big city might offer, but the local tax base does pay for what we do have just fine. I would imagine most suburbs of bigger cities have more services, but I would also expect higher home values and a stronger tax base than a small town.
Inner ring suburbs are the places where the Ponzi scheme has stopped. They are famously impoverished, while their former apparent wealth has moved out to further suburbs.
Oak Park, just across the border from one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, is not famously impoverished. Nor is Westchester, just across the border from the Bronx. I don't think the inner ring around Los Angeles is impoverished either, rather Beverly Hills is famously wealthy.
You're right that the pattern is more complicated than what I'm suggesting. There is often a "favored quarter" where the suburbs in that direction retain their value, and the ones in the other directions burn out. There are also often individual suburbs that manage to resist.
It seems to me that Oak Park is a unique dot of wealth on Chicago's west side, and Mt Greenwood is a suburban neighborhood of the city of Chicago that is also a standout on the southwest. But otherwise, both south and west from Chicago seem to share the pattern that there's poverty a mile or two out from downtown, and then increasing wealth as you go farther out. (The north side is the favored quarter.)
In New York, it looks like the parts of Westchester adjacent to the Bronx *are* pretty poor, and it's a few miles out before you reach wealth. To the extent that there's a favored quarter, it appears to be northwest (though the ring of poverty falls inside the city to the east and north, and outside the city towards the west).
Los Angeles has lots of complications in its patterns, due in part to the constraints that the mountains and deserts put on development, and also to the fact that its suburbs have always had a more urban development pattern than suburbs in the northeast and midwest. But the history of Compton exemplifies the pattern pretty strikingly.
It's not that zoning *itself* is the Ponzi scheme. It's rather that zoning for standard suburban development only works as a Ponzi scheme. It's cheap to put in pipes and streets on a greenfield development, but more expensive to dig them up and repair them a few decades later when they are reaching the end of their life. So a suburban development can be built rather cheaply, but in a few decades it will be too expensive to fix, unless it is upzoned for higher density, or has become *extremely* rich. Thus, the typical pattern around cities since the middle 20th century has been a slow burn of middle class suburbs around the edge, gradually turning into poor suburbs with bad infrastructure as the middle class fringe moves farther out.
Obviously this is oversimplified, and I haven't worked through the details of the calculations, but it gets at something right, particularly things like the plight of Detroit, where the city is now swamped by debt obligations it took on for the first round of suburbanization, that it can no longer grow to pay back, let alone fix up the decrepit former suburban neighborhoods.
Strongtown's thesis is nonsense; infrastructure maintenance is typically a small part of suburban budgets. Detroit (which is not a suburb and was not built the way Strongtowns claims) has a much larger problem: depopulation. When you go from 1.8 million people to 0.67 million, you tend to lose a lot of tax base.
Detroit has a whole set of problems, it's true. Depopulation is partly white flight, partly the decrease in household size everywhere, and partly inability to densify (only the latter of which fits in the Strong Towns thesis).
But much of the land area of Detroit is clearly suburban in form and zoning.
Anecdata: my middle-ring suburb of 53,000 people spends only $11.4m out of a $157m budget on public works. As with most places, education claims the lion's share of the revenue.
The link appears to be a theory founded upon the 2008 recession, which was actually caused by monetary policy. I'm not going to bother reading further chapters about "why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted" when that is plainly not true.
Thanks for the text link. Their theory seems to be founded largely on things like including the area devoted to parking in the denominator of their "efficiency" calculation for stores which have their own parking lots, but not including the on-street parking in front of stores which don't.
Yes, that's right. There's a lot of reasonable criticisms of Strong Towns.
But I think it would be fair to calculate efficiency for neighborhoods including all the land devoted to "green space", streets, and on-street parking as well as off-street parking. It might not turn out *quite* as stark as the calculations they carry out, but it'll still have the same pattern (because most development of the past 70 years has required the land area devoted to parking to be comparable or larger to the land area for the store, while street parking has never been that much).
Melbourne doesn't seem to have collapsed yet, and that's a city of 5 million in 10,000 km^2 (i.e. houses, houses and more houses, although there's been an effort to increase density recently).
What is the general consensus on Tether, the $60 billion stablecoin that detractors allege is a giant fraud? If true, does this pose a systemic risk to Bitcoin and the crypto market in general?
From what I've heard (probably from Coffeezilla), the issue with Tether isn't that it's a threat to bitcoin, it's that it's a really big bank which claimed to have 100% fiat money reserves, turned out to have much less than that, and may have none at all.
Tether being unbacked, by itself, would only be a problem for anyone owning Tether (and to anybody who was involved in the misrepresentation and didn't outrun the law).
The "Bitcoin is overvalued due to market distortion by Tether-the-company" claim is explicitly made by "The Bit Short" (the article Scott linked when making his prediction on DSL).
I mean, it's a threat to Bitcoin in the sense that a majority of the stablecoin volume in BTC is through Tether. Tether is largely controlled by a few large wallets that likely engage in substantial wash trading of BTC/Tether to manipulate the price. In other words, a lot of the supposed volume of interest in BTC may not be using real dollars but essentially a digital counterfeit version of USD. Liquidity is not what it appears to be in these markets.
Remember that the crypto markets have none of the consumer protections in place in regulated markets, and that shady stuff is going on 24/7.
So much of the problem with cryptos as an asset class is the point at which they touch the fiat market. Fees, and taxes are obvious big pains; price instability, over-leveraged coin holders, and algo traders are also concerns. I think it might be wrong to ever consider crypto as equivalent to dollars, instead of as a thing of value in its own right. People lament that BTC is used for illegal stuff without considering we could very easily be heading toward a future where wanting illegal stuff will be more common and seem like less of a choice (Need Penicillin? Got XRP?).
The USDT/USD exchange rate will fall on various exchanges. At the peak of tether FUD in April 2017 it briefly dipped to 92 cents, but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment. Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is.
Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin and it is only used because it is cheaper, faster, and less regulated than wire transfers for sending fiat from one exchange to another for arbitrage purposes. If Tether went to zero tomorrow due to an exit scam, bitcoin would dip temporarily, but I don't think it would have any effect on the long term trajectory of bitcoin (I estimate a 60% chance that bitcoin's market cap passes gold's before 2028 regardless of whether tether is a scam)
"...but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment" During the selloff last month, it was pretty clearly in the mid 90's on several exchanges (per coingecko)
If you want to argue that that's only on a few exchanges, cuz arbitrage, OK, but your claim wasn't true. Also, it seems like you should have to explain why high USDT premiums have existed if the general thesis is that exchange arbitrage is driving everything
"Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is". I sort of see this point except that with challenging off-ramps, you have to settle in USDT, whereas in real prediction markets, you get settlement in dollars. If you're long tether, and want to compare it to a prediction markets, units of settlement should be the same.
"Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin". I admit this is a nit, but it was 10.2% when you wrote this.
cryptos are an extremely interesting and possibly useful technology that currently has zero usefulness. however there seems to be too many wealthy people behind it now, and they arent going to let it fail.
This story contains a bunch of references to various unfree places around the world where people are escaping the control of tyrannical governments using bitcoin:
El Salvador uses USD as its official currency. This seems like the goalposts have moved. If USD is 'local garbage', then everything is 'local garbage'. I'm sure crypto enthusiasts may actually agree with that, but that is different from the argument that it is an escape from weak currencies of smaller poorer countries.
Gotta love the irony of a quasi-dictator forcing his country to accept Bitcoin, the currency invented to try and free people from government control of transactions...
"currently has zero usefulness" ... I would like to contest this point. The Ethereum blockchain has actually been implemented for a variety of useful ventures. Governments have used it for debt issuances, say what you will about NFTs but they have successfully used the Ethereum blockchain... there are a plethora of other utilities that may not be macroscopic (i.e. businesses using blockchains internally).
My uninformed opinion is that if tether lost its peg that would probably tank the market temporarily, but another stable coin or coins would eventually fill in the gap.
I try to hold usdc instead of tether when possible. If you think it’s sufficiently probable that it’s a ponzi, you can probably short it pretty cheaply by depositing another stable on aave, borrowing tether, and swapping it for the original stable.
Do the critics want them to have a volcano lair with a giant vault full of cash that they can swim in like scrooge mcduck? Every company puts the "cash and equivalents" on its balance sheet into bank accounts which are not insured by FDIC due to exceeding the 250,000 threshold, plus various short term investments such as commercial paper and repos. This is what they're doing. I think the critics just lack any context for how any other company manages a multi-billion dollar pile of cash.
Plus, if they put more of the money into a bank instead of commercial paper, the bank would just invest the money in commercial paper and keep half the profits for itself. (interest rates on demand deposits suck) At some point it becomes more economical to do it yourself.
Ok, here's the issue- they claim to hold $20-30 billion in commercial paper. This puts them at somewhere around 2% of the total commercial paper market, making them one of the largest single holders in the world. Yet they have no US banking relationships and no professionals in the commercial paper business have heard of them. Also, they refuse to disclose which companies they are lending to. Right now, Tether hasn't proven:
1. That they actually hold the commercial paper
2. If they do hold, that the commercial paper is from financially solvent entities
And they aren't "any other company." Tether's holdings are not corporate reserves, they essentially amount to deposits covering the value of their issued USDT. They have to keep those assets in highly liquid assets to provide liquidity in the event of large redemptions. If they either (1) don't actually have the reserves, or (2) their "reserves" are a bunch of short-term loans to insolvent companies, they will not be able to make redemptions.
Real banks have stuff like the Basel Accords and stress testing and the like to reduce the risk of them going bust. Even if Tether is legit, it's still no better than a 19th century wildcat bank.
The hypothesis is that Bitcoin's price is high due to Tether the company making arbitrary and growing quantities of Tether with which to buy it. Only a fraudulent stablecoin can be minted in arbitrary quantities, as a legitimate one needs to be backed 1:1 with dollar reserves.
It's probably true that only a fraudulent one can be minted in "arbitrary" quantities, but bankers have known for centuries that fractional reserves will work in most situations. There's still the possibility of a run if too many withdrawals line up, but even if you have 1:1 reserves, there's a possibility of a run if some of those reserves get frozen or lost at the time that the other crisis is happening (and these events are likely not uncorrelated).
I think a lot of the concern about Tether boils down to two main points:
1) the private entities behind it are not particularly trustworthy
2) a misunderstanding about the centrality of Tether's role in the market
On the first point, it has been established that there were periods in the past where the claim that there existed held assets in one-to-one correspondence with the value of Tethers being printed was not true. However at this point with the explosive market growth that the private entities charged with backing Tether have no doubt profited from, this is likely not an issue.
On the second point, people see through analytics platforms like glassnode that a large fraction of Bitcoin purchases are made using tethers. While this is true, it's simply because on many crypto exchanges you can't directly make purchases using dollars, so you have to do it through some sort of intermediary coin. Tether is a good choice due to being a stable coin, however there are now a whole slew of stable coins to choose from, so if Tether were to vanish one of the others such as USDC could easily take its place.
My problem is that it looks like USDC may be taking the same path as Tether. They've recently changed the language in their attestations to be more fuzzy about what "approved assets" are backing their coin. Also, it's notable that none of these stablecoin issuers have undergone a real, independent audit. Attestations are not a substitute. And anyone claiming they can't do an audit is silly, since the stablecoin business model *should* be holding a bunch of cash/Treasury/other super-safe assets in an account somewhere!
To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, one should have a reasonable amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about any investment. Nothing is certain, especially not the value of a cryptographic token with no real value that has only been successfully used by criminals to extort victims and launder money... I can't believe that the collapse of the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and by far the largest in terms of trading volume, won't have major effects on the broader crypto movement.
tl:dr if people really believe in Bitcoin/crypto, they need to get rid of bad actors like Tether ASAP
You're giving them too much credit. It's more like the constant financial panics of the 19th century, back when banks were completely unregulated and each issued their own currency.
My current read is that they are able to handle a very high level of demand both coming into and off blockchain reliably (and consistently). (Information from various sources.) It is certainly true that they have had a ton of shady dealings in their past, but the NYAG ruling in January also didn't seem to turn up anything more recent than 2018 (or 2019, I forget).
Something else that people are talking about now (outside fraud and other crimes) is that a very large percentage of their holdings are in company paper, which may be unstable in times of sustained massive downtick in crypto prices. (Since the paper is likely with other crypto-based entities.) I can't say one way or the other about that one. (Nor do I know if the current market represents a massive sustained downtick - there was a meteoric rise and fall, but net we're at the same prices as January right now, which were an all-time high at the time.
Just remember that people running frauds of this magnitude often make things up that almost seem too crazy to be true, and get away with it a lot longer than one might expect. Bernie Madoff claimed to be trading more options than actually existed on the CBOE, yet never made a single trade and kept all the money in bank accounts. Despite these facts being known, it took over 8 years from the time whistleblowers starting calling up the SEC before his scam finally collapsed.
> As part of the settlement, Bitfinex and Tether agreed to pay $18.5 million, cease trading with New York residents and entities, and will provide quarterly transparency reports to the NYAG. As part of the settlement, Bitfinex and Tether neither admit or deny any of the NYAG’s findings.
It seems to me that this should be evidence that tether can’t be that fraudulent, since there wasn’t even admission of wrongdoing involved, and they now have to provide quarterly reports.
Or is there a reason I should interpret this report differently?
Well, they still haven't produced an audit, and since the settlement their supposed value has increased exponentially from ~$1 billion to ~$62 billion. They have never undergone an audit and claim to be one of the largest holders of commercial paper in the world despite having no relationship with any US bank and nobody in the commercial paper business having heard of them: https://www.ft.com/content/342966af-98dc-4b48-b997-38c00804270a.
They were recently audited by Moore Kayman, as the article states:
> “Tether has amply demonstrated, most recently through assurance opinions from [auditor] Moore Cayman, that all issued tethers are, in fact, fully reserved,” he added.
And, note that the company and its general counsel have demonstrably lied to the public about the nature, quality and quantity of their reserves essentially since Tether was started...
Their business model, if they were legit, literally amounts to:
1. Get money (USD) and hold it in safe places (insured deposits, Treasuries, etc)
2. Issue USD-backed USDT so people can buy crypto
3. Give people USD back when they don't want USDT anymore.
If they really were doing this, it wouldn't be hard to prove. Cash is probably the easiest component of a company to audit- it's either there or it isn't. Tether/Bitfinex could put the whole issue to bed by just showing everyone where they put the money, something that most companies have no problem doing...
It's standard to neither admit nor deny in a settlement, even when the allegations definitely obviously happened, so that part doesn't really give any indication of "not that fraudulent". If it wasn't that bad, the punishment likely wouldn't have included ceasing all business with NY.
Tether is almost certainly a scam. As in, if it collapses overnight, nobody would be suprised in the slightest. We were expecting it to collapse around 2016 AFAIR.
On the other hand, almost all players in the game are incentivized to keep the charade going.
The second part is why I got off the crypto train. If the crypto markets can't prevent scams like this from manipulating prices, and if the major players tolerate/participate in the scam, then how will BTC ever be stable or transparent enough to use as a currency or as a store of value?
Hey, maybe the entire world economy will collapse due to hyperinflation. Could happen. However, the collapse of a $60 billion counterfeiting/Ponzi scheme is just a little more likely!
There is a lot more capital and, crucially, men with guns and aircraft carriers that are invested in keeping the global fiat economy going.
> If nothing surprises you, then you don't really have a predictive model, do you?
A predictive model that suggests a coinflip is correct if you are, in fact, trying to predict the result of flipping a coin.
It can also give you pause if you plan to put your life savings on the coin falling heads up.
> If you expected it to collapse in 2016, does that mean you are surprised that it's still around?
Surprised and amused, yes.
The best case scenario is less scammy stablecoins taking over and people quietly sweeping the entire thing under the rug. This seems to slowly happen.
People outside of the crypto space have a weird intuition that there are some kind of respectable institutions backing all of this. It's scams all the way down, basically EVE online economy in which you can actually get rich. To a first approximation, I'd expect every stablecoin to be backed by air, empty promises and collusion with auditors (if there even are audits, lmao). The history of Tether and Bitfinex is a wild ride indeed.
There are many places where you can borrow USDT to sell it short. There are also derivatives markets where you can short tether. If tether were actually a scam, it would probably get broken pretty quickly along similar lines to how Soros broke the bank of England. At any rate, I have less confidence in critics who don't put their money where their mouth is.
Tether will probably be fine. Don't worry about Black Swans when there are hungry tigers right outside your tent. Worry about the tigers, they are right there! The 'hungry tiger' is the risk that governments impose very onerous regulations or make it impossible for crypto to interface with the normal financial system. China has already done this. Other countries could follow suit. Crypto is full of legit scams. Tether is a comparatively small risk. Nevermind, the fact that Tether collapsing can be easily recovered from. Crypto cannot easily recover if tons of countries act like China.
I recall a discussion on here where someone suggested that cost disease might be an artifact of a bad CPI basket, and someone else replied that that's plausible but would imply that the US has been in near-endless recession for 40 years, with wages dropping 80% due to 7% inflation. But I can't find it.
These don't seem indexed by Google, so you probably have to wait until someone builds a search engine that is specifically designed to index these comments (like Nybbler once built for SSC).
I tried that, but failed. Turned out it was a post on Marginal Revolution quoted by Scott on SSC, which I processed as "recent" because I'd only read it recently and thus assumed must be here.
I've had a couple of experiences of finding I was looking in the wrong place.
One was a science fiction story which, for some reason, I thought was by Alfred Bester. The reason I couldn't find it was that it was "Rations of Tantalus" (also published as "The Rages" by Margaret St. Clair. Quite a good story-- people get mandatory pills to control anger, but never quite enough of them. It turns out that the pills and their generally constrained lives are increasing their anger.
The other was a bit I thought was by C S Lewis about utopian ideals just being about pink people expanding into space. It seemed odd for the racial implication, and Lewis' writing is searchable.
It wasn't Lewis. I found it by chance by rereading HG Wells' _Star-Begotten_, a transhumanist book which may be of interest here.
Similarly, I’d like to find a SSC comment, sometime in the last two years, by a quantum chemist about why “it’s all a simulation” is highly implausible (based on his experience with simulating atoms, iirc). Does anyone recall this?
I think I've seen an argument somewhere that you can't use atoms to simulate significant numbers of atoms because the atoms are already busy being themselves.
I believe that if we're living in a simulation, it was built in a universe with richer physics than we've got, just as our simulations are vastly simplified compared to our universe.
In Mac you could do this from the Terminal application. In windows (10) you could use WSL2 to get a Ubuntu command line, or perhaps other command line emulators (or perhaps powershell will have theses tools).
You'll have to poke around a bit and perhaps ask Qs on stack overflow but this should be doable with a bit of learning effort. (Unfortunately not a fast easy solution if you are unfamiliar with the command line, but it can be learned with some googling and is very powerful.)
I think one (possible) problem with this is that `wget` won't load (all of) the comments automatically. Worst case, you might need to write/develop a custom 'scraper' for Substack blogs (which is par for the course with web scraping).
(It somewhat necessarily only includes comments on public posts, so if the comment you're looking for is on a subscriber-only post then I'm afraid you're out of luck.)
I spent a good part of the afternoon making a script to generate a big HTML file with all comments from ACX (the public ones). With the titles and metadata of the posts, it currently clocks at 45Mo. Here's a link for a version generated a few minutes ago: https://acx-comments.neocities.org/. You can more or less search for comments in it, but it's a bit slow. However, the structure of the comments is preserved.
Therapists and psychiatrists tend to be skeptical of DID because of the possibility in their minds of it being induced into impressionable minds by media, hypnosis, suggestibility... Here is one meta-analysis paper that compared the "trauma model" (TM) of severe dissociation with the "fantasy model" (FM):
> There was no evidence that DES scores had decreased over recent decades, which does not support FM assertions that DD were a fad of the 1990s. Three of the five hypotheses tested provided clear support for the TM and a fourth hypothesis provided partial support for the TM. None of the five hypotheses tested supported the FM.
Ordinary dissociative disorders are very different from dissociative identity disorder, even though the names sound similar, and there's no reason a dissociative experiences scale should relate to DID in particular.
Yup, Scott's got it. All sorts of people have more dissociative experiences than average, and anxiety and PTSD are the most common sources of that.
I've personally watched DID being constructed by several trauma patients through the work of a mental health professional (a psychiatric nurse), when I was a psych practicum student working on an adolescent psychiatry unit. This iatrogenic creation of DID is actually the most common concern, not 'media, hypnosis, suggestibility ...'.
I have no evidence that DID is only a iatrogenic phenom, but there certainly needs to be more research, and more care in training mental health professionals around this.
That's unfortunate, albeit not entirely surprising. My experience with a therapist suggesting DID was the opposite actually. Her approach was to spend a lot of time quietly listening to me and encouraging me to talk while she got to know me, and we went along like this for months. Eventually she asked "have you ever heard of Dissociative Identity Disorder?" and I was like, no. She expressed the idea that that particular label didn't ultimately matter much for treatment and we could move forward without trying to apply it as a diagnosis, and I was happy with that. She literally never brought up DID again.
I apparently rank pretty high on the DES but I didn't find out about that until later (she never used it on me).
I looked DID up once and thought "well I guess that makes sense". Maybe the symptom that inspired her to suggest DID was the fact that I never identify with my own image in the mirror more than 90%, and this experience becomes "I'm looking at a stranger" when I'm really stressed out (this was not the case before childhood abuse happened). I also tend to look back on my life and see many different versions of me (they're all the same person but they feel like different people to me), and I'm occasionally revisited by an unfortunate feeling that the person I used to be is dead and I've become someone unrecognizable.
Standard disclaimer: don't worry about me, really I'm fine, actually I'm doing great at this point in my life considering, just like to be open about my experiences because pretty much nobody talks about this stuff.
Not fishing for a diagnosis here (I really don't need it), but I'm curious about how other practitioners approach this stuff: if you met a patient with similar symptoms, would you personally suspect DID or would you make sense of them in another fashion? In your practice, do you find it sufficient to use a more general technique like the DES without trying to diagnose people with DID?
If you'd rather not go there because of professional limitations etc, I totally respect that.
The symptoms you discuss here are pretty classic in Complex PTSD, and are dissociative symptoms, but even for people who think DID is a real thing, not indicative of DID. Glad to hear the therapist didn't press this; too many do.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing your take on it. Yeah I feel lucky to have a good therapist who doesn't project too much on me. Ultimately I put more stock in my personal sense of well-being than in the labels and categories used to assess me (not that I don't think diagnostic categories matter, but I realize they're not the goal). Life's a weird journey but I'm grateful for where it's taken me :)
It's great that you are doing well, despite apparently pretty severe trauma early on! It looks like in your case the diagnosis didn't matter, and CPTSD is always present when DID is, so successfully treating CPTSD symptoms would go a long way to not having to worry about dissociated identities.
Sadly, that is not a possibility for many people: they are dissociated to the degree where amnesia and uncontrollable switching run and ruin their lives. Even more sadly, Karen and Scott seem to reflect the common view among the mental health practitioners that "DID is unproven, rare, and mostly iatrogenic." Some day this view will be ridiculed as the old ones, that "rocks don't fall from the sky" or that "earth is solid and continents don't move", but we seem to be far away from that still.
I get the impression that the resistance to DID comes from two sources of motivation in the psych community: not wanting to pathologize things that aren't problematic, and not wanting to craft diagnoses in such a way that they are imposed upon patients by practitioners (or by patients themselves).
Regarding the first, I've known enough people with highly flexible outward personalities that I'm tempted to think flexible-outward-personality is a benign trait that has the potential to become problematic when trauma destroys your center of gravity. In which case, perhaps it doesn't deserve to be catalogued in the DSM, a great repository of human psychiatric problems. I wish there were a great repository of benign human traits wherein we could describe all of human mental diversity without pathologizing it. Does such a thing exist?
Regarding the second, I've read stuff that swayed me to believe that media influence and practitioner bias did produce more cases of people with purported multiple personalities. This doesn't mean that none truly exist, but I think it's a good reason to be careful with this stuff. True multiple personalities could be so extremely rare that the false-positives are far more common, which puts everyone in a rather difficult position.
No pressure to get into the personal stuff, but do you know anyone you think would qualify?
Have a small anecdote: I talked briefly with a man who said his mother had trauma-based DID, but he had DID (maybe not a disorder) because when he was growing up, he though having multiple personalities was how to be a person.
Wow. Makes me think of my relationship with my father. He's more consistent now, but when I was a kid, his affect, the way he expressed himself, and his accent changed dramatically depending on context. In the restaurant he was a charming Greek with romantic stories. Around his cousin he used cockney slang and made rude jokes in a British accent. Around my mom's relatives he talked like a cowboy and was all salt-of-the-earth. To others, he might seem inauthentic. To me, these are all equally valid expressions of my dad.
He once told me that when he's alone, he talks to himself. But none of the things he says out loud actually come from "him"- they are the words of characters that live in his mind, speaking to each other through him.
I've scarcely considered how he might have influenced the way I construct my own sense of identity, but I suspect his example made it easier for me to handle the death-of-the-self experience I had post-trauma. He made personality seem like outfits; you could have a different one for every occasion. When one isn't working, you change into another. Post-trauma, I played rather freely with different facets of myself, all of whom revolved around the black hole where my unified sense of self once was. They often looked like different people. They never felt like full-fledged "multiple personalities", and they never felt like they deserved the term "disorder".
I'm curious what inspired this. Do you have any links to articles about therapists' attitudes toward DID specifically? I had the impression the psych community rejected multiple personalities disorder a long time ago, and that DID was created to accommodate some valid symptoms that were previously associated with the fictitious multiple personalities disorder.
DID is just the term that's used in the DSM for Multiple Personality Disorder and some similar symptom sets.
Part of the problem is that mental health professionals are a huge and varied group, with more and less training, training that is more or less scientific, and as many influences working on them as the general population. There's some speculation that therapists with high levels of narcissistic traits are more likely to believe in DID and then, of course, to diagnosis it in their patients. 'Cause it's so dramatic and impressive and they get to be the only professional who really understands the patient!
I was actually surprised the read the paper. The description of the Fantasy Model sounded very convincing, and my observation of depression does. coincide with some of the claims of that model. It was surprising to see that there is absolutely no experimental support for it (and that trauma is an accurate reflection of real life events, not someone's macabre fantasy).
Antinatalism is the ethical view that negatively values coming into existence and procreation. They typically believe having children is unethical. I could see antinatalism compromising of a disproportionate number of people with the following traits:
1. Intelligence. Entertaining ideas about moral philosophy involves some higher levels of intelligence usually.
2. Irreligiosity. Religious people usually feel they have a higher purpose and many believe having children is a part of that.
3. Depression. I have to imagine that the average antinatalist feels their own life is comprised of a lot of suffering and they feel other’s lives must be as well. I imagine depressed people are receptive to this ideology.
We know that these traits are in some part heritable. I hypothesize the following:
1. The psychological profile of someone who is an antinatalist is heritable.
2.Antinatalists do not have children and therefore do not pass on their antinatalist genetic tendencies.
3. The psychological profile common among antinatalists will become increasingly uncommon if antinatalism becomes popular and the remaining population will be more pronatalist.
The more widespread the ideology and the harsher the stigma around giving birth, the stronger the selection for pro-natalist attitudes in the population. This is not to say that antinatalism is not true. It's just to note that this would mean that voluntary human extinction is unlikely to be possible no matter how convincing the ideology is. Something worth noting.
(1) and (3) in your hypothesis are logically contradictory. If the attitude is largely the result of DNA, then ipso facto it cannot become widespread by any means other than substantial procreational advantage, which is inconsistent with the philosophy itself. If, on the other hand, the attitude can be learned, freely taken up by reflection, et cetera, then it cannot be heritable (i.e. Lamarckism remains dead), and so natural selection poses no barrier to its widespread adoption.
I think you are mistaken. E.g. SAT scores have high heritability within the US population but clearly are based on culturally learned prerequisites (such as understanding the English language). Likewise, the invention of better methods of birth control must have had a huge impact on the effects of genes that affect the propensity to use birth control.
"Heritable" in this context could also be looked at as learned behavior in the next generation. Those who have this philosophy are not having children and cannot pass it along to the next generation as they raise them. People who choose to have children will be able to teach (even implicitly through their choice to have children) the next generation.
This implies that over any timeframe above one generation, anti-natalism will diminish itself, whether because of the OPs genetic heritability or through learned behavior in future generations.
This also applies to long term population trends between those who have few to no children for other reasons - for instance philosophical desire to not overwhelm the earth's resources, compared to those who choose to have large families.
You seem to be assuming that memes are inherited from parents. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption. E.g. the reason Newtonian physics is popular today is not that Newton had a bunch of children.
I'm suggesting that we do learn a lot from our parents, especially about their lifestyle. What we see in our early years is what we consider normal, even if it's actually really weird to much of society. If you grew up in a household with several siblings, you are going to have a different opinion about having children than if you grew up in a household without any other children. Far more importantly, nobody can grow up in a household with no children, to absorb that approach and think of it as normal.
Right. Memes can spread in lots of ways, and learning from parents is an important one.
Take religion, the archetypal example of a meme. Evangelism to strangers happens, but most people still follow the religion of their parents. And not coincidentally, successful religions tend to be very opposed to antinatalism.
Agree except for one important point: "the average antinatalist feels their own life is comprised of a lot of suffering and **they feel other’s lives must be as well**"
There is no need to assume that many/most other people are depressed, only (as you discuss further down) that depression is heritable. If you are depressed in your own life, then chances are reasonably good that your offspring will be as well, which I think constitutes a pretty good argument against oneself reproducing.
I understand antinatalism not just as the decision not to have children, but the moral opposition to anyone having children, usually accompanied by dismay that the majority of people still feel that life is worth living. Those certainly feel like distinct positions - one's personal preference, the other is a normative statement.
Depression isn't the only reason people might adopt antinatalism. I can see 2 others, both of which are probably growing:
1. Resolution of cognitive dissonance: You're apprehensive about having kids because of the effect on your lifestyle, or because you can't find a suitable partner. You rationalize your decision not to reproduce by believing that you're doing what is right.
2. Environmentalism and Malthusianism: You don't actually want the human race to die out, but think that current population is above Earth's carrying capacity, or just that we'd all have a better quality of life if the world was less crowded. You'd switch to pronatalism if the population got low enough.
Completely voluntary extinction is almost certainly impossible, as even a single remaining small contrarian population would be enough for eventual repopulation. Of course, if such an outlook was ever to become the majority opinion, it's doubtful that compliance would remain voluntary.
Majority antinatalist wouldn't be enough for enforcement. You'd also need the "sterilisation = death, therefore I have no reason not to revolt" group to be small enough to be suppressed (else the state fails and can't execute the plan).
There are certain ideologies that have strong favouritism for encouraging people into non reproductive sexual behaviours and sterilisation, while viewing it as a moral virtue and statements as milquetoast as this comment as evil as genocidal murder. These ideologies have become, in a very underststed way, much more common over the last decade. Of course as this is a no politics thread this topic cannot be explored any further for now.
This is why I encourage anti-natalists. Not that I agree with them, but because filtering them out of the gene pool little-by-little is the safest way.
This is generally true at some level, but it still take longer to get going because culture is changing so rapidly at present, which means the anti-natal and pro-natal psychological profile are also in flux. This is how fertility has been able to decrease basically continuously since the start of the industrial revolution and is now comfortably below replacement in most of the world.
For example, the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
Going back to the topic of the Ashkenazim from a few threads back -- at one point, the Jewish population was exploding and Ashkenazi Judaism was clearly a pro-natal cultural belief. But now its population, at least in the US, is imploding, with most US Jews having significantly fewer children than the US median, and it has transformed into an anti-natal belief system. Though of course the more traditional Orthodox Judaism remains a pro-natal belief system, for now.
All that to say, I think ultimately human beings will develop some combination of culture and genetics that are resistant to anti-natal ideas (and as a result I believe the Earth will one day return to a Malthusian state), but it will likely be a messy, centuries-long process, with several false starts and dead ends.
> the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
This sounds really interesting - do you have a source where I can see more about this?
It's the graph towards the bottom, though unfortunately the link for his source is now broken, so I'm not sure what the root source is.
What you see is that men with 1 partner have always done reasonably well, and started out the 20th century, while men with 20+ partners have never been the most fertile group (presumably relying mostly on prostitutes prior to the Sexual Revolution).
But in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of "dating culture" and the breakdown of some traditional norms, all of the more caddish groups rose considerably, with 7-9 partners being the most fertile group in the 1930s. After that 1 partner returned to the top position but only slight beat out the next few groups, until the 1960s, when men who defied the Sexual Revolution and only had 1 partner became by far the most fertile group.
