I'm toying with the idea of starting a blog. I feel this community, for good or ill, knows what I have to offer and how I write. I'm curious if there's any thoughts as to: First, what people would be most interested in me talking about. Secondly, stylistic or delivery advice that people would like to see. Thanks in advance!
I've been blogging[1] for... geez probably over a decade now and basically I do a couple of things:
1) Professional progress updates (I'm a game developer so I post monthly progress reports for a game I'm working on)
2) Analysis pieces on trends (again in the games industry)
3) Anything that I want to be able to put into one authoritative work and then be able to link to people from then on
4) I often use twitter, forums, or blogs as "rough drafts" for an article. They say the best way to get correct information on the Internet is to post wrong information, and all that. After I've felt out an idea and gotten a bunch of feedback and corrections to obvious mistakes I blogify it.
5) I have an academic background so I had to slowly work my way out of that style (never use the word "I", lean too much on passive voice) into a more informal one that fits me better
3) in particular has been useful for me and where some of my most read works have come from.
My only advice, as someone unsuccessful at blogging regularly, is:
1) to not overthink what you're writing about, where you're publishing or anything details that don't involve sitting at a keyboard and typing words. Set a schedule and start writing, and you'll figure out what topics resonate with both yourself and your audience. It's very easy to bikeshed unimportant choices when the #1 way to fail is to not get around around to actually writing.
2) don't be embarrassed about self-promoting. Someone has to do it.
Thanks! I'm afraid I'm prone to overthinking. I do have a list of topics though. Also, I'm aware self-promotion is necessary. I'm not so much afraid of that. But I do feel like fame is a sword with no grip, as our host knows.
Thank you! I'm afraid if I talked about what I wanted it would be so incredibly scattershot that it would be hard for the blog or audience to have much of an identity...
You gave me the advice to go for an identity but can't your identity be a very intelligent and interesting blogger? What exactly is Scott's identity? He writes about everything but he's extremely successful.
I'd say Scott's a rationalist blogger that deals with the more humanistic side of things. Psychology, politics, philosophy, etc. The blog mostly appeals to rationalist type adult men, so well educated STEM types and the like. I'm not sure if he set out to appeal to a specific demographic but the blog has a very defined identity and audience.
One thing that I'd throw in to the pot of advice is not to be be married to the particular blog focus you decide on at first. I had an idea of what my blog would be at first, and then started writing those things and the fit/feel was off. I don't think it would have been sustainable in the original form I thought about. The nice thing about the beginning part is nobody in particular is reading yet - you can try a few a things and see what you like before it's affecting anything much.
You have a lot of knowledge about a bunch of things, so I suggest to write what you know best. As for delivery, I think you write overly tersely and confidently. I suggest loosening up the writing style a bit, so it sounds like someone more your age.
Thanks. It's picking the topic that's the issue. I'm torn between the instinct to write about whatever interests me and the need to winnow it down to a specific theme. But certainly there are topics I know more or less and I'll stick with more.
Thanks again for the advice on my voice. I'm afraid this is pretty close to how I talk. But I can definitely soften my voice in a writing piece. There I'm trying to inhabit an explicit tone and mood. And that voice can be more uncertain and longform.
Ancient history, preferably. As far as delivery goes, I think for a blog post (as opposed to a forum comment) you need to expand on the details a lot, and it would help if you would cite your sources, because a lot of your posts on history are interesting but handwavy. For example, I didn't come away from your criticisms of Bret Devereaux (like his Marxist assumptions in the bread series) with any sense of where the Marxist analysis goes wrong or what the alternative is. I said privately at the time:
> [Erusian] says for instance that Devereaux's presuming that labor vs capital in this mode of production matters most for power distribution. Okay, sounds pretty Marxist to me, but where it is *wrong*? What matters more?
Yeah, my comments are kind of handwavy because they're me just sitting down and saying what I think. It's also why they have typos. Actual posts would, I hope, be higher quality. This is in some way graduating to a higher level because I've reached the point where I'm being treated seriously.
My threshold for interest in reading someone's writing is lower when it's possible for me to respond, and lower still when it's reasonably likely that a conversation will result.
This is true in general, and not at all specific to you.
Notability and the cadre of "We'll delete any article on this subject no matter how well researched, sourced, and written!" deletionists makes it difficult to mentally invest in anything but minor fixups.
Same. Also: articles on important subjects that are permanently watched by obsessives with axes to grind who know how to wikilawyer all contenders to exhaustion really sap the will to bother out of me.
I do wish there was a "big database of human knowledge" fork of Wikipedia that continually pulls in all the Wikipedia content while also allowing the extra articles: a lower bar for notability, less concern about whether a topic is befitting of a traditional print encyclopedia, curation of effort-articles which were deleted from Wikipedia etc.
My dream is an "evidence clearing house". A site where you just input data (and links to data), and then aggregate claims based on that, in a hierarchical way where authors recursively build bigger and more interesting claims out of hierarchies of smaller claims, with all claims ultimately backed legibly by data.
+1. I have considered contributing to Wikipedia but the thought that some stranger can just revert it stops me from doing so. Would I even be notified if my work was reverted? Could I appeal? What's the probability that I get reverted? Without some assurance there isn't a delete-happy editor overseeing whatever I edit, I'm reluctant.
I started to recently, mostly making small improvements to articles I read rather than adding substantial amounts of new information; I have not noticed the problems other commenters mention, though that is probably because I haven't been active there for very long.
Editing wikipedia seems like homework. I would rather write on my blog if I am writing something and have it attributed to me. It's probably just a psychological difference. I can't say either side is correct in this.
Prior to becoming an active Wikipedian I think I had this idea about categorizing everything I read by topic, but then I realized that this was basically the function of the encyclopedia. So now what I do is I blog or comment if I have a Super Original Take(tm) or a life update, and write wikipedia text for everything else.
My eleventh GA is currently at FAC and I passed 10k edits a couple weeks ago. Multiple people have told me they have my RfA watchlisted; some of them are pretty big names.
I have gone through a great deal of trouble to acquire the highest level of expertise in several subjects, none of which is internal wiki-admin politics. So, no, I don't edit Wikipedia. They've made it clear that I will be at most grudgingly tolerated, and there's no respect or reward in it for me. and if your plan is "other people will produce valuable content for our project because it is the Right Thing To Do; we shall reward them with Grudging Tolerance", then they can sod off.
I do on occasion write essays and articles that other people use as sources when they edit wikipedia, which seems to me wholly superior in that A: it results in wider distribution of knowledge, both through wikipedia and through specialist media, and B: it results in more credit for me,.
A lot of my North Korea work is at 38 North, https://www.38north.org , though I had to pull back from that when my classified day-job work started overlapping my open-source arms control and non-proliferation work.
The other day I glanced at the Wikipedia entry on Fabio. I noticed that the article mentioned his sponsorships and reality TV show, and the goose incident, but didn't mention that he is primarily known for being on the cover of romance novels. I left a comment asking about this on the talk page, and now it's there, but still only as two minor sentences, as opposed to full paragraphs about his sponsorship from Nintendo.
I stopped when every change resulted in a comment that said, "please read these 10000 word policies on notability when it comes to films, tv shows, plays, entertainment, entertainers, and jugglers before contributing."
Currently, I almost never edit Wikipedia, but I used to.