Better to be the kid born after he decided kids were bad (that's how much he wanted you) than to be the kids born before he decided they were bad (you were why he regretted having kids).
Sorry, missent one, so this is the real post. I think there are two main possibilities for a counterargument.
Counterargument A) Sickle Cell traits. This has advantages if you have only one copy of the trait, but disadvantages if you have both. I think it's quite possible antinatalism could be something like this. Intelligence is certainly positive, as is opportunity for education, both of which would tend to be necessary. It could be just that when you have the misfortune of combining that with irreligiosity, depression, and whatever else contributes, you end up with antinatilism, but the core components each can serve a purpose for enhancing fitness.
Counterargument B) Grandmother effects. I think it seems plausible that being an antinatilist could have positive outcomes for relatives. While intelligence is heritable, that's a pretty noisy inheritance. It seems like there's good odds that if you are an antinalist, you'll be smarter than your siblings just by regression to the mean. Thus you'll tend to make more money, and since you're an antinatalist who feels life is suffering, maybe you'll be more compelled to help your nieces and nephews. I'm much less confident in B, but figured I'd throw it out there.
If either A or B hold, it seems plausible we'll never see the extinction of antinatalism simply because it's tied to other good outcomes.
But you can basically only have that if you also have a pretty good education. The best quality medications are expensive, so you both need a good job and need to live somewhere with a good economy (and usually thus good education). I'd be willing to bet that people in the US who didn't complete high school have worse child mortality rates than someone college educated, even controlling for race.
It does not require "the best quality of medications" for children to reliably survive to adulthood. The cheap medicines you can buy for $10 at Wal-Mart or have handed to you for free by hanging out in an ER for a while will suffice for that, I do not think there is any socioeconomic class or other major population subgroup in the United States whose children have <90% probability of surviving to adulthood, and to grandparenthood if they are so inclined.
P(kids surviving to adulthood) is a second-order term in this equation, the dominant term is p(kids will bother having kids of their own).
Recently, there have been discussions of moral offsetting and utilitarianism on ACX. I found these discussions interesting but I feel as though there are major issues with this sort of moral reasoning. It seems as though you are allowed to offset "trivial" things like eating meat or carbon emissions but not "serious" things like murder. I do not believe that there is a good reason for making this distinction. Utilitarianism maps everything to a linear scale of utility. There is no clear line as to what is trivial or serious. And there is no categorical difference in properties between these arbitrary clusterings that would make one offsettable and one not.
Scott made an essay (axiology, morality, law) creating a distinction between these things but I found its arguments unconvincing. In a utilitarian framework, whatever maximizes utility (axiology) is the action that should be done (morality). Utilitarians do not incorporate other ethical intuitions or considerations in moral choices but it seems like the "triaging" of axiology's demands is incorporating non-utility considerations. Creating a non-moral hazard distinction between murdering and letting die is also incorporating intuitions about inflicting harm which are not justified in utilitarian thinking. It is the feeling of having inflicted harm that makes someone want to offset in my view. It is mostly a way to deal with feelings of guilt. Not donating to reduce carbon emissions should elicit the same feelings for a consistent utilitarian.
Here are my questions for Utilitarians:
1. I am deciding if I should do moral choice A or B. A is utility maximizing and B is not, all things considered. Under what circumstances is B the correct choice?
2. What is a moral consideration that overrides utility maximization?
3. If you believe in this idea of morality (as laid out in Scott's essay Axiology, Morality, Law), can you explain how you come to know moral facts or the nature of this morality. For example, why is it worse to kill 1 than to not save 2 even without moral hazard issues?
For 1 and 2 the answer is never and none, pretty much by definition if you are talking to a utilitarian.
Most limits people around here talk about are practical not moral. E.g. In an ideal world I'd donate most of my money to charity and be happy about it, but I know that practically that's not possible because of how human psychology works. If I did that I'd be miserable and probably stop doing it fairly quickly. So it's not a good option. Instead I donate about 10% of my income regularly, which is an amount I can sustain. Psychological constraints are just as real as other practical constraints. Other constraints might be certainty, eg you might think killing someone would be net utility maximising, but can't be sufficiently certain that you'd do it, because if the risks of being wrong. And you can inform that with reasoning about how often people who think that killing someone is the right thing to do are correct.
I think the slight caveat on 1 and 2 is that you have to look at what level the decision is being made at. We naively think that we can decide each individual action that we make. But in practice, we more often control our actions by developing habits. Most of the things I do in the morning (have coffee, go to the bathroom, shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, check my e-mail) are done every day more because I've done them each of the past several days than because of any explicit decision to do them today.
So if A is the specific action on this specific occasion that will maximize utility, but B is part of a habit that is slightly less good on this occasion, but part of a broader pattern of behavior that is better than any habit one can train by doing A, then maybe doing B is better. (Of course, in this case, we might say that doing B actually maximizes utility, because we can account some of the good from future acts of B to this act, and can account some of the bad from breaking the habit to the present act of A.)
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons.
Allowing offsets for murder increases the social acceptability of murder, a very undesirable consequence. Perhaps more money goes to charity, but by definition this is evened out be an increase in murder, which is bad for the people that get murdered but also for everyone else in society. Obviously there are legal barriers to offsetting murder and getting away with it, but even if you could get away (bribing the cops? framing someone else and offsetting their sentence as well?), I'd argue that you shouldn't - there's value to a general prohibition of murder.
(I can't 100% say that murder can't be offset - we generally agree that it can be offset by time served, and many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money - however, that doesn't seem to be a society that we want to live in today.)
Offsetting something like meat eating or polluting has solely good consequences - the offsetting does good, it incentives you to do less of the bad thing by increasing its cost, and it has a second order positive effect in that other people may also consider whether the negative externalities should be factored into.
TL;DR offset things you were going to do anyway, don't offset reprehensible things in order to allow you to do them.
We generally agree that time served in prison is the /most acceptable/ out of all the ones we tried or thought of: the death penalty, blood money, corporal punishment, or indentured servitude have all been found unacceptable. The conflicting drives of the need for retributive justice and the opposition to cruel and unusual punishment mean that no one solution is universally satisfying. For that reason I'd say that murder cannot be offset, even though we try to force people to do so out of necessity.
I'd sort of argue that we still have acceptable offsets. Mainly I'd point to speeding fines. The core danger of speeding is that you kill someone, so to me speeding fines represent offsetting the small chance of you killing someone through speeding. We also have similar fines for other things that have low percentage chances of killing someone. Admittedly we no longer have good ways of offsetting 100% odds of murder, but we do ok with smaller odds.
"many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money"
Seems to have been a combination of "I'm an important rich guy and that was only a serf/slave/whatever, should I really have to undergo the death penalty instead of using my wealth to pay a fine?" and stopping the cycle of "Bob kills Joe so Tom is obligated by blood feud social pressure to kill Bob so then Bill has to kill Tom and then Phil had to kill Bill...."
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons"
That's assuming society supplies you with deontological ethics, which is more correct than utilitarian ethics, because it overrides utilitarian ethics. It's hardly a defense of utilitarian ism
Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer) so allowing offsetting would make the world a worse place. Perhaps it would be better if there were equally strong prohibitions against eating animals (debateable), but if you feel that it's morally wrong but struggle to refrain from it, offsetting it seems like a good way to move the world towards a state in which its less permissible, because offsetting at least implies that there's a need for atonement.
Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that the world would be a worse place if we told everyone that murder is OK if you think it makes the world a better place.
"Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer"
. If you have a rule that murder can never be offset, then you lose utility in the cases where the offset would have generated positive utility. In general, utilitarianism is utility maximising, and having absolute rules is deontology, and deontology isn't utility maximising, so adopting deontology leaves some utility on the table.
"Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism".
OK, well I'm either inconsistent (very likely) or just outlining a useful principle that I'd generally (but not universally) adhere to, given the impossibility of actually calculating utility (approximations all the way down). I accept that there are contrived situations in which offsetting murder seems like a good idea, but most of the time it seems like it's going to be better to not do the murder and also do whatever good thing would offset it. In the real world maintaining a general prohibition against murder seems like a good idea - after all, if it's justified, it's not generally considered murder.
I was just trying to explain why a utilitarian might recommend offsetting actions that are socially acceptable but morally questionable, without also thinking that we shouldn't just let billionaires murder people after donating to AMF - primarily because there are better ways to raise money for charity than that (although I guess if there weren't I'd have to consider it...)
I agree with the impossibility of actually calculating utility, but I summarise that as "utility wrong". It's confused thinking to fix utilitarianism by making it work like deontology, while still calling it utilitarianism.
Utility is only guaranteed to be utility maximizing if you do *all* the math, including all the second- and third-order terms involving small harms spread over large populations. No, not just the *one* dust-specks-in-a-trillion-eyes term that made this particular problem so fascinating to think about, but also all the other messy realities that you tried to round to zero before you started calculating.
That's not how anybody actually practices utilitarianism. To implement utilitarianism in finite time requires rounding most of the terms to zero before you start calculating, and most people intuitively zero out the terms they expect would argue against their preferred course of action.
Allow murder offsets, and people will balance the zero-order "murder is bad" term with whatever first-order terms they think are most likely to make their preferred murder seem OK, and maybe whatever terms they can't get away with ignoring because other people will focus on them, and then they will stop. Whether they're a wannabe murderer themselves, or a judge charged with deciding whether someone else has paid enough offsets.
I've never seen anyone even seriously try to put numbers on the "this will result in far more murders because wannabe murderers will optimistically expect they can get away with discount weregeld", and "this will result in lots of people living their lives in fear of being murdered because they don't think other people put a high enough dollar value on their lives" terms. So I highly doubt that a bunch of clever utilitarians trying to implement a murder-offset legal regime would maximize, or even increase, utility.
I read your blog and liked it. I felt convinced then that there was some detail missing / inconsistencies.
Now reading the other responses I feel less convinced.
The value of a civil society is what jumped out at me.
If the price a making a brick is £1 and just to be sure you make it £100 that doesn't mean I'll happily give you a brick from my house in exchange for £100.
All that to say the price for murder should be the price for saving a life plus the price of making everyone feel as secure as they used to before they could be murdered legally.
Should there still be a price? Yes. Perhaps the reason it isn't openly accepted / talked about is the price is so high. Or that there is no utility in talking about it. I'm sure military commanders have made similarly cold blooded decisions in the past but it would be bad for morale to describe exactly how much benefit each soldier would be sacrificed for
I think it gives good intuitions for the questions you've asked. But here is my own explanation.
Utilitarianism works poorly without propper consequentialist framework. It's like a chess program with a propper ability to evaluate possible moves which can only look one step ahead. Such program can be beaten even by a heuristic chess reasoner like GPT-3. However if such program can look lots of steps ahead - it can become very good at chess.
If our utility function is properly defined according to our ability to predict long term consequences it's always moral to do action A. But it may be not the case. So the moral consideration which overrides pure utility maximization is weather such maximization will probably lead to less utility eventually.
The distinction between Axiology, Morality and Law comes from acknowledging the possible consequences. If we normalize offsetting human murder it seems to lead to the world with more murder and more power to the wealthy ellites which seems to be a drop in utility. On the other hand normalizing carbon offset seems to be leading mostly to more money in initiatives fighting carbon pollution and only a tiny increase in actuall pollution. So that's why we say that offsetting murder is a bad idea, while offsetting carbon emision is a good one.
If by moral hazard you mean exactly this - than there is no other reason. But I believe that reason is enough.
I think you sort of miss Scott's point about axiology/morality/law. Utilitarians (consistent ones, at least) really do believe that the only thing that matters is the maximization of utility. To a utilitarian, morality and law are not things external to axiology, but rather some of its specific subsets; this is, in fact, the point of rule utilitarianism. A utilitarian might say that a rule like "thou shalt not kill" is shorthand for "there is very strong evidence that killing people has negative utility beyond what naive consideration would suggest; therefore, you shouldn't e.g. kill 1 to save 2". Both the utilitarian and the deontologist recognize the rule; the utilitarian does not believe it to be absolute - so there's an 'N' where "kill 1" becomes better "don't save N" - and I don't know enough about deontology to know what it thinks about this.
Within this framework, moral blameworthiness as a concept is entirely instrumental, as is the notion of supererogatory acts. They are (ideally) set at whatever society-wide level that gets the most people to do good stuff, i.e. to maximize utility.
Your analysis of rationalists' attitude in respect to utilitarianism (in the essay) is perhaps correct, but it is besides the point and somewhat improper as an argument. It does not, strictly speaking, matter to a philosophical position's strength that a particular group of people was driven to it by "impure" considerations.
As for your questions this particular utilitarian would answer:
1. Never
2. There aren't any
3. By taking "common-sense morality" as a reasonable-but-not-infallible metric to compare naively-utilitarian considerations against, attempting to derive its commands in their most common forms from utilitarian principles, and then seeing if this derivation works for the specific case at hand.
In the case of "thou shalt not kill", for example, you say something like "(a) murder has direct adverse effects on social order, and also (b) there are pseudo-Kantian considerations like 'if you think you have sufficient reason to murder, then everyone will think that, too', and also (c) murder is usually wrong even without taking these complicated reasons, so the simplicity of a rule like 'murder is never correct' wins out in utility over the fringe cases where it doesn't work."
(Not claiming that this list is exhaustive - just that these can be morally valid reasons for a utilitarian to avoid murder.)
If the situation is such that (a), (b) or (c) are negated completely - or 'enough', really - and a utilitarian is confident enough in their applied ethics to believe that there isn't any (d) of substance they're missing, then yeah, they actually do get to ignore the rule. This is obviously a pretty rare occurrence, which is, again, why "don't murder" is usually good enough.
If something related to (a), (b) or (c) is what you mean by moral hazard, then I believe that answers the third question.
I think it depends on your utilitarian. There is the strawman bad guy who goes "okay, so I killed a few people/skinned some cats alive/eat beefburgers every Wednesday, but look at all the good things I do! Look at all the lives my donations to disease research and hospital wings have saved! Does it *really* matter if I murdered my mother for the insurance money to get my start in business, when I've been a huge philanthropist since I made my first billion?"
But there is the danger, because we're all human and humans make excuses to rationalise their behaviour, that people will go "does it really matter if I do teeny, tiny, bad thing X so long as good thing Y also happens?"
I am probably more of a utilitarian than most people, so I’ll just give you my general take on 3. I don’t really believe in moral laws. This point has been made by other commenters: “Do not kill” is a good shorthand rule. It’s an especially good law since that makes it an enforceable rule that will stop the action of killing which usually has bad outcomes. So I actually think (in a vacuum) it’s worse to not save two people than to kill one. Once you add in externalities, who knows though.
With respect to moral offsetting, it’s weird. Here’s how I think of it: In economics there’s this idea of “indifference curves” where it’s all the possible combinations of a pair of goods that would give you the same amount of utility. If you add one more of Good A your utility goes up and you’re off of the indifference curve. Obviously this can be generalized to indifference hyper-surfaces.
people tend to have a goal amount of morality. I think very few people aim to be maximally moral, unless they have a system that sets the bar reasonably low. As everyone knows, utilitarianism sets a high, almost unreachable, bar. So often a utilitarian will have some amount of utility that they informally aim to create.
Now let’s say you want to do something that would drop you below your “goodness goal.” In order to get back up to that level, you want to stay on the hypersurface so you have to offset somewhere else.
To bring up Bill Gates murdering people, I’d be concerned, but overall he’s done a lot of good and if it wasn’t going to lead to serious societal issues (which it probably would), I’d be ok with offsetting
There are practical as well as moral considerations driving human action. No inertia needs to be overcome to not save someone. You just need to keep doing whatever you were already doing. Murdering a person is not easy for most people to do. You may find yourself unwilling or unable even if you believe it is the right thing to do, and if you follow through and manage it anyway, it is likely to do significant psychology damage, which is a lot of disincentive.
Patching an ethical system with extra-moral considerations like this makes it much more likely that people can actually adopt and follow it, even if it makes the system less internally consistent.
Where true pure utilitarianism shines is guiding the actions of states, not individuals. Nations are absolutely going to kill lots of people one way or another, whether through inaction or action, and should use that to guide whether active killing is the better option. They have efficient means of killing via specialized trained professionals who are willing and able to do it.
> Utilitarianism maps everything to a linear scale of utility.
I don't see why the scale has to be linear. Murder could very well be exponentially more abhorrent than minor infractions like , say, eating meat. So much so that offseting murder would be impossible unless you were balancing it against other deaths in a trolley problem scenario, ie. murder one person to save humanity.
I think in this context "linear" is meant to contrast with "multi-dimensional" rather than with "quadratic" or "exponential". A linear ordering is one in which for every two elements, either the first is greater than the second, or the second is greater than the first, or they are equal.
That said, I don't see that utilitarianism needs to assume linearity of the ordering. A utilitarian could conceivably treat physical pleasure and social pleasure as two incomparable positive values, so that a situation that is better on both counts is better, one that is worse on both counts is worse, and one that is better on one but worse on the other is neither better nor worse nor equal. It's going to mean that there are some situations where no action is "right" or "required", because there's a set of acts whose outcomes are incomparable to each other. But there will usually be many acts that are still forbidden, because they end with results that are worse on both counts.
While I agree that a multi-dimensional calculation makes more sense, that's not really meeting the purpose of utilitarian calculations. If you cannot compare two acts, even with perfect knowledge, then you're defeating the purpose.
If the purpose is to see which is better and which is worse, and there is no fact about which is better and which is worse, then you're serving the purpose right.
It's only if the purpose is to have some algorithm that always returns a unique result that this would be defeating the purpose.
> Utilitarians do not incorporate other ethical intuitions or considerations in moral choices
I think that's incorrect, under my understanding of utilitarianism as a type of consequentialism. Even if we're talking about a hypothetical perfect utilitarian who has no competing moral intuitions, this person would still be trying to examine all consequences of their choices, including the way those choices would be perceived by the majority of the public who are non-utilitarians. Those perceptions could alter which choice is best from the utilitarian's perspective, e.g. the utilitarian may be wise to avoid "reputational damage" from actions that otherwise improve utility but are considered unvirtuous / rule-breaking by the community, because poor reputation can lower one's freedom/ability to act or influence others in the future.
1. A is utility maximizing and B is not, all things considered. Under what circumstances is B the correct choice?
In line with the previous thought, action B may sometimes enable more freedom of future action than A because it looks more virtuous, or more popular, or is simply cheaper (e.g. action B, "giving 100% of my savings to effective charity X", is more utility-maximizing than action A, "giving 10% of my savings to effective charity X", but it also limits my future actions. I might afterward learn something that shows charity Y is actually more effective than charity X, say, and would regret the 100% donation due to that.
In addition, it's often hard to be sure that A is utility maximizing and B is not. What we usually have when making a choice is "I predict A improves utility more than B, but I could be wrong". This is a great reason to let the Law and deontological/vitrtue ethics inform your otherwise utilitarian decisions. These other forms of ethics are organic things, shaped by history, and so they encode general knowledge of how past decisions played out (i.e. actions that often caused problems historically are likely to end up in rules against those actions). So one can reasonably use these other ethical ideas as a "general prior" about what actions are more or less likely to maximize utility.
2. What is a moral consideration that overrides utility maximization?
Nothing comes to mind.
3. If you believe in this idea of morality (as laid out in Scott's essay Axiology, Morality, Law), can you explain how you come to know moral facts or the nature of this morality. For example, why is it worse to kill 1 than to not save 2 even without moral hazard issues?
I don't have a theory of utilitarianism that says it is better to let 2 die than to kill 1, except in reference to the above (killing people can badly harm your reputation/freedom, except in special cases like killing a convicted murderer who is holding a gun on two people and threatening to kill them).
The saving grace of utilitarianism is that it's looking for ways to increase utility *as much as possible*, and killing people is usually not the *best way* you can find to do that. That is, when people claim "utilitarianism implores me to kill!" they are usually wrong (and, I suspect, usually arguing against utilitarianism). But there are cases where killing people seems like obviously the best available choice, e.g. if you somehow have an opportunity to kill Hitler during WWII, my utilitarianism approves.
Your argument for 1) is meaningless. The parameters of the question are "A is utility-maximising, B is not, *all things considered*". All your answers for this amount to "well, maybe B is actually utility-maximising when you consider all things", which seems to me a misunderstanding of the question.
An interesting aspect of Dutch is the many food-related ways in which you can refer to people. For example, these are mild pejoratives if someone is doing something stupid that bothers you (like in traffic):
- 'pancake'
- 'meatball' (this one also exists in English)
- 'bag of fries'
- 'soup chicken' (if it is a woman)
And you can refer to a weird person like this:
- 'weird haricot'
- 'grape'
And when someone someone is incompetent, you can call them a 'cookie baker'. This goes back to 1572, when mayor Cookiebaker refused to hand over the Dutch city of Brielle to the Sea Beggars, the Dutch revolutionaries led by the William of Orange who fought the Spanish rulers. This refusal was rather silly, since the city was not garrisoned, so it was defeated quickly. This conquest was rather important, as the Sea Beggars no longer had a base of operations, as Queen Elisabeth I had turned them away from the English ports. The attack on Brielle was one of desperation. Emboldened by this victory, the citizens of another major Dutch port revolted. They handed over that city to the Sea Beggars. Thereafter many more cities revolted and the conquest of Brielle is commonly seen as the true start of the fight for Dutch independence, as the Sea Beggars were merely a raiding force before that time.
Another word for a fool is a 'cheese head.' In Germany, it is a pejorative term for the Dutch in general.
A word for a young man who thinks he knows it all, but who lacks experience/wisdom, is a mik mouth. In Dutch, we use the term milk teeth for baby teeth, which is where this derives from.
An adolescent girl who always spends her time with her friends, constantly laughs and otherwise is very silly, is a 'baking fish.' This refers to fish that is too small to be a meal in itself, but too large to throw back in the water, so a bunch of them are baked together.
A weakling can be referred to as a 'tasteless snack', which can also be used for poor products and the like, in which case it is similar to the English 'weaksauce.' Another word for such a person is a 'soft boiled egg.'
A very irritating person can a 'stuk vreten,' which is a bit hard to translate. 'Vreten' means eating fast and sloppily. Just shoving the food in there. 'Stuk' means 'a piece of'. So it's a rather weird statement.
A hypocritical person can be called a 'holy bean'. This derives from a sarcastic statement about orphans, who used to wear multicolor clothing, which can be referred to a 'bont' in Dutch, and often misbehaved themselves in public, but behaved in sight of the orphanage workers (who would beat them if they misbehaved). Later on, people forgot about the original meaning and misheard the statement as 'holy bean.'
When a man is a great guy, you can call him a 'cool pear'.
A person who always complains is a 'sour plum'.
A very loud woman is a 'viswijf.' This word consists of 'vis', which means 'fish', and 'wijf', which goes back to the same word for woman that ended up as 'wife' in English. However, in Dutch it is fairly pejorative. Calling someone a fishing woman goes back to the tradition of men going out to sea to fish, while their wives would sell the fish at the market and would shout loudly to sell their wares.
A slut can be called a 'licked sandwich'.
And an old woman can be referred to as an 'old cake' if you don't like her and an 'old berry' if you do, but she is very fragile.
This would be very similar to "old boiler" in Australian English.
In general I like these food-based insults. Can you give the Dutch originals so I can add a bit of mystery and exoticism when I mutter them to my colleagues?
My grandmother taught Yiddish for decades, and could have written a very similar post for that language, but I never thought to ask.
That's sad for me, of course, but probably lucky for other ACX readers, because the theme in Yiddish isn't food. It's the noises, smells and fluids that come out of the human body, and there are very specific, finely differentiated, and artistically evocative for all of them.
Great list. Many of these originally come from German, don't they? At least bavis, that's backfisch in German. You can use the expression for a teenage/young adult girl in English also, and in Scandinavian languages. Although if you do, you are either 100 years old, or you make a point of speaking as if you are 100 years old.
> An adolescent girl who always spends her time with her friends, constantly laughs and otherwise is very silly, is a 'baking fish.' This refers to fish that is too small to be a meal in itself, but too large to throw back in the water, so a bunch of them are baked together.
I've always wondered about the origin of 'bakvis', it's such a silly word. Thanks!
The Irish version of this is "gligín" which I've always heard used about girls/young women not men, but apparently it can be. Dictionary definition says it comes from a little bell, something that makes a tinkling noise, hence rattle, hence rattle-brained or shallow person:
"Screaming like a fish joulter" is the Hiberno-English version (at least in my neck of the woods). "Joulter" is a word for "pedlar" so it refers to the same general notion, of "fishwives" who would be loudly crying their goods and also loudly getting into quarrels amongst themselves.
My own father actually calls me “meatball” as a term of endearment. I don’t think most girls would be too thrilled with that one, but he’s called me that since I was a baby and it makes me smile.
Fun comment, but I don't think I've ever heard someone referred to as a meatball in English. Meathead, yes. Not specifically a meatball, though, although I suppose they're pretty close.
This is awesome, though I lived in the Netherlands seven years and never heard most of these! Living and working almost entirely among expats in Amsterdam my Dutch never got past level one, which is a shame because Dutch slang is amazing.
I always loved the Dutch name for French toast, “wentelteefjes”, which my friend translated as something like “flipbitches”. One order of flipbitches, please!
That's probably more a case of 'teef' once being used for something completely different, which has been forgotten aside from this one use. Wentelteefje is a rather old term, the earliest known use being in 1623.
For rationalists and philosophy majors in general, ethics seems like a sort of mathematics: there are axioms (you can buy them or not), and then there is the logic that fills out that implication of the axioms.
I find this to be a lovely endeavor, and I am not at all against it. Those engaged in it are living in accordance with their nature.
I suspect that most rationalists would object to using your gut as opposed to your brain to determine matters of ethics, so I'm going to try to steelman why you should.
For context, I'm not making this idea up from scratch. I believe that when the Buddhists talk about "living according to your nature" and when Emerson says "If I'm a Devil's child, my duty is to the Devil."(or something like that) they are getting at the idea of morality I am trying to get at: Just be your fucking self. That's good enough.
I think the best ethics amounts to going with your gut. That may mean you've read extensively on the subject, sweated over it, debated it, lost sleep over it, and then came to a gut conclusion. Or it may mean you gave it zero thought, as most of us do on most subjects.
The pragmatic problem with a rational ethics is most of us aren't rational. So if rational ethics are going to make a dent in the world either most people need to become rational, or rationalists need to gain so much power that their minority philosophy has sufficient sway. I don't see either of those things happening.
So my title here is Ethics and Aesthetics. My belief is we mostly do what seems right based upon what could be called an aesthetic judgment. For instance, I'm an atheist. I don't believe if I murdered someone I would experience eternal damnation. But I don't have no desire to murder someone because the idea of it horrifies me. Same goes with stealing, coveting my neighbors' wife, hiring a lawyer who advertises on TV, etc. My moral sensibility is an extension of my aesthetic sensibility.
Given there is no God, don't aesthetic sensibilities fully explain moral sensibilities?
I tend to also see ethics and aesthetics as similar, but I think there is a large difference in that the ethical breaches of others provoke outrage in a way incomparable to aesthetic breaches. Someone who rapes a child (in accordance with his nature) and someone who makes atrocious music (in accordance with her nature) are just not treated the same.
The problem is that we want to oppose our ethics on others, but generally are (ethically) opposed to the imposing our aesthetics on others. I don't want other people to murder each other, but as long as I don't have to hear it I couldn't care less what music they listen to.
The desire for a rational ethics is based around the idea that we all have some shared values to appeal to. The law is the basic expression of rational ethics - it's not 100% rational or ethical, but I feel that a judge and jury are more like a philosopher than to a cultural critic - they're trying to determine the truth and it's consequences, rather than just making an aesthetic judgement.
We disagree on the existence of God, but I agree that without a higher power to appeal to there doesn't seem to be much separating ethics and aesthetics. I don't think we can totally equivocate what is right with what is beautiful, but there's clearly conceptual overlap between the concepts.
However, even granting this doesn't rule out rational contemplation in favour of going for your gut. In the same way that deeper contemplation rather than simply accepting your initial reaction results in a different understanding of beauty, it's clear that that thinking through your moral decisions may result in a very different conclusion than simply following your gut. You could say that the gut reaction is a more authentic expression of beauty/rightness, but contemplation may allow greater insight into the art/dilemma, ultimately changing your intuitions. Since this is based around an appreciation of nuance and complexity, I'd argue that your intuition following contemplation is more valuable than the initial gut reaction, both aesthetically (you'll appreciate the art more) and morally (your decision will better reflect your own values).
I think the world would be a worse place if we told everyone to totally disregard their moral intuitions in favour of following philosophers instead (that leaves open the door to totalitarianism), but I do think that encouraging more people to think rationally about morality would result in a world that better satisfies most people's ethical preferences. As you point out, most people aren't very rational - that makes the task difficult, but to me this also suggests there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick if you can only make the discussion slightly more nuanced and contemplative.
>You could say that the gut reaction is a more authentic expression of beauty/rightness, but contemplation may allow greater insight into the art/dilemma, ultimately changing your intuitions. Since this is based around an appreciation of nuance and complexity, I'd argue that your intuition following contemplation is more valuable than the initial gut reaction, both aesthetically (you'll appreciate the art more) and morally (your decision will better reflect your own values).
It's worth noting that there is (generally) no symmetric grounds on which to judge that the intuition that comes out of contemplation is any better than the intuition that precedes it. For those of my moral intuitions that fell out of contemplation, had I known that this would be the result, I would have deliberately avoided contemplation altogether, since the resulting intuitions are fundamentally opposed to my previous position in an irreconcilable way.
I think there's something to be said for how contemplation refines the intuition in terms of the detail it picks out, but the primary effect in how it alters intuitions is not much different from spontaneously and accidentally gaining a new set of values upon getting smacked in the head with a shovel. If you have reason to believe that the new values thereby produced will not displace your *fundamental* values, but only higher-order ones, then this might be a worthwhile procedure (as judged against those same fundamental values).
I don't think my initial moral intuition is disproven by contemplation of, say, a trolley problem, it's more that I notice more complex nuances that my initial reaction overlooked. This may depend on what your initial values are. I like to think that I want to do what's best for others (obviously constrained by my own selfishness), so if contemplation changes my mind it's not because I've imported a different set of values, it's just because I've realised that my initial intuition was ignorant and naïve. Wilful blindness of the full complexity of the moral landscape seems equivalent to simply saying the first answer that comes into my head in response to a difficult question, and refusing to think about it more, which doesn't seem like a great approach to anything. Just because something feels right at the time doesn't mean it's actually the right answer.
The reason why I brought up the comparison to getting hit in the head with a shovel is that contemplation isn't straightforwardly a clean-and-tidy mental operation, such that any new notion will be robustly checked against the existing crop of understandings. The intuition I presently accept as fundamental came about as the conclusion of an argument that I considered (and still consider) invalid and unsound - I came to accept it as the consequence of what I describe as an electrical short in the brain.
>so if contemplation changes my mind it's not because I've imported a different set of values, it's just because I've realised that my initial intuition was ignorant and naïve
I'm not sure this amounts to anything other than importing a different set of values - although again, supposing that the displaced values are higher-order and not fundamental, then you have your fundamental values still available as grounds on which to judge that the displaced higher-order values were "ignorant and naïve". I admit that this is more of a linguistic nitpick without making finer distinctions between where values end and strategy begins.
However, I submit that there is a reason to think of contemplation as "subtly modifying values" instead of only "figuring out what my values entail" - but the distinction mostly gains relevance at the point where it's the fundamental values that get modified (as happened to me, but may be an unfamiliar experience to you).
To put it slightly differently, if certain values are fundamental, and contemplation is purely untangling what those values entail, then it should be completely impossible for those values to be displaced by contemplation - they were either not fundamental in the first place, or contemplation is doing something other than checking for consistency/entailment against the fundamentals. (As it happens, this latter possibility seems sensible on other grounds - why should I expect a brain to work as a squeaky-clean inference machine, and not make some inadmissible leaps under the right conditions?)
> We disagree on the existence of God, but I agree that without a higher power to appeal to there doesn't seem to be much separating ethics and aesthetics.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that, unless you're suggesting that aesthetics are also objective:
I should have clarified - I find the arguments in favour of objective morality unconvincing when they come from an atheistic perspective. That's not to say humans can't generally agree on a system of morality, but humans can agree on aesthetics too, that doesn't make it objective.
I guess if you accept that morals are objective you can argue that aesthetics are objective but it seems unlikely that there's a universal concept of beauty.
It probably depends on how exactly you define objectivity, but I'm unconvinced that morality can be defined without some reference to individual subjectivity, even if the existence of God is assumed, since morality deals with interactions between subjective beings with individual desires and needs.
> It probably depends on how exactly you define objectivity, but I'm unconvinced that morality can be defined without some reference to individual subjectivity
What is the nature of this subjectivity? I assume you consider math objective, but I doubt you would require math to be defined without reference to some axioms, so why should objective morality be any different? Are mathematical axioms subjective in your view?
For instance, Kant's categorical imperative seems pretty reasonable as a mind-independent construction of morality with minimal assumptions.
Furthermore, whether people agree with these moral frameworks doesn't seem relevant to whether they qualify as internally consistent constructions of objective morality.
I read through the paper, and I think the main point of conflict is this:
The paper argues that there is objective morality and that we know it the same way we know there is objective reality even though we can’t prove either logically. It specifically says that just as those who are skeptical that anything exists can logically dispute the “common sense” arguments of those who say otherwise, similarity his “proof” cannot convince a moral skeptic. He merely argues (and well) that those who accept the common sense philosophical argument for the objective reality cannot logically dismiss the common sense argument for objective morality.
The problem is that while you can philosophically accept that objective morality exists using this method, there’s no underlying theory to explain why it exists. It’s like scientists in Galileos time who observed the brute facts of moons orbiting Jupiter and the transit of Venus but did not have a compelling model of the solid system to explain those facts (not until Newton anyway). The religious have a model that explains moral facts and is parsimonious: the atheist does not. Perhaps an atheistic model could be found someday, but the paper you proffered does not have it and does not claim to have it.
> It specifically says that just as those who are skeptical that anything exists can logically dispute the “common sense” arguments of those who say otherwise, similarity his “proof” cannot convince a moral skeptic.
I mostly agree with your summary, with the addendum that the Moorean proof also shows that the skeptic's argument is necessarily less plausible than the common sense argument. As the paper says, that the skeptic's points are *literally* false.
> The problem is that while you can philosophically accept that objective morality exists using this method, there’s no underlying theory to explain why it exists.
Should we expect one? If we could explain every observation using science except for some questions about why certain fundamental constants have their values, like the speed of light, is that theory incomplete?
> The religious have a model that explains moral facts and is parsimonious
Assuming a deity is not parsimonious. It basically lifts all moral prescriptions into assumptions, along with a whole boatload of metaphysical assumptions about divine knowledge and authority. It's the complete opposite of parsimony IMO.
> Perhaps an atheistic model could be found someday, but the paper you proffered does not have it and does not claim to have it.
I agree, but it allegedly shows that at least one moral fact exists, and demonstrates that our typical process of reasoned debate can uncover more. I admit that I'm not as well versed in the philosophy of aesthetics, but I'm not sure this is equally of both ethics and aesthetics.
Both ethics and aesthetics as practiced by humans consist of conscious and subconscious judgements, so in this sense they are obviously similar. The important difference is that ethics is concerned with mediating interpersonal relationships to a much greater degree. To be effective at this it has to be largely consistent between participants in these relationships. To facilitate this we're (evolved/designed by some creator - choose appropriate) to have strong intuitions about its judgements having to be both obligatory and universal.
I think you are getting rationalist morality wrong. Moreover, It's deontological or virtue ethics reasoning, dogmatic morality set in stone, probably initially dictated by someones aesthetical ideas, which resembles mathematical axioms. Something is assumed to be moral and then we go with the consequences biting all the bullets in the way.
On the other hand, rationalists ethics is predominantly some sort of consequential utilitarism. We begin from the intuitive feelings of our values and then trying to make them consistent and in this process some of the initial aesthetical sentiments may cease to be so important. Begin with your gut and then use your brain in case your gut may have got it wrong. And yes, you are recommended to use math for your utility calculations, but thats a difference between something used as a handy instrument for a cause and a cause in its structure resembling some instrument.
It's actually interesting that you assumed that rationalist ethics resembles mathematics. It seems to be itself an idea dictated mostly by aesthetics. And it highligths why aesthitical decisions without propper investigation can lead to poor judgement.
". . . biting all the bullets in the way . . ." I love this phrase. I expect it will come to mind multiple times today, and I'm going to enjoy every one of them. Did you just come up with the phrase as you wrote that sentence, or is it an expression people use in some circles?
Technically true. Axioms are used to pin down entities in the concept space. If we take some fixed sort of consequential utilitarism, we can describe it axiomatically like any other entity.
But as far as I'm concerned, Jack Wilson wasn't talking about this, while comparing rationalist ethics to mathematics. Such methaphor would've been useless anyway, as it can fit anything. He was talking about the dynamics of ethical practice.
And I claim, that rationalist ethical practice is less similar to mathematical practice than more traditional deontological ethical practices including simply following your gut, due to the reasons I've mentioned above.
>I believe that when the Buddhists talk about "living according to your nature" [...]and when Emerson says "If I'm a Devil's child, my duty is to the Devil."(or something like that) they are getting at the idea of morality I am trying to get at: Just be your fucking self. That's good enough.
Buddhist ideas about ethics are very different from this Emerson quote (at least if I'm understanding that quote correctly). If Buddhists say "live according to your nature" it should probably be understood as living in accordance with your Buddha-Nature, that is your deepest nature which is formless and which is already enlightened. Such a statement would not be that dissimilar to a Christian asking themselves "What would Jesus do?" (or better: "What would Christ do?")
For everyone not sufficiently enlightened (ie everyone currently living), there are loads of Buddhist lists of moral behaviors (Sila) and virtues (Paramis) that they are encouraged to follow/aspire to.
In general, to me Theravadan buddhism seems to be somewhat distrustful of personalities and focused on uprooting harmful thought and behavior patterns. Vajrayana/Tantric paths embrace the personality, but with lots of disclaimers about the great dangers if you don't do it exactly right. Zen (which I know least about) seems to me to be generally very disinterested in personality, something which is present in all of Buddhism but I think heightened in Zen.
An ethical philosophy *must* have times when it conflicts with your gut instinct, or why do you even have it? "Do whatever feels right to you" is not an ethical philosophy, it's the lack of one.
(And while I'm cynical enough to say that people often use moral philosophy to justify what they wanted to do anyway, I'm not cynical enough to say that's *all* moral philosophy is.)
Also, ethical theories are universalizable, while everyone can only access their own gut instincts. So if your gut disagrees with someone else's gut, you'll have to make an appeal to a universal principles that you both agree on.
To put it another way, if one guy in the trolley problem wants to pull the lever because his moral intuitions say "save five people," and another person wants to not pull the lever because his intuitions say "thou shalt not kill," how do you resolve this without getting into a fistfight over the trolley lever?
In that specific situation, announce that if he wants to stop you from pulling the level, he'll have to kill you, thus resolving the moral dilemma in your favour!
In defence of some form of ethical intuitionism - my own experience is that ethical philosophies are most useful when my gut instinct conflicts with my other gut instincts - intuitions are great but often incoherent - trolley problems pit the urge to not kill against the urge to save life. I tend to reject moral philosophies if they seem to totally violate my instincts ("killing all life on earth is good actually"), I think of the appeal of any philosophy comes from it matching some of our intuitions most of the time. I guess where I disagree with Jack Wilson is that he seems to have a much more confident gut than me - mine's generally undecided and benefits a lot from thoughtful contemplation.
As for those universal principles, if you don't believe in a natural law out there to be discovered or revealed through revelation, it's difficult to say whether they're truly universal or just based on commonly shared human instincts. I don't think this is a bad thing, hedonic utilitarianism only works because we instinctively want to seek pleasure and avoid pain - if that wasn't the case it would be even less popular.
This is a little off topic, but I get annoyed when I point out that most people and animals seem to want to live, then other people argue that's an invalid preference since it's only due to evolutionary pressure in favour of not committing suicide - where do these people think pleasure and pain came from? You only enjoy not-starving because your primordial ancestors that were disinterested in food didn't stick around for long!
"Given there is no God, don't aesthetic sensibilities fully explain moral sensibilities?"
The late Roger Zelazny, in his novel "Lord of Light", has his main character use this as the approach to building a rebellion against the gods:
"The answer, the justification, is the same for men as it is for gods. Good or ill, say the sages, mean nothing for they are of Samsara. Agree with the sages, who have taught our people for as far as the memory of man may reach. Agree, but consider also a thing of which the sages do not speak. This thing is 'beauty,' which is a word, but look behind the word and consider the Way of the Nameless. And what is the way of the Nameless? It is the Way of Dream. And why does the Nameless dream? This thing is not known to any dweller within Samsara. So ask, rather, what does the Nameless dream?
"The Nameless, of which we are all a part, does dream form. And what is the highest attribute any form may possess? It is beauty. The Nameless, then, is an artist. The problem, therefore, is not one of good or evil, but one of esthetics. To struggle against those who are mighty among dreamers and are mighty for ill, or ugliness, is not to struggle for that which the sages have taught us to be meaningless in terms of Samsara or Nirvana, but rather it is to struggle for the symmetrical dreaming of a dream, in terms of the rhythm and the point, the balance and the antithesis which will make it a thing of beauty. Of this, the sages say nothing. This truth is so simple that they have obviously overlooked it. For this reason, I am bound by the esthetics of the situation to call it to your attention. To struggle against the dreamers who dream ugliness, be they men or gods, cannot but be the will of the Nameless. This struggle will also bear suffering, and so one's karmic burden will be lightened thereby, just as it would be by enduring the ugliness; but this suffering is productive of a higher end in the light of the eternal values of which the sages so often speak.
"Therefore, I say unto you, the esthetics of what you have witnessed this evening were of a high order. You may ask me, then, 'How am I to know that which is beautiful and that which is ugly, and be moved to act thereby?' This question, I say, you must answer for yourself. To do this, first forget what I have spoken, for I have said nothing. Dwell now upon the Nameless." He raised his right hand and bowed his head.
..."No," said Sam, "I just wanted to try another line on the audience. It is difficult to stir rebellion among those to whom all things are good. There is no room for evil in their minds, despite the fact that they suffer it constantly. The slave upon the rack who knows that he will be born again, perhaps as a fat merchant, if he suffers willingly, his outlook is not the same as that of a man with but one life to live. He can bear anything, knowing that great as his present pain may be, his future pleasure will rise higher. If such a one does not choose to believe in good or evil, perhaps then beauty and ugliness can be made to serve him as well. Only the names have been changed."
"they are getting at the idea of morality I am trying to get at: Just be your fucking self. That's good enough."
Which works okay if (a) you believe that fundamentally, people are good, just sometimes they get a bit screwed-up and (b) that most people will muddle along in a sorta kinda ethical way and (c) stuff called "sin" or "crime" is just "fun things the wet blankets don't want you to do, like sex and drugs and rock'n'roll!"
I'm currently reading a cheap, pulpy, series of urban fantasy/light horror novels (written by a man, for once) where the main character is a somewhat seedy sorcerer involved in light crime who has now taken up with a demoness as his girlfriend (so far, par for the course for urban fantasy) and in this particular volume of the series, the Bad Guys are trying to get the soul of Gilles de Rais to help their nefarious purposes.
Our guy wants to put a crimp in their plans so he decides to get the soul first. Here's the line I want to quote:
"I shook my head and rolled up the scroll. “I don’t have a lot of work for a child-abusing serial killer. He can stay in there and rot for all I care. I just don’t want anyone else to have him.”
Thing is, our guy acknowledges that he's not really a good guy since there aren't really any Good Guys. There are Bad Guys and Less Bad Guys. My quibble with what he says here is "But this is exactly the kind of company you are keeping now. This is the compeer for you, now that you're working with actual real demons. These are the kinds of people who make bargains and sign contracts with devils, and you yourself are overcoming any moral qualms about stuff you might be doing, or more importantly that your demon girlfriend might be doing, with 'yeah but she's really hot' so pot, kettle".
I notice that a lot in much of this kind of genre: sure, maybe I'm dealing with demons and devils, but they're not so bad once you get to know them; God is absent, if angels are present they're 'dicks with wings' to quote "Supernatural" and yeah Hell exists, but only *really* bad people go there, like child-abusing serial killers. The sins we like and indulge in are not sins. The sins we don't like are sins.
Let everyone be themselves, and then you have to face up to the fact that some people's selves *are* child-abusing serial killers, or people who drift around in a criminal milieu including drug dealers and gang-bangers and convince themselves that everyone is like this, I'm not so bad by comparison, and it's all Society's Fault anyway.
I think that's a good point - "If I'm a Devil's child" I shouldn't give the Devil his due - he's the goddamn Devil, I should tell him to get stuffed and do the right thing instead. (This is the plot of so many other stories that it has it's own page on TV tropes, Good Omens is one of the most amusing takes on it https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiAntiChrist, and although it's always slightly blasphemous as I Christian I appreciate the irony of it)
More seriously, you can't just "be yourself" - you could be a wide variety of different people, you have to seriously think about which of those people you want to become or there's a genuine risk of becoming someone you hate.
I think by "be yourself" most people mean "follow what you think is right, and ignore what other people tell you is right".
Of course, there's a big question mark over how much of people's moral action is ethically derived vs. compelled by consequence (legal and social) vs. mere habit from compelled-by-consequence being usual. "Be yourself" is saying to throw #2 in the garbage and go with #1 - but it kind of ignores #3.
> I think by "be yourself" most people mean "follow what you think is right, and ignore what other people tell you is right".
I understand you may just be summarising the view, but that doesn't seem like a great way to be good at anything (maths, science, basketball, cooking), so it seems odd to suggest that morality is the only aspect of human life that doesn't benefit from criticism. Obviously there are times to ignore others and do what you think is right anyway, in both creative and moral endeavours, but I'd phrase that as "follow what you think is right, after listening carefully and critically to what other people tell you is right". If there's a consequence to doing something (legal or social) that's a good reason not to do it - you need a more compelling reason to do it anyway, not a reckless disregard for the consequences of your actions!
"Be yourself" might be an effort to undercut an anxious belief that one is intrinsically unable to do well enough. This is worth undercutting, but presumably needs a more sophisticated approach.
It's probably a great message for some people and the worst possible thing you can say to other people. In fact, some of the time it's exactly what I need to hear, and some of the time it's really counterproductive on account of my massive ego. So I tend to prefer more nuanced advice.
I'd say there's a difference between taking note of other people's reasoning vs. taking note of other people's applause and heckles. (Among other differences, the number and identities of those other people are only relevant to the second one.)
As for the bit about consequences - well, that all depends on how you weigh things. Some value their honor above their lives, and more only a little below. And then there are those who think grinding away at a norm through defiance is worth the cost.
It's the "Daniel Faust" series by Craig Schaefer, out on Amazon. I get 'em on Kindle but they're also published in paperback by 47North, an Amazon imprint (I didn't know Jeff decided he might as well have his own line of publishing but hey, why not?)
They're cheap and trashy and he has a couple of series running in parallel, but sometimes you just want pulp entertainment. The main draw is that like Harry Dresden, he gets into Very Sticky Situations and you want to see "how is he going to pull his chestnuts out of the fire this time?" That's the main and only resemblance, really; apart from the fact that Jim Butcher is a hundred times more A Big Name Author than this guy will ever be (and nothing wrong with being a small-time writer if you can manage to make a living out of it), Harry Dresden may think he's in the grey morality area but compared with Daniel Faust, he is whiter than white.
It's not bad for what it is, I'm reading a lot of these small-time, almost self-published/published by tiny independent presses/sell most of their work via Kindle horror/dark fantasy authors this weather (maybe it's the pandemic?) and some of them are really terrible. This guy is not bad. He's not Stephen King or Jim Butcher, but he's okay if you want a decent setting (Las Vegas, giving him the opportunity to talk about crime - when the Mob were run out, the corporations took over the gambling and casinos, it seems, and they're a lot more ruthless when it comes to profit-making), a coherent magic system (in that it's the usual grab-bag of traditions and the modern take on 'it's mostly symbolic so whatever you got to hand will do' apparatus and ingredients) and a protagonist who, if he's not very careful, is going to end up in deep doo-doo if he doesn't have one foot already there (he has a Tragic Backstory, of course, but we get hints rather than fully going into it, at least as far as I've read).
It's somewhat different in that the protagonist is also a petty criminal (or maybe not so petty) who was involved with the local crime boss until they had a falling-out, and it's strongly hinted he was along for some Bad Things happening in that line of work. He's still involved in crime, and has no qualms shooting people in the face (so long as he's got a good reason to do so). So there very definitely is a marker set out from the start that "I'm not one of the Good Guys, but I'm a Less Bad Guy". I'll be interested to see if the whole "hanging round with demons and committing crimes and sorcery means I'm going to Hell" situation is developed and what that may mean. So far, he's kind of dodged that by not thinking at all about what happens after he dies. We see *other* people definitely going to Hell but they're pegged as the Really Bad Guys, so we'll see.
The grab-bag traditions again are the usual modern take: Hindu demons? Sure! Haitian magic, hippy-dippy stuff, ceremonial magic (he gives a shout-out to Aleister Crowley), any tradition you like? All work. Except, you know, Christianity *of course*. I haven't seen anything from the other two Abrahamic traditions but I'd be willing to bet if he ever gets into Muslim or Jewish occult traditions, they're gonna be bang-up effective and golems, djinns and what you will are all real.
God is absent or dead, Lucifer/Satan also seems to have left the scene for unknown reasons (but they know Lucifer was around, since the Civil War in Hell only started after he left). No angels, any mention of them is very disapproving (they're not going to save humans, they will destroy humans for being sinful, so it's a good job they're not on the scene). The last book I read, the demoness girlfriend gave the protagonist a sort of pep talk which, again, is the usual modern take on such: there is no God/good power waiting in the wings to save you, sure demons are real and take advantage but they don't make humans do bad things, humans have free will and are totally responsible for their own actions good or bad, they are the highest power and are the ones in control in their own world.
_The Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking_ was self-published after being turned down by publishers for a decade. It's a dark YA novel which somehow was difficult for publishers to accept.
I can't see how it's even nearly as dark as _The Hunger Games_, but publishers are a mystery.
Only somewhat related, but if you're looking for an urban fantasy story where demons are treated as a serious moral black hole, Wildbow's Pact might interest you. There are lots of horrible things in the setting, and working with them will make you enemies, but even someone who calls up Abyssal monsters to torture his enemies will be worth allying with against someone who works with demons. They felt a bit like a nuclear weapon metaphor, for someone harangued on all sides they must be extremely tempting, nearly limitless power at your fingertips, but using them takes something from the world that you can't ever get back, and will make you an enemy of the world.
That doesn't seem like much of a metaphor for nuclear weapons; fallout is by its very nature not permanent and is at least somewhat capable of being cleaned up, and international norms seem to be "nukes are okay in a total war".
The same person born in 10 different times and places throughout history would have 10 different sets of aesthetics regarding morality. This is b cause these aesthetics are largely learned from your culture during childhood.
What determines which aesthetics your culture teaches you? That depends on a lot of factors, bit one of the big factors in most societies is a group of elites who think very carefully about morality, try to come to the best possible conclusions about it given their understanding of the world, and then reproduce their conclusions as a series of aesthetics to feed back to the general population.
The people who are trying to think rationally about morality are attempting to be precisely this type of influential elite. Yes, it will likely never happen that every person in the country does full utilitarian math before coming to a moral conclusion. However, it's very possible that rationalists produce a series of moral aesthetics which, when followed, correlate much more highly with the results of doing those calculations, than the results of other moral aesthetics would. And it's very possible that they reproduce some of those aesthetics in other members of the general population, through various channels of influence (eg, Ezra Klein pushing effective altruism to his genpop audience).
There's a lot to critique about this idea, and I think other people in this thread have done a good job with it, but what I do like about it is that it acknowledges that the trickiest part of ethics isn't in knowing the right thing to do but in actually doing it. There's no point in spending a lot of time thinking carefully about ethics if you're then going to wander off and behave like a jerk anyway.
There are some people who do awful things because they genuinely believe them to be good, but the more common or garden variety of awful-thing-doer knows perfectly well that they shouldn't be doing what they're doing and they do it anyway. Figuring out how to get people not to do blatantly unethical things (even when they really feel like it!) would have a much greater impact on society than sitting around trying to smooth out the rough edges of abstract ethical systems.
Should you send a trolley to run over three fat men or one million lizards? Doesn't matter, that's never going to happen. Stop littering and don't cheat on your wife.
I base my ethics on my aesthetics and am happy with it. I would not conflate "gut feeling" and "aesthetic judgment" - sometimes my aesthetic judgment may be the result of a lengthy rational process (slow thinking vs fast thinking). I'm also OK with my ethics being not objective/universal, just like my aesthetics.
Could go even farther - consider this thought experiment. Suppose I am a scientific rationalist convinced that religion is all bogus illusion, but I have that "religion shaped hole", would like the comforts that religion provides, and know that being religious is beneficial. I want to take up a religion despite knowing it's bogus, but which one to choose? Why not go with aesthetic judgment.
Which reminds me of the story about the Tsar of Russia choosing Christianity instead of Islam because the Russians could never give up booze.
I will object to your rational/gut felling dichotomy.
"That may mean you've read extensively on the subject, sweated over it, debated it, lost sleep over it, and then came to a gut conclusion."
For me this is rational. Training your intuition to reach better solutions is rational. Reason is not something that only happens consciously. Have you ever slept over a problem and then used intuition to get to the right solution that could be independently verified? How is that not reason?
Furthermore, if you believe in the predictive processing model of the brain, that the brain is constantly doing bayesian updating, you will basically have to admit that rationality happens unconsciously.
But even if you don't, a significant part of doing mathematics is using your gut feeling on how to solve a problem. Mathematics is pure reason. Whatever your definition is reason is, it has to include mathematics, and therefore at least some things that happen unconsciously.
But! Like it is ridiculously high and I was trying to finish my Dad's side of the family tree which is mostly Finnish and I kept on running into suicide after suicide after suicide- like this is my great uncle! https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/58897638/waine-walpo-herronen "Mr. Herronen was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room Sunday night. Death was attributed to a self-inflicted gunshot wound."
Which - side note- great debate on whether the high rate of suicide in Las Vegas is because suicidal people go to Las Vegas or whether Las Vegas makes people suicidal- and given my great uncle emigrated from Finland to shoot himself in Vegas- data for the former.
Anyway, there's actually some v weird Finnish ER protein variants that cause weird diabetes and hearing loss and! major depression. And it made me realize that every time we give a rough summary of heritability of any syndrome or illness- we're lying because it very much depends on the etiology. It's like breast cancer. The BRCA variants account for like a very small percentage of overall breast cancers and yet white girls in my age group outside of science frequently refer to it as a definitive overall risk factor.
Anyway, we should test for the obvious genetic causes of mental illness even in mental illnesses that are traditionally thought of as not heritable.
Also the transcriptome only predicts 60 to 70% of ribosomal occupancy and no one really knows how earth's magnetic field works. And I don't really understand why anyone touts the current era of being one of inescapable science and technology where surely we will crack the code on aging when we're still living in that degree of dark-ages ignorance.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. If a disease has heritable and non-heritable etiologies that we can't distinguish, its apparent heritability will be somewhere in the middle, depending on how common each is.
Heritability isn't independent of environment. Somebody might inherit a metabolic quirk that makes them very likely to develop Disease X if there's a certain chemical in their environment. If they live in an environment that is free of the chemical their risk of the disease is the same as everyone else's. If that chemical is present virtually everywhere, we would think of the person as having a high inherited risk of developing X. If the chemical is only present in 3 small areas scattered over the planet, we would not.
As I understand it, suicide in one's family makes suicide more likely. I don't know whether it's been checked whether it's genetic or social influence.
It could even be that there's both a chemical and metabolic control of some pathway, and if that pathway is too extreme in one direction or the other, it results in depression and suicide. In locations where the chemical is high, genes for a higher metabolic control will be genes for suicide, while in locations where the chemical is low, genes for a higher metabolic control will be genes *against* suicide.
How concerned are Americans about the Delta variant and other yet-to-be discovered variants? There seems to be an idea that COVID is mostly over in the US, but the Delta variant has some vaccine evasion and seems a lot more contagious. What are the odds that the US sees another wave of COVID (35,000+ cases per day as a weekly average, to pick an arbitrary number that may be too high or too low to be useful) before the end of January 2022?
It would help if we could put some reliable numbers on "some" and "a lot more".
The British Medical Journal, https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1513 , says Pfizer is 88% effective vs Delta (compared to 95% vs baseline Covid), which isn't terribly worrisome.
We'd also need the infection fatality ratio, which several sources give as "low" but without numbers. Since the expected end state of COVID-19 is to evolve into one more of the 200+ variants of the common cold, making lots of people a little bit sick while killing almost none, it would seem important to know if Delta is a step on that path.
We've seen evidence of seasonality to covid, so even without a significant new variant, I've thought there's a moderate chance of some new bump by the end of January, particularly if vaccination rates slow down again.
One potential confounder is if testing rates continue to fall. They don't need to fall that much more for us to miss a bump that "would have" returned us to 35,000 daily cases as a weekly average, particularly if the dropoff in testing is most severe in localities with low vaccination rates. That said, if the actual number of infections went up to a level that "would have" corresponded to 50,000 or 75,000 daily cases, then I think there would be enough news coverage to increase testing rates to the level that we would detect it. (I'm using "would have" here to account for whatever fraction of actual infections get detected by tests and become cases, and I still don't know how to think about that.)
We no longer have the social trust to convince more than ~80% of the United States population to take any vaccine, and probably no more than ~70% for any new vaccine. If we get a variant where 70-80% vaccination + immunity from prior infection is not enough to prevent a renewed pandemic, we're getting a renewed pandemic no matter how good our vaccines are or how quickly we can manufacture them.
Western Europe can probably do somewhat better than this, but not 100%.
My friend and I just recorded an album of songs we wrote during the late half of COVID I thought I’d share. You all entertain me every week on this site so if you like it I’d be happy to send you a free download code, just reach out to us on the “Contact Cold Beverage Link” and mention Astral Codex Ten
There is a lot of talk about possible booster shots of COVID vaccine being made available some time this year. It all seems to skip over recipients of the J&J vaccine though.
Should the people who received the J&J consider getting the Pfizer or Moderna also?
There's apparently a long history of mix-and-match vaccine usage for many diseases, and it sounds like UK and Canada are doing mix-and-match with AstraZeneca and some of the mRNA vaccines, so almost certainly someone who had J&J and then got Pfizer or Moderna would be safe, and would get some increased immunity.
If there are a noticeable number of vaccine doses going to waste, then it's probably not unethical for an individual to choose to use one of those. But if the number of excess doses available is being used to determine how many doses to ship off to other locations that will use them, it might be, since the further protection of an extra dose is unlikely to be as significant as the first dose to someone in a location where the disease is still spreading in an uncontrolled fashion.
I happened to draw the J&J in the vaccine scrum earlier this year. I don’t want bypass the queue but with the US seeming to approach some sort of asymptotic limit on vaccination rate I am tempted to step up and say I don’t need a free beer or a lottery entry for a million dollars. I’m ready now.
But I do take your point about the need to make a decision about exporting our surplus vaccine.
I’m in robust health though, so being patient seems like the best play here.
I got Pfizer as my first dose, actually asked for AstraZeneca as second a couple of weeks ago, in the hope of increasing immunity. (I'm in Canada, btw.) Public health wouldn't let me; there's decent data on mRNA followed by AstraZeneca, but the studies in the UK going the other direction, while generally positive, aren't complete yet.
Hopefully if it's significantly better, I can get an AstraZeneca shot as a booster in a few months.
I have the impression that aging is driven by genetic damage. My understanding is that when cells replicate, there’s a chance of transcription error. These errors accumulate over time and eventually our cells stop replicating.
If this is correct, wouldn’t one possible approach to aging be to sequence our DNA when we are young, then record it in some database, and then eventually use some yet-to-be invented nanotechnology to repair DNA damage?
Separately of the two steps a) sequence healthy DNA and b) alter millions of base pairs in the DNA in 30 trillion cells in the human body, the difficulty of b >>>> a
What Vermillion said, read about the Hayflick limit and Telomeres. My simplistic picture; there's a biological trade off between dying of cancer or of old age... running out the clock on cell division.
Why would there be a tradeoff? Naked-mole rats are ridiculously long lived for a mammal of their size *and* all but immune to cancer. Some things, like powerful DNA repair mechanisms or the immune system being good at cleaning up damaged cells, seem to be independently important for preventing both aging and cancer.
It's a very controversial topic - to what extent aging is driven by genetic damage. Certain markers of aging can be upstream or downstream of it, the entire field hasn't really established much in the way of causal chains.
Your embryonal genome should be trivial to reconstruct by sampling your somatic cells - whatever mutations happened, affected only some of the cells. You could probably do it with current technology, for a few $k per person.
The yet-to-be invented nanotechnology might be the hard part. Consider delivering massive amounts of targeted replacements to each cell without introducing further errors, the genome spontaneously changing all over the place due to transposons, heterochromatin being basically inaccessible to outside intervention without unwinding it, the necessity to restore not only the genetic but also the epigenetic information (methylation patterns)....
It would be very difficult to do, and with trillions of cells to correct it's almost inevitable that the repair attempt would introduce new errors. As the number of corrections increases, the probability of giving yourself cancer approaches 1, so it's probably neither useful nor safe.
However, you're thinking along the right lines - if you stored or reconstructed your original, unmutated genome, you could use it to clone fresh stem cells and reintroduce them into your body to replace your old, worn out cells. These cells would also lack the many other hallmarks of aging like shortened telomeres, I'd recommend this paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/) if you're interested in learning more, Figure 1 summarises the hallmarks of aging recognised as of 2013.
Hmm, Aging = Cancer is backwards in my view. It's true that about equal numbers die from cancer and aging... But that's a data point for the 'You die by aging *or* cancer' , hypothesis, evolution picks the mid point.
Are you commenting on my post or on the linked paper? Just curious because it could be either, the paper conceptualises both aging and cancer as products of cellular damage and I think makes a pretty convincing argument that the same processes the produce cancer can also contribute to aging. There's definitely some role of senescence in preventing cancer, but I wouldn't describe aging and cancer as a dichotomy - aging increases vulnerability to cancer as the normal mechanisms that prevent cancer break down. Why choose one when both is an option?
Telomeres set the max number of cell divisions, to stop cells that turn cancerous. But reaching the end of the telomere leads to cell senescence. So then aging is our programmed response to help not get cancer.
As other people have said, aging is complex. One good example is nucleosome positioning: in old age, the chromatin structure itself becomes looser, interfering with epigenetic regulation across the board. Here's a 2018 review article going over this sort of epigenetic issue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924543/
Just focusing on DNA itself, remember that it has several levels of structure. Primary structure is the sequence of nucleic acids, which is what you're proposing replacing from a database. But DNA is wrapped around nucleosomes. The chemical modifications applied to nucleosomes are linked to gene expression, diverse across cells, and are hard to make sense of (look up the histone "code").
You wouldn't necessarily need to replace the complete genome of each cell. I can imagine a strategy that involved determining the embryonic DNA of an organism, then somehow activating or supplementing the normal DNA repair mechanisms present in each cell to fix whatever mutations are present.
This would pose challenges for the immune system, since antibody-producing cells specialize by modifying their own DNA to produce specific antibodies against specific antigens. But I suspect this would be the least of your challenges.
An alternative would be to come up with a range of strategies for regrowing new tissue and removing damaged tissue. For example, you could create a robust supply of stem cells, figure out how to differentiate them into useful tissue, remove the original tissue, and implant the new. Imagine getting a heart replacement every 50 years, for example, or going in for regular senescent cell-removal therapies.
There is work going on in these areas. The most active, to my knowledge, is regenerative medicine and the creation of new healthy tissue for implantation. This is taking place on scales from a few cells (i.e. to regrow damaged axons for spinal cord repair) to larger tissues (we can create bladders and corneas now - things that are sheets, tubes, or bags). Necessarily, this entails a "refreshment" of the DNA, but it also comes with a "refreshment" of the cell itself. It may be easier to do that than to precisely target a DNA repair or replacement while keeping the original cell intact.
The idea that aging is purely about genetic damage is frankly pretty outdated. The DNA in your cells is damaged a trillion times per day and almost all of it is repaired. So the aging, or really one aspect of it, is breakdown of that repair mechanism, not accumulation of damage per se. Another example is that you can take a cell from an adult or even old organism and make a clone and the clone will be young, so the age isn't "preserved" in the DNA. And why that repair mechanism break downs is a whole long different story. One good explanation of the modern understanding is here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcifQCKkRc9XTjxC2/anti-aging-state-of-the-art#Part_III__What_is_aging_
Does anyone have good recommendations for parenting books? Preferably early years but anything up to teenage years might be useful. I've found a few that look interesting but there are loads on the market, and I'd be interested in recommendations from rationalists/rationalist-adjacents/nerds.