The three and a two half reasons:
- the software has been getting harder and harder for me to use. I'm very comfortable with markup; not so comfortable with tool bars etc. And the templates (macros) get more and more complex - and less and less documented - every year, as well as being more and more required.
- (half reason) the rules for how to write, what may be written, what constitutes a source etc. seem to get both harder to follow and more often ignored.
- Wiki-politics is ugly, and tends to drive away editors and administrators I like and respect. I also get the impression that wikimedia foundation, like Stack Exchange, is keen to monetize a volunteer effort they are also sabotaging, e.g. by tone deaf attempts to promote oppressed minorities.
- I just don't have the time.
- (half reason) I'm rather more of an essayist than e.g. a science journalist. I don't especially enjoy writing balanced, carefully-sourced descriptions of consensus knowledge. And it's a complete PITA looking for "reliable sources" for e.g. particular computer algorithms and where they are used. (Note "reliable source" is a technical term on wikipedia, and while it's intended to mean what it says, it's actually more of a set of bureaucratic regulations.)
I tried a few times, but never to good result. One set in particular really turned me off, where I was updating wiki articles with citations to relevant articles the academic journal my PhD advisor ran. Sometimes this was just a further reading link, other times I would add a paragraph or so if the article was in conflict etc.
Every single one of these changes got rejected, sometimes with a nastygram attached to the effect of "we don't like your kind here" and little else. Whether this is due to political economy being a little touchy a subject, or the general culture of Wikipedia, I don't know, but that put me off pretty well.
Nope. High quality writing doesn't come easy to me, and I'd get stressed and a bit obsessed. Also, when I go to Wikipedia it's usually to learn stuff that I don't know much about, so I don't often bump into articles to which I could contribute significantly without having to study quite a bit first (and I bet there aren't many anyway). Occasionally, I read stuff that I feel I could improve a little, but not often enough to make it worth learning the Wikipedia rules and inner workings.
Never had visions but I always try to pay attention at that border. Thoughts controlled by what I think of as ‘me’ get increasingly scrambled, but I try to follow the process. Usually my body will experienced a little myoclonic jerk at that liminal point.
Rarely when I'm lying in bed I will have hallucinations (usually still or moving images, rarely audio) that are clearly the start of my brain's dreaming subroutine, but occurring while I'm still somewhat lucid, mobile and able to abort the going to sleep process. When I was a kid and did a lot of bedtime reading this usually took the form of suddenly realizing that I had closed my eyes from tiredness so it did not make sense that I was still perceiving book full of words, these days I think it's rarer and it's more like experiencing a couple seconds of a totally random dream with no connection to my current experience.
I have hypnogogic hallucinations sometimes upon waking or approaching sleep, one of many fun symptoms from having Narcolepsy. I describe it as having scenes from a dream superimposed on reality, kind of like painted animation cels.
It started a year ago. When I fall asleep I immediately begin to see dreams for 30- 60 minutes but my brain can't turn off and as soon as I fall asleep for the first time I instantly wake up. And after that I fall asleep normally
I had infinite universe black/white visions as a child. They didn't come during sleep/wake transitions but came at random. They were visions in the true sense that I lost my regular sight and started seeing this stuff. It was nuts.
I get hypnagogic hallucinations while falling asleep or waking up, with associated sleep paralysis, but they are generally auditory-only, or if they're visual at all they're incredibly vague and indistinct, more like confusion over the interpretation of what I'm seeing vs seeing something that isn't there.
I assume this is related to the fact that I seem to be aphantasic (or uh, hypophantasic, if that's a word). This thread prompted me to go read a bit about aphantasia, and to discover this recent new study on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7308278/
Discussion of scam ticket-selling sites. They resemble the actual venue, but vastly overcharge and don't deliver tickets reliably.
The federal government makes some efforts to stop them, but is fairly ineffective partly as a result of not being well-funded for the size of the job, and I suspect that the size of the job keeps increasing.
This gets to the question of what can be done about fraud, and also issues of what makes for a high-trustworthiness society. If a tenth of a percent or so is defecting a lot, they do a good bit of damage.
Re point 3, I regularly experienced an "expansion" feeling, something like what Shulgin described, while falling asleep when I was younger. It was like my body was inflating or being elongated to incredible lengths. (I've occasionally wondered if Lewis Carroll had similar experiences which inspired the size change magic in Wonderland.) I don't recall anything quite like those other visions, though, certainly not on a regular basis.
When I was a kid I had similar experiences whenever I would have a high fever - sensations of my body being enormous, or extremely small, in an infinite and otherwise empty universe. It would always freak me out. I assumed the feeling was happening because I was sick.
"Then there was a recurring one I can barely describe except that I suddenly perceived all spoken words as large, puffy, rubbery letters, like gigantic pasta shapes, that I was digging through with my hands as I processed their meaning. I would only understand the words once my fingers felt the tiny “bones” inside them, but the sensation of finding those bones made kid-me start BAWLING."
Huh, I always thought that segment of Comfortably Numb was artistic license, or "for effect". Thanks for sharing, this is an interesting shade of the human experience!
Hi! Amazed to hear your description. I had this too for many years as a child. However it would happen without a fever, and without going to sleep. I would just randomly be playing in my room and then suddenly have these sensations/visions of infinitely sized objects next to impossibly large/small ones.
Question: do you remember if your visions were in color or monochrome?
I don't remember for certain about the chromaticity of my fever visions, but since I almost never have regular dreams in color, my guess is that they would also have been the same. (Now I almost want to run another high fever and do some self-observations!)
While lying in bed, I sometimes got the sensation that my room was far larger than it really was, with the walls and ceiling very far away. I wouldn't call it a "vision", because nothing *looked* out of the ordinary; the sensation was separate from my eyesight.
I have the same sensation, especially when not feeling well (but sometimes when I feel fine). In my case, I attributed it to a practice of trying to make my room as dark as possible, especially eliminating well-defined light sources. If the only thing I can see when trying to sleep is just the diffuse glow from the translucent curtains covering the edges of the blinds, there really isn't anything to use as a reference for scale, and my tired mind probably loses the ability to judge distances with binocular vision. Fixed light sources break the effect, especially if they're not red. My current house has a smoke detector with a small green LED, which is sharp enough to fixate on if it's in my line of vision.
I used to have similar experiences as a kid, especially when sick, of my body parts pulsating between being immense and tiny. Not visual at all, just at the proprioception level. Not an unpleasant experience necessarily, just weird
Same here! Exact same hallucinations when I was sick or feverish, or sometimes just when I was trying to sleep. It was relatively rare and stopped completely as I got older.
This definitely also happened to me. I attribute it to my "body image" not having fully coalesced at that age. I am still able to modify the shape of my proprioceptive body at will, but it doesn't go haywire on me like that when I'm not paying attention any more. This coincided pretty closely with the age (pretty late, maybe mid-teens) that I stopped being sort of surprised and taken aback every time I looked in a mirror because what I saw seemed unexpected somehow.
On one hand the article seems to suggest that this technology is not very effective. On the other hand it expresses concerns about exacerbating inequalities. I feel like at most one of these two concerns can be valid; not both at the same time.
There is a section "unintended consequences" that says that selecting for high IQ would also increase the risk of bipolar disorder. What's not mentioned is that selecting for high IQ would decrease the risk of most other diseases. Bipolar disorder is an exception in that regard. Genetically, most good things cluster together with other good things. So the majority of unintended consequences of selecting for high IQ would actually be positive.