Ozy reviewed a large number of parenting books on thing of things awhile back. Just skim/search the archive for the monthly book posts, here's an example that I think is one of the last ones to focus on parenting, so probably start there and work backwards: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/book-post-for-april-parenting/
I really like The Whole Brain Child and its companion book, No Drama Discipline, authors are Siegel and Bryson (careful, there are other books with similar titles). The strategies they suggest are very helpful for raising a child who is reasonable, responsible, and cooperative without being inflexible, a blind follower or unthinking, as well as happy, and they explain why and how the strategies we use make a difference.
Oh, and about the teen years, Hold on to Your Kids by Neufeld and Mate is great.
BTW, good connection and positive discipline in childhood greatly reduce friction and conflict in adolescence. If there is more than one parent/adult involved in raising the child, early and ongoing close connection w/all, not just one, also makes the teen years much easier.
Selfish Reasons to have More Kids by Caplain. Very data driven, with a reasonable analytical overlay. He thought he was arguing for having more kids, I read it as having more reasons to do what's right for us instead of stuff normies do.
I love his emphasis on how useless the intensive parenting is, and how it can be harmful to kids, families and parents. I often explain to my students when we discuss factors influencing family size that having just one or two kids puts a TON more pressure on kids, and therefore parents. There's no more room to have one kid who lives in your basement forever, or doesn't want kids, or goes to jail or is otherwise not as we would like. So those situations go from sad and difficult to seemingly intolerable in small families. The fact that children are now a choice and no longer the automatic outcome of having sex or not wanting to starve on your farm or in your old age increases that pressure.
HOWEVER, there is one area where actually paying attention to your kids does make a pretty big difference, and that is the emotional stuff. Kids need to know their parents CARE, and the way we show that is by investing a reasonable amount of our time and attention in them. (Just not in screaming at them to practice the fucking violin!) That's what puts the 'benign' in benign neglect, and creates a lot more resilience when our kids hit the rough patches in life.
I truly truly hate the current cultural norm that life is some huge competition and if you're not 'winning' it, you are going to have a crap miserable life, and should be ashamed of that. And you can't even 'win' just by making a decent living; you have to make obscene amounts of money at something you have a passion for, and also be some type of renaissance person, physically very fit, and famous to boot. I realize that (in the US more than here in Canada, so far) there are a lot of cracks to fall through in life, but so wish it could again be fine to be 'average', with an average job, average house, average kids ....
BTW, there's now decent research showing that one of the biggest predictors of high levels of ability to delay gratification is stability and security experienced by the child early in life, including the kids' perceptions of how stable/secure the parents feel (meaning there can be intergenerational impacts of poverty, risks of falling into poverty, violence, etc.
Because, ya know, if everything can and probably will go to shit at any moment, eating the single marshmallow NOW is the rational response.
I agree with that - it was always a great relief to know that my parents supported me, but mostly just let me just do the things I enjoyed and was good at. They had 3 spares so I guess if I screw up it's not too big a loss.
You should read "Little Platoons: A Defense of the Family in a Competitive Age". It is about this topic of over competitive intensive off, and I really enjoyed it.
Emily Oster's books seem pretty data-driven. Allison Gopnik's "The Gardener and the Carpenter" was pretty interesting. I found some useful strategies in "How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen." The information in "Raising Good Humans" was helpful in examining why I relate to my children the way I do. "Hunt Gather Parent" had information/recommendations that matched some of my priors so I was inclined to like it, but I'm not sure how scientific it really is (I'm not saying it's unscientific--I just don't know). I think 95% of raising kids boils down to the following: Provide food, shelter, clothing, and love. Try to give them some autonomy and don't hit them (or otherwise abuse them). After that, I think any improvement from parenting is incremental, and everything else is up to luck or genes. (This is my experience with a one-year-old and a soon-to-be-four-year-old. My perspective could change with experience).
Parenting books seem to be a lot like business books, largely consisting of a single moderately useful idea padded out with a lot of anecdotes and wild assertions to fill whatever the minimum word count the publisher will accept.
As far as I can figure out after watching a summary video, the core idea of "1 2 3 Magic" is that you respond to insolent kids with "That's one", "That's two", and "That's three, go to your room". Decent time-honoured tactic, but doesn't seem worth an entire book; on the other hand, looking at 123magic.com it seems that it's not just a whole book but an entire industry.
And even with that one good idea. counting to 5, rather slowly, works better. Kids need time to process and simmer down a bit.
The hilarious part is, this still works on my 20 and 21 yr olds! I don't need it often, and use it less often still because I don't want the magic to break.
I didn't really look into the whole industry. I read the book and it doesn't work on all kids but many, the premise is solid and I enjoyed the writing.
I do NOT like the Dr. Sears Baby Book quite as much.
My mom also recommended Dr. Spock's common sense book of baby and childcare, and I got a 1950 edition and it's an interesting read at the least.
Most parenting books I've read seem to be some combination of iffy generalisation, proof-by-anecdote, and citations to badly performed studies from the Journal Of Stuff That Probably Won't Replicate.
The only one I've read that was actually useful was the classic "What To Expect The First Year", which avoids all these pitfalls and provides pretty useful and concrete information about what babies do, which will all be obvious in retrospect but which is all new when you are first starting out.
Perhaps babies are just a more limited class of problem than older kids. What works on one eight-year-old won't work on another eight-year-old so books on eight year olds are useless, but babies are all pretty much the same, or at least vary in just a few simple ways.
I think a lot of these things are hard to study due to the heterogeneity of kids, or at least multi-modal distributions of disposition. I have two kids, and the same approaches don't work on both because their temperaments are different, so you should read different approaches and try them. Or read the summary and try them without buying the whole book. I think to make rigorous generalizations, the insights are going to be not-very-useful, and it's quite likely that the well-supported science you read won't apply to your specific case.
Denizens of ACX, I am going to be returning to the USS Iowa in July, and am hosting a meetup on the 10th. If any of you want to come see a battleship and live in the LA area, then I'd love to see you there.
Tried posting this in the subscriber only thread and got no joy, so trying again here:
I'm designing an English lit. (loosely defined!) course for second-year Cégep students (roughly 1st year Uni) that will be centred on EA and related issues. Students will be reading Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better and a bunch of fiction related to Global Health, Animal Welfare, and X-risk/Longtermism . . . Any recommendations for the fiction? For reference, some texts I'm looking at: "Pig," by Roald Dahl, "Blood Music," by Greg Bear, and "The Volunteer," by Lucinda Nelson Dhavan.
Short stories are especially welcome, but I'm happy to excerpt from longer works and/or show films/video, etc. Thanks in advance from a first time poster.
Oh, wow! This is perfect! Thank you so much, Nancy. I think I'll use this to wrap up the course. I don't suppose you have any other recs for GH or AW in particular? X-Risk lends itself really well to (science) fiction, so I'm having an easier time there.
I can't think of anything. There are some stories about what if people were better-- _The Stone That Never Came Down_ and _The Infinitive of Go_ by Brunner, and "The Skills of Xanadu" by Sturgeon.
Brunner's _The Squares of the City_ about city planning might be relevant, but I don't remember it well enough.
Off-topic comments are welcome after the 300th comment on a post-- the current post is over 1000 comments, so that's fine. If there's a new post, you might need to wait a little to ask for recommendations.
I remember reading that years ago. After reading Greg Cochran mock all those people who assumed COVID couldn't evolve to be more dangerous, the character of Les comes across very differently.
Les assumes that pathogens evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. To that, Greg always brings up how long smallpox remained horribly lethal.
You already mentioned Blood Music so just want to add that if you're looking for an adaptation of both of these there were excerpted and adapted for audio on the radio program Studio 360 (Blood music, haven't found last policeman but I def remember hearing it back in the day: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/blood-music)
Wonderful--what an intriguing premise. I guess we are all living with the spectre of the individual asteroid/swordofdamocles/whatever (i.e. death), but there is something important about the idea that future generations will exist.
Yeah I found it a really interesting spin on the 'traditional' type of giant asteroid scenario. Not following the astronauts or whatever but imagining what it's like for everyone left on earth trying to process a new reality.
Great--a short clip might actually work better than a novel, for my purposes. I'll have a listen. For what it's worth, Greg Egan's *Perihelion Summer* is another excellent (and unusual) take on the world-ending natural disaster subgenre.
Bitcoin's issues stem from multiple sources, some social and some technical.
On the social side, the idea of increasing the block size is somewhat controversial, and the system for introducing new changes is designed to only allow uncontroversial changes. They could create a governance process to make unified decisions in these cases, but Bitcoin users don't want to be governed, and so no process has been created.
On a technical level, the fundamental problem is that all nodes must process all transactions. For that reason, there has to be some kind of upper limit on transaction sizes, or else some nodes will fall behind and never catch up. Even before you hit that limit, you run into some undesirable effects. For example, if you increase the block size, you increase the orphan rate, (the number of blocks which never get built upon) which increases the incentive for miners to engage in SPV mining. That causes events like the Fork of July: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/July_2015_chain_forks
Is the cancelling of Bret Weinstein on youtube a political discussion? It seems the same as Dr. Suess and publishing. So I'll say yes and save this space for next week.
I recently read a news article about someone investing $20 in an unknown crypto currency on Coinbase, and become a trillionaire...well he's probably not going to get that amount of money from Coinbase, but essentially the currency just exploded overnight.
If I have $100 to spare, would it be rational for me to log into Coinbase and invest $20 each into five crypto currencies with very low prices? Or is it irrational on a level comparable to buying a lottery ticket after seeing someone win the lottery on TV?
Cryptos on Coinbase tend to be currencies that are already established, so making 100x or 1000x gains (like what happened with DOGE and SHIB) may be unlikely there. Right now is also not an excellent time to invest because prices are decreasing - you will want to wait for the bottom. Finally, don't look just for low prices, but for low market caps.
Do some research, follow the price levels, and make a decision from there. Disclaimer: this is not financial advice.
It's only rational if you treat it like buying a Blu-Ray or something -- you're buying for the entertainment, not the re-sale value. Obviously there is no rational reason for garbage cryptos to increase and you will probably lose money. They might increase though, so sometimes it's fun to think about and that's worth paying for! You could also just go to a casino and put it on red five times in a row.
Also, I only vaguely follow cryptos, but I am curious if there are cryptos that increased at that level of magnitude. If you bought $20 of dogecoin at its exact low of the past year and sold at its exact high of the past year, you still only went up 289x and turned that $20 into $5800. That's a major gain, but it's not a trillion dollars, and at this point you're much more likely to just lose $15 of the $20. Similar rate of return for AMC, although GME went up about 700x if you sold it exactly at all-time high.
And remember that no one actually realized this level of gains -- most normal people probably bought late and held way too long and maybe just 1.5x'd their money or actually lost it, and potentially even if they made anything they'll lose it all in fees at H&R Block after the IRS sends them a letter saying "we see you made money on Coinbase why didn't you mention that to us?" (I don't think the IRS has done a good job keeping track of crypto even via Coinbase in the past but no idea if that will eventually change.)
People say that I am missed, but I can't imagine why, and even if I am, it's not for things like this. I've been writing things instead of despairposting. Instead of despairposting as much, anyway. I haven't changed my beliefs since they are based on observations, I just try and think about them less.
How do you find good modern fiction? (I define modern as first published in past two decades.) I was kind of baffled by the fact that I can't do this. Non-fiction is no problem, great fiction of past century is no problem either, but as for modern day fiction, um... I just randomly look it up online or in bookstores and it's bad, which is an obvious consequence since my strategy is bad.
Decide on a genre, look it up on a site that provides lots of user ratings (like goodreads), filter by publication date and sort by ratings, then skim synopses until something sounds appealing. (My claim is not that all well-rated anythings are good, but rather that they're a great starting point for a search.)
I personally also prefer standalone books over series, and finished series over ongoing ones. The latter ones can deteriorate in quality or end unfinished for various reasons.
---
To give two concrete but imperfect examples:
Here are Goodreads lists by decade (though they're unfortunately sorted by popularity, not ratings): https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/by-decade with categories like "Best Books of the Decade: 2010s", "Best Fantasy of the 2010s", "Science Fiction - 2010-2019", "Best Mysteries from the 2010s".
I've sort of given up on modern literary fiction, I think the last novel in that genre I read was back in the 90s. I'm too old to get the concerns of the Bright Young Things who come out with their dazzling first novels, and as for the rest of it, I never did cotton to the Hampstead Adultery Novel (either male academic goes through mid-life crisis and has affair with much younger woman, or wife of above finds out about same and leaves him for her own mid-life crisis).
Goodreads is a fun rabbithole to go down, just keep clicking on what makes you curious til you get somewhere. For literary fiction, I also try to pay attention to the big book awards (Man Booker Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner) and read at least one or two that stand out to me from each list each year (you can go back through past years with these too), just to mix things up and get a sense for what people think is good at any given year. There are genre-specific award series too if you like sci-fi, dystopian, graphic novel, magical realism, etc. as well.
One answer is that if you find an author you like, read the rest of their work. Sounds obvious, but I know I didn't really start following through with this until recently.
Otherwise, lots of my reading is from soliciting recommendations from people I trust. My in-person circle for this is my parents and two or three friends. But also, this forum has been pretty good as well for that! So maybe say what you're in to, and what you're hoping to get from reading, and let the hive-mind do the rest.
Unfortunately, my in-person circle mostly consists of people who don't read much and/or consider books inferior to other media. So that's not an option.
I seem to find enough sf to suit me, but I don't know quite what you're looking for? Genre? Literary? How recent? What are some examples of fiction you think is good?
Seriously, one strategy is to be specific enough so that you can get recommendations here.
It doesn't exist. The last good writer was Gene Wolfe, who died in 2019, and he was the last holdout of a long-diminishing breed. (The reason is that anyone who has the vigor and makes movies or TV now, those being where the audience are. Written fiction has turned into a museum for dyspeptics, alas.) Fortunately, there are 4-5 lifetimes' worth of good books from the past, so the problem is only chimerical. You don't *need* fiction to be recent.
I think you're hinting at something: If you want a strong network of trust, you should live in a red tribe/"conservative" way: live in the countryside, join a church etc.
I also think you're missing the failure mode of trust networks. Some people try to exploit them ("psychopaths"). You get "broken stairs" people that are hard to get rid of etc.
I would think psychopaths are mostly a problem in networks with closed boundaries - say a hippie commune? Not so much in a boundryless network - in a group of people with vaguely overlapping connections.
Also, I think it is perfectly possible to build strong networks of trust without going red tribe. Of course I live in the countryside, but its mostly a countryside filled with remote working programmers and other fairly open minded types. There are also a lot of networks in cities, though, those probably need to be a bit more coordinated to cohere - which makes them more prone to psychopaths turning them into cults etc.
Alternately if you don't want to change life style: any sort of weird fringe hobbies/interest. Always easier to join rather than form.
Look for shit where the non-monetary cost of entry is high, and prestige is low.
You gotta be careful not to accidentally join a cult or some shit, but getting real into D&D, or table top gaming, or drone racing, or some shit can be like joining a church.
"Look for shit where the non-monetary cost of entry is high, and prestige is low." - That's a great rule of thumb, I'll have to meditate on that tonight when I mown the lawn.
Somewhere -- I could have sworn it was on SSC but I have been unable to find it -- I remember someone posting about a book on a group of radicals back in the 70s, like Weathermen or some such. They were discussing strategies and options and the talk came around to what to do with the proportion of people who would never support their proposed society even after the revolution was successful. The upshot was they decided they would have to imprison or execute all of those people. This was presumably testified to by a mole, I think.
Does this ring a bell with anyone? I thought the book was "Days of Rage," but I can't find any reference to it in there.
I haven't been closely following COVID treatment studies, since the vaccine is so effective at preventing it. But I've recently read some conflicting information about the effectiveness of certain medications when treating COVID.
Could someone more knowledgeable give me a good faith survey of the evidence for and against the following medications:
* Hydroxychloroquin
* Ivermectin
I'm trying to gauge whether, in general, doctors use such medicines when treating COVID, what they are effective for, and how effective they are.
Oh wow, the Aurora toy kits! I never saw those particular sets, but when I was a nipper the ads for "build your own Frankenstein/Wolfman" in the backs of American comics (when you could get those in your local newsagent, the supply was sketchy)? I well remember those!
As for the rest of it, it was the 70s, man. They really were Like That.
Are kids around the world going to grow up with American accents? I know several people whose little kids are watching youtube since age 2. It seems to be taking up the vast majority of their interest.
My stepchildren watch a fair amount of Youtube. However, they mostly watch in French which leaves their French-speaking pretty much unaltered. Their watching of English Youtube also appears to have zero effect on their English accents - they continue to have delightful RP accents - just like their parents...
Not sure how kids around the world watching Youtube in their own languages is going to give them American accents.
Purely anecdotal but both my partner and I have observed that our 4 year old certainly has a notable American accent when pronouncing a handful of words ("Mom", "Pool" etc). Interestingly he has somewhat equal exposure to American and British content with no noticeable British pronunciation of any words.
Critics of electric cars have claimed that they will be bad for the environment since there will be mountains of old, toxic batteries someday. Supporters of electric cars counter that this won't be a problem since we will be able to keep using the car batteries, but in stationary applications like house backups. But aren't old car batteries wasteful at storing energy?
Here's how I envision it works: A brand-new Tesla's batteries can be fully charged up with 100 units of electricity, and they discharge all 100 units to power the car. However, a 10-year-old Tesla's worn-out batteries still need 100 units of electricity to get "full," but the batteries will only release 80 units of electricity to power the car. That's why the car's range decreases as it gets older. Eventually, this gets so aggravating that the owners have to sell them.
Why would I want to use the old Tesla batteries as a power backup for my house when they lose so much electricity? I pay to put 100 units into them, but then when the power grid fails, the batteries only provide me with 80 units before running out.
Is my conceptualization of how battery wear-out happens right?
Let's say we transplant my old Tesla car battery into my basement and hook it up to my electrical wiring to serve as a home battery backup. It will still keep degrading with time, so in a few years, it will only be able to hold 70 units of electricity, and then 60, and so on.
Before reaching a capacity of 0, would it get so degraded that it wouldn't be worth keeping in my house anymore? Approximately what storage level would that have to be, and why would it be at that level?
If I threw the battery in the trash, doesn't it end up as part of a mountain of old, toxic batteries, just as the critics of electric cars claimed would be the case?
It will likely fail before it naturally decays to less than 1% power, because there are a bunch of sub-components in there, all with their own MTTFs.
If you are comfortable working with electronics, you could take out the individual cells and keep those that are functioning going in a homebuilt powerwall for quite some time. There are risks of using things past their lifetimes, though. (The first question for any homebrew powerwall is to ask "If one cell fails by catching on fire, will that light all the other cells next to it on fire?")
Lithium-ion batteries can be recycled in theory, but for the most part the responsible thing is to dispose of it in the hazardous waste your city has.
Why would you throw the battery in the trash? There are battery recycling companies that would love to have the raw materials, because there are valuable minerals that we'd otherwise have to mine for.
The thing that gets me about this "battery waste" or "Solar panel waste" argument is that we don't apply it to other items. For example, if I buy an EV instead of an internal combusion engine car, the ICE car will also be scrapped after many years -- why is the concern about battery disposal any different, in principle, than engine recycling?
Right, and my question is, how is this different than what we do now for ICE engine blocks? Maybe it is, or will be, cheaper to mine new lithium, which will make batteries even cheaper. And then when you have lots of degraded EV batteries laying around, you'll have lots of spare parts and components to use for repair, replacement, or even reuse in an appllication like grid or home battery storage. Isn't this kind of how junkyards work now?
I mean, the way I look at it is, the choice isn't between making EVs and not making EVs. Or between making solar roofs and nothing. It's between making EVs versus making ICEs, or between making solar roofs versus making conventional shingled roofs.
The question is, which is better _on balance_? ICEs pollute as long as they are used and require us to refine oil into gasoline. Where I live most roofs are asphalt and generally require replacement after 30 years -- but no one worries about that fact, or that that the old shingles get thrown out (not recycled).
I'm sure we will find ways to use degraded EV batteries or solar panels -- we already know the ways now and it's likely their decreasing cost will make more applications viable.
An engine block, or for that matter a crushed-car-block, can be turned into a useful raw material just by throwing it into a furnace. Throwing a lithium-ion battery into a furnace is likely to result in an exploding furnace, and recycling a lithium-ion battery safely and effectively is a much more labor-intensive process. I believe that at the current state of the art, recycling steel is cheaper than mining ore+coal and producing new steel, but recycling lithium is harder than mining new lithium.
My girlfriend isn't a big fan of old movies (like, say, noir's from the 40s) because she finds the acting too melodramatic and unrealistic.
On the one hand, I agree that the acting then was more melodramatic (self-awarely so, mostly). OTOH, I suspect our notion of realistic dialogue, body language and behavior comes from the media we consume. Movies and TV are a big portion of our culture, and we learn a lot of subtleties of behavior from them. Supposedly, in the days when movies were in black & white, most people dreamt in black & white, and then when movies went color people started dreaming in color. (What were dreams like before there were movies?)
If our dreams are so influenced by media, then our waking behavior must be also, I'd imagine.
With that in mind, I suspect that 50 years from now the most "realistic" seeming movies and TV today -- in terms of say, dialogue and delivery -- maybe take a recent show like Mare of Eastown or a movie like Nomadland, both which purport to portray realism, will seem melodramatic or weirdly unrealistic in 50 years.
Is there any way to get access to Scott's old LiveJournal posts as Squid314? I came across an excerpt from his "World War II is full of plot holes" rant, and I'm dying to read the rest.
> No property owner was harmed or lost property values in this exercise.
The amount of economic ignorance in this sentence is truly depressing. You made your properties less desirable to developers. That, by definition, made them less valuable, which cost everyone who owned those houses money. It's one thing if you guys said "we like our neighborhood the way it is, don't want it to change, and are willing to give up higher property prices to keep it that way." It's entirely another to pretend that that tradeoff doesn't exist...
how much permanence does the character of the neighborhood have?
If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on.
There's a legitimate argument from externalities. I have an interest in nobody within half a kilometre of me working with thioacetone, for instance, as the compound is so horrifically smelly that people will vomit and faint at that distance (fumehoods have little effect).
The usual way to deal with this is zoning; in location A, you're not allowed to build a plant using thioacetone, and in location B, you're told in advance that people are allowed to build a plant using thioacetone (and thus if you have any brains you don't live there). However, zoning is only useful if it is enforced.
I often feel like HOAs are what you get when "if zoning didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it"
Yes, that’s right. Zoning is public land use regulation enforced by public law enforcement and land use agencies. HOAs are private land use regulation enforced through contract. Homeowners are free to contract with each other (with some limits) in lieu of public land use restrictions.
A lot of racial covenants were written into HOA laws in the 1950’s and before. Because these agreements are legally permanent, a lot of these racial covenants are still on the books at HOAs, with an agreement that they won’t be enforced. They are awful, and they’re still out there.
"If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on."
This.
Well, it should be actually all the people. Not, like, ten nimbys who are the only people who show up at the committee meetings. It should be at least 51% of all the people who live in that neighborhood.
If the city has a reasonable georgist-land-tax, then that's probably a sufficient criterion.
The answer to this question feels like a policy setting rather than a moral law. Ideally the local government would have a specific answer to that question.
Some local government areas would have a policy saying "Build whatever you want on your own land". Other local government areas can have a policy saying "You can't build anything unless you get at least 90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it". Most areas could have something somewhere in between. People could choose whether they wanted to live in a pro-development area or an anti-development area, and we could see in the long run which areas wind up nicer and which wind up awful.
Personally I'd love to live in an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
"Some local government areas would have a policy saying "Build whatever you want on your own land". "
But then what would the bureaucrats have control over?
> an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
If this is 20 minutes walking distance, I could see the pleasure of such an area. But basically by definition, it's impossible for there to be very much of this sort of land area (if you have too much of it then your location is not near a downtown core of a major city, but at best a weird suburban splotch that is surrounded by denser areas).
We have a version of this in my small upstate NY village. Current zoning code says you cannot cover more than 10% of your land with built structure (excluding driveways) yet less than 5% of the currently built structure adheres to that requirement. Essentially this means if you want to replace that falling down deck in back of your house, you need to go through planning board which then refers you to a zoning board which may or may not approve it based upon, you guessed it, the opinion of the neighbors. Because of rapidly escalating prices lately, it's not uncommon for applicants at the zoning board of appeals to 'lawyer up.' This is in a village of less than 3,000. So, while we don't require "90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it," essentially we require 100% of the neighbors within 200 feet to agree to it or you will be forced to modify your plans to suit your neighbors whims which is how the un-elected boards get away with all this. I'm told that changing the code is "too hard" as there are too many moneyed interests that like it the way it is (recent lakefront estate went on the market for $15m) yet the political interests all say that affordable housing is in the top 3 of local concerns.
Never. If the character of your neighborhood needs saving it is already gone.
if it's the wrong sort of people moving in then you don't really have anything you can do
even burning crosses aren't going to reverse the economic changes that prompted the move
if it's illegal activity and/or vagrants you need to become a bigger nuisance to the police and the municipal authorities than dealing with the issue is
this has three stages and you have to be persistent and go through all of them
1. they'll humor you but practically ignore you - someone will show up when you call but explain they don't have the legal authority to do anything - they're lying
2.they'll start harassing and threatening to prosecute you for wasting police resources - ignore it
3. if you have karened strongly and longly enough they will finally remove the hobo camp/crack house/brothel and it would help if you and all the other people from the neighborhood are there to cheer them on - giving the police positive reinforcement helps shorten the process the next time
>if it's the wrong sort of people moving in then you don't really have anything you can do
>even burning crosses aren't going to reverse the economic changes that prompted the move
Adios.
you should always be able to do what you can to change the character in your prefered direction. but things like 'character of the neighborhood' are nowhere near as permanent as people think. they will inevitably change,.. your neighborhoods character has probably only been that way for no longer than one and a half generations ( exceptions of course)
If it's a new building going in. The neighborhood might ask for changes to the facade that tries to keep the same 'character'. I've seen that work in small town USA.
It should be decided by people who don't live or have interests in the neighborhood. There's a tradeoff between the aesthetic value of the neighborhood's current character and the economic value of letting the neighborhood grow/change. Only an outsider can make an objective choice about which has more value.
I actually have no problem with a community deciding to stop development to save the character of a neighbourhood, basically ever. I just wish that, when doing so, they would be honest about the fact that this is going to dramatically increase the price of housing (at least, in communities with increasing demand, which is most urban areas), and have negative consequences for young families and the poor trying to live in the area. That's not a tradeoff I personally would ever make, but I don't have a problem really with any community deciding to make it. The problem is when communities make that tradeoff but then lie to themselves about why the community is expensive and start doing a bunch of other things to try and fix the problem that won't ever work because they aren't addressing the root cause.
I think there are at least two components to the "character of a neighborhood". One is the physical infrastructure (i.e., buildings, streets, bike lanes, sidewalks, green spaces, signage, etc.) and the other is the social character (i.e., who are the residents, what businesses are present, what languages are spoken, what is the level of wealth, etc.).
These two characters usually interface in a way with regional economic conditions, such that no one of these can change without one of the others changing. If the overall metro grows so that this neighborhood is now more central than it used to be, it will be in higher demand, so that if the physical infrastructure remains the same, then the social character will drastically change.
The problem I see is that people sometimes see the change in the physical infrastructure as a symptom of a single overall concept of "change in character", and assume that if they can stop the change of physical infrastructure, then they can also stop the change of the social character. But sometimes you may need to *accelerate* the change of physical infrastructure to have any hope of keeping the social character. If a neighborhood comes into higher demand, you may need to build lots of big apartment buildings in order to maintain some residences that are still affordable for the working-class residents of the previous incarnation of the neighborhood, and lots of storefronts near these apartments in order for the affordable diners and hardware stores that cater to these residents to be able to remain while a new set of businesses catering to the new residents also come in.
There are some cases when it seems to me that the physical infrastructure is absolutely worthy of preservation, even if it means the destruction of the social character of the neighborhood. The historic cores of Florence, Venice, and Amsterdam are worth preserving as a museum, even if they become places of tourism rather than sites of commerce and daily life as they used to be. But I think in most cases, the social character of a neighborhood is far more morally valuable than the physical infrastructure, and it would be nice if preservation laws were able to more effectively target that. However, this is an extremely difficult problem - it's hard to know how to change physical infrastructure in light of changing economic conditions in such a way that an existing community is able to remain in place, while it's much easier to know how to keep physical infrastructure the same, regardless of its effects on anything else.
The retired civil engineer behind Strong Towns makes a compelling case that autocentric suburban zoning is wildly financially unsustainable and essentially a giant Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
Basically its numerically impossible for low density suburbs to contain a tax base that can pay for the upkeep of all their sprawled out infrastructure. I
So its one thing to want to control the character of a neighborhood. It's something else entirely to demand everyone subsidize a bunch of insolvent organizational systems and pretend its all just perfectly natural and organic because its your "preference."
Zoning seems like one of those powers that will just never be used responsibly once it exists. Yes, there might be cases where people have legitimate compelling interests to control what gets built in their neighborhood.
I don't want to watch a video when I can read text instead. How is zoning a "Ponzi scheme"? It seems to me like there are suburbs which have been around longer than any Ponzi scheme.
I'll second the request.
Presumably there is a level of services required in some suburbs that is beyond the level of the tax base in that same suburb to provide. In that case, a nearby city/the state provide the services at a loss while recouping the money from other taxpayers?
My local small town does not have all the services that a big city might offer, but the local tax base does pay for what we do have just fine. I would imagine most suburbs of bigger cities have more services, but I would also expect higher home values and a stronger tax base than a small town.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
Time to summon the ghost of the nameless academic who said "It may work in practice, but will it work in theory?"
Famous saying: "If something can't go on, it will stop."
Corollary to famous saying: "If something has not stopped, it can go on."
Inner ring suburbs are the places where the Ponzi scheme has stopped. They are famously impoverished, while their former apparent wealth has moved out to further suburbs.
Oak Park, just across the border from one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, is not famously impoverished. Nor is Westchester, just across the border from the Bronx. I don't think the inner ring around Los Angeles is impoverished either, rather Beverly Hills is famously wealthy.
You're right that the pattern is more complicated than what I'm suggesting. There is often a "favored quarter" where the suburbs in that direction retain their value, and the ones in the other directions burn out. There are also often individual suburbs that manage to resist.
Looking at this site: https://richblockspoorblocks.com/
It seems to me that Oak Park is a unique dot of wealth on Chicago's west side, and Mt Greenwood is a suburban neighborhood of the city of Chicago that is also a standout on the southwest. But otherwise, both south and west from Chicago seem to share the pattern that there's poverty a mile or two out from downtown, and then increasing wealth as you go farther out. (The north side is the favored quarter.)
In New York, it looks like the parts of Westchester adjacent to the Bronx *are* pretty poor, and it's a few miles out before you reach wealth. To the extent that there's a favored quarter, it appears to be northwest (though the ring of poverty falls inside the city to the east and north, and outside the city towards the west).
Los Angeles has lots of complications in its patterns, due in part to the constraints that the mountains and deserts put on development, and also to the fact that its suburbs have always had a more urban development pattern than suburbs in the northeast and midwest. But the history of Compton exemplifies the pattern pretty strikingly.
Here's the text version: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
It's not that zoning *itself* is the Ponzi scheme. It's rather that zoning for standard suburban development only works as a Ponzi scheme. It's cheap to put in pipes and streets on a greenfield development, but more expensive to dig them up and repair them a few decades later when they are reaching the end of their life. So a suburban development can be built rather cheaply, but in a few decades it will be too expensive to fix, unless it is upzoned for higher density, or has become *extremely* rich. Thus, the typical pattern around cities since the middle 20th century has been a slow burn of middle class suburbs around the edge, gradually turning into poor suburbs with bad infrastructure as the middle class fringe moves farther out.
Obviously this is oversimplified, and I haven't worked through the details of the calculations, but it gets at something right, particularly things like the plight of Detroit, where the city is now swamped by debt obligations it took on for the first round of suburbanization, that it can no longer grow to pay back, let alone fix up the decrepit former suburban neighborhoods.
Strongtown's thesis is nonsense; infrastructure maintenance is typically a small part of suburban budgets. Detroit (which is not a suburb and was not built the way Strongtowns claims) has a much larger problem: depopulation. When you go from 1.8 million people to 0.67 million, you tend to lose a lot of tax base.
Detroit has a whole set of problems, it's true. Depopulation is partly white flight, partly the decrease in household size everywhere, and partly inability to densify (only the latter of which fits in the Strong Towns thesis).
But much of the land area of Detroit is clearly suburban in form and zoning.
Detroit can't "densify" because of depopulation. And Grosse Pointe, which shares a border with Detroit, is not famously impoverished.
Anecdata: my middle-ring suburb of 53,000 people spends only $11.4m out of a $157m budget on public works. As with most places, education claims the lion's share of the revenue.
The link appears to be a theory founded upon the 2008 recession, which was actually caused by monetary policy. I'm not going to bother reading further chapters about "why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted" when that is plainly not true.
Thanks for the text link. Their theory seems to be founded largely on things like including the area devoted to parking in the denominator of their "efficiency" calculation for stores which have their own parking lots, but not including the on-street parking in front of stores which don't.
Yes, that's right. There's a lot of reasonable criticisms of Strong Towns.
But I think it would be fair to calculate efficiency for neighborhoods including all the land devoted to "green space", streets, and on-street parking as well as off-street parking. It might not turn out *quite* as stark as the calculations they carry out, but it'll still have the same pattern (because most development of the past 70 years has required the land area devoted to parking to be comparable or larger to the land area for the store, while street parking has never been that much).
Melbourne doesn't seem to have collapsed yet, and that's a city of 5 million in 10,000 km^2 (i.e. houses, houses and more houses, although there's been an effort to increase density recently).
Why isn't this the essence of politics? Who gets to do what to whom?
What is the general consensus on Tether, the $60 billion stablecoin that detractors allege is a giant fraud? If true, does this pose a systemic risk to Bitcoin and the crypto market in general?
Some relevant articles:
- https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-reliance-on-stablecoins-harks-back-to-the-wild-west-of-finance-11622115246 (paywall)
From what I've heard (probably from Coffeezilla), the issue with Tether isn't that it's a threat to bitcoin, it's that it's a really big bank which claimed to have 100% fiat money reserves, turned out to have much less than that, and may have none at all.
What happens if there's a run on Tether?
Tether being unbacked, by itself, would only be a problem for anyone owning Tether (and to anybody who was involved in the misrepresentation and didn't outrun the law).
The "Bitcoin is overvalued due to market distortion by Tether-the-company" claim is explicitly made by "The Bit Short" (the article Scott linked when making his prediction on DSL).
I mean, it's a threat to Bitcoin in the sense that a majority of the stablecoin volume in BTC is through Tether. Tether is largely controlled by a few large wallets that likely engage in substantial wash trading of BTC/Tether to manipulate the price. In other words, a lot of the supposed volume of interest in BTC may not be using real dollars but essentially a digital counterfeit version of USD. Liquidity is not what it appears to be in these markets.
Remember that the crypto markets have none of the consumer protections in place in regulated markets, and that shady stuff is going on 24/7.
I second this understanding of the issue^
So much of the problem with cryptos as an asset class is the point at which they touch the fiat market. Fees, and taxes are obvious big pains; price instability, over-leveraged coin holders, and algo traders are also concerns. I think it might be wrong to ever consider crypto as equivalent to dollars, instead of as a thing of value in its own right. People lament that BTC is used for illegal stuff without considering we could very easily be heading toward a future where wanting illegal stuff will be more common and seem like less of a choice (Need Penicillin? Got XRP?).
Also, there's a pretty good correlation between the Tether peg breaking and Bitcoin price crashes. Although that's kind of a chicken/egg issue.
The USDT/USD exchange rate will fall on various exchanges. At the peak of tether FUD in April 2017 it briefly dipped to 92 cents, but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment. Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is.
Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin and it is only used because it is cheaper, faster, and less regulated than wire transfers for sending fiat from one exchange to another for arbitrage purposes. If Tether went to zero tomorrow due to an exit scam, bitcoin would dip temporarily, but I don't think it would have any effect on the long term trajectory of bitcoin (I estimate a 60% chance that bitcoin's market cap passes gold's before 2028 regardless of whether tether is a scam)
I'm moderately certain that all (and certainly most) of these claims are false.
Would you please elaborate on that and provide evidence?
"...but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment" During the selloff last month, it was pretty clearly in the mid 90's on several exchanges (per coingecko)
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tether
If you want to argue that that's only on a few exchanges, cuz arbitrage, OK, but your claim wasn't true. Also, it seems like you should have to explain why high USDT premiums have existed if the general thesis is that exchange arbitrage is driving everything
"Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is". I sort of see this point except that with challenging off-ramps, you have to settle in USDT, whereas in real prediction markets, you get settlement in dollars. If you're long tether, and want to compare it to a prediction markets, units of settlement should be the same.
"Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin". I admit this is a nit, but it was 10.2% when you wrote this.
cryptos are an extremely interesting and possibly useful technology that currently has zero usefulness. however there seems to be too many wealthy people behind it now, and they arent going to let it fail.
Surely it's still useful for criminal activity, as well as in messed-up countries where it's still a better currency than their own local garbage?
what is an example country?
Venezuela
I don't beleive so. The only reference I see looks to have been an april fools joke.
This story contains a bunch of references to various unfree places around the world where people are escaping the control of tyrannical governments using bitcoin:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/reason.com/video/2021/02/05/bitcoin-is-protecting-human-rights-around-the-world/%3Famp
El Salvador is about to do it officially. In Venezeuela, it's just how people can use money in the first place under hyperinflation.
El Salvador uses USD as its official currency. This seems like the goalposts have moved. If USD is 'local garbage', then everything is 'local garbage'. I'm sure crypto enthusiasts may actually agree with that, but that is different from the argument that it is an escape from weak currencies of smaller poorer countries.
And why do you think they abandoned their old one? This just means going for another external currency.
And *obviously* BitCoin becomes interesting for people to use once the local currency is garbage, like in the oft-mentioned case of Venezuela.
Gotta love the irony of a quasi-dictator forcing his country to accept Bitcoin, the currency invented to try and free people from government control of transactions...
"currently has zero usefulness" ... I would like to contest this point. The Ethereum blockchain has actually been implemented for a variety of useful ventures. Governments have used it for debt issuances, say what you will about NFTs but they have successfully used the Ethereum blockchain... there are a plethora of other utilities that may not be macroscopic (i.e. businesses using blockchains internally).
I'm seeing progressively more online stores accepting cryptocoins, so their usefulness is definitely above zero.
My uninformed opinion is that if tether lost its peg that would probably tank the market temporarily, but another stable coin or coins would eventually fill in the gap.
I try to hold usdc instead of tether when possible. If you think it’s sufficiently probable that it’s a ponzi, you can probably short it pretty cheaply by depositing another stable on aave, borrowing tether, and swapping it for the original stable.
I'm not sure that the scam stops at Tether. Some recent evidence suggests that USDC may be doing something similar with their "reserves:" https://twitter.com/Frances_Coppola/status/1403798559829512202
I’ll take a look but if you look at the link below you’ll see an independent audit from a big firm showing they hold a dollar for each usdc issued.
https://www.centre.io/hubfs/pdfs/attestation/Grant-Thorton_circle_usdc_reserves_06092021.pdf?hsLang=en
Like with Tether, this is not an audit! It is an attestation. This is basically Grant Thorton saying "the money is there, trust us!"
Do the critics want them to have a volcano lair with a giant vault full of cash that they can swim in like scrooge mcduck? Every company puts the "cash and equivalents" on its balance sheet into bank accounts which are not insured by FDIC due to exceeding the 250,000 threshold, plus various short term investments such as commercial paper and repos. This is what they're doing. I think the critics just lack any context for how any other company manages a multi-billion dollar pile of cash.
Plus, if they put more of the money into a bank instead of commercial paper, the bank would just invest the money in commercial paper and keep half the profits for itself. (interest rates on demand deposits suck) At some point it becomes more economical to do it yourself.
Ok, here's the issue- they claim to hold $20-30 billion in commercial paper. This puts them at somewhere around 2% of the total commercial paper market, making them one of the largest single holders in the world. Yet they have no US banking relationships and no professionals in the commercial paper business have heard of them. Also, they refuse to disclose which companies they are lending to. Right now, Tether hasn't proven:
1. That they actually hold the commercial paper
2. If they do hold, that the commercial paper is from financially solvent entities
And they aren't "any other company." Tether's holdings are not corporate reserves, they essentially amount to deposits covering the value of their issued USDT. They have to keep those assets in highly liquid assets to provide liquidity in the event of large redemptions. If they either (1) don't actually have the reserves, or (2) their "reserves" are a bunch of short-term loans to insolvent companies, they will not be able to make redemptions.
Real banks have stuff like the Basel Accords and stress testing and the like to reduce the risk of them going bust. Even if Tether is legit, it's still no better than a 19th century wildcat bank.
The hypothesis is that Bitcoin's price is high due to Tether the company making arbitrary and growing quantities of Tether with which to buy it. Only a fraudulent stablecoin can be minted in arbitrary quantities, as a legitimate one needs to be backed 1:1 with dollar reserves.
It's probably true that only a fraudulent one can be minted in "arbitrary" quantities, but bankers have known for centuries that fractional reserves will work in most situations. There's still the possibility of a run if too many withdrawals line up, but even if you have 1:1 reserves, there's a possibility of a run if some of those reserves get frozen or lost at the time that the other crisis is happening (and these events are likely not uncorrelated).
I think a lot of the concern about Tether boils down to two main points:
1) the private entities behind it are not particularly trustworthy
2) a misunderstanding about the centrality of Tether's role in the market
On the first point, it has been established that there were periods in the past where the claim that there existed held assets in one-to-one correspondence with the value of Tethers being printed was not true. However at this point with the explosive market growth that the private entities charged with backing Tether have no doubt profited from, this is likely not an issue.
On the second point, people see through analytics platforms like glassnode that a large fraction of Bitcoin purchases are made using tethers. While this is true, it's simply because on many crypto exchanges you can't directly make purchases using dollars, so you have to do it through some sort of intermediary coin. Tether is a good choice due to being a stable coin, however there are now a whole slew of stable coins to choose from, so if Tether were to vanish one of the others such as USDC could easily take its place.
My problem is that it looks like USDC may be taking the same path as Tether. They've recently changed the language in their attestations to be more fuzzy about what "approved assets" are backing their coin. Also, it's notable that none of these stablecoin issuers have undergone a real, independent audit. Attestations are not a substitute. And anyone claiming they can't do an audit is silly, since the stablecoin business model *should* be holding a bunch of cash/Treasury/other super-safe assets in an account somewhere!
FUD from folks who would stand to benefit.
To paraphrase Nassim Taleb, one should have a reasonable amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about any investment. Nothing is certain, especially not the value of a cryptographic token with no real value that has only been successfully used by criminals to extort victims and launder money... I can't believe that the collapse of the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, and by far the largest in terms of trading volume, won't have major effects on the broader crypto movement.
tl:dr if people really believe in Bitcoin/crypto, they need to get rid of bad actors like Tether ASAP
they've taken something very volatile and have created complex products to mask that volatility... sounds like 2008.
You're giving them too much credit. It's more like the constant financial panics of the 19th century, back when banks were completely unregulated and each issued their own currency.
My response to complaints about FUD, is, as always: none of the words "fear", "uncertainty", or "doubt" mean "false".
I was planning to ask the same question.
My current read is that they are able to handle a very high level of demand both coming into and off blockchain reliably (and consistently). (Information from various sources.) It is certainly true that they have had a ton of shady dealings in their past, but the NYAG ruling in January also didn't seem to turn up anything more recent than 2018 (or 2019, I forget).
Something else that people are talking about now (outside fraud and other crimes) is that a very large percentage of their holdings are in company paper, which may be unstable in times of sustained massive downtick in crypto prices. (Since the paper is likely with other crypto-based entities.) I can't say one way or the other about that one. (Nor do I know if the current market represents a massive sustained downtick - there was a meteoric rise and fall, but net we're at the same prices as January right now, which were an all-time high at the time.
Their claim to hold >$20 billion in commercial paper would make them one of the largest holders in the world, despite nobody in the business having heard of them. https://www.ft.com/content/342966af-98dc-4b48-b997-38c00804270a.
Just remember that people running frauds of this magnitude often make things up that almost seem too crazy to be true, and get away with it a lot longer than one might expect. Bernie Madoff claimed to be trading more options than actually existed on the CBOE, yet never made a single trade and kept all the money in bank accounts. Despite these facts being known, it took over 8 years from the time whistleblowers starting calling up the SEC before his scam finally collapsed.
2018 is just when they stopped officially claiming to be 100% backed.
The US attorney general settled with tether for 18.5 million dollars:
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-new-york-attorney-general-s-office-9385268/
> As part of the settlement, Bitfinex and Tether agreed to pay $18.5 million, cease trading with New York residents and entities, and will provide quarterly transparency reports to the NYAG. As part of the settlement, Bitfinex and Tether neither admit or deny any of the NYAG’s findings.
It seems to me that this should be evidence that tether can’t be that fraudulent, since there wasn’t even admission of wrongdoing involved, and they now have to provide quarterly reports.
Or is there a reason I should interpret this report differently?
Well, they still haven't produced an audit, and since the settlement their supposed value has increased exponentially from ~$1 billion to ~$62 billion. They have never undergone an audit and claim to be one of the largest holders of commercial paper in the world despite having no relationship with any US bank and nobody in the commercial paper business having heard of them: https://www.ft.com/content/342966af-98dc-4b48-b997-38c00804270a.
> They have never undergone an audit
They were recently audited by Moore Kayman, as the article states:
> “Tether has amply demonstrated, most recently through assurance opinions from [auditor] Moore Cayman, that all issued tethers are, in fact, fully reserved,” he added.
Here is a link to the audit:
> https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/tether-assurance-mar-2021-2.pdf
1. No, it's not an audit, it's an attestation. "We conducted our attestation engagement in accordance with..."
2. There are no details provided about what the "assets" are, where they are held, etc.
3. Take a look at Moore Cayman and consider whether they are a reputable firm.
And, note that the company and its general counsel have demonstrably lied to the public about the nature, quality and quantity of their reserves essentially since Tether was started...
Their business model, if they were legit, literally amounts to:
1. Get money (USD) and hold it in safe places (insured deposits, Treasuries, etc)
2. Issue USD-backed USDT so people can buy crypto
3. Give people USD back when they don't want USDT anymore.
If they really were doing this, it wouldn't be hard to prove. Cash is probably the easiest component of a company to audit- it's either there or it isn't. Tether/Bitfinex could put the whole issue to bed by just showing everyone where they put the money, something that most companies have no problem doing...
It's standard to neither admit nor deny in a settlement, even when the allegations definitely obviously happened, so that part doesn't really give any indication of "not that fraudulent". If it wasn't that bad, the punishment likely wouldn't have included ceasing all business with NY.
Tether is almost certainly a scam. As in, if it collapses overnight, nobody would be suprised in the slightest. We were expecting it to collapse around 2016 AFAIR.
On the other hand, almost all players in the game are incentivized to keep the charade going.
The second part is why I got off the crypto train. If the crypto markets can't prevent scams like this from manipulating prices, and if the major players tolerate/participate in the scam, then how will BTC ever be stable or transparent enough to use as a currency or as a store of value?
If nothing surprises you, then you don't really have a predictive model, do you?
If you expected it to collapse in 2016, does that mean you are surprised that it's still around?
> almost all players in the game are incentivized to keep the charade going.
If this is true of cryptocurrency, couldn't it be true of the global fiat economy as well?
Hey, maybe the entire world economy will collapse due to hyperinflation. Could happen. However, the collapse of a $60 billion counterfeiting/Ponzi scheme is just a little more likely!
There is a lot more capital and, crucially, men with guns and aircraft carriers that are invested in keeping the global fiat economy going.
> If nothing surprises you, then you don't really have a predictive model, do you?
A predictive model that suggests a coinflip is correct if you are, in fact, trying to predict the result of flipping a coin.
It can also give you pause if you plan to put your life savings on the coin falling heads up.
> If you expected it to collapse in 2016, does that mean you are surprised that it's still around?
Surprised and amused, yes.
The best case scenario is less scammy stablecoins taking over and people quietly sweeping the entire thing under the rug. This seems to slowly happen.
People outside of the crypto space have a weird intuition that there are some kind of respectable institutions backing all of this. It's scams all the way down, basically EVE online economy in which you can actually get rich. To a first approximation, I'd expect every stablecoin to be backed by air, empty promises and collusion with auditors (if there even are audits, lmao). The history of Tether and Bitfinex is a wild ride indeed.
There are many places where you can borrow USDT to sell it short. There are also derivatives markets where you can short tether. If tether were actually a scam, it would probably get broken pretty quickly along similar lines to how Soros broke the bank of England. At any rate, I have less confidence in critics who don't put their money where their mouth is.
Tether will probably be fine. Don't worry about Black Swans when there are hungry tigers right outside your tent. Worry about the tigers, they are right there! The 'hungry tiger' is the risk that governments impose very onerous regulations or make it impossible for crypto to interface with the normal financial system. China has already done this. Other countries could follow suit. Crypto is full of legit scams. Tether is a comparatively small risk. Nevermind, the fact that Tether collapsing can be easily recovered from. Crypto cannot easily recover if tons of countries act like China.
Is there a way to search comments on ACX?
I recall a discussion on here where someone suggested that cost disease might be an artifact of a bad CPI basket, and someone else replied that that's plausible but would imply that the US has been in near-endless recession for 40 years, with wages dropping 80% due to 7% inflation. But I can't find it.
These don't seem indexed by Google, so you probably have to wait until someone builds a search engine that is specifically designed to index these comments (like Nybbler once built for SSC).
If you know the post it was on or have narrowed it down to a few, then Ctrl+F it once the page has loaded.
I tried that, but failed. Turned out it was a post on Marginal Revolution quoted by Scott on SSC, which I processed as "recent" because I'd only read it recently and thus assumed must be here.
Do you have a link? Would be interested to read it!
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/
Ctrl-F "Doug" or "Marginal Revolution".
The original is here (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/02/behind-cost-disease.html) in the comment section (the link-to-specific-comment isn't working for me, though, and Doug made a lot of posts in that thread, hence my linking to the cross-post).
Thank you!
I've had a couple of experiences of finding I was looking in the wrong place.
One was a science fiction story which, for some reason, I thought was by Alfred Bester. The reason I couldn't find it was that it was "Rations of Tantalus" (also published as "The Rages" by Margaret St. Clair. Quite a good story-- people get mandatory pills to control anger, but never quite enough of them. It turns out that the pills and their generally constrained lives are increasing their anger.
The other was a bit I thought was by C S Lewis about utopian ideals just being about pink people expanding into space. It seemed odd for the racial implication, and Lewis' writing is searchable.
It wasn't Lewis. I found it by chance by rereading HG Wells' _Star-Begotten_, a transhumanist book which may be of interest here.
Similarly, I’d like to find a SSC comment, sometime in the last two years, by a quantum chemist about why “it’s all a simulation” is highly implausible (based on his experience with simulating atoms, iirc). Does anyone recall this?
I don't recall this but if you don't have any luck here try asking in the subreddit.
I think I've seen an argument somewhere that you can't use atoms to simulate significant numbers of atoms because the atoms are already busy being themselves.
I believe that if we're living in a simulation, it was built in a universe with richer physics than we've got, just as our simulations are vastly simplified compared to our universe.
It's here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/05/open-thread-151/#comment-876772
From a Linux command line: `wget`
the webpage and `grep` the results.
In Mac you could do this from the Terminal application. In windows (10) you could use WSL2 to get a Ubuntu command line, or perhaps other command line emulators (or perhaps powershell will have theses tools).
You'll have to poke around a bit and perhaps ask Qs on stack overflow but this should be doable with a bit of learning effort. (Unfortunately not a fast easy solution if you are unfamiliar with the command line, but it can be learned with some googling and is very powerful.)
I think one (possible) problem with this is that `wget` won't load (all of) the comments automatically. Worst case, you might need to write/develop a custom 'scraper' for Substack blogs (which is par for the course with web scraping).
I've put together a datasette of ACX comments (with full text search) at https://acxsearch.herokuapp.com.
You can use it to search through comments here: https://acxsearch.herokuapp.com/acx/comments
(It somewhat necessarily only includes comments on public posts, so if the comment you're looking for is on a subscriber-only post then I'm afraid you're out of luck.)
I spent a good part of the afternoon making a script to generate a big HTML file with all comments from ACX (the public ones). With the titles and metadata of the posts, it currently clocks at 45Mo. Here's a link for a version generated a few minutes ago: https://acx-comments.neocities.org/. You can more or less search for comments in it, but it's a bit slow. However, the structure of the comments is preserved.
Therapists and psychiatrists tend to be skeptical of DID because of the possibility in their minds of it being induced into impressionable minds by media, hypnosis, suggestibility... Here is one meta-analysis paper that compared the "trauma model" (TM) of severe dissociation with the "fantasy model" (FM):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334625332_The_prevalence_of_Dissociative_Disorders_and_dissociative_experiences_in_college_populations_a_meta-analysis_of_98_studies_Author_Accepted_Copy
From the abstract:
> There was no evidence that DES scores had decreased over recent decades, which does not support FM assertions that DD were a fad of the 1990s. Three of the five hypotheses tested provided clear support for the TM and a fourth hypothesis provided partial support for the TM. None of the five hypotheses tested supported the FM.
Ordinary dissociative disorders are very different from dissociative identity disorder, even though the names sound similar, and there's no reason a dissociative experiences scale should relate to DID in particular.
Fair. One can imagine that when lumped with (iatrogenic) DID, they would completely mask it.
Yup, Scott's got it. All sorts of people have more dissociative experiences than average, and anxiety and PTSD are the most common sources of that.
I've personally watched DID being constructed by several trauma patients through the work of a mental health professional (a psychiatric nurse), when I was a psych practicum student working on an adolescent psychiatry unit. This iatrogenic creation of DID is actually the most common concern, not 'media, hypnosis, suggestibility ...'.
I have no evidence that DID is only a iatrogenic phenom, but there certainly needs to be more research, and more care in training mental health professionals around this.
That's unfortunate, albeit not entirely surprising. My experience with a therapist suggesting DID was the opposite actually. Her approach was to spend a lot of time quietly listening to me and encouraging me to talk while she got to know me, and we went along like this for months. Eventually she asked "have you ever heard of Dissociative Identity Disorder?" and I was like, no. She expressed the idea that that particular label didn't ultimately matter much for treatment and we could move forward without trying to apply it as a diagnosis, and I was happy with that. She literally never brought up DID again.
I apparently rank pretty high on the DES but I didn't find out about that until later (she never used it on me).
I looked DID up once and thought "well I guess that makes sense". Maybe the symptom that inspired her to suggest DID was the fact that I never identify with my own image in the mirror more than 90%, and this experience becomes "I'm looking at a stranger" when I'm really stressed out (this was not the case before childhood abuse happened). I also tend to look back on my life and see many different versions of me (they're all the same person but they feel like different people to me), and I'm occasionally revisited by an unfortunate feeling that the person I used to be is dead and I've become someone unrecognizable.
Standard disclaimer: don't worry about me, really I'm fine, actually I'm doing great at this point in my life considering, just like to be open about my experiences because pretty much nobody talks about this stuff.
Not fishing for a diagnosis here (I really don't need it), but I'm curious about how other practitioners approach this stuff: if you met a patient with similar symptoms, would you personally suspect DID or would you make sense of them in another fashion? In your practice, do you find it sufficient to use a more general technique like the DES without trying to diagnose people with DID?
If you'd rather not go there because of professional limitations etc, I totally respect that.
The symptoms you discuss here are pretty classic in Complex PTSD, and are dissociative symptoms, but even for people who think DID is a real thing, not indicative of DID. Glad to hear the therapist didn't press this; too many do.
Glad to hear you're doing well!
Interesting. Thanks for sharing your take on it. Yeah I feel lucky to have a good therapist who doesn't project too much on me. Ultimately I put more stock in my personal sense of well-being than in the labels and categories used to assess me (not that I don't think diagnostic categories matter, but I realize they're not the goal). Life's a weird journey but I'm grateful for where it's taken me :)
It's great that you are doing well, despite apparently pretty severe trauma early on! It looks like in your case the diagnosis didn't matter, and CPTSD is always present when DID is, so successfully treating CPTSD symptoms would go a long way to not having to worry about dissociated identities.
Sadly, that is not a possibility for many people: they are dissociated to the degree where amnesia and uncontrollable switching run and ruin their lives. Even more sadly, Karen and Scott seem to reflect the common view among the mental health practitioners that "DID is unproven, rare, and mostly iatrogenic." Some day this view will be ridiculed as the old ones, that "rocks don't fall from the sky" or that "earth is solid and continents don't move", but we seem to be far away from that still.
I get the impression that the resistance to DID comes from two sources of motivation in the psych community: not wanting to pathologize things that aren't problematic, and not wanting to craft diagnoses in such a way that they are imposed upon patients by practitioners (or by patients themselves).
Regarding the first, I've known enough people with highly flexible outward personalities that I'm tempted to think flexible-outward-personality is a benign trait that has the potential to become problematic when trauma destroys your center of gravity. In which case, perhaps it doesn't deserve to be catalogued in the DSM, a great repository of human psychiatric problems. I wish there were a great repository of benign human traits wherein we could describe all of human mental diversity without pathologizing it. Does such a thing exist?
Regarding the second, I've read stuff that swayed me to believe that media influence and practitioner bias did produce more cases of people with purported multiple personalities. This doesn't mean that none truly exist, but I think it's a good reason to be careful with this stuff. True multiple personalities could be so extremely rare that the false-positives are far more common, which puts everyone in a rather difficult position.
No pressure to get into the personal stuff, but do you know anyone you think would qualify?
Have a small anecdote: I talked briefly with a man who said his mother had trauma-based DID, but he had DID (maybe not a disorder) because when he was growing up, he though having multiple personalities was how to be a person.
Wow. Makes me think of my relationship with my father. He's more consistent now, but when I was a kid, his affect, the way he expressed himself, and his accent changed dramatically depending on context. In the restaurant he was a charming Greek with romantic stories. Around his cousin he used cockney slang and made rude jokes in a British accent. Around my mom's relatives he talked like a cowboy and was all salt-of-the-earth. To others, he might seem inauthentic. To me, these are all equally valid expressions of my dad.
He once told me that when he's alone, he talks to himself. But none of the things he says out loud actually come from "him"- they are the words of characters that live in his mind, speaking to each other through him.
I've scarcely considered how he might have influenced the way I construct my own sense of identity, but I suspect his example made it easier for me to handle the death-of-the-self experience I had post-trauma. He made personality seem like outfits; you could have a different one for every occasion. When one isn't working, you change into another. Post-trauma, I played rather freely with different facets of myself, all of whom revolved around the black hole where my unified sense of self once was. They often looked like different people. They never felt like full-fledged "multiple personalities", and they never felt like they deserved the term "disorder".
I'm curious what inspired this. Do you have any links to articles about therapists' attitudes toward DID specifically? I had the impression the psych community rejected multiple personalities disorder a long time ago, and that DID was created to accommodate some valid symptoms that were previously associated with the fictitious multiple personalities disorder.
DID is just the term that's used in the DSM for Multiple Personality Disorder and some similar symptom sets.
Part of the problem is that mental health professionals are a huge and varied group, with more and less training, training that is more or less scientific, and as many influences working on them as the general population. There's some speculation that therapists with high levels of narcissistic traits are more likely to believe in DID and then, of course, to diagnosis it in their patients. 'Cause it's so dramatic and impressive and they get to be the only professional who really understands the patient!
I was actually surprised the read the paper. The description of the Fantasy Model sounded very convincing, and my observation of depression does. coincide with some of the claims of that model. It was surprising to see that there is absolutely no experimental support for it (and that trauma is an accurate reflection of real life events, not someone's macabre fantasy).
Antinatalism is the ethical view that negatively values coming into existence and procreation. They typically believe having children is unethical. I could see antinatalism compromising of a disproportionate number of people with the following traits:
1. Intelligence. Entertaining ideas about moral philosophy involves some higher levels of intelligence usually.
2. Irreligiosity. Religious people usually feel they have a higher purpose and many believe having children is a part of that.
3. Depression. I have to imagine that the average antinatalist feels their own life is comprised of a lot of suffering and they feel other’s lives must be as well. I imagine depressed people are receptive to this ideology.
We know that these traits are in some part heritable. I hypothesize the following:
1. The psychological profile of someone who is an antinatalist is heritable.
2.Antinatalists do not have children and therefore do not pass on their antinatalist genetic tendencies.
3. The psychological profile common among antinatalists will become increasingly uncommon if antinatalism becomes popular and the remaining population will be more pronatalist.
The more widespread the ideology and the harsher the stigma around giving birth, the stronger the selection for pro-natalist attitudes in the population. This is not to say that antinatalism is not true. It's just to note that this would mean that voluntary human extinction is unlikely to be possible no matter how convincing the ideology is. Something worth noting.
(1) and (3) in your hypothesis are logically contradictory. If the attitude is largely the result of DNA, then ipso facto it cannot become widespread by any means other than substantial procreational advantage, which is inconsistent with the philosophy itself. If, on the other hand, the attitude can be learned, freely taken up by reflection, et cetera, then it cannot be heritable (i.e. Lamarckism remains dead), and so natural selection poses no barrier to its widespread adoption.
I think you are mistaken. E.g. SAT scores have high heritability within the US population but clearly are based on culturally learned prerequisites (such as understanding the English language). Likewise, the invention of better methods of birth control must have had a huge impact on the effects of genes that affect the propensity to use birth control.
"Heritable" in this context could also be looked at as learned behavior in the next generation. Those who have this philosophy are not having children and cannot pass it along to the next generation as they raise them. People who choose to have children will be able to teach (even implicitly through their choice to have children) the next generation.
This implies that over any timeframe above one generation, anti-natalism will diminish itself, whether because of the OPs genetic heritability or through learned behavior in future generations.
This also applies to long term population trends between those who have few to no children for other reasons - for instance philosophical desire to not overwhelm the earth's resources, compared to those who choose to have large families.
You seem to be assuming that memes are inherited from parents. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption. E.g. the reason Newtonian physics is popular today is not that Newton had a bunch of children.
I'm suggesting that we do learn a lot from our parents, especially about their lifestyle. What we see in our early years is what we consider normal, even if it's actually really weird to much of society. If you grew up in a household with several siblings, you are going to have a different opinion about having children than if you grew up in a household without any other children. Far more importantly, nobody can grow up in a household with no children, to absorb that approach and think of it as normal.
Right. Memes can spread in lots of ways, and learning from parents is an important one.
Take religion, the archetypal example of a meme. Evangelism to strangers happens, but most people still follow the religion of their parents. And not coincidentally, successful religions tend to be very opposed to antinatalism.
Agree except for one important point: "the average antinatalist feels their own life is comprised of a lot of suffering and **they feel other’s lives must be as well**"
There is no need to assume that many/most other people are depressed, only (as you discuss further down) that depression is heritable. If you are depressed in your own life, then chances are reasonably good that your offspring will be as well, which I think constitutes a pretty good argument against oneself reproducing.
I understand antinatalism not just as the decision not to have children, but the moral opposition to anyone having children, usually accompanied by dismay that the majority of people still feel that life is worth living. Those certainly feel like distinct positions - one's personal preference, the other is a normative statement.
Depression isn't the only reason people might adopt antinatalism. I can see 2 others, both of which are probably growing:
1. Resolution of cognitive dissonance: You're apprehensive about having kids because of the effect on your lifestyle, or because you can't find a suitable partner. You rationalize your decision not to reproduce by believing that you're doing what is right.
2. Environmentalism and Malthusianism: You don't actually want the human race to die out, but think that current population is above Earth's carrying capacity, or just that we'd all have a better quality of life if the world was less crowded. You'd switch to pronatalism if the population got low enough.
Completely voluntary extinction is almost certainly impossible, as even a single remaining small contrarian population would be enough for eventual repopulation. Of course, if such an outlook was ever to become the majority opinion, it's doubtful that compliance would remain voluntary.
Majority antinatalist wouldn't be enough for enforcement. You'd also need the "sterilisation = death, therefore I have no reason not to revolt" group to be small enough to be suppressed (else the state fails and can't execute the plan).
There are certain ideologies that have strong favouritism for encouraging people into non reproductive sexual behaviours and sterilisation, while viewing it as a moral virtue and statements as milquetoast as this comment as evil as genocidal murder. These ideologies have become, in a very underststed way, much more common over the last decade. Of course as this is a no politics thread this topic cannot be explored any further for now.
This is why I encourage anti-natalists. Not that I agree with them, but because filtering them out of the gene pool little-by-little is the safest way.
This is generally true at some level, but it still take longer to get going because culture is changing so rapidly at present, which means the anti-natal and pro-natal psychological profile are also in flux. This is how fertility has been able to decrease basically continuously since the start of the industrial revolution and is now comfortably below replacement in most of the world.