Keep in mind that scientists in western countries can't simply publicly endorse polygenic embryo screening without taking major career risks. Condemning it on the other hand is relatively safe.
Suppose somebody's been exposed to a mutagen and then has kids. A mutagen is likely to cause thousands or tens of thousands of mutations, most of which don't do anything and most of the rest of which are bad. As such, the kids are going to have problems in lots of different ways.
If you have a population, half of which has been exposed to mutagens and the other half of which hasn't, there will therefore be a positive correlation between good outcomes in their children - because the non-mutated kids are going to be statistically superior to the mutated kids in almost everything.
There are a variety of things which can cause high mutational load IRL, like maternal/paternal age, hence these correlations. I'm *not* sure whether this correlation would hold up when performing IVF, as the mutational load of the parents is largely fixed (it's the same two people, at the same time in their lives).
It's because a single broken gene can have negative effects on multiple functions. E.g. consider all the symptoms of Huntington's disease. The same thing happens for mutations with less dramatic effects.
I think it's just a consequence of the fact that good things cluster together phenotypically. High IQ tends to be correlated with all sorts of positive life outcomes, including an (often slightly) lower risk for many diseases. Probably not because there is a direct causal link between IQ and disease, but because there is some other common underlying causal factor. If that other common underlying causal factor is partially genetic - and it will be, because everything is partially genetic - then this will mean that on average genetic variants that are associated with a higher IQ will also be associated with lower disease risk.
I feel I should point out to you that this is not an explanation - it's just restating the fact that good things go together, without explaining why. The reasons *why* are pleiotropy, non-independence of criteria (i.e. high IQ makes you get higher test scores which makes you more competitive in the labour market which makes you richer) and the non-uniform mutational load which makes broken things correlate with other broken things.
You're right, my explanation doesn't go all the way down the causal ladder, it's just stating that we should expect selection for IQ to have mostly positive side effects if it mostly has positive correlations with other positive traits (low disease risk). Positive phenotypic correlations usually translate into positive genetic correlations.
I don't know if we can be certain at this point about genetic mechanisms that are causing this. The mutational load argument sounds compelling and is certainly true to some extent, but polygenic predictors and genetic correlations are both based on common genetic variants that have very little in common with the very rare genetic variants that people have in mind when they talk about mutational load. The reason for that is that on average you can predict a polygenic trait much better by considering a large number of individually unremarkable, common variants, than by considering a necessarily smaller number of rare, large-effect, mutational-load variants.
The varations are likely random, but remember that the initial genome being varied is not random, but has survived lots of selection and is far more functional than a genome created at random. So random changes are much more likely to have negative rather than positive effects. Therefore if one system is observed to have been corrupted by random changes, it is likely that others are as well. By analogy, a car that has had parts changed at random with those of different models is likely to end up worse in every measure, because the original car was a carefully selected combination of parts.
To me the article seems generally on board with the idea as long as its caveats and limitations are properly communicated, although someone else might read this as "polygenetic selection is a scam and should be banned". It did suggest that companies shouldn't be charging for this until they can prove it works, which seems like a great way to kill it, but it's probably not that expensive to throw in a few extra tests into disease screening so maybe it could still work. The reference to the evils of eugenics seemed like it was only there because it had to be included, it's important to regularly remind everyone that you think Involuntary Sterilisation Is Bad.
"someone else might read this as "polygenetic selection is a scam and should be banned"
Not something that had occurred to me prior to reading your comment, but oh yeah. Every cowboy and dodgy doc in the business will jump on the chance to offer "polygenic screening for a better baby!" the way dodgy clinics are currently offering "stem cell cures":
"There is a section "unintended consequences" that says that selecting for high IQ would also increase the risk of bipolar disorder" -- OH NO, NEURODIVERGENT PEOPLE!
From where I'm standing, allism and simultypy are severe, crippling disabilities that are obviously completely incompatible with any kind of good life, and purging them from the population is a self-evident good, and any allist or simultype who disagrees with me is just blinded by having a weird brain that thinks wrong things. *Mysteriously*, this position is far less common than its inverse.
"Schizo" to "split" gives you "simul" to "together". I used to identify as autistic, on account of being diagnosed with it for longer, but "what were you diagnosed with first, according to what was trendy when you were a kid to label a given cluster of weird kids with" is not the be-all and end-all of a given person's neurotype and if the schizotypal liberation movement ends up consisting of me and me only, well, that's an improvement on it consisting of no one.
I am unconvinced of the degree to which I believe the statement above and the degree to which I think it's a worthwhile thing to say independent of its truth, because of everyone else believing the exact opposite thing. I *do* strongly and sincerely believe that letting allistic and simultypal people decide what the correct balance of neurotypes is may as well be signing society's death warrant, that there's no possible way it could result in a non-dystopian world, and that the current balance of those neurotypes in the population is too low rather than too high.
I realise you've already said you're not sure whether this statement is true later in this thread, but I'm curious about this scenario, regardless - so here's a genuine question from my point of ignorance:
If we were to treat allism as a disability and mankind were to abandon empathy (as in, the illusion of knowing what other people are feeling), is that not a loss from a game-theoretic point of view?
I'm unfamiliar with how cooperation with people you expect to only ever meet once arises and remains stable in this scenario (something that seems fairly crucial to civilisation as we know it). Would we depend on laws and their consequences to regulate all those scenarios (bland example - the person you just gave five dollars to should give you the thing you're buying with those five dollars, otherwise they will be punished by society)?
Or is the argument that you shouldn't, precisely because it's illogical (and therefore civilisation as we know it potentially needs serious changes)?
I'm reasonably sure this is probably covered by a 101 somewhere, but I'm not sure how to find it. Feel free to just slap a link my way that covers this!
I think lack-of-cognitive-empathy *is* one of the disabling effects of autism. My experience is you can solve much of this problem with psychedelics, so...work backwards from there.
As an autistic person, my experience is that non-autistics have precious little empathy for autistics, to the point of resembling the caricature descriptions of autistics sometimes produced.
AFAICT, most non-autistics get away with projecting their own feelings (in similar circumstances) onto others, and calling that "empathy". They get away with it because when they do this with "normal"/high status people, they are often right, and those judging them don't care about "weird"/lower status people.
Strongly agreed. I first noticed the pattern when reading Temple Grandin's memoir and realizing what a hard time her mother had empathizing with her.
Also, what passes for empathy with neurotypicals can be pretty mechanical-- a hand on the shoulder at the right time can make people feel a lot better even if the person supplying the hand isn't feeling much of anything.
Indeed and when autistic people project their own feelings/desires on others, this is called a lack of empathy.
It's really rather ugly. Like a supercharged version of the stereotypical 'ugly American' who starts shouting at a local who doesn't understand English when visiting a foreign country. Only this time the person is even accused of being illiterate, their mastery of the local language being completely ignored.
I wonder how much of the alleged normie empathy is actually recognizing someone else's emotion... and how much is an unwritten social contract to be so bland that they can freely project their emotions on each other, and to never contradict each other when doing so.
If the normie has a model of you, and you show that this model is wrong -- for example by expressing interest in something the normie considers boring, and therefore automatically assumes you also consider it boring, -- the normie feels discomfort, because their illusion of empathy was broken. The normie will then project, and blame you for not having empathy.