For example, the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
Going back to the topic of the Ashkenazim from a few threads back -- at one point, the Jewish population was exploding and Ashkenazi Judaism was clearly a pro-natal cultural belief. But now its population, at least in the US, is imploding, with most US Jews having significantly fewer children than the US median, and it has transformed into an anti-natal belief system. Though of course the more traditional Orthodox Judaism remains a pro-natal belief system, for now.
All that to say, I think ultimately human beings will develop some combination of culture and genetics that are resistant to anti-natal ideas (and as a result I believe the Earth will one day return to a Malthusian state), but it will likely be a messy, centuries-long process, with several false starts and dead ends.
> the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
This sounds really interesting - do you have a source where I can see more about this?
I know I've seen it in more than one place, but here's one example:
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/some-guys-get-all-the-babes-not-exactly/
It's the graph towards the bottom, though unfortunately the link for his source is now broken, so I'm not sure what the root source is.
What you see is that men with 1 partner have always done reasonably well, and started out the 20th century, while men with 20+ partners have never been the most fertile group (presumably relying mostly on prostitutes prior to the Sexual Revolution).
But in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of "dating culture" and the breakdown of some traditional norms, all of the more caddish groups rose considerably, with 7-9 partners being the most fertile group in the 1930s. After that 1 partner returned to the top position but only slight beat out the next few groups, until the 1960s, when men who defied the Sexual Revolution and only had 1 partner became by far the most fertile group.
Jim Crawford of the antinatalism blog has kids... some of whom post-date him becoming an antinatalist.
I bet that's fun for those kids when they find out!
Better to be the kid born after he decided kids were bad (that's how much he wanted you) than to be the kids born before he decided they were bad (you were why he regretted having kids).
Sorry, missent one, so this is the real post. I think there are two main possibilities for a counterargument.
Counterargument A) Sickle Cell traits. This has advantages if you have only one copy of the trait, but disadvantages if you have both. I think it's quite possible antinatalism could be something like this. Intelligence is certainly positive, as is opportunity for education, both of which would tend to be necessary. It could be just that when you have the misfortune of combining that with irreligiosity, depression, and whatever else contributes, you end up with antinatilism, but the core components each can serve a purpose for enhancing fitness.
Counterargument B) Grandmother effects. I think it seems plausible that being an antinatilist could have positive outcomes for relatives. While intelligence is heritable, that's a pretty noisy inheritance. It seems like there's good odds that if you are an antinalist, you'll be smarter than your siblings just by regression to the mean. Thus you'll tend to make more money, and since you're an antinatalist who feels life is suffering, maybe you'll be more compelled to help your nieces and nephews. I'm much less confident in B, but figured I'd throw it out there.
If either A or B hold, it seems plausible we'll never see the extinction of antinatalism simply because it's tied to other good outcomes.
My understanding is that education is currently negatively correlated with fertility.
My guess would be that it's pretty well correlated with having your children survive to adulthood though
Children surviving to adulthood is the norm with modern medicine & lack of famines.
But you can basically only have that if you also have a pretty good education. The best quality medications are expensive, so you both need a good job and need to live somewhere with a good economy (and usually thus good education). I'd be willing to bet that people in the US who didn't complete high school have worse child mortality rates than someone college educated, even controlling for race.
It does not require "the best quality of medications" for children to reliably survive to adulthood. The cheap medicines you can buy for $10 at Wal-Mart or have handed to you for free by hanging out in an ER for a while will suffice for that, I do not think there is any socioeconomic class or other major population subgroup in the United States whose children have <90% probability of surviving to adulthood, and to grandparenthood if they are so inclined.
P(kids surviving to adulthood) is a second-order term in this equation, the dominant term is p(kids will bother having kids of their own).
Recently, there have been discussions of moral offsetting and utilitarianism on ACX. I found these discussions interesting but I feel as though there are major issues with this sort of moral reasoning. It seems as though you are allowed to offset "trivial" things like eating meat or carbon emissions but not "serious" things like murder. I do not believe that there is a good reason for making this distinction. Utilitarianism maps everything to a linear scale of utility. There is no clear line as to what is trivial or serious. And there is no categorical difference in properties between these arbitrary clusterings that would make one offsettable and one not.
Scott made an essay (axiology, morality, law) creating a distinction between these things but I found its arguments unconvincing. In a utilitarian framework, whatever maximizes utility (axiology) is the action that should be done (morality). Utilitarians do not incorporate other ethical intuitions or considerations in moral choices but it seems like the "triaging" of axiology's demands is incorporating non-utility considerations. Creating a non-moral hazard distinction between murdering and letting die is also incorporating intuitions about inflicting harm which are not justified in utilitarian thinking. It is the feeling of having inflicted harm that makes someone want to offset in my view. It is mostly a way to deal with feelings of guilt. Not donating to reduce carbon emissions should elicit the same feelings for a consistent utilitarian.
Here are my questions for Utilitarians:
1. I am deciding if I should do moral choice A or B. A is utility maximizing and B is not, all things considered. Under what circumstances is B the correct choice?
2. What is a moral consideration that overrides utility maximization?
3. If you believe in this idea of morality (as laid out in Scott's essay Axiology, Morality, Law), can you explain how you come to know moral facts or the nature of this morality. For example, why is it worse to kill 1 than to not save 2 even without moral hazard issues?
Here is a full essay I wrote on the matter: https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/contra-alexander-on-moral-offsetting.
For 1 and 2 the answer is never and none, pretty much by definition if you are talking to a utilitarian.
Most limits people around here talk about are practical not moral. E.g. In an ideal world I'd donate most of my money to charity and be happy about it, but I know that practically that's not possible because of how human psychology works. If I did that I'd be miserable and probably stop doing it fairly quickly. So it's not a good option. Instead I donate about 10% of my income regularly, which is an amount I can sustain. Psychological constraints are just as real as other practical constraints. Other constraints might be certainty, eg you might think killing someone would be net utility maximising, but can't be sufficiently certain that you'd do it, because if the risks of being wrong. And you can inform that with reasoning about how often people who think that killing someone is the right thing to do are correct.
I think the slight caveat on 1 and 2 is that you have to look at what level the decision is being made at. We naively think that we can decide each individual action that we make. But in practice, we more often control our actions by developing habits. Most of the things I do in the morning (have coffee, go to the bathroom, shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, check my e-mail) are done every day more because I've done them each of the past several days than because of any explicit decision to do them today.
So if A is the specific action on this specific occasion that will maximize utility, but B is part of a habit that is slightly less good on this occasion, but part of a broader pattern of behavior that is better than any habit one can train by doing A, then maybe doing B is better. (Of course, in this case, we might say that doing B actually maximizes utility, because we can account some of the good from future acts of B to this act, and can account some of the bad from breaking the habit to the present act of A.)
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons.
Allowing offsets for murder increases the social acceptability of murder, a very undesirable consequence. Perhaps more money goes to charity, but by definition this is evened out be an increase in murder, which is bad for the people that get murdered but also for everyone else in society. Obviously there are legal barriers to offsetting murder and getting away with it, but even if you could get away (bribing the cops? framing someone else and offsetting their sentence as well?), I'd argue that you shouldn't - there's value to a general prohibition of murder.
(I can't 100% say that murder can't be offset - we generally agree that it can be offset by time served, and many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money - however, that doesn't seem to be a society that we want to live in today.)
Offsetting something like meat eating or polluting has solely good consequences - the offsetting does good, it incentives you to do less of the bad thing by increasing its cost, and it has a second order positive effect in that other people may also consider whether the negative externalities should be factored into.
TL;DR offset things you were going to do anyway, don't offset reprehensible things in order to allow you to do them.
We generally agree that time served in prison is the /most acceptable/ out of all the ones we tried or thought of: the death penalty, blood money, corporal punishment, or indentured servitude have all been found unacceptable. The conflicting drives of the need for retributive justice and the opposition to cruel and unusual punishment mean that no one solution is universally satisfying. For that reason I'd say that murder cannot be offset, even though we try to force people to do so out of necessity.
I'd sort of argue that we still have acceptable offsets. Mainly I'd point to speeding fines. The core danger of speeding is that you kill someone, so to me speeding fines represent offsetting the small chance of you killing someone through speeding. We also have similar fines for other things that have low percentage chances of killing someone. Admittedly we no longer have good ways of offsetting 100% odds of murder, but we do ok with smaller odds.
"many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money"
Seems to have been a combination of "I'm an important rich guy and that was only a serf/slave/whatever, should I really have to undergo the death penalty instead of using my wealth to pay a fine?" and stopping the cycle of "Bob kills Joe so Tom is obligated by blood feud social pressure to kill Bob so then Bill has to kill Tom and then Phil had to kill Bill...."
"Jerdenizen9 hr ago
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons"
That's assuming society supplies you with deontological ethics, which is more correct than utilitarian ethics, because it overrides utilitarian ethics. It's hardly a defense of utilitarian ism
Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer) so allowing offsetting would make the world a worse place. Perhaps it would be better if there were equally strong prohibitions against eating animals (debateable), but if you feel that it's morally wrong but struggle to refrain from it, offsetting it seems like a good way to move the world towards a state in which its less permissible, because offsetting at least implies that there's a need for atonement.
Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that the world would be a worse place if we told everyone that murder is OK if you think it makes the world a better place.
"Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer"
. If you have a rule that murder can never be offset, then you lose utility in the cases where the offset would have generated positive utility. In general, utilitarianism is utility maximising, and having absolute rules is deontology, and deontology isn't utility maximising, so adopting deontology leaves some utility on the table.
"Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism".
No, but failing to maximise utility is.
OK, well I'm either inconsistent (very likely) or just outlining a useful principle that I'd generally (but not universally) adhere to, given the impossibility of actually calculating utility (approximations all the way down). I accept that there are contrived situations in which offsetting murder seems like a good idea, but most of the time it seems like it's going to be better to not do the murder and also do whatever good thing would offset it. In the real world maintaining a general prohibition against murder seems like a good idea - after all, if it's justified, it's not generally considered murder.
I was just trying to explain why a utilitarian might recommend offsetting actions that are socially acceptable but morally questionable, without also thinking that we shouldn't just let billionaires murder people after donating to AMF - primarily because there are better ways to raise money for charity than that (although I guess if there weren't I'd have to consider it...)
I agree with the impossibility of actually calculating utility, but I summarise that as "utility wrong". It's confused thinking to fix utilitarianism by making it work like deontology, while still calling it utilitarianism.
Utility is only guaranteed to be utility maximizing if you do *all* the math, including all the second- and third-order terms involving small harms spread over large populations. No, not just the *one* dust-specks-in-a-trillion-eyes term that made this particular problem so fascinating to think about, but also all the other messy realities that you tried to round to zero before you started calculating.
That's not how anybody actually practices utilitarianism. To implement utilitarianism in finite time requires rounding most of the terms to zero before you start calculating, and most people intuitively zero out the terms they expect would argue against their preferred course of action.
Allow murder offsets, and people will balance the zero-order "murder is bad" term with whatever first-order terms they think are most likely to make their preferred murder seem OK, and maybe whatever terms they can't get away with ignoring because other people will focus on them, and then they will stop. Whether they're a wannabe murderer themselves, or a judge charged with deciding whether someone else has paid enough offsets.
I've never seen anyone even seriously try to put numbers on the "this will result in far more murders because wannabe murderers will optimistically expect they can get away with discount weregeld", and "this will result in lots of people living their lives in fear of being murdered because they don't think other people put a high enough dollar value on their lives" terms. So I highly doubt that a bunch of clever utilitarians trying to implement a murder-offset legal regime would maximize, or even increase, utility.
Oh, dear. This needs to come back in a politics thread.
I read your blog and liked it. I felt convinced then that there was some detail missing / inconsistencies.
Now reading the other responses I feel less convinced.
The value of a civil society is what jumped out at me.
If the price a making a brick is £1 and just to be sure you make it £100 that doesn't mean I'll happily give you a brick from my house in exchange for £100.
All that to say the price for murder should be the price for saving a life plus the price of making everyone feel as secure as they used to before they could be murdered legally.
Should there still be a price? Yes. Perhaps the reason it isn't openly accepted / talked about is the price is so high. Or that there is no utility in talking about it. I'm sure military commanders have made similarly cold blooded decisions in the past but it would be bad for morale to describe exactly how much benefit each soldier would be sacrificed for
Have you read Consequentialist FAQ? https://web.archive.org/web/20161115073538/http://raikoth.net/consequentialism.html
I think it gives good intuitions for the questions you've asked. But here is my own explanation.
Utilitarianism works poorly without propper consequentialist framework. It's like a chess program with a propper ability to evaluate possible moves which can only look one step ahead. Such program can be beaten even by a heuristic chess reasoner like GPT-3. However if such program can look lots of steps ahead - it can become very good at chess.
If our utility function is properly defined according to our ability to predict long term consequences it's always moral to do action A. But it may be not the case. So the moral consideration which overrides pure utility maximization is weather such maximization will probably lead to less utility eventually.
The distinction between Axiology, Morality and Law comes from acknowledging the possible consequences. If we normalize offsetting human murder it seems to lead to the world with more murder and more power to the wealthy ellites which seems to be a drop in utility. On the other hand normalizing carbon offset seems to be leading mostly to more money in initiatives fighting carbon pollution and only a tiny increase in actuall pollution. So that's why we say that offsetting murder is a bad idea, while offsetting carbon emision is a good one.
If by moral hazard you mean exactly this - than there is no other reason. But I believe that reason is enough.
I think you sort of miss Scott's point about axiology/morality/law. Utilitarians (consistent ones, at least) really do believe that the only thing that matters is the maximization of utility. To a utilitarian, morality and law are not things external to axiology, but rather some of its specific subsets; this is, in fact, the point of rule utilitarianism. A utilitarian might say that a rule like "thou shalt not kill" is shorthand for "there is very strong evidence that killing people has negative utility beyond what naive consideration would suggest; therefore, you shouldn't e.g. kill 1 to save 2". Both the utilitarian and the deontologist recognize the rule; the utilitarian does not believe it to be absolute - so there's an 'N' where "kill 1" becomes better "don't save N" - and I don't know enough about deontology to know what it thinks about this.
Within this framework, moral blameworthiness as a concept is entirely instrumental, as is the notion of supererogatory acts. They are (ideally) set at whatever society-wide level that gets the most people to do good stuff, i.e. to maximize utility.
Your analysis of rationalists' attitude in respect to utilitarianism (in the essay) is perhaps correct, but it is besides the point and somewhat improper as an argument. It does not, strictly speaking, matter to a philosophical position's strength that a particular group of people was driven to it by "impure" considerations.
As for your questions this particular utilitarian would answer:
1. Never
2. There aren't any
3. By taking "common-sense morality" as a reasonable-but-not-infallible metric to compare naively-utilitarian considerations against, attempting to derive its commands in their most common forms from utilitarian principles, and then seeing if this derivation works for the specific case at hand.
In the case of "thou shalt not kill", for example, you say something like "(a) murder has direct adverse effects on social order, and also (b) there are pseudo-Kantian considerations like 'if you think you have sufficient reason to murder, then everyone will think that, too', and also (c) murder is usually wrong even without taking these complicated reasons, so the simplicity of a rule like 'murder is never correct' wins out in utility over the fringe cases where it doesn't work."
(Not claiming that this list is exhaustive - just that these can be morally valid reasons for a utilitarian to avoid murder.)
If the situation is such that (a), (b) or (c) are negated completely - or 'enough', really - and a utilitarian is confident enough in their applied ethics to believe that there isn't any (d) of substance they're missing, then yeah, they actually do get to ignore the rule. This is obviously a pretty rare occurrence, which is, again, why "don't murder" is usually good enough.
If something related to (a), (b) or (c) is what you mean by moral hazard, then I believe that answers the third question.
I think it depends on your utilitarian. There is the strawman bad guy who goes "okay, so I killed a few people/skinned some cats alive/eat beefburgers every Wednesday, but look at all the good things I do! Look at all the lives my donations to disease research and hospital wings have saved! Does it *really* matter if I murdered my mother for the insurance money to get my start in business, when I've been a huge philanthropist since I made my first billion?"
But there is the danger, because we're all human and humans make excuses to rationalise their behaviour, that people will go "does it really matter if I do teeny, tiny, bad thing X so long as good thing Y also happens?"
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/utilitarian
as said by many others, 1 and 2 are both “no”
I am probably more of a utilitarian than most people, so I’ll just give you my general take on 3. I don’t really believe in moral laws. This point has been made by other commenters: “Do not kill” is a good shorthand rule. It’s an especially good law since that makes it an enforceable rule that will stop the action of killing which usually has bad outcomes. So I actually think (in a vacuum) it’s worse to not save two people than to kill one. Once you add in externalities, who knows though.
With respect to moral offsetting, it’s weird. Here’s how I think of it: In economics there’s this idea of “indifference curves” where it’s all the possible combinations of a pair of goods that would give you the same amount of utility. If you add one more of Good A your utility goes up and you’re off of the indifference curve. Obviously this can be generalized to indifference hyper-surfaces.
people tend to have a goal amount of morality. I think very few people aim to be maximally moral, unless they have a system that sets the bar reasonably low. As everyone knows, utilitarianism sets a high, almost unreachable, bar. So often a utilitarian will have some amount of utility that they informally aim to create.
Now let’s say you want to do something that would drop you below your “goodness goal.” In order to get back up to that level, you want to stay on the hypersurface so you have to offset somewhere else.
To bring up Bill Gates murdering people, I’d be concerned, but overall he’s done a lot of good and if it wasn’t going to lead to serious societal issues (which it probably would), I’d be ok with offsetting
There are practical as well as moral considerations driving human action. No inertia needs to be overcome to not save someone. You just need to keep doing whatever you were already doing. Murdering a person is not easy for most people to do. You may find yourself unwilling or unable even if you believe it is the right thing to do, and if you follow through and manage it anyway, it is likely to do significant psychology damage, which is a lot of disincentive.
Patching an ethical system with extra-moral considerations like this makes it much more likely that people can actually adopt and follow it, even if it makes the system less internally consistent.
Where true pure utilitarianism shines is guiding the actions of states, not individuals. Nations are absolutely going to kill lots of people one way or another, whether through inaction or action, and should use that to guide whether active killing is the better option. They have efficient means of killing via specialized trained professionals who are willing and able to do it.
> Utilitarianism maps everything to a linear scale of utility.
I don't see why the scale has to be linear. Murder could very well be exponentially more abhorrent than minor infractions like , say, eating meat. So much so that offseting murder would be impossible unless you were balancing it against other deaths in a trolley problem scenario, ie. murder one person to save humanity.
I think in this context "linear" is meant to contrast with "multi-dimensional" rather than with "quadratic" or "exponential". A linear ordering is one in which for every two elements, either the first is greater than the second, or the second is greater than the first, or they are equal.
That said, I don't see that utilitarianism needs to assume linearity of the ordering. A utilitarian could conceivably treat physical pleasure and social pleasure as two incomparable positive values, so that a situation that is better on both counts is better, one that is worse on both counts is worse, and one that is better on one but worse on the other is neither better nor worse nor equal. It's going to mean that there are some situations where no action is "right" or "required", because there's a set of acts whose outcomes are incomparable to each other. But there will usually be many acts that are still forbidden, because they end with results that are worse on both counts.
While I agree that a multi-dimensional calculation makes more sense, that's not really meeting the purpose of utilitarian calculations. If you cannot compare two acts, even with perfect knowledge, then you're defeating the purpose.
If the purpose is to see which is better and which is worse, and there is no fact about which is better and which is worse, then you're serving the purpose right.
It's only if the purpose is to have some algorithm that always returns a unique result that this would be defeating the purpose.
Agreed, which is one of the reasons I reject utilitarianism.
> Utilitarians do not incorporate other ethical intuitions or considerations in moral choices
I think that's incorrect, under my understanding of utilitarianism as a type of consequentialism. Even if we're talking about a hypothetical perfect utilitarian who has no competing moral intuitions, this person would still be trying to examine all consequences of their choices, including the way those choices would be perceived by the majority of the public who are non-utilitarians. Those perceptions could alter which choice is best from the utilitarian's perspective, e.g. the utilitarian may be wise to avoid "reputational damage" from actions that otherwise improve utility but are considered unvirtuous / rule-breaking by the community, because poor reputation can lower one's freedom/ability to act or influence others in the future.
1. A is utility maximizing and B is not, all things considered. Under what circumstances is B the correct choice?
In line with the previous thought, action B may sometimes enable more freedom of future action than A because it looks more virtuous, or more popular, or is simply cheaper (e.g. action B, "giving 100% of my savings to effective charity X", is more utility-maximizing than action A, "giving 10% of my savings to effective charity X", but it also limits my future actions. I might afterward learn something that shows charity Y is actually more effective than charity X, say, and would regret the 100% donation due to that.
In addition, it's often hard to be sure that A is utility maximizing and B is not. What we usually have when making a choice is "I predict A improves utility more than B, but I could be wrong". This is a great reason to let the Law and deontological/vitrtue ethics inform your otherwise utilitarian decisions. These other forms of ethics are organic things, shaped by history, and so they encode general knowledge of how past decisions played out (i.e. actions that often caused problems historically are likely to end up in rules against those actions). So one can reasonably use these other ethical ideas as a "general prior" about what actions are more or less likely to maximize utility.
2. What is a moral consideration that overrides utility maximization?
Nothing comes to mind.
3. If you believe in this idea of morality (as laid out in Scott's essay Axiology, Morality, Law), can you explain how you come to know moral facts or the nature of this morality. For example, why is it worse to kill 1 than to not save 2 even without moral hazard issues?
I don't have a theory of utilitarianism that says it is better to let 2 die than to kill 1, except in reference to the above (killing people can badly harm your reputation/freedom, except in special cases like killing a convicted murderer who is holding a gun on two people and threatening to kill them).
The saving grace of utilitarianism is that it's looking for ways to increase utility *as much as possible*, and killing people is usually not the *best way* you can find to do that. That is, when people claim "utilitarianism implores me to kill!" they are usually wrong (and, I suspect, usually arguing against utilitarianism). But there are cases where killing people seems like obviously the best available choice, e.g. if you somehow have an opportunity to kill Hitler during WWII, my utilitarianism approves.
Your argument for 1) is meaningless. The parameters of the question are "A is utility-maximising, B is not, *all things considered*". All your answers for this amount to "well, maybe B is actually utility-maximising when you consider all things", which seems to me a misunderstanding of the question.
An interesting aspect of Dutch is the many food-related ways in which you can refer to people. For example, these are mild pejoratives if someone is doing something stupid that bothers you (like in traffic):
- 'pancake'
- 'meatball' (this one also exists in English)
- 'bag of fries'
- 'soup chicken' (if it is a woman)
And you can refer to a weird person like this:
- 'weird haricot'
- 'grape'
And when someone someone is incompetent, you can call them a 'cookie baker'. This goes back to 1572, when mayor Cookiebaker refused to hand over the Dutch city of Brielle to the Sea Beggars, the Dutch revolutionaries led by the William of Orange who fought the Spanish rulers. This refusal was rather silly, since the city was not garrisoned, so it was defeated quickly. This conquest was rather important, as the Sea Beggars no longer had a base of operations, as Queen Elisabeth I had turned them away from the English ports. The attack on Brielle was one of desperation. Emboldened by this victory, the citizens of another major Dutch port revolted. They handed over that city to the Sea Beggars. Thereafter many more cities revolted and the conquest of Brielle is commonly seen as the true start of the fight for Dutch independence, as the Sea Beggars were merely a raiding force before that time.
Another word for a fool is a 'cheese head.' In Germany, it is a pejorative term for the Dutch in general.
A word for a young man who thinks he knows it all, but who lacks experience/wisdom, is a mik mouth. In Dutch, we use the term milk teeth for baby teeth, which is where this derives from.
An adolescent girl who always spends her time with her friends, constantly laughs and otherwise is very silly, is a 'baking fish.' This refers to fish that is too small to be a meal in itself, but too large to throw back in the water, so a bunch of them are baked together.
A weakling can be referred to as a 'tasteless snack', which can also be used for poor products and the like, in which case it is similar to the English 'weaksauce.' Another word for such a person is a 'soft boiled egg.'
A very irritating person can a 'stuk vreten,' which is a bit hard to translate. 'Vreten' means eating fast and sloppily. Just shoving the food in there. 'Stuk' means 'a piece of'. So it's a rather weird statement.
A hypocritical person can be called a 'holy bean'. This derives from a sarcastic statement about orphans, who used to wear multicolor clothing, which can be referred to a 'bont' in Dutch, and often misbehaved themselves in public, but behaved in sight of the orphanage workers (who would beat them if they misbehaved). Later on, people forgot about the original meaning and misheard the statement as 'holy bean.'
When a man is a great guy, you can call him a 'cool pear'.
A person who always complains is a 'sour plum'.
A very loud woman is a 'viswijf.' This word consists of 'vis', which means 'fish', and 'wijf', which goes back to the same word for woman that ended up as 'wife' in English. However, in Dutch it is fairly pejorative. Calling someone a fishing woman goes back to the tradition of men going out to sea to fish, while their wives would sell the fish at the market and would shout loudly to sell their wares.
A slut can be called a 'licked sandwich'.
And an old woman can be referred to as an 'old cake' if you don't like her and an 'old berry' if you do, but she is very fragile.
> 'wijf', which goes back to the same word for woman that ended up as 'wife' in English. However, in Dutch it is fairly pejorative.
Compare English "frow", borrowed from Middle Dutch. According to Wiktionary:
1. A woman; a wife, especially a Dutch or German one.
2. (obsolete) A slovenly woman; a wench; a lusty woman.
3. (obsolete) A big, fat woman; a slovenly, coarse, or untidy woman; a woman of low character.
> 'soup chicken' (if it is a woman)
This would be very similar to "old boiler" in Australian English.
In general I like these food-based insults. Can you give the Dutch originals so I can add a bit of mystery and exoticism when I mutter them to my colleagues?
pancake = pannenkoek
meatball = bal gehakt
bag of fries = zak patat
soup chicken = soepkip
weird haricot = rare snijboon
grape = druif
cookie baker = koekenbakker
cheese head = kaaskop
milk mouth = melkmuil
baking fish = bakvis
tasteless snack = slappe hap
soft boiled egg = zachtgekookt eitje
holy bean = heilig boontje
cool pear = toffe peer
sour plum = zuurpruim
licked sandwich = afgelikte boterham
old cake = ouwe taart
old berry = oud besje
This is the first time I hear 'melkmuil'. Is it regional?
Not that I'm aware of. It's a bit old-fashioned, though. It goes back to the 16th century.
Thank you! Rare snijboon is my favourite.
Although slappe hap has a nice ring to it....
What do you mean by tasteless snack? Zoutloos? I for the life of me can't figure it out. But then I'm kind of a droppie.
That one was a bit hard to translate. The original is 'slappe hap.'
That was a wonderful comment! Thank you.
My grandmother taught Yiddish for decades, and could have written a very similar post for that language, but I never thought to ask.
That's sad for me, of course, but probably lucky for other ACX readers, because the theme in Yiddish isn't food. It's the noises, smells and fluids that come out of the human body, and there are very specific, finely differentiated, and artistically evocative for all of them.
That sounds very interesting and extremely gross.
Great list. Many of these originally come from German, don't they? At least bavis, that's backfisch in German. You can use the expression for a teenage/young adult girl in English also, and in Scandinavian languages. Although if you do, you are either 100 years old, or you make a point of speaking as if you are 100 years old.
It's from Germany, indeed. It goes back to at least 1555, so plenty of time for the word to migrate to other languages.
1955, Nabokov, Lolita:
I knew, of course, it was but an innocent game on her part, a bit of backfisch foolery in imitation of some simulacrum of fake romance […]
> An adolescent girl who always spends her time with her friends, constantly laughs and otherwise is very silly, is a 'baking fish.' This refers to fish that is too small to be a meal in itself, but too large to throw back in the water, so a bunch of them are baked together.
I've always wondered about the origin of 'bakvis', it's such a silly word. Thanks!
The Irish version of this is "gligín" which I've always heard used about girls/young women not men, but apparently it can be. Dictionary definition says it comes from a little bell, something that makes a tinkling noise, hence rattle, hence rattle-brained or shallow person:
"gligín, 1. (a) Little bell, tinkler, rattle(r). (b) Tinkle. 2. Rattle-brained person. "
"Loud as a fishwife" exists in English too.
"Screaming like a fish joulter" is the Hiberno-English version (at least in my neck of the woods). "Joulter" is a word for "pedlar" so it refers to the same general notion, of "fishwives" who would be loudly crying their goods and also loudly getting into quarrels amongst themselves.
I've never heard anyone use "meatball" this way in English!
We used to have All in the Family on Dutch TV, where Archie Bunker called his son in law by that name.
It was meathead in English. I don't think I've seen the term anywhere else.
Yes, I looked it up and you are right.
Yes, Archie Bunker used “meathead”.
My own father actually calls me “meatball” as a term of endearment. I don’t think most girls would be too thrilled with that one, but he’s called me that since I was a baby and it makes me smile.
In Chinese:
Stupid melon = a fool (傻瓜 Shagua )
Stupid egg = a fool (笨蛋 Bendan)
Chicken thief = Miserly (鸡贼 Jizei)
Rice bag = Good-for-nothing (饭袋 Fandai）
Milk milk = Grandma (奶奶 Nainai)
Cardamom = a budding beauty (豆蔻 Doukou)
Fun comment, but I don't think I've ever heard someone referred to as a meatball in English. Meathead, yes. Not specifically a meatball, though, although I suppose they're pretty close.
The Dutch have the best insults. I'm quite fond of the disease-based ones and wish there was an English equivalent for e.g. "cancer whore."
This is awesome, though I lived in the Netherlands seven years and never heard most of these! Living and working almost entirely among expats in Amsterdam my Dutch never got past level one, which is a shame because Dutch slang is amazing.
I always loved the Dutch name for French toast, “wentelteefjes”, which my friend translated as something like “flipbitches”. One order of flipbitches, please!
That's probably more a case of 'teef' once being used for something completely different, which has been forgotten aside from this one use. Wentelteefje is a rather old term, the earliest known use being in 1623.
It seems women loudly selling things was quite the annoyance back in the day. In Russian, inadequate people are called bazaar hags.
Ethics and Aesthetics
For rationalists and philosophy majors in general, ethics seems like a sort of mathematics: there are axioms (you can buy them or not), and then there is the logic that fills out that implication of the axioms.
I find this to be a lovely endeavor, and I am not at all against it. Those engaged in it are living in accordance with their nature.
I suspect that most rationalists would object to using your gut as opposed to your brain to determine matters of ethics, so I'm going to try to steelman why you should.
For context, I'm not making this idea up from scratch. I believe that when the Buddhists talk about "living according to your nature" and when Emerson says "If I'm a Devil's child, my duty is to the Devil."(or something like that) they are getting at the idea of morality I am trying to get at: Just be your fucking self. That's good enough.
I think the best ethics amounts to going with your gut. That may mean you've read extensively on the subject, sweated over it, debated it, lost sleep over it, and then came to a gut conclusion. Or it may mean you gave it zero thought, as most of us do on most subjects.
The pragmatic problem with a rational ethics is most of us aren't rational. So if rational ethics are going to make a dent in the world either most people need to become rational, or rationalists need to gain so much power that their minority philosophy has sufficient sway. I don't see either of those things happening.
So my title here is Ethics and Aesthetics. My belief is we mostly do what seems right based upon what could be called an aesthetic judgment. For instance, I'm an atheist. I don't believe if I murdered someone I would experience eternal damnation. But I don't have no desire to murder someone because the idea of it horrifies me. Same goes with stealing, coveting my neighbors' wife, hiring a lawyer who advertises on TV, etc. My moral sensibility is an extension of my aesthetic sensibility.
Given there is no God, don't aesthetic sensibilities fully explain moral sensibilities?
I tend to also see ethics and aesthetics as similar, but I think there is a large difference in that the ethical breaches of others provoke outrage in a way incomparable to aesthetic breaches. Someone who rapes a child (in accordance with his nature) and someone who makes atrocious music (in accordance with her nature) are just not treated the same.
The problem is that we want to oppose our ethics on others, but generally are (ethically) opposed to the imposing our aesthetics on others. I don't want other people to murder each other, but as long as I don't have to hear it I couldn't care less what music they listen to.
The desire for a rational ethics is based around the idea that we all have some shared values to appeal to. The law is the basic expression of rational ethics - it's not 100% rational or ethical, but I feel that a judge and jury are more like a philosopher than to a cultural critic - they're trying to determine the truth and it's consequences, rather than just making an aesthetic judgement.
We disagree on the existence of God, but I agree that without a higher power to appeal to there doesn't seem to be much separating ethics and aesthetics. I don't think we can totally equivocate what is right with what is beautiful, but there's clearly conceptual overlap between the concepts.
However, even granting this doesn't rule out rational contemplation in favour of going for your gut. In the same way that deeper contemplation rather than simply accepting your initial reaction results in a different understanding of beauty, it's clear that that thinking through your moral decisions may result in a very different conclusion than simply following your gut. You could say that the gut reaction is a more authentic expression of beauty/rightness, but contemplation may allow greater insight into the art/dilemma, ultimately changing your intuitions. Since this is based around an appreciation of nuance and complexity, I'd argue that your intuition following contemplation is more valuable than the initial gut reaction, both aesthetically (you'll appreciate the art more) and morally (your decision will better reflect your own values).
I think the world would be a worse place if we told everyone to totally disregard their moral intuitions in favour of following philosophers instead (that leaves open the door to totalitarianism), but I do think that encouraging more people to think rationally about morality would result in a world that better satisfies most people's ethical preferences. As you point out, most people aren't very rational - that makes the task difficult, but to me this also suggests there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick if you can only make the discussion slightly more nuanced and contemplative.
>You could say that the gut reaction is a more authentic expression of beauty/rightness, but contemplation may allow greater insight into the art/dilemma, ultimately changing your intuitions. Since this is based around an appreciation of nuance and complexity, I'd argue that your intuition following contemplation is more valuable than the initial gut reaction, both aesthetically (you'll appreciate the art more) and morally (your decision will better reflect your own values).
It's worth noting that there is (generally) no symmetric grounds on which to judge that the intuition that comes out of contemplation is any better than the intuition that precedes it. For those of my moral intuitions that fell out of contemplation, had I known that this would be the result, I would have deliberately avoided contemplation altogether, since the resulting intuitions are fundamentally opposed to my previous position in an irreconcilable way.
I think there's something to be said for how contemplation refines the intuition in terms of the detail it picks out, but the primary effect in how it alters intuitions is not much different from spontaneously and accidentally gaining a new set of values upon getting smacked in the head with a shovel. If you have reason to believe that the new values thereby produced will not displace your *fundamental* values, but only higher-order ones, then this might be a worthwhile procedure (as judged against those same fundamental values).
I don't think my initial moral intuition is disproven by contemplation of, say, a trolley problem, it's more that I notice more complex nuances that my initial reaction overlooked. This may depend on what your initial values are. I like to think that I want to do what's best for others (obviously constrained by my own selfishness), so if contemplation changes my mind it's not because I've imported a different set of values, it's just because I've realised that my initial intuition was ignorant and naïve. Wilful blindness of the full complexity of the moral landscape seems equivalent to simply saying the first answer that comes into my head in response to a difficult question, and refusing to think about it more, which doesn't seem like a great approach to anything. Just because something feels right at the time doesn't mean it's actually the right answer.
The reason why I brought up the comparison to getting hit in the head with a shovel is that contemplation isn't straightforwardly a clean-and-tidy mental operation, such that any new notion will be robustly checked against the existing crop of understandings. The intuition I presently accept as fundamental came about as the conclusion of an argument that I considered (and still consider) invalid and unsound - I came to accept it as the consequence of what I describe as an electrical short in the brain.
>so if contemplation changes my mind it's not because I've imported a different set of values, it's just because I've realised that my initial intuition was ignorant and naïve
I'm not sure this amounts to anything other than importing a different set of values - although again, supposing that the displaced values are higher-order and not fundamental, then you have your fundamental values still available as grounds on which to judge that the displaced higher-order values were "ignorant and naïve". I admit that this is more of a linguistic nitpick without making finer distinctions between where values end and strategy begins.
However, I submit that there is a reason to think of contemplation as "subtly modifying values" instead of only "figuring out what my values entail" - but the distinction mostly gains relevance at the point where it's the fundamental values that get modified (as happened to me, but may be an unfamiliar experience to you).
To put it slightly differently, if certain values are fundamental, and contemplation is purely untangling what those values entail, then it should be completely impossible for those values to be displaced by contemplation - they were either not fundamental in the first place, or contemplation is doing something other than checking for consistency/entailment against the fundamentals. (As it happens, this latter possibility seems sensible on other grounds - why should I expect a brain to work as a squeaky-clean inference machine, and not make some inadmissible leaps under the right conditions?)
> We disagree on the existence of God, but I agree that without a higher power to appeal to there doesn't seem to be much separating ethics and aesthetics.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that, unless you're suggesting that aesthetics are also objective:
A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals - Bambrough (1969), https://www.dropbox.com/s/p9v7qt23p21gfci/Proof%20of%20the%20Objectivity%20of%20Morals.pdf?dl=0
I should have clarified - I find the arguments in favour of objective morality unconvincing when they come from an atheistic perspective. That's not to say humans can't generally agree on a system of morality, but humans can agree on aesthetics too, that doesn't make it objective.
I guess if you accept that morals are objective you can argue that aesthetics are objective but it seems unlikely that there's a universal concept of beauty.
It probably depends on how exactly you define objectivity, but I'm unconvinced that morality can be defined without some reference to individual subjectivity, even if the existence of God is assumed, since morality deals with interactions between subjective beings with individual desires and needs.
> It probably depends on how exactly you define objectivity, but I'm unconvinced that morality can be defined without some reference to individual subjectivity
What is the nature of this subjectivity? I assume you consider math objective, but I doubt you would require math to be defined without reference to some axioms, so why should objective morality be any different? Are mathematical axioms subjective in your view?
For instance, Kant's categorical imperative seems pretty reasonable as a mind-independent construction of morality with minimal assumptions.
Furthermore, whether people agree with these moral frameworks doesn't seem relevant to whether they qualify as internally consistent constructions of objective morality.
I read through the paper, and I think the main point of conflict is this:
The paper argues that there is objective morality and that we know it the same way we know there is objective reality even though we can’t prove either logically. It specifically says that just as those who are skeptical that anything exists can logically dispute the “common sense” arguments of those who say otherwise, similarity his “proof” cannot convince a moral skeptic. He merely argues (and well) that those who accept the common sense philosophical argument for the objective reality cannot logically dismiss the common sense argument for objective morality.
The problem is that while you can philosophically accept that objective morality exists using this method, there’s no underlying theory to explain why it exists. It’s like scientists in Galileos time who observed the brute facts of moons orbiting Jupiter and the transit of Venus but did not have a compelling model of the solid system to explain those facts (not until Newton anyway). The religious have a model that explains moral facts and is parsimonious: the atheist does not. Perhaps an atheistic model could be found someday, but the paper you proffered does not have it and does not claim to have it.
> It specifically says that just as those who are skeptical that anything exists can logically dispute the “common sense” arguments of those who say otherwise, similarity his “proof” cannot convince a moral skeptic.
I mostly agree with your summary, with the addendum that the Moorean proof also shows that the skeptic's argument is necessarily less plausible than the common sense argument. As the paper says, that the skeptic's points are *literally* false.
> The problem is that while you can philosophically accept that objective morality exists using this method, there’s no underlying theory to explain why it exists.
Should we expect one? If we could explain every observation using science except for some questions about why certain fundamental constants have their values, like the speed of light, is that theory incomplete?
> The religious have a model that explains moral facts and is parsimonious
Assuming a deity is not parsimonious. It basically lifts all moral prescriptions into assumptions, along with a whole boatload of metaphysical assumptions about divine knowledge and authority. It's the complete opposite of parsimony IMO.
> Perhaps an atheistic model could be found someday, but the paper you proffered does not have it and does not claim to have it.
I agree, but it allegedly shows that at least one moral fact exists, and demonstrates that our typical process of reasoned debate can uncover more. I admit that I'm not as well versed in the philosophy of aesthetics, but I'm not sure this is equally of both ethics and aesthetics.
Both ethics and aesthetics as practiced by humans consist of conscious and subconscious judgements, so in this sense they are obviously similar. The important difference is that ethics is concerned with mediating interpersonal relationships to a much greater degree. To be effective at this it has to be largely consistent between participants in these relationships. To facilitate this we're (evolved/designed by some creator - choose appropriate) to have strong intuitions about its judgements having to be both obligatory and universal.
I think you are getting rationalist morality wrong. Moreover, It's deontological or virtue ethics reasoning, dogmatic morality set in stone, probably initially dictated by someones aesthetical ideas, which resembles mathematical axioms. Something is assumed to be moral and then we go with the consequences biting all the bullets in the way.
On the other hand, rationalists ethics is predominantly some sort of consequential utilitarism. We begin from the intuitive feelings of our values and then trying to make them consistent and in this process some of the initial aesthetical sentiments may cease to be so important. Begin with your gut and then use your brain in case your gut may have got it wrong. And yes, you are recommended to use math for your utility calculations, but thats a difference between something used as a handy instrument for a cause and a cause in its structure resembling some instrument.
It's actually interesting that you assumed that rationalist ethics resembles mathematics. It seems to be itself an idea dictated mostly by aesthetics. And it highligths why aesthitical decisions without propper investigation can lead to poor judgement.
". . . biting all the bullets in the way . . ." I love this phrase. I expect it will come to mind multiple times today, and I'm going to enjoy every one of them. Did you just come up with the phrase as you wrote that sentence, or is it an expression people use in some circles?
I believe it's a known idiom.
Rationalist ethics isn't axiom-free , because nothing is.
Technically true. Axioms are used to pin down entities in the concept space. If we take some fixed sort of consequential utilitarism, we can describe it axiomatically like any other entity.
But as far as I'm concerned, Jack Wilson wasn't talking about this, while comparing rationalist ethics to mathematics. Such methaphor would've been useless anyway, as it can fit anything. He was talking about the dynamics of ethical practice.
And I claim, that rationalist ethical practice is less similar to mathematical practice than more traditional deontological ethical practices including simply following your gut, due to the reasons I've mentioned above.
>I believe that when the Buddhists talk about "living according to your nature" [...]and when Emerson says "If I'm a Devil's child, my duty is to the Devil."(or something like that) they are getting at the idea of morality I am trying to get at: Just be your fucking self. That's good enough.
Buddhist ideas about ethics are very different from this Emerson quote (at least if I'm understanding that quote correctly). If Buddhists say "live according to your nature" it should probably be understood as living in accordance with your Buddha-Nature, that is your deepest nature which is formless and which is already enlightened. Such a statement would not be that dissimilar to a Christian asking themselves "What would Jesus do?" (or better: "What would Christ do?")
For everyone not sufficiently enlightened (ie everyone currently living), there are loads of Buddhist lists of moral behaviors (Sila) and virtues (Paramis) that they are encouraged to follow/aspire to.
In general, to me Theravadan buddhism seems to be somewhat distrustful of personalities and focused on uprooting harmful thought and behavior patterns. Vajrayana/Tantric paths embrace the personality, but with lots of disclaimers about the great dangers if you don't do it exactly right. Zen (which I know least about) seems to me to be generally very disinterested in personality, something which is present in all of Buddhism but I think heightened in Zen.
An ethical philosophy *must* have times when it conflicts with your gut instinct, or why do you even have it? "Do whatever feels right to you" is not an ethical philosophy, it's the lack of one.
(And while I'm cynical enough to say that people often use moral philosophy to justify what they wanted to do anyway, I'm not cynical enough to say that's *all* moral philosophy is.)
Also, ethical theories are universalizable, while everyone can only access their own gut instincts. So if your gut disagrees with someone else's gut, you'll have to make an appeal to a universal principles that you both agree on.
To put it another way, if one guy in the trolley problem wants to pull the lever because his moral intuitions say "save five people," and another person wants to not pull the lever because his intuitions say "thou shalt not kill," how do you resolve this without getting into a fistfight over the trolley lever?
In that specific situation, announce that if he wants to stop you from pulling the level, he'll have to kill you, thus resolving the moral dilemma in your favour!
In defence of some form of ethical intuitionism - my own experience is that ethical philosophies are most useful when my gut instinct conflicts with my other gut instincts - intuitions are great but often incoherent - trolley problems pit the urge to not kill against the urge to save life. I tend to reject moral philosophies if they seem to totally violate my instincts ("killing all life on earth is good actually"), I think of the appeal of any philosophy comes from it matching some of our intuitions most of the time. I guess where I disagree with Jack Wilson is that he seems to have a much more confident gut than me - mine's generally undecided and benefits a lot from thoughtful contemplation.
As for those universal principles, if you don't believe in a natural law out there to be discovered or revealed through revelation, it's difficult to say whether they're truly universal or just based on commonly shared human instincts. I don't think this is a bad thing, hedonic utilitarianism only works because we instinctively want to seek pleasure and avoid pain - if that wasn't the case it would be even less popular.
This is a little off topic, but I get annoyed when I point out that most people and animals seem to want to live, then other people argue that's an invalid preference since it's only due to evolutionary pressure in favour of not committing suicide - where do these people think pleasure and pain came from? You only enjoy not-starving because your primordial ancestors that were disinterested in food didn't stick around for long!
"Given there is no God, don't aesthetic sensibilities fully explain moral sensibilities?"
The late Roger Zelazny, in his novel "Lord of Light", has his main character use this as the approach to building a rebellion against the gods:
"The answer, the justification, is the same for men as it is for gods. Good or ill, say the sages, mean nothing for they are of Samsara. Agree with the sages, who have taught our people for as far as the memory of man may reach. Agree, but consider also a thing of which the sages do not speak. This thing is 'beauty,' which is a word, but look behind the word and consider the Way of the Nameless. And what is the way of the Nameless? It is the Way of Dream. And why does the Nameless dream? This thing is not known to any dweller within Samsara. So ask, rather, what does the Nameless dream?
"The Nameless, of which we are all a part, does dream form. And what is the highest attribute any form may possess? It is beauty. The Nameless, then, is an artist. The problem, therefore, is not one of good or evil, but one of esthetics. To struggle against those who are mighty among dreamers and are mighty for ill, or ugliness, is not to struggle for that which the sages have taught us to be meaningless in terms of Samsara or Nirvana, but rather it is to struggle for the symmetrical dreaming of a dream, in terms of the rhythm and the point, the balance and the antithesis which will make it a thing of beauty. Of this, the sages say nothing. This truth is so simple that they have obviously overlooked it. For this reason, I am bound by the esthetics of the situation to call it to your attention. To struggle against the dreamers who dream ugliness, be they men or gods, cannot but be the will of the Nameless. This struggle will also bear suffering, and so one's karmic burden will be lightened thereby, just as it would be by enduring the ugliness; but this suffering is productive of a higher end in the light of the eternal values of which the sages so often speak.
"Therefore, I say unto you, the esthetics of what you have witnessed this evening were of a high order. You may ask me, then, 'How am I to know that which is beautiful and that which is ugly, and be moved to act thereby?' This question, I say, you must answer for yourself. To do this, first forget what I have spoken, for I have said nothing. Dwell now upon the Nameless." He raised his right hand and bowed his head.
..."No," said Sam, "I just wanted to try another line on the audience. It is difficult to stir rebellion among those to whom all things are good. There is no room for evil in their minds, despite the fact that they suffer it constantly. The slave upon the rack who knows that he will be born again, perhaps as a fat merchant, if he suffers willingly, his outlook is not the same as that of a man with but one life to live. He can bear anything, knowing that great as his present pain may be, his future pleasure will rise higher. If such a one does not choose to believe in good or evil, perhaps then beauty and ugliness can be made to serve him as well. Only the names have been changed."
"they are getting at the idea of morality I am trying to get at: Just be your fucking self. That's good enough."
Which works okay if (a) you believe that fundamentally, people are good, just sometimes they get a bit screwed-up and (b) that most people will muddle along in a sorta kinda ethical way and (c) stuff called "sin" or "crime" is just "fun things the wet blankets don't want you to do, like sex and drugs and rock'n'roll!"
I'm currently reading a cheap, pulpy, series of urban fantasy/light horror novels (written by a man, for once) where the main character is a somewhat seedy sorcerer involved in light crime who has now taken up with a demoness as his girlfriend (so far, par for the course for urban fantasy) and in this particular volume of the series, the Bad Guys are trying to get the soul of Gilles de Rais to help their nefarious purposes.
Our guy wants to put a crimp in their plans so he decides to get the soul first. Here's the line I want to quote:
"I shook my head and rolled up the scroll. “I don’t have a lot of work for a child-abusing serial killer. He can stay in there and rot for all I care. I just don’t want anyone else to have him.”
Thing is, our guy acknowledges that he's not really a good guy since there aren't really any Good Guys. There are Bad Guys and Less Bad Guys. My quibble with what he says here is "But this is exactly the kind of company you are keeping now. This is the compeer for you, now that you're working with actual real demons. These are the kinds of people who make bargains and sign contracts with devils, and you yourself are overcoming any moral qualms about stuff you might be doing, or more importantly that your demon girlfriend might be doing, with 'yeah but she's really hot' so pot, kettle".
I notice that a lot in much of this kind of genre: sure, maybe I'm dealing with demons and devils, but they're not so bad once you get to know them; God is absent, if angels are present they're 'dicks with wings' to quote "Supernatural" and yeah Hell exists, but only *really* bad people go there, like child-abusing serial killers. The sins we like and indulge in are not sins. The sins we don't like are sins.
Let everyone be themselves, and then you have to face up to the fact that some people's selves *are* child-abusing serial killers, or people who drift around in a criminal milieu including drug dealers and gang-bangers and convince themselves that everyone is like this, I'm not so bad by comparison, and it's all Society's Fault anyway.
I think that's a good point - "If I'm a Devil's child" I shouldn't give the Devil his due - he's the goddamn Devil, I should tell him to get stuffed and do the right thing instead. (This is the plot of so many other stories that it has it's own page on TV tropes, Good Omens is one of the most amusing takes on it https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiAntiChrist, and although it's always slightly blasphemous as I Christian I appreciate the irony of it)
More seriously, you can't just "be yourself" - you could be a wide variety of different people, you have to seriously think about which of those people you want to become or there's a genuine risk of becoming someone you hate.
I think by "be yourself" most people mean "follow what you think is right, and ignore what other people tell you is right".
Of course, there's a big question mark over how much of people's moral action is ethically derived vs. compelled by consequence (legal and social) vs. mere habit from compelled-by-consequence being usual. "Be yourself" is saying to throw #2 in the garbage and go with #1 - but it kind of ignores #3.
> I think by "be yourself" most people mean "follow what you think is right, and ignore what other people tell you is right".
I understand you may just be summarising the view, but that doesn't seem like a great way to be good at anything (maths, science, basketball, cooking), so it seems odd to suggest that morality is the only aspect of human life that doesn't benefit from criticism. Obviously there are times to ignore others and do what you think is right anyway, in both creative and moral endeavours, but I'd phrase that as "follow what you think is right, after listening carefully and critically to what other people tell you is right". If there's a consequence to doing something (legal or social) that's a good reason not to do it - you need a more compelling reason to do it anyway, not a reckless disregard for the consequences of your actions!
"Be yourself" might be an effort to undercut an anxious belief that one is intrinsically unable to do well enough. This is worth undercutting, but presumably needs a more sophisticated approach.
It's probably a great message for some people and the worst possible thing you can say to other people. In fact, some of the time it's exactly what I need to hear, and some of the time it's really counterproductive on account of my massive ego. So I tend to prefer more nuanced advice.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
I'd say there's a difference between taking note of other people's reasoning vs. taking note of other people's applause and heckles. (Among other differences, the number and identities of those other people are only relevant to the second one.)
As for the bit about consequences - well, that all depends on how you weigh things. Some value their honor above their lives, and more only a little below. And then there are those who think grinding away at a norm through defiance is worth the cost.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too....
I admit I'm kinda curious what this fantasy series is. The only one I've read by a male author recently is Dresden Files.
It's the "Daniel Faust" series by Craig Schaefer, out on Amazon. I get 'em on Kindle but they're also published in paperback by 47North, an Amazon imprint (I didn't know Jeff decided he might as well have his own line of publishing but hey, why not?)
They're cheap and trashy and he has a couple of series running in parallel, but sometimes you just want pulp entertainment. The main draw is that like Harry Dresden, he gets into Very Sticky Situations and you want to see "how is he going to pull his chestnuts out of the fire this time?" That's the main and only resemblance, really; apart from the fact that Jim Butcher is a hundred times more A Big Name Author than this guy will ever be (and nothing wrong with being a small-time writer if you can manage to make a living out of it), Harry Dresden may think he's in the grey morality area but compared with Daniel Faust, he is whiter than white.
It's not bad for what it is, I'm reading a lot of these small-time, almost self-published/published by tiny independent presses/sell most of their work via Kindle horror/dark fantasy authors this weather (maybe it's the pandemic?) and some of them are really terrible. This guy is not bad. He's not Stephen King or Jim Butcher, but he's okay if you want a decent setting (Las Vegas, giving him the opportunity to talk about crime - when the Mob were run out, the corporations took over the gambling and casinos, it seems, and they're a lot more ruthless when it comes to profit-making), a coherent magic system (in that it's the usual grab-bag of traditions and the modern take on 'it's mostly symbolic so whatever you got to hand will do' apparatus and ingredients) and a protagonist who, if he's not very careful, is going to end up in deep doo-doo if he doesn't have one foot already there (he has a Tragic Backstory, of course, but we get hints rather than fully going into it, at least as far as I've read).
It's somewhat different in that the protagonist is also a petty criminal (or maybe not so petty) who was involved with the local crime boss until they had a falling-out, and it's strongly hinted he was along for some Bad Things happening in that line of work. He's still involved in crime, and has no qualms shooting people in the face (so long as he's got a good reason to do so). So there very definitely is a marker set out from the start that "I'm not one of the Good Guys, but I'm a Less Bad Guy". I'll be interested to see if the whole "hanging round with demons and committing crimes and sorcery means I'm going to Hell" situation is developed and what that may mean. So far, he's kind of dodged that by not thinking at all about what happens after he dies. We see *other* people definitely going to Hell but they're pegged as the Really Bad Guys, so we'll see.
The grab-bag traditions again are the usual modern take: Hindu demons? Sure! Haitian magic, hippy-dippy stuff, ceremonial magic (he gives a shout-out to Aleister Crowley), any tradition you like? All work. Except, you know, Christianity *of course*. I haven't seen anything from the other two Abrahamic traditions but I'd be willing to bet if he ever gets into Muslim or Jewish occult traditions, they're gonna be bang-up effective and golems, djinns and what you will are all real.
God is absent or dead, Lucifer/Satan also seems to have left the scene for unknown reasons (but they know Lucifer was around, since the Civil War in Hell only started after he left). No angels, any mention of them is very disapproving (they're not going to save humans, they will destroy humans for being sinful, so it's a good job they're not on the scene). The last book I read, the demoness girlfriend gave the protagonist a sort of pep talk which, again, is the usual modern take on such: there is no God/good power waiting in the wings to save you, sure demons are real and take advantage but they don't make humans do bad things, humans have free will and are totally responsible for their own actions good or bad, they are the highest power and are the ones in control in their own world.
Have you seen any excellent self-published work?
_The Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking_ was self-published after being turned down by publishers for a decade. It's a dark YA novel which somehow was difficult for publishers to accept.
I can't see how it's even nearly as dark as _The Hunger Games_, but publishers are a mystery.
Only somewhat related, but if you're looking for an urban fantasy story where demons are treated as a serious moral black hole, Wildbow's Pact might interest you. There are lots of horrible things in the setting, and working with them will make you enemies, but even someone who calls up Abyssal monsters to torture his enemies will be worth allying with against someone who works with demons. They felt a bit like a nuclear weapon metaphor, for someone harangued on all sides they must be extremely tempting, nearly limitless power at your fingertips, but using them takes something from the world that you can't ever get back, and will make you an enemy of the world.
That doesn't seem like much of a metaphor for nuclear weapons; fallout is by its very nature not permanent and is at least somewhat capable of being cleaned up, and international norms seem to be "nukes are okay in a total war".
The same person born in 10 different times and places throughout history would have 10 different sets of aesthetics regarding morality. This is b cause these aesthetics are largely learned from your culture during childhood.
What determines which aesthetics your culture teaches you? That depends on a lot of factors, bit one of the big factors in most societies is a group of elites who think very carefully about morality, try to come to the best possible conclusions about it given their understanding of the world, and then reproduce their conclusions as a series of aesthetics to feed back to the general population.
The people who are trying to think rationally about morality are attempting to be precisely this type of influential elite. Yes, it will likely never happen that every person in the country does full utilitarian math before coming to a moral conclusion. However, it's very possible that rationalists produce a series of moral aesthetics which, when followed, correlate much more highly with the results of doing those calculations, than the results of other moral aesthetics would. And it's very possible that they reproduce some of those aesthetics in other members of the general population, through various channels of influence (eg, Ezra Klein pushing effective altruism to his genpop audience).
There's a lot to critique about this idea, and I think other people in this thread have done a good job with it, but what I do like about it is that it acknowledges that the trickiest part of ethics isn't in knowing the right thing to do but in actually doing it. There's no point in spending a lot of time thinking carefully about ethics if you're then going to wander off and behave like a jerk anyway.
There are some people who do awful things because they genuinely believe them to be good, but the more common or garden variety of awful-thing-doer knows perfectly well that they shouldn't be doing what they're doing and they do it anyway. Figuring out how to get people not to do blatantly unethical things (even when they really feel like it!) would have a much greater impact on society than sitting around trying to smooth out the rough edges of abstract ethical systems.
Should you send a trolley to run over three fat men or one million lizards? Doesn't matter, that's never going to happen. Stop littering and don't cheat on your wife.
I base my ethics on my aesthetics and am happy with it. I would not conflate "gut feeling" and "aesthetic judgment" - sometimes my aesthetic judgment may be the result of a lengthy rational process (slow thinking vs fast thinking). I'm also OK with my ethics being not objective/universal, just like my aesthetics.
Could go even farther - consider this thought experiment. Suppose I am a scientific rationalist convinced that religion is all bogus illusion, but I have that "religion shaped hole", would like the comforts that religion provides, and know that being religious is beneficial. I want to take up a religion despite knowing it's bogus, but which one to choose? Why not go with aesthetic judgment.
Which reminds me of the story about the Tsar of Russia choosing Christianity instead of Islam because the Russians could never give up booze.
I will object to your rational/gut felling dichotomy.
"That may mean you've read extensively on the subject, sweated over it, debated it, lost sleep over it, and then came to a gut conclusion."
For me this is rational. Training your intuition to reach better solutions is rational. Reason is not something that only happens consciously. Have you ever slept over a problem and then used intuition to get to the right solution that could be independently verified? How is that not reason?
Furthermore, if you believe in the predictive processing model of the brain, that the brain is constantly doing bayesian updating, you will basically have to admit that rationality happens unconsciously.
But even if you don't, a significant part of doing mathematics is using your gut feeling on how to solve a problem. Mathematics is pure reason. Whatever your definition is reason is, it has to include mathematics, and therefore at least some things that happen unconsciously.
I am looking for co-author for a paper in the field of Deep Learning Computer Vision.
I have three ideas for papers that seem decent, and I would rather not do it alone:
1. A new (hopefully) way to process video using CNN's.
2. CNN-based keyframe extraction in videos.
3. A way to interpret penultimate layer features of a CNN.
I am looking for a person with experience in DL, CV, pytorch, who writes decent python code and has enough free time.
My background: Masters of CS, ML engineer, 3 papers published (no top journals/conferences yet though), based in Russia.
Check out my LinkedIn for more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/btseytlin/
Shoot me an email! b.tseytlin@lambda-it.ru
TL/DR: Heritability of any disease with heterogenous etiologies is always very heritable to not
Did you know scientists in the 90s were utterly perplexed by the high rate of completed suicide by men in the 90s? It led to a bunch of terrible terrible hyotheses like this one- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugrian_suicide_hypothesis
But! Like it is ridiculously high and I was trying to finish my Dad's side of the family tree which is mostly Finnish and I kept on running into suicide after suicide after suicide- like this is my great uncle! https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/58897638/waine-walpo-herronen "Mr. Herronen was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room Sunday night. Death was attributed to a self-inflicted gunshot wound."
Which - side note- great debate on whether the high rate of suicide in Las Vegas is because suicidal people go to Las Vegas or whether Las Vegas makes people suicidal- and given my great uncle emigrated from Finland to shoot himself in Vegas- data for the former.
Anyway, there's actually some v weird Finnish ER protein variants that cause weird diabetes and hearing loss and! major depression. And it made me realize that every time we give a rough summary of heritability of any syndrome or illness- we're lying because it very much depends on the etiology. It's like breast cancer. The BRCA variants account for like a very small percentage of overall breast cancers and yet white girls in my age group outside of science frequently refer to it as a definitive overall risk factor.
Anyway, we should test for the obvious genetic causes of mental illness even in mental illnesses that are traditionally thought of as not heritable.
Also the transcriptome only predicts 60 to 70% of ribosomal occupancy and no one really knows how earth's magnetic field works. And I don't really understand why anyone touts the current era of being one of inescapable science and technology where surely we will crack the code on aging when we're still living in that degree of dark-ages ignorance.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. If a disease has heritable and non-heritable etiologies that we can't distinguish, its apparent heritability will be somewhere in the middle, depending on how common each is.
Oh I definitely forgot important words- Finnish men not just men in general
Heritability isn't independent of environment. Somebody might inherit a metabolic quirk that makes them very likely to develop Disease X if there's a certain chemical in their environment. If they live in an environment that is free of the chemical their risk of the disease is the same as everyone else's. If that chemical is present virtually everywhere, we would think of the person as having a high inherited risk of developing X. If the chemical is only present in 3 small areas scattered over the planet, we would not.
As I understand it, suicide in one's family makes suicide more likely. I don't know whether it's been checked whether it's genetic or social influence.
It could even be that there's both a chemical and metabolic control of some pathway, and if that pathway is too extreme in one direction or the other, it results in depression and suicide. In locations where the chemical is high, genes for a higher metabolic control will be genes for suicide, while in locations where the chemical is low, genes for a higher metabolic control will be genes *against* suicide.
Yup indeed.
How concerned are Americans about the Delta variant and other yet-to-be discovered variants? There seems to be an idea that COVID is mostly over in the US, but the Delta variant has some vaccine evasion and seems a lot more contagious. What are the odds that the US sees another wave of COVID (35,000+ cases per day as a weekly average, to pick an arbitrary number that may be too high or too low to be useful) before the end of January 2022?
It would help if we could put some reliable numbers on "some" and "a lot more".
The British Medical Journal, https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1513 , says Pfizer is 88% effective vs Delta (compared to 95% vs baseline Covid), which isn't terribly worrisome.
Multiple sources give ~60% greater infection rate, but those all seem to trace to a single case-control study, https://khub.net/documents/135939561/405676950/Increased+Household+Transmission+of+COVID-19+Cases+-+national+case+study.pdf/7f7764fb-ecb0-da31-77b3-b1a8ef7be9aa , and case-control studies are not terribly reliable. I haven't seen a proper cohort study of Delta variant, though my search has been far from exhaustive.
We'd also need the infection fatality ratio, which several sources give as "low" but without numbers. Since the expected end state of COVID-19 is to evolve into one more of the 200+ variants of the common cold, making lots of people a little bit sick while killing almost none, it would seem important to know if Delta is a step on that path.
We've seen evidence of seasonality to covid, so even without a significant new variant, I've thought there's a moderate chance of some new bump by the end of January, particularly if vaccination rates slow down again.
One potential confounder is if testing rates continue to fall. They don't need to fall that much more for us to miss a bump that "would have" returned us to 35,000 daily cases as a weekly average, particularly if the dropoff in testing is most severe in localities with low vaccination rates. That said, if the actual number of infections went up to a level that "would have" corresponded to 50,000 or 75,000 daily cases, then I think there would be enough news coverage to increase testing rates to the level that we would detect it. (I'm using "would have" here to account for whatever fraction of actual infections get detected by tests and become cases, and I still don't know how to think about that.)
We have the manufacturing power to meet it with an adapted vaccine if escape becomes a problem.
We no longer have the social trust to convince more than ~80% of the United States population to take any vaccine, and probably no more than ~70% for any new vaccine. If we get a variant where 70-80% vaccination + immunity from prior infection is not enough to prevent a renewed pandemic, we're getting a renewed pandemic no matter how good our vaccines are or how quickly we can manufacture them.
Western Europe can probably do somewhat better than this, but not 100%.
Not that I want to find out, but if it's a very deadly plague and a very good vaccine, vaccination rates might be higher.
My friend and I just recorded an album of songs we wrote during the late half of COVID I thought I’d share. You all entertain me every week on this site so if you like it I’d be happy to send you a free download code, just reach out to us on the “Contact Cold Beverage Link” and mention Astral Codex Ten
Cold Beverage - Hot Wax
Garage Rock, Blues, Punk
https://coldbeverage.bandcamp.com/album/hot-wax
Oh yeah, gimme some of that Mississippi Queen. You know what I mean. :)
There is a lot of talk about possible booster shots of COVID vaccine being made available some time this year. It all seems to skip over recipients of the J&J vaccine though.