I don't think that's it. I think the normie thing is to have beliefs (predictive processing?) which is usually not too far off from most people's actual emotions.
Empathy the skill and empathy the character trait are different things.
Autistic people aren't *inherently* great at empathy-the-skill targetting neurotypicals, although we can learn it. (I'm not sure of the state of the research on how well autists read other autists.)
We have empathy-the-character-trait, though. That is to say, we care but don't always know how you feel. (This is the reverse of a sociopath, who knows but doesn't care how you feel.)
The majority of autists find lying deeply upsetting and don't generally do it, so I imagine you'd actually have to worry about fraud less than usual. There are potential issues with an all-autistic society, but it's the sort of thing that's probably worth a try to see if it pans out.
Anecdotes are not data, I realise, but my exposure to one case of someone with schizophrenia did not convince me that they were living their best life.
Regularly go off their meds, lose their job because of that, then spiral down until they came into the office claiming that people were breaking into their house to smear faeces on their walls, visibly upset and distressed and convinced this was true (it was not) - I don't see that as helping that person or society in general.
Best to worst case: neurotypical -> neurodivergent but can stay on their meds -> neurodivergent, can't stay on their meds, become more and more enmeshed in their disorder until they're a danger to themselves and/or others.
Neurodivergent is a wide catagory. So wide I don't think it can be said to be better or worse in aggregate. In specifics, sure, the kid with an 80 IQ that can't communicate with his parents is a painful life. The adult with a high-paying job in a technical field who doesn't give two shits about social pressures to spend beyond their means is a great life.
Anecdata is not data. My anecdata is that psychosis is not an impediment to my life, and is often an improvement to it. My anecdata is also that I've never taken neuroleptics and don't plan to; there is a fair amount of interesting suggestion in the direction they are not a net positive, but rather a contributor to the disability that people with some neurotypes experience.
Fun for you. Not so fun for the people who have to deal with you pissing and howling on the floor. If you aren't one of the people who get so bad that they do end up pissing and howling on the floor, congratulations. But then what you are saying is "I can manage my symptoms/my symptoms are not so bad that they impinge on my ability to lead an independent life".
You're like someone who says "Well I only need glasses, plainly trying to cure river blindness is oppression of the differently abled by the ignorant and repressive majority!"
When nerdy people say they are "a little autistic," are they being a little cheeky, or do they mean it in a way that is continuous with a clinical diagnosis of autism? Is it legitimately just a matter of degree?
That makes sense. I recently heard myself described as "a little autistic" for the first time, and while that description makes a lot of my traits more legible, I'm still not sure how much I or other very mildly autistic people should lean into it. At first glance it feels vaguely insensitive to use the same term to both describe my excessively mechanistic approach to social interactions / inability to tune out background noise, and someone who is autistic to the point of being non-verbal.
I’ve wondered if the whole “spectrum” idea might one day fall apart, or schism into multiple spectra. I personally have never understood how we came up with a spectrum that has my high-functioning friends on one end and the kind of profound autism that leaves you institutionalized on the other. The traits we identify with autism don’t seem like they slide along a scale the way something like hearing loss does.
Consider for instance Temple Grandin. She was non verbal as a kid, only learned to speak after speech therapy. Was falsely diagnosed with brain damage. It seems like the only thing separating her and a "classical case" of autism was the dedication of her parents. If you agree to put Temple in the same category as a "classical autism" case, then what is the difference between her now and your "mild autisic" high functioning friends?
I’m not sure I had a “classical” idea of autism. But there are a lot of people on the spectrum who are sufficiently high functioning that they’re only diagnosed as adults, if at all. And there are others in institutions whose condition would seem to defy any amount of parental or professional dedication. Surely there’s some difference between those two groups, and maybe that difference warrants two distinct diagnoses.
In my view, it’s totally fine to use descriptions along the line of “a little bit autistic”. Unless you are in the context of a psychiatric institution, the majority of autistic people that you’ll interact with are probably going to be the high functioning ones (such as myself), and there really is a meaningful category of people that have some traits associated with (predominantly high functioning) autism, while not being to the point of qualifying for a diagnosis.
I do find it a bit odd how much popular perception of autism conflates the high functioning (to the degree that you might not know they have autism from a casual interaction) with the low functioning (to the degree that they cannot really live without significant chaperoning).
This is similar to my view. I have never been diagnosed myself, but my son was. What the doctor described as the tells/symptoms were things I myself had as much or more, but had learned to cope with. (My son had sessions with a therapist for a while and now has no obvious or outward signs that are distinguishable from regular shyness or social awkwardness. He is also high functioning and doesn't meet most people's perceptions of what autism looks like, though it was more obvious before the sessions).
I don't tell people I'm autistic, because I'm high functioning enough that very few people would ever notice and I was never diagnosed. I even work in a people-oriented field, having figured out lots of workarounds to being a genuine people-person.
> I'm still not sure how much I or other very mildly autistic people should lean into it
In general I think we are doing a bit too much leaning into labels. Once you decide who you are is a foobarist you end up buying foobarist clothes, going to foobarist parties, and agreeing with foobarist policy positions. It’s true that this can give a comforting sense of belonging but it also closes you off to a lot of possibilities that you end up rejecting out of hand because they aren’t foobarist.
Tried the questionnaire, got to "I am fascinated by dates (agree/disagree)" and couldn't figure out whether they were talking about fruit, social interactions, or calendars. Unfortunately my answer is very different depending.
To add on to this, it is to be noted that very, very often we *hear* 'spectrum' but *envision* a _gradient_ — i.e., a scale going from more to less affected by a 'color' (the condition), when the intended meaning is usually a collection of different 'colors' (ways of being affected).
I think (as Brian said), that the clinical diagnosis is a spectrum, so that helps it be consistent. But it’s also a good shorthand for a lot of behaviors and traits; saying someone is “mildly autistic” actually has a pretty high information content about them. Even if a few bits of information are wrong in what’s conveyed, the mass of information can be worth it to use as a phrase.
wrt whether it’s insensitive, maybe? but it’s not clear to me who it’d be problematic for. I think people can be offended by basically anything, but generally I think if you’re using it as a legitimate descriptor, rather than as a pejorative term, you’re within the normal bounds of insensitivity, since it’s a spectrum and there isn’t anyone who seems to have a clear case for being offended by its usage.
Obviously if someone can present a clear case for why it’s problematic I’m open to changing my mind, but otherwise I view it as other spectrum words like “disabled” “hearing impaired” or “buff”
They're probably being cheeky. I could see this sort of thing as mildly bothersome to autistic people. But psychological conditions do seem to be on a spectrum. So if someone does describe themselves as a little autistic, what they are saying could make sense depending on why they said it. Just like someone could say they're a little bit borderline or bipolar or traumatized but generally those terms are reserved for more serious cases. I think everything is just a matter of degree.
It's legitimately just a manner of degree, and an inconsistent one. I have an ASD diagnosis since toddlerhood; most people in the ratsphere, including the ones who swear up and down that they're not, are far more characteristically autistic than me.
Can't speak for nerdy people generally, but when I say it I mean I have something like a subclinical form of autism. I have all the usual deficits/strengths, but they're minor enough that I really don't think I'd be diagnosable.
I suspect there some who are cheeky, some who try to point out some traits on the continuous spectrum of symptoms, and some are doing a little bit both, often inadvertently. It is difficult to self-diagnose ones self-psychology, and its contingent on reference points one has available.
They're doing the best they can to describe how they think their brain works, now that the Very Serious Medical Authorities have told them they're not allowed to use the word "Asperger's" for that purpose. I'm not sure it's an improvement to treat everything from what used to be called mild Asperger's, to someone who will spend the rest of their life in an asylum screaming, a "spectrum", but that's what we're stuck with unless we want to fight a language war to reclaim "Asperger's".
Wasn't a lot of this a push-back from parents of autistic kids, who didn't want their kids to be stigmatised as the "have to wear a helmet 24/7 or they will beat their brains out against a wall" (an instance I encountered during my working life) type, so they insisted that the Asperger's and 'high functioning' be folded into the entire autism definition and that it be put on a spectrum?
There *is* a wide spectrum between "socially awkward but can handle their symptoms" to "noticeably autistic but functional" to "will bite off their own fingers, will always need institutional care" autism, but I think that the very severe cases are not on the same line as the autists formerly known as Aspies.
I hadn't heard that theory as to the origin of the "spectrum" diagnosis, but it seems plausible. And I agree, we may not be dealing with just a single axis where the helmet-Autistics just have more of what the Aspies have. Actually, now that I think about it, this is something I'd expect Scott to be familiar with; he's written a few things sort of adjacent to it before, but I don't recall him addressing it directly.
I'm going mostly on what I've heard/read elsewhere. Currently working in administrative capacity in a centre for children with additional needs. They get referred to it by the local Early Intervention Services Team. Includes children with autism but also other developmental needs. Generally "mild to moderate" cases. I haven't seen any of the severe cases in this job.
The really severe one was a previous job, where part of the work was administering grants for home improvements for medical reasons. One family had two teenage/young adult sons with autism, and they wanted to build an extension to have a padded room so the older son could go there when getting stressed out, and so he could take off the motorcycle helmet he had to wear 24/7 because in the padded room even if he did knock his head against the walls he couldn't damage himself.
I haven't seen any of the 'savant' types. I do think keeping Asperger's Syndrome separate was more helpful, as there are definitely 'clusters' - the mild to the moderate to the severe types.
I worry that a lot of it is the same as when type A personalities describe themselves as "a little OCD". It's possible that some of them are right, but I've got to imagine that a lot of self-diagnosis is just people who have no idea what the real condition is like.
Depends on what you think about taxonometrics. If you take their word for it, there isn't a bimodal distribution of autistic and non-autistic people.
Troll answer: they don't know any better to compare two (morally loaded) concepts which have significantly different magnitudes. In this case, nerdiness and autism.
I'm starting a self-experiment to see if melatonin can help prevent me from waking up, and am hoping to get some feedback/critique of my experimental design. Anyone have any suggestions?
I realize melatonin is typically used to control when you go to sleep, but I'm hopeful that it will last long enough in the bloodstream that it might impact time asleep as well.
- Doses: 0, 0.3, and 3 mg, taken 30 min. before bedtime
- Randomization: pills placed in opaque gelatin capsules, randomly assigned to each day by an assistant (i.e. blinded)
- Measurement: time fell asleep, time woke up, time asleep, HRV, sleeping pulse, fasting blood sugar, change in blood sugar, measured by Apple Watch/Autosleep app & Dexcom G6
- Analysis: effect size and p-value tested for melatonin vs. blank. If meaningful effect size is observed, experiment will be repeated with that dose to confirm.
*Any suggestions on improving the protocol or other interventions would be greatly appreciated.*
A variant you might try is to set an alarm for 2 or 3 hrs after you go to sleep, and take the pill then. This is my go-to trick for periods when my sleep cycle gets funky and I wake up nightly after 4 or 5 hours and can't go back to sleep. Don't think I've ever done this with melatonin -- have used diphenhydramine or lorazepam. For me, anyhow, an alarm that goes off in the first 2 or 3 hours pulls me out of a dead sleep, and I can go right back to sleep after taking the pill. Taking the med at that point in the night means it kicks in at around the time I would normally had my too-early spontaneous awakening, and its effect lasts til I've been asleep 8 hours or so.
Interesting. I'm only waking up 20-30 min. early, so I don't think this would be worth it for me. I'll recommend it to my wife, though. She frequently wakes up 3-4h after going to sleep.
I'm struggling with how much I can expect from a partner with ADHD. We have a young son who requires a lot of attention, and my husband just doesn't seem to have the patience required to spend long periods of time playing with him. I can deal with it, but I'd sure like to just hang out and play video games also. Am I being ablist to think he should just suck it up and split the time equally?
I'm not really qualified to give advice here, but is there something else helpful he could be doing? If he genuinely can't handle long play sessions it won't be good for anyone to try to force it; but if he spends that time doing something fun and easy and unproductive, you will understandably be frustrated and also somewhat suspicious (not necessarily that he's being cynical or deliberately dishonest, but that he's subconsciously making more of a choice than he'd admit to himself or you). If there are household tasks that he can handle, and that you might otherwise have to do yourself, maybe he could put some extra time into those while you're playing with your son.
I would try to recast your question to ignore the ADHD, because it's not necessarily relevant. I used to love playing with our little kids. My wife has always been unable to do it, and she doesn't have any kind of mental health issue. Ability to play with young children simply varies from person to person. What she could do, on the other hand, was plan day trips and put the kids in the car and go and look at a Thing (whereas I found that kind of process utterly enervating and pointless). With parenting, ultimately you just have to accept what the other person can or cannot do with the children; you can't force it.
The other issue is that you seem to suggest that when your husband isn't on kid duty, he goofs off and plays games. I don't know if you're a woman, but this sounds like quite a common male/female dynamic, and my very very very very strong advice is to be very explicit with him about it. (Apologies for horrible stereotyping to follow, obviously this is not true of everyone, but...) Men really really think differently about stuff, and we really really won't realise that we're annoying our partners until a row blows up. If you want your resident male to do more about the house, instructing him directly on what to do and when to do it is much more likely to get good results than any other tactic.
Completely agree. Some people just do not enjoy playing with small children. Does not mean they have attention deficit disorder or a cold heart. Think of a task your husband can do to help the household and free you up some, something he does not find irksome and weird, and ask him to do more of that. It's likely that when your child is older your husband will find him much more fun to hang out with.
If you are just in the same room as your kids and they play by themselves, you are not neglecting them. Kids do most of their playing that way. Sometimes they need direct attention and it can be fun to get on the floor and play with them, but if you are not doing that, they'll still do fine.
This. The expectation that parents constantly play with their kids, Bluey-style (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJkn-r-rJJY) is very, very new and not necessarily good. You say you have a young son who "requires a lot of attention," but are you absolutely certain that's true?
I obviously don't know anything about your son, so maybe it is true. But unless he's too young to be trusted not to choke himself to death swallowing a toy or he has a developmental issue, he should be able to play without your constant involvement! Lego, Play-doh, caring for baby dolls, digging a hole in a sandbox, going down the slide of a swing set, imagining a story with friends...until 20-30 years ago, these were activities parents generally didn't get directly involved with. They might admire the end product of a Lego fort or a clay snake, but they didn't usually put their hands on the toys.