Should the people who received the J&J consider getting the Pfizer or Moderna also?
Would it be safe?
Would it be useful?
Would it be ethical?
There's apparently a long history of mix-and-match vaccine usage for many diseases, and it sounds like UK and Canada are doing mix-and-match with AstraZeneca and some of the mRNA vaccines, so almost certainly someone who had J&J and then got Pfizer or Moderna would be safe, and would get some increased immunity.
If there are a noticeable number of vaccine doses going to waste, then it's probably not unethical for an individual to choose to use one of those. But if the number of excess doses available is being used to determine how many doses to ship off to other locations that will use them, it might be, since the further protection of an extra dose is unlikely to be as significant as the first dose to someone in a location where the disease is still spreading in an uncontrolled fashion.
I happened to draw the J&J in the vaccine scrum earlier this year. I don’t want bypass the queue but with the US seeming to approach some sort of asymptotic limit on vaccination rate I am tempted to step up and say I don’t need a free beer or a lottery entry for a million dollars. I’m ready now.
But I do take your point about the need to make a decision about exporting our surplus vaccine.
I’m in robust health though, so being patient seems like the best play here.
I got Pfizer as my first dose, actually asked for AstraZeneca as second a couple of weeks ago, in the hope of increasing immunity. (I'm in Canada, btw.) Public health wouldn't let me; there's decent data on mRNA followed by AstraZeneca, but the studies in the UK going the other direction, while generally positive, aren't complete yet.
Hopefully if it's significantly better, I can get an AstraZeneca shot as a booster in a few months.
I have the impression that aging is driven by genetic damage. My understanding is that when cells replicate, there’s a chance of transcription error. These errors accumulate over time and eventually our cells stop replicating.
If this is correct, wouldn’t one possible approach to aging be to sequence our DNA when we are young, then record it in some database, and then eventually use some yet-to-be invented nanotechnology to repair DNA damage?
Is there some aspect to this that I am missing?
I mean...not wrong but somewhat incomplete. There seem to be a lot of different events associated with aging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Definition_and_characteristics) and I suspect only some are downstream of DNA damage.
Separately of the two steps a) sequence healthy DNA and b) alter millions of base pairs in the DNA in 30 trillion cells in the human body, the difficulty of b >>>> a
What Vermillion said, read about the Hayflick limit and Telomeres. My simplistic picture; there's a biological trade off between dying of cancer or of old age... running out the clock on cell division.
Partially correct - see telomerase expression.
Why would there be a tradeoff? Naked-mole rats are ridiculously long lived for a mammal of their size *and* all but immune to cancer. Some things, like powerful DNA repair mechanisms or the immune system being good at cleaning up damaged cells, seem to be independently important for preventing both aging and cancer.
It's a very controversial topic - to what extent aging is driven by genetic damage. Certain markers of aging can be upstream or downstream of it, the entire field hasn't really established much in the way of causal chains.
Your embryonal genome should be trivial to reconstruct by sampling your somatic cells - whatever mutations happened, affected only some of the cells. You could probably do it with current technology, for a few $k per person.
The yet-to-be invented nanotechnology might be the hard part. Consider delivering massive amounts of targeted replacements to each cell without introducing further errors, the genome spontaneously changing all over the place due to transposons, heterochromatin being basically inaccessible to outside intervention without unwinding it, the necessity to restore not only the genetic but also the epigenetic information (methylation patterns)....
It would be very difficult to do, and with trillions of cells to correct it's almost inevitable that the repair attempt would introduce new errors. As the number of corrections increases, the probability of giving yourself cancer approaches 1, so it's probably neither useful nor safe.
However, you're thinking along the right lines - if you stored or reconstructed your original, unmutated genome, you could use it to clone fresh stem cells and reintroduce them into your body to replace your old, worn out cells. These cells would also lack the many other hallmarks of aging like shortened telomeres, I'd recommend this paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/) if you're interested in learning more, Figure 1 summarises the hallmarks of aging recognised as of 2013.
Hmm, Aging = Cancer is backwards in my view. It's true that about equal numbers die from cancer and aging... But that's a data point for the 'You die by aging *or* cancer' , hypothesis, evolution picks the mid point.
Are you commenting on my post or on the linked paper? Just curious because it could be either, the paper conceptualises both aging and cancer as products of cellular damage and I think makes a pretty convincing argument that the same processes the produce cancer can also contribute to aging. There's definitely some role of senescence in preventing cancer, but I wouldn't describe aging and cancer as a dichotomy - aging increases vulnerability to cancer as the normal mechanisms that prevent cancer break down. Why choose one when both is an option?
On the article. So this is a good description of my model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Role_in_the_cell_cycle
Telomeres set the max number of cell divisions, to stop cells that turn cancerous. But reaching the end of the telomere leads to cell senescence. So then aging is our programmed response to help not get cancer.
Or you can just store your stem cells directly and forgo the cloning step
As other people have said, aging is complex. One good example is nucleosome positioning: in old age, the chromatin structure itself becomes looser, interfering with epigenetic regulation across the board. Here's a 2018 review article going over this sort of epigenetic issue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5924543/
Just focusing on DNA itself, remember that it has several levels of structure. Primary structure is the sequence of nucleic acids, which is what you're proposing replacing from a database. But DNA is wrapped around nucleosomes. The chemical modifications applied to nucleosomes are linked to gene expression, diverse across cells, and are hard to make sense of (look up the histone "code").
You wouldn't necessarily need to replace the complete genome of each cell. I can imagine a strategy that involved determining the embryonic DNA of an organism, then somehow activating or supplementing the normal DNA repair mechanisms present in each cell to fix whatever mutations are present.
This would pose challenges for the immune system, since antibody-producing cells specialize by modifying their own DNA to produce specific antibodies against specific antigens. But I suspect this would be the least of your challenges.
An alternative would be to come up with a range of strategies for regrowing new tissue and removing damaged tissue. For example, you could create a robust supply of stem cells, figure out how to differentiate them into useful tissue, remove the original tissue, and implant the new. Imagine getting a heart replacement every 50 years, for example, or going in for regular senescent cell-removal therapies.
There is work going on in these areas. The most active, to my knowledge, is regenerative medicine and the creation of new healthy tissue for implantation. This is taking place on scales from a few cells (i.e. to regrow damaged axons for spinal cord repair) to larger tissues (we can create bladders and corneas now - things that are sheets, tubes, or bags). Necessarily, this entails a "refreshment" of the DNA, but it also comes with a "refreshment" of the cell itself. It may be easier to do that than to precisely target a DNA repair or replacement while keeping the original cell intact.
The idea that aging is purely about genetic damage is frankly pretty outdated. The DNA in your cells is damaged a trillion times per day and almost all of it is repaired. So the aging, or really one aspect of it, is breakdown of that repair mechanism, not accumulation of damage per se. Another example is that you can take a cell from an adult or even old organism and make a clone and the clone will be young, so the age isn't "preserved" in the DNA. And why that repair mechanism break downs is a whole long different story. One good explanation of the modern understanding is here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcifQCKkRc9XTjxC2/anti-aging-state-of-the-art#Part_III__What_is_aging_
Interesting article, thanks!
Does anyone have good recommendations for parenting books? Preferably early years but anything up to teenage years might be useful. I've found a few that look interesting but there are loads on the market, and I'd be interested in recommendations from rationalists/rationalist-adjacents/nerds.
Not a parenting book but The Nurture Assumption
Ozy reviewed a large number of parenting books on thing of things awhile back. Just skim/search the archive for the monthly book posts, here's an example that I think is one of the last ones to focus on parenting, so probably start there and work backwards: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/book-post-for-april-parenting/
I really like The Whole Brain Child and its companion book, No Drama Discipline, authors are Siegel and Bryson (careful, there are other books with similar titles). The strategies they suggest are very helpful for raising a child who is reasonable, responsible, and cooperative without being inflexible, a blind follower or unthinking, as well as happy, and they explain why and how the strategies we use make a difference.
Oh, and about the teen years, Hold on to Your Kids by Neufeld and Mate is great.
BTW, good connection and positive discipline in childhood greatly reduce friction and conflict in adolescence. If there is more than one parent/adult involved in raising the child, early and ongoing close connection w/all, not just one, also makes the teen years much easier.
+1 for The Whole Brain Child. Strategies covered have been immeasurably helpful for me.
Selfish Reasons to have More Kids by Caplain. Very data driven, with a reasonable analytical overlay. He thought he was arguing for having more kids, I read it as having more reasons to do what's right for us instead of stuff normies do.
Are "we" not normies here? I'm a normie. Can't I be both rationalist and normie, or do I have to choose one or the other? If so I choose normie.
I love his emphasis on how useless the intensive parenting is, and how it can be harmful to kids, families and parents. I often explain to my students when we discuss factors influencing family size that having just one or two kids puts a TON more pressure on kids, and therefore parents. There's no more room to have one kid who lives in your basement forever, or doesn't want kids, or goes to jail or is otherwise not as we would like. So those situations go from sad and difficult to seemingly intolerable in small families. The fact that children are now a choice and no longer the automatic outcome of having sex or not wanting to starve on your farm or in your old age increases that pressure.
HOWEVER, there is one area where actually paying attention to your kids does make a pretty big difference, and that is the emotional stuff. Kids need to know their parents CARE, and the way we show that is by investing a reasonable amount of our time and attention in them. (Just not in screaming at them to practice the fucking violin!) That's what puts the 'benign' in benign neglect, and creates a lot more resilience when our kids hit the rough patches in life.
I truly truly hate the current cultural norm that life is some huge competition and if you're not 'winning' it, you are going to have a crap miserable life, and should be ashamed of that. And you can't even 'win' just by making a decent living; you have to make obscene amounts of money at something you have a passion for, and also be some type of renaissance person, physically very fit, and famous to boot. I realize that (in the US more than here in Canada, so far) there are a lot of cracks to fall through in life, but so wish it could again be fine to be 'average', with an average job, average house, average kids ....
I'll get off my soap box now ...
BTW, there's now decent research showing that one of the biggest predictors of high levels of ability to delay gratification is stability and security experienced by the child early in life, including the kids' perceptions of how stable/secure the parents feel (meaning there can be intergenerational impacts of poverty, risks of falling into poverty, violence, etc.
Because, ya know, if everything can and probably will go to shit at any moment, eating the single marshmallow NOW is the rational response.
Good rant.
Seconded.
I agree with that - it was always a great relief to know that my parents supported me, but mostly just let me just do the things I enjoyed and was good at. They had 3 spares so I guess if I screw up it's not too big a loss.
You should read "Little Platoons: A Defense of the Family in a Competitive Age". It is about this topic of over competitive intensive off, and I really enjoyed it.
Emily Oster's books seem pretty data-driven. Allison Gopnik's "The Gardener and the Carpenter" was pretty interesting. I found some useful strategies in "How to Talk so Little Kids will Listen." The information in "Raising Good Humans" was helpful in examining why I relate to my children the way I do. "Hunt Gather Parent" had information/recommendations that matched some of my priors so I was inclined to like it, but I'm not sure how scientific it really is (I'm not saying it's unscientific--I just don't know). I think 95% of raising kids boils down to the following: Provide food, shelter, clothing, and love. Try to give them some autonomy and don't hit them (or otherwise abuse them). After that, I think any improvement from parenting is incremental, and everything else is up to luck or genes. (This is my experience with a one-year-old and a soon-to-be-four-year-old. My perspective could change with experience).
123 Magic: Effective Discipline for Children 2-12 is a good read.
Titles recommended to me and on my reading list:
The optimistic child;
Parenting from the Inside Out;
How to talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk.
Parenting books seem to be a lot like business books, largely consisting of a single moderately useful idea padded out with a lot of anecdotes and wild assertions to fill whatever the minimum word count the publisher will accept.
As far as I can figure out after watching a summary video, the core idea of "1 2 3 Magic" is that you respond to insolent kids with "That's one", "That's two", and "That's three, go to your room". Decent time-honoured tactic, but doesn't seem worth an entire book; on the other hand, looking at 123magic.com it seems that it's not just a whole book but an entire industry.
And even with that one good idea. counting to 5, rather slowly, works better. Kids need time to process and simmer down a bit.
The hilarious part is, this still works on my 20 and 21 yr olds! I don't need it often, and use it less often still because I don't want the magic to break.
I didn't really look into the whole industry. I read the book and it doesn't work on all kids but many, the premise is solid and I enjoyed the writing.
I do NOT like the Dr. Sears Baby Book quite as much.
My mom also recommended Dr. Spock's common sense book of baby and childcare, and I got a 1950 edition and it's an interesting read at the least.
Most parenting books I've read seem to be some combination of iffy generalisation, proof-by-anecdote, and citations to badly performed studies from the Journal Of Stuff That Probably Won't Replicate.
The only one I've read that was actually useful was the classic "What To Expect The First Year", which avoids all these pitfalls and provides pretty useful and concrete information about what babies do, which will all be obvious in retrospect but which is all new when you are first starting out.
Perhaps babies are just a more limited class of problem than older kids. What works on one eight-year-old won't work on another eight-year-old so books on eight year olds are useless, but babies are all pretty much the same, or at least vary in just a few simple ways.
I think a lot of these things are hard to study due to the heterogeneity of kids, or at least multi-modal distributions of disposition. I have two kids, and the same approaches don't work on both because their temperaments are different, so you should read different approaches and try them. Or read the summary and try them without buying the whole book. I think to make rigorous generalizations, the insights are going to be not-very-useful, and it's quite likely that the well-supported science you read won't apply to your specific case.
Denizens of ACX, I am going to be returning to the USS Iowa in July, and am hosting a meetup on the 10th. If any of you want to come see a battleship and live in the LA area, then I'd love to see you there.
More details at https://www.navalgazing.net/Naval-Gazing-Meetup-2021-Los-Angeles.
Alas, that's only one week after I'll be in Los Angeles. Maybe next time!
I just got back from driving to the most recent meetup. I'm not doing that driving again any time soon!
Tried posting this in the subscriber only thread and got no joy, so trying again here:
I'm designing an English lit. (loosely defined!) course for second-year Cégep students (roughly 1st year Uni) that will be centred on EA and related issues. Students will be reading Will MacAskill's Doing Good Better and a bunch of fiction related to Global Health, Animal Welfare, and X-risk/Longtermism . . . Any recommendations for the fiction? For reference, some texts I'm looking at: "Pig," by Roald Dahl, "Blood Music," by Greg Bear, and "The Volunteer," by Lucinda Nelson Dhavan.
Short stories are especially welcome, but I'm happy to excerpt from longer works and/or show films/video, etc. Thanks in advance from a first time poster.
The Giving Plague by Brin.
http://www.davidbrin.com/fiction/givingplague.html
Oh, wow! This is perfect! Thank you so much, Nancy. I think I'll use this to wrap up the course. I don't suppose you have any other recs for GH or AW in particular? X-Risk lends itself really well to (science) fiction, so I'm having an easier time there.
I can't think of anything. There are some stories about what if people were better-- _The Stone That Never Came Down_ and _The Infinitive of Go_ by Brunner, and "The Skills of Xanadu" by Sturgeon.
Brunner's _The Squares of the City_ about city planning might be relevant, but I don't remember it well enough.
It might be good to ask at Charlie Stross' blog. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
Excellent, will do! Thanks again.
Off-topic comments are welcome after the 300th comment on a post-- the current post is over 1000 comments, so that's fine. If there's a new post, you might need to wait a little to ask for recommendations.
I remember reading that years ago. After reading Greg Cochran mock all those people who assumed COVID couldn't evolve to be more dangerous, the character of Les comes across very differently.
Could you expand on that?
Les assumes that pathogens evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. To that, Greg always brings up how long smallpox remained horribly lethal.
The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters.
You already mentioned Blood Music so just want to add that if you're looking for an adaptation of both of these there were excerpted and adapted for audio on the radio program Studio 360 (Blood music, haven't found last policeman but I def remember hearing it back in the day: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/blood-music)
Wonderful--what an intriguing premise. I guess we are all living with the spectre of the individual asteroid/swordofdamocles/whatever (i.e. death), but there is something important about the idea that future generations will exist.
Yeah I found it a really interesting spin on the 'traditional' type of giant asteroid scenario. Not following the astronauts or whatever but imagining what it's like for everyone left on earth trying to process a new reality.
Found that clip I was thinking about, it's an interview that starts with the author reading a section about when it's announced that the asteroid strike is now certain https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/trilogy-about-end-world
Great--a short clip might actually work better than a novel, for my purposes. I'll have a listen. For what it's worth, Greg Egan's *Perihelion Summer* is another excellent (and unusual) take on the world-ending natural disaster subgenre.
I've heard a lot of people mention that bitcoin can't handle very many transactions (this link: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-blockchain-scalability-problem-the-race-for-visa-like-transaction-speed-5cce48f9d44 says about 4-5/second).
People made fun of Elon Musk for saying they should increase the block and speed it up and cut transaction costs (was that doge?).
Are there actual numbers on this? Are there coins/protocols that don't have this issue? Is this just part of the nature of any "proof of work" system?
and that is just the throughput.
Vitalik Buterin (of Ethereum) wrote a technical response to that Musk tweet: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/05/23/scaling.html
Bitcoin's issues stem from multiple sources, some social and some technical.
On the social side, the idea of increasing the block size is somewhat controversial, and the system for introducing new changes is designed to only allow uncontroversial changes. They could create a governance process to make unified decisions in these cases, but Bitcoin users don't want to be governed, and so no process has been created.
On a technical level, the fundamental problem is that all nodes must process all transactions. For that reason, there has to be some kind of upper limit on transaction sizes, or else some nodes will fall behind and never catch up. Even before you hit that limit, you run into some undesirable effects. For example, if you increase the block size, you increase the orphan rate, (the number of blocks which never get built upon) which increases the incentive for miners to engage in SPV mining. That causes events like the Fork of July: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/July_2015_chain_forks
New mega thread on Heraclitus and pre Socratic https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1405555292587401222
Good stuff! In the spirit of Heraclitus, I chose to read your tweets individually (one or two at a time over the course of a day) in random order.
Is the cancelling of Bret Weinstein on youtube a political discussion? It seems the same as Dr. Suess and publishing. So I'll say yes and save this space for next week.
I recently read a news article about someone investing $20 in an unknown crypto currency on Coinbase, and become a trillionaire...well he's probably not going to get that amount of money from Coinbase, but essentially the currency just exploded overnight.
If I have $100 to spare, would it be rational for me to log into Coinbase and invest $20 each into five crypto currencies with very low prices? Or is it irrational on a level comparable to buying a lottery ticket after seeing someone win the lottery on TV?
Cryptos on Coinbase tend to be currencies that are already established, so making 100x or 1000x gains (like what happened with DOGE and SHIB) may be unlikely there. Right now is also not an excellent time to invest because prices are decreasing - you will want to wait for the bottom. Finally, don't look just for low prices, but for low market caps.
Do some research, follow the price levels, and make a decision from there. Disclaimer: this is not financial advice.
It's only rational if you treat it like buying a Blu-Ray or something -- you're buying for the entertainment, not the re-sale value. Obviously there is no rational reason for garbage cryptos to increase and you will probably lose money. They might increase though, so sometimes it's fun to think about and that's worth paying for! You could also just go to a casino and put it on red five times in a row.
Also, I only vaguely follow cryptos, but I am curious if there are cryptos that increased at that level of magnitude. If you bought $20 of dogecoin at its exact low of the past year and sold at its exact high of the past year, you still only went up 289x and turned that $20 into $5800. That's a major gain, but it's not a trillion dollars, and at this point you're much more likely to just lose $15 of the $20. Similar rate of return for AMC, although GME went up about 700x if you sold it exactly at all-time high.
And remember that no one actually realized this level of gains -- most normal people probably bought late and held way too long and maybe just 1.5x'd their money or actually lost it, and potentially even if they made anything they'll lose it all in fees at H&R Block after the IRS sends them a letter saying "we see you made money on Coinbase why didn't you mention that to us?" (I don't think the IRS has done a good job keeping track of crypto even via Coinbase in the past but no idea if that will eventually change.)
I just came across this video. Does this count as successfully passing the Turing test? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coNjpBa5m1E
This has literally nothing to do with anything but I wrote a song and maybe you would like to listen to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH7si4ZNvRU
People say that I am missed, but I can't imagine why, and even if I am, it's not for things like this. I've been writing things instead of despairposting. Instead of despairposting as much, anyway. I haven't changed my beliefs since they are based on observations, I just try and think about them less.
How do you find good modern fiction? (I define modern as first published in past two decades.) I was kind of baffled by the fact that I can't do this. Non-fiction is no problem, great fiction of past century is no problem either, but as for modern day fiction, um... I just randomly look it up online or in bookstores and it's bad, which is an obvious consequence since my strategy is bad.
So, how do you do it?
Decide on a genre, look it up on a site that provides lots of user ratings (like goodreads), filter by publication date and sort by ratings, then skim synopses until something sounds appealing. (My claim is not that all well-rated anythings are good, but rather that they're a great starting point for a search.)
I personally also prefer standalone books over series, and finished series over ongoing ones. The latter ones can deteriorate in quality or end unfinished for various reasons.
---
To give two concrete but imperfect examples:
Here are Goodreads lists by decade (though they're unfortunately sorted by popularity, not ratings): https://www.goodreads.com/list/tag/by-decade with categories like "Best Books of the Decade: 2010s", "Best Fantasy of the 2010s", "Science Fiction - 2010-2019", "Best Mysteries from the 2010s".
And here are Goodreads lists by ratings (but without filtering for fiction or publication date): https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/24716.Highest_Rated_Books_on_Goodreads_with_at_least_100_ratings_ and https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/10198.Books_With_a_Goodreads_Average_Rating_of_4_5_or_higher_and_With_At_Least_100_Ratings
Thank you, I'll try it.
I've sort of given up on modern literary fiction, I think the last novel in that genre I read was back in the 90s. I'm too old to get the concerns of the Bright Young Things who come out with their dazzling first novels, and as for the rest of it, I never did cotton to the Hampstead Adultery Novel (either male academic goes through mid-life crisis and has affair with much younger woman, or wife of above finds out about same and leaves him for her own mid-life crisis).
Goodreads is a fun rabbithole to go down, just keep clicking on what makes you curious til you get somewhere. For literary fiction, I also try to pay attention to the big book awards (Man Booker Prize, National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner) and read at least one or two that stand out to me from each list each year (you can go back through past years with these too), just to mix things up and get a sense for what people think is good at any given year. There are genre-specific award series too if you like sci-fi, dystopian, graphic novel, magical realism, etc. as well.
Thanks, I didn't consider looking into book awards.
One answer is that if you find an author you like, read the rest of their work. Sounds obvious, but I know I didn't really start following through with this until recently.
Otherwise, lots of my reading is from soliciting recommendations from people I trust. My in-person circle for this is my parents and two or three friends. But also, this forum has been pretty good as well for that! So maybe say what you're in to, and what you're hoping to get from reading, and let the hive-mind do the rest.
Unfortunately, my in-person circle mostly consists of people who don't read much and/or consider books inferior to other media. So that's not an option.
I seem to find enough sf to suit me, but I don't know quite what you're looking for? Genre? Literary? How recent? What are some examples of fiction you think is good?
Seriously, one strategy is to be specific enough so that you can get recommendations here.
perhaps we need an SSC new fiction recs google doc
It doesn't exist. The last good writer was Gene Wolfe, who died in 2019, and he was the last holdout of a long-diminishing breed. (The reason is that anyone who has the vigor and makes movies or TV now, those being where the audience are. Written fiction has turned into a museum for dyspeptics, alas.) Fortunately, there are 4-5 lifetimes' worth of good books from the past, so the problem is only chimerical. You don't *need* fiction to be recent.
I've been thinking a lot about have developing stronger trust networks can save me a lot of time and resources. (I detail my best current model for how to do that here: https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/scaling-networks-of-trust)
What am I missing?
I think you're hinting at something: If you want a strong network of trust, you should live in a red tribe/"conservative" way: live in the countryside, join a church etc.
I also think you're missing the failure mode of trust networks. Some people try to exploit them ("psychopaths"). You get "broken stairs" people that are hard to get rid of etc.
I would think psychopaths are mostly a problem in networks with closed boundaries - say a hippie commune? Not so much in a boundryless network - in a group of people with vaguely overlapping connections.
Also, I think it is perfectly possible to build strong networks of trust without going red tribe. Of course I live in the countryside, but its mostly a countryside filled with remote working programmers and other fairly open minded types. There are also a lot of networks in cities, though, those probably need to be a bit more coordinated to cohere - which makes them more prone to psychopaths turning them into cults etc.
Alternately if you don't want to change life style: any sort of weird fringe hobbies/interest. Always easier to join rather than form.
Look for shit where the non-monetary cost of entry is high, and prestige is low.
You gotta be careful not to accidentally join a cult or some shit, but getting real into D&D, or table top gaming, or drone racing, or some shit can be like joining a church.
Mutual aid is the shit.
"Look for shit where the non-monetary cost of entry is high, and prestige is low." - That's a great rule of thumb, I'll have to meditate on that tonight when I mown the lawn.
Somewhere -- I could have sworn it was on SSC but I have been unable to find it -- I remember someone posting about a book on a group of radicals back in the 70s, like Weathermen or some such. They were discussing strategies and options and the talk came around to what to do with the proportion of people who would never support their proposed society even after the revolution was successful. The upshot was they decided they would have to imprison or execute all of those people. This was presumably testified to by a mole, I think.
Does this ring a bell with anyone? I thought the book was "Days of Rage," but I can't find any reference to it in there.
https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/ is the post you're looking for.
Scott references Days Of Rage here https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/02/book-review-ages-of-discord/ but I don't see your anecdote.
I haven't been closely following COVID treatment studies, since the vaccine is so effective at preventing it. But I've recently read some conflicting information about the effectiveness of certain medications when treating COVID.
Could someone more knowledgeable give me a good faith survey of the evidence for and against the following medications:
* Hydroxychloroquin
* Ivermectin
I'm trying to gauge whether, in general, doctors use such medicines when treating COVID, what they are effective for, and how effective they are.
TIL:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160811130754/http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/84257/nabiscos-x-rated-toy-scandal-1971
Oh wow, the Aurora toy kits! I never saw those particular sets, but when I was a nipper the ads for "build your own Frankenstein/Wolfman" in the backs of American comics (when you could get those in your local newsagent, the supply was sketchy)? I well remember those!
As for the rest of it, it was the 70s, man. They really were Like That.
Are kids around the world going to grow up with American accents? I know several people whose little kids are watching youtube since age 2. It seems to be taking up the vast majority of their interest.
My stepchildren watch a fair amount of Youtube. However, they mostly watch in French which leaves their French-speaking pretty much unaltered. Their watching of English Youtube also appears to have zero effect on their English accents - they continue to have delightful RP accents - just like their parents...
Not sure how kids around the world watching Youtube in their own languages is going to give them American accents.
Haven't you heard of the "Peppa Pig effect"? American toddlers talking with British accents? Some media doubt it: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/feb/14/peppa-pig-american-children-british-accents
But my son (not an English native speaker) can do a very cute "wakey, wakey, mummy and daddy", from the Cuckoo Clock episode.
Purely anecdotal but both my partner and I have observed that our 4 year old certainly has a notable American accent when pronouncing a handful of words ("Mom", "Pool" etc). Interestingly he has somewhat equal exposure to American and British content with no noticeable British pronunciation of any words.
Critics of electric cars have claimed that they will be bad for the environment since there will be mountains of old, toxic batteries someday. Supporters of electric cars counter that this won't be a problem since we will be able to keep using the car batteries, but in stationary applications like house backups. But aren't old car batteries wasteful at storing energy?
Here's how I envision it works: A brand-new Tesla's batteries can be fully charged up with 100 units of electricity, and they discharge all 100 units to power the car. However, a 10-year-old Tesla's worn-out batteries still need 100 units of electricity to get "full," but the batteries will only release 80 units of electricity to power the car. That's why the car's range decreases as it gets older. Eventually, this gets so aggravating that the owners have to sell them.
Why would I want to use the old Tesla batteries as a power backup for my house when they lose so much electricity? I pay to put 100 units into them, but then when the power grid fails, the batteries only provide me with 80 units before running out.
Is my conceptualization of how battery wear-out happens right?
No, when old, the battery will only accept 80 units of energy in, and give the 80 units back out.
(Keeping with the simple model. There is a few percent loss at each step.)
OK.
Let's say we transplant my old Tesla car battery into my basement and hook it up to my electrical wiring to serve as a home battery backup. It will still keep degrading with time, so in a few years, it will only be able to hold 70 units of electricity, and then 60, and so on.
Before reaching a capacity of 0, would it get so degraded that it wouldn't be worth keeping in my house anymore? Approximately what storage level would that have to be, and why would it be at that level?
If I threw the battery in the trash, doesn't it end up as part of a mountain of old, toxic batteries, just as the critics of electric cars claimed would be the case?
It will likely fail before it naturally decays to less than 1% power, because there are a bunch of sub-components in there, all with their own MTTFs.
If you are comfortable working with electronics, you could take out the individual cells and keep those that are functioning going in a homebuilt powerwall for quite some time. There are risks of using things past their lifetimes, though. (The first question for any homebrew powerwall is to ask "If one cell fails by catching on fire, will that light all the other cells next to it on fire?")
Lithium-ion batteries can be recycled in theory, but for the most part the responsible thing is to dispose of it in the hazardous waste your city has.
Why would you throw the battery in the trash? There are battery recycling companies that would love to have the raw materials, because there are valuable minerals that we'd otherwise have to mine for.
https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/about
The thing that gets me about this "battery waste" or "Solar panel waste" argument is that we don't apply it to other items. For example, if I buy an EV instead of an internal combusion engine car, the ICE car will also be scrapped after many years -- why is the concern about battery disposal any different, in principle, than engine recycling?
The critics say no one will want to recycle the batteries because it is cheaper to mine new lithium and trace metals.
Right, and my question is, how is this different than what we do now for ICE engine blocks? Maybe it is, or will be, cheaper to mine new lithium, which will make batteries even cheaper. And then when you have lots of degraded EV batteries laying around, you'll have lots of spare parts and components to use for repair, replacement, or even reuse in an appllication like grid or home battery storage. Isn't this kind of how junkyards work now?
I mean, the way I look at it is, the choice isn't between making EVs and not making EVs. Or between making solar roofs and nothing. It's between making EVs versus making ICEs, or between making solar roofs versus making conventional shingled roofs.
The question is, which is better _on balance_? ICEs pollute as long as they are used and require us to refine oil into gasoline. Where I live most roofs are asphalt and generally require replacement after 30 years -- but no one worries about that fact, or that that the old shingles get thrown out (not recycled).
I'm sure we will find ways to use degraded EV batteries or solar panels -- we already know the ways now and it's likely their decreasing cost will make more applications viable.
An engine block, or for that matter a crushed-car-block, can be turned into a useful raw material just by throwing it into a furnace. Throwing a lithium-ion battery into a furnace is likely to result in an exploding furnace, and recycling a lithium-ion battery safely and effectively is a much more labor-intensive process. I believe that at the current state of the art, recycling steel is cheaper than mining ore+coal and producing new steel, but recycling lithium is harder than mining new lithium.
Ozy's started blogging again. https://thingofthings.substack.com/
Realistic Acting
My girlfriend isn't a big fan of old movies (like, say, noir's from the 40s) because she finds the acting too melodramatic and unrealistic.
On the one hand, I agree that the acting then was more melodramatic (self-awarely so, mostly). OTOH, I suspect our notion of realistic dialogue, body language and behavior comes from the media we consume. Movies and TV are a big portion of our culture, and we learn a lot of subtleties of behavior from them. Supposedly, in the days when movies were in black & white, most people dreamt in black & white, and then when movies went color people started dreaming in color. (What were dreams like before there were movies?)
If our dreams are so influenced by media, then our waking behavior must be also, I'd imagine.
With that in mind, I suspect that 50 years from now the most "realistic" seeming movies and TV today -- in terms of say, dialogue and delivery -- maybe take a recent show like Mare of Eastown or a movie like Nomadland, both which purport to portray realism, will seem melodramatic or weirdly unrealistic in 50 years.
No?
Did I sturdier?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qaKZi6p6sxg
Is there any way to get access to Scott's old LiveJournal posts as Squid314? I came across an excerpt from his "World War II is full of plot holes" rant, and I'm dying to read the rest.
I don't have a generalizable solution for you, but web archives are sporadically effective. For example: https://web.archive.org/web/20180223070527/https://squid314.livejournal.com/275614.html