I'm 41, have memories going back to 2.5 years old, and I don't remember my parents *ever* playing with my toys (or my younger brother's) as if they were a peer. In fact, from 4 years old on, if my mother "caught" me acting out a story with My Little Pony figurines, I would stop and wait for her to leave the room before getting back to it. Every parent of every kid I ever knew had similar boundaries. An adult joining us in imaginative play would have been way too intimate and intrusive.
Obviously none of this answers your question about your husband's involvement in child-rearing, but it is worth considering: What if you gradually assert some boundaries on you son's demands for your attention, and insist that he learn how to entertain himself without you (or your husband) actively engaging him every minute? If your son can act out a dinosaur war on the living room rug or sculpt a Play-doh family to live in the Lego house he built while your husband and/or you read a book or play a video game nearby, you'll all benefit.
Yeah, there are a lot of good points here. I think part of my problem is guilt from having him at daycare 40 hours of the week. I feel like I need to "make the most" of the time I am there with him. He feels that too. It's a constant refrain of "Mama Mama Mama"
Strictly anecdotal example coming up, but I don't think we can assume daycare actually impacts clinginess/sense of loss/etc!
How old is your little guy? My best friend is a stay-at-home mom with an almost four year old girl. Between normal maternity leave and the pandemic, her kid has never even met a hired babysitter, much less been in daycare. She has quite literally spent her whole life exclusively in the company of her parents' adult pod (grandparents, an uncle, a couple of her parents' friends), and her mom was present for way more than 99% of those gatherings.
Her kid is "Mama Mama Mama" with 20 minute meltdowns if she wants to leave the kid with her doting grandparents and go to the grocery store by herself.
My friend has *maybe* had 150 total hours away from her daughter in her daughter's whole life. And yet her kid throws huge fits whenever they part, as if she's being abandoned in the woods to hungry bears.
So I'm just saying. It might not be daycare, it might just be that your kid is programmed by evolution to solicit maximum engagement from you so he survives to adulthood. That doesn't mean he actually needs it in your safe 2021 home.
I'm sure you're a great mom. Don't accidentally deprive him of the opportunity to be totally self-absorbed in autonomous play. He'll figure out that it's an pleasure different from playing with adults.
1) Kids will behave how you condition them, and you condition them with both rewards and punishment. If the constant refrain is "Mama Mama Mama" its because it leads to good results for him. You need to find ways to recondition him. That first invovles figuring out what you want out of him. More autonomy? Maybe. Trying to handle things himself first? Maybe.
2) From above, it sounds like you have a marraige type that I call "equal," where your foundational principal is that the two adults are equal partners who contribute equally. You should do half the kid playing, and your partner should do the other half.
(Totally personal opinion here) This, frankly, is a bad way to structure your marraige, expecially once kids show up. How can a kid be equal with the parents.
Instead, think about moving your marrage from a marraige of equalit to one of mercy. It is the job of each adult to give each member of the family (including themselves) what they need. Full stop. The same way two renters are 100% responsible for the rent. It doesn't mean you need to kill yourself to serve everyone else - that's not giving yourself what you need.
But my wife hates hates hates scrubbing the bathroom. If find it fine, but old cold wet food gives me the willies. So I scrub the bathroom and she does the dishes. Simple example, but it applies to larger things. I work an intensive, long-hour job. My wife just isn't up to it. She makes about 12% what I do in a part time job. If I demanded she have a job like mine, it would burn her out.
Now you throw in a kid, who doesn't know how to be fair. He's going to throw a wrench into any equal plans you have because he's a child. I bet you suspend the equal thinking when your partner has the flu or whatever. Well, a kid is needs that 24/7 for at least the first decade of life.
You can play with the kid for a certain amount of time before you get burned out. Partner can play with the kid for a shorter amount of time. That's all the two of you can give. Your job is to figure out how to make it enough, and to give your kid what he needs.
But I bet he needs a lot less than you think. You should read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - it really illuminates how over-worked the modern American parents are in a way that has no benefit on their children.
It seems to me, as others have said, that you ought to be able to find room for your husband to watch the kid without the husband needing to exhaust himself by "playing" in what sounds like a fairly specific and, for him, exhausting way.
It's totally fine for the husband to just keep an eye on the kid while he plays by himself, watches TV, or does whatever. The husband can also go take the kid for a walk around the neighborhood, go visit the park, or just take the kid with him on a run to the store or something. It could also be that your husband can find his own way of playing with the kid - if he has a hobby or interest of his own, maybe he can find ways to share parts of that with the kid, which might feel much more meaningful than whatever banal playtime activities are currently normal.
Ultimately though, it's not ableist to ask your husband to step up and do his part. But it probably is ableist to expect that your husband's interactions with the kid will look exactly like your interactions, and that his parenting style will exactly match your own specific preferences.
I'm surprised that nobody here has asked if you've tried medication for ADHD? If you have and it didn't work or if you haven't and have reasons for that stance, perhaps you'd explain in a further post.
Christina The Story Girl has replied to you in an excellent post with which I fully agree. It seems to me your thinking is taking you on a dangerous path that may not end up anywhere nice for your family.
I just did a podcast episode with Greg Cochran on UFOs. We both think there is a reasonable chance that some of the UFOs seen by the Navy are aliens. Scott once wrote that Greg had "creepy oracular powers". https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521/cochran-on-ufos-part-1
This! ^ I’m glad audiobooks and podcasts exist for those who enjoy them, but to me it’s a maddeningly slow and inefficient method of getting information.
I'm listening to it rather gradually, and I recommend the first 20 minutes or so as good about high altitude lightning (sprites) that pilots simply didn't talk about in public because it would make them seem too weird. There was also a problem with it being visible to humans but so brief that it was difficult to photograph.
So I'll recommend cachelot.com - a collection of essays arguing a fascinating case for cachalots (aka sperm whales) being human-level intelligent. If nothing else, it shows just how little we really know about cetacean and especially whale intelligence, even now. The site also includes a blog on animal intelligence in general, written more rationalist-adjacently than other stuff I've seen on the subject.
Something I’ve been thinking about a little recently:
Is it surprising how much intelligent people disagree?
I’m often amazed by the extent to which people of roughly equal intellect arrive at such divergent conclusions, even when they are forming opinions based on the same information and possess similar expertise. I also find it fascinating when people that I agree with on one issue express views which I find utterly illogical elsewhere. Intuitively, I am surprised by these observations, but maybe I shouldn’t be.
A lot of intelligence is creative and performative - it's not like a prediction market where all the points are for being right. Especially with armchair thinking (no skin in the game), having opinions is more like building something out of lego than finding the "right answer". From that perspective, it's not surprising that people can reach different conclusions from the same set of initial blocks.
They may have vastly different priors, and confirmations bias does the rest of the work. In general, I'd say that human brain didn't evolve to be able to reliably arrive at objective truth, and rationalism's expectation that it's feasible to overcome this is naive at best.
I'm not sure that two people (say Alice and Bob) being presented with the same information is enough to ensure that they come to the same assumptions. Even if Alice and Bob have approximately the same priors coming into it,
1. They could have differing update rules. How do they incorporate new evidence into their model of their world? Alice might weight new information much more than Bob.
2. They could just experience the information differently. Alice might see the dress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress) as white and gold, Bob might see it as black and blue. Silly example, but if we can't even agree on something as foundational as color it's possible we could subjectively disagree on more abstract information.
3. What if they just "think differently", but still rationally?. If Alice tends to think in terms of causal descscion theory and Bob tends to think in evidentiary descscion theory, are either of their positions on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox more justified than the other's?
People have different personalities and moral foundations. If something is an issue related to morality or something political, then it is difficult for people to think clearly. Moral reasoning is a complicated process and different views can lead to different outcomes. Political beliefs are built on moral reasoning. Political and moral beliefs inform a lot of thinking about empirical issues like minimum wage and unemployment or climate change. If something is non-controversial, non-moral and non-political, it is easier to agree but intelligent people are still subject to biases.
I think some of it is that people differ in how conformist they are, i.e. if there is an objectively correct viewpoint and a different socially correct viewpoint, equally intelligent people will disagree simply based on different levels of conformity. Another factor is that eureka moments happen randomly.
Aumann's Agreement Theorem describes the broad area you speak of. Here's a pointer to Yudkowsky's essay on the subject, "complete" with some comments/discussions below from the rationalist community:
I'd say that the concept is unrealistic and useless. The profoundly unrealistic part is condensed in these five words: "based on the same information".
On tabula-rasa AIs, maybe. Not on humans.
The "information" based on which you assess situations, has accreted over decades and decades, depending on your age. There's megabits and megabits of such information involved, a significant portion of which can be a factor in how you view and judge any given issue. When you "state" any given issue from your perspective, you might state it with a few dozen bits of information, and you'll be under the illusion that those few dozen bits are "really it", that they fully cover your judgement of that issue, and there can not be any disagreement in the judgement if there's no disagreement upon those few dozen bits of information.
That view is, in almost all cases, false. There will be kilobits, hundreds of kilobits of information that really goes into that judgement which you *think* is fully expressed by those few dozen bits. The other 99% you "naturally take for granted", whereas granted it is not. If you took someone whose judgements you "find illogical" and locked yourself in a mountain hut for a whole week, doing nothing but descent into the differences between all your priors, you might still emerge a week later having covered no more than one percent of the *actual* information space from which your different judgements stem.
Scott's blog - much more so than Yudkowsky's - is the zone where people come to engage in such activities. (minus the mountain hut)
Aumann's Agreement Theorem doesn't require the information be common, only the priors and the posteriors (the differences in posterior being the disagreement). The example he gives at the end of the paper (http://www.dklevine.com/archive/refs4512.pdf) does a good job of showing it -- the parties are exchanging their posteriors, not the actual evidence they used to form it. The common prior assumption is strong, but not as strong as requiring all information to be shared. Some even say common knowledge of rationality is enough to meet common priors (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/prior.pdf) .
As I understand it, the "point" of the theorem is less that rational agents presented with the exact same evidence in total should come to the same conclusion, and more that if you trust that the other agent is rational you should use that when refining your own posterior. It's practical value (which I agree is dubious), is to point you to be more modest in your disagreement if the other agent is honest and rational.
Human intelligence is not really optimized for finding the "correct" view on something - it is optimized for mounting a rhetorical defense of an arbitrary, pre-selected position.
If your social community believes obscure religious idea A, and a neighboring social community believes a contradicting obscure religious idea B, your selection of obscure religious idea to believe will simply be a factor of whether you can to remain a member in good standing with your current community or if you see a benefit to jumping ship to a new community.
In either case, the ability to mount creative and clever arguments for your chosen position will place you in high regard in whichever community you choose to affiliate with, and may even be respected within the rival community in a "worthy opponent" sort of way.
This sort of social game is what human intelligence is optimized for. We are not optimized at all for looking at the world with unbiased eyes and forming an accurate map of the territory, because that sort of behavior tends to make you popular with nobody, and it is only in very recent times that the rewards for seeing clearly may come to be as worthwhile as the rewards for being a member in good standing with the community.
If you are surprise by it, you are running off the wrong theory of rationality/epistemology, because the right theory would predict the facts.That should be obvious, but a lot of the rationalsphere insist on using broken theories ,like Aumanns theorem.
Issues that are sufficiently deep, or which cut across cultural boundaries run into a problem where, not only do parties disagree about the object level issue, they also disagree about underlying questions of what constitutes truth, proof, evidence, etc. "Satan created the fossils to mislead people" is an example of one side rejecting the other sides evidence as even being evidence . Its a silly example, but there are much more robust ones.
Aumanns theorem tacitly assumes that two debaters agree in what evidence is: real life is not so convenient.
Can't you just agree on an epistemology, and then resolve the object level issue? No, because it takes an epistemology to come to conclusions about epistemology. Two parties with epistemological differences at the object level will also have them at the meta level.
Once this problem, sometimes called "the epistemological circle" or "problem of the criterion" is understood, it will be seen that the ability to agree or settle issues is the exception, not the norm. The tendency to agree , where it is apparent, does not show that anyone has escaped the epistemological circle, since it can also be explained by culture giving people shared beliefs. Only the convergence of agents who are out of contact with each other is strong evidence for objectivism
Experts are selected not for accuracy, but for improving our theorizing about a phenomenon. In the long run that should lead to accuracy, but in the short run it's better to have lots of people proposing weird theories like hollow earth, heliocentrism, etc., some of which will be right and most wrong.
I am not sure experts are even selected for that. It seems to me that experts are chosen based on how much they agree with existing experts, or just the relevant prior beliefs of the relevant selection group.
I don't think that's right. You don't become a respected academic by agreeing with everyone - you absolutely *must* say something weird and new. There are definitely limits of the type of weirdness and newness, but someone who just agrees with all the conventional wisdom won't get far.
Not at all. The vast majority of every conference I have attended is made up of papers that poke a little at the edges of what is generally known and find "Yup, what we thought was true is pretty much true", with the caveat that they can demonstrate it at p <= .05.
Now, if you want to be in the top say 5% of a field, you want to try and mix it up quite a bit. That might get you in the door. From that position, you then dictate what "respectable" means.
Further, note that there is a difference between your research conforming to beliefs about what the current state of research is and beliefs about how the world should work. If you are say, Card and Krueger, you can get famous publishing an article that goes against established economic theory, that raising the minimum wage lowers employment, but goes along with the prevailing political (for lack of a better word) beliefs of the academic community, that raising the minimum wage is good and something we should do.
In fact, doing that is a big win because people WANT to believe it. All those academic economists that are ashamed to point out at faculty gatherings that raising the minimum wage probably hurts employment prospects now can merrily join the consensus of the rest of the faculty. Whew! No more cognitive dissonance!
So yea, if you want to be respectable, that is, hold your job and get tenure, you need to toe the damned line. That line is drawn both by what current experts agree is true, and what the group wants to be true. After you get tenured you can maybe afford to get a little weird, but even then you'd better be careful.
*Note* My experiences are from the field of economics, with a little dabbling in philosophy and sociology. The sciences that are farther from politics are possibly not so bad, but any science that suggests what governments should do in some fashion gets corrupted really quickly. Jane Goodall might have some fun stories about how people pushed back against her work, however, and chimp behavior is pretty far from human society. Well, at least in how we apply it.
> even when they are forming opinions based on the same information
That's never the case. There's literally always divergence in information, most often in personal experiences that shaped their reactions and intuitions around certain topics. Couple that with pervasive cognitive bias and divergence in conclusions shouldn't be logically surprising. Much like the unexpected hanging paradox, we're often surprised nonetheless.
This is extra interesting in the case of differences in Protestant theology. We're all working off the same source material, which we hold to be self-consistent and infallible. Most of us will quote identical maxims about taking the text as it stands, not theologizing off experience, etc. We'll even agree about the order of suprency of the books. But consider the Calvinists vs the Lutherans - a tiny (and I do mean tiny) difference in how to weight pure logical consistency vs. our human inability to fully comprehend the Divine, and they wind up disagreeing about a whole slew of things. It's astonishing how much of a divergence small differences can produce.
In my experience, some highly intelligent people develop such a powerful distrust of the intellectually average that they end up a little too self-reliant when it comes to forming opinions about the world, effectively insulating themselves from other people's perspectives and opinions even when those people have far more expertise behind those perspectives and opinions. Meanwhile, smart people are still susceptible to bias. So you end up with some very biased and insulated smart people convinced of really weird ideas, despite having access to the same information as everyone else, because they won't let anybody talk them out of it.
There are a lot of good responses to your question, but I'll also add one other thing to consider. You are looking at the differences, which are sometimes pretty extensive and important. If you looked at the similarities, you may find that even smart people who disagree vehemently on certain topics actually agree on the vast majority of topics. Not too many smart people disagree about the rough shape of the earth, the existence of countries, the structure of the periodic table of the elements, and thousands of other details.
We concentrate on the differences because there isn't that much to say about where we agree. "Argentina is a real country." - "Okay, I agree." That's pretty much our response to tons of random factoids, unless or until we disagree. Scott's Link posts contains lots of cool information and nobody says much about them. When they disagree, it spawns comment threads and that's most of what people will read about the Link posts.
Even in fields where disagreements are notorious, like economics, there is mostly agreement on basic principals and facts. If two "intelligent people" agree on 98% of all relevant facts, it is certainly noteworthy that they could still disagree on conclusions and important details, but I think it's less noteworthy than the fact that they agree on so much in the first place.
Diversity cultivates more broad experimentation, which invites more serendipity. I’m not sure how an evolutionary mechanism would reward that, though. Even if being part of a diverse society helps everyone, the individual payoffs might still encourage convergence. Since we observe divergence, maybe not.
On polygenic screening - a recent article in the Guardian gives some evidence that public opinion (in the UK at least) might be positive towards the broad family of genetic screening. Of course, just one data point, and this is post-natal not embryonic, but I think this is useful for context as there was some speculation about whether the tech would be outright banned.
Of course I could see this going differently in the US vs. Europe.
That's not eugenics, though, because you aren't selecting the babies with the lowest risk; killing the babies with high risk of X gets you arrested for murder.
Another piece of evidence is that in Denmark, almost all mongoloid children are killed before birth. It's difficult to imagine any principled argument against extending this to other serious defects (and then to less serious ones).
I won't ban you for now, because probably you're from Denmark and I don't know how things work there, but in the US this is considered offensive and I'd prefer you use the standard term.
"a recent article in the Guardian gives some evidence that public opinion (in the UK at least) might be positive towards the broad family of genetic screening"
Of course it will be, depending on how the question being put is asked. There's a difference between "do you think we should use genetic screening to prevent Terrible Awful Suffering (insert photo of severely disabled child here)?" and "Do you think we should try breeding the Superman (insert Aryan ideal photo here)?"
People will be very inclined to be sympathetic to "Hi, my name is Jill. I have a family history of Terrible Awful Syndrome. I've seen aunts, cousins, and my granny dying in horrible pain and suffering from this. I am a carrier of the gene for Terrible Awful Syndrome. I want to use polygenic screening so my child can have a happy, healthy, normal life. Won't you help me achieve that?" and photo of appealing mother with bouncing baby at the top of the article.
Who could possibly be against Niceness and Happiness?
Meanwhile, the clinics that are promising parents "we will give you a smart, tall, handsome, Nobel Prize Winner Olympian Tech Billionaire Entrepreneur baby" will not put that into the publicity for the general public, because it sounds too much like the bad name eugenics got from trying to breed the Ubermensch. It will be discreetly mentioned to the potential clients, but worded vaguely enough that it can't be pinned down as a promise.
All the stories and press releases they feed the media will be the "Help Cure Terrible Awful Syndrome" type instead. Public opinion is malleable, and once you have them by the heart-strings, you can get on with the profitable stuff.
I think I agree with you in direction, but not in magnitude of certainty -- while I think it's most likely this will play out with the end state that you narrate, I can see a few paths by which this tech could get banned at a national level. I'd be very surprised if it gets banned everywhere though.
The most obvious path to banning would be if in 5 years' time, 90% of embryo screening products end up being "make your child blonde haired, blue eyed, and high IQ" style products and not the "Terrible Awful Syndrome" treatments as you put it. (I'm phrasing this in a deliberately and hopefully-illustratively inflammatory caricature, I am not trying to smuggle objections to this tech into the argument here.)
I'll stay out of the political rabbit-hole here, and just say that there are permutations of the discretionary genetic engineering product that would trigger pretty much every group with cultural influence. (Speculating: would it be easier to launch non-medical screening services, which don't make any FDA-regulated claims on health? If so, this would seem to make this failure path more likely to happen.)
> It will be discreetly mentioned to the potential clients, but worded vaguely enough that it can't be pinned down as a promise.
I think this is perhaps a bit optimistic. In this day and age I'd expect investigative journalists or twitter to find out about this practice approximately immediately, if there's any substantial access below millionaire and/or upper-class tiers. More concretely, at the prices quoted in the previous article I'd be surprised if it didn't get offered in every IVF clinic in the US; if it's really just +10-20% onto the ticket price it would be strange for this to not see wide adoption. So I think we have to fall back on weighing whether the positive optics of "helping sufferers of TAS" outweighs the negative optics of how this tech will be spun, rather than hoping that the negative interpretations will somehow not be noticed.
Five years down the line, as long as nobody explicitly says "sure, we're aiming for the blue-eyed blond genius market", it will be too late. People will have accepted TAS screening. Any attempts to put a limit on it will be treated the same way any attempts to limit abortion. "So you want to ban this treatment? You want to force women to carry to term children who will only live short, painful lives? You monster!"
Investigative journalists will only investigate if they think they can make a story out of it. The people who will be pro- this technique will be the Blue Tribe, because Science and My Body My Choice and all the rest of it. And investigative journalists are Blue Tribe, too. They would run a story on it if they could spin it as "Republicans for white supremacy", but Red Tribe will probably not be pro- this technique.
Even if such a company wanted to advertise that they had the ability to help select for physical attributes, surely they'd be smart enough to run ads with an interracial couple featuring a word bubble next to a black woman saying "Thanks to SelectCo, I was able to ensure my daughter had hair like mine!"
That's the way to do it; be impeccably woke. Ads with smiling inter-racial same-sex and opposite-sex couples cuddling their cute bundles of joy. Delighted testimony from satisfied customers about how the threat of their family medical history was hanging over them until SelectCo sensitively and caringly helped and advised them. "My wife and I wanted to be sure our child would look like us both", says Jane, "and with SelectCo's patented technology, now everyone tells us our daughter looks just like her moms!"
That SelectCo also helps you pick out the Best Baby along the blond blue-eyed genius route isn't touted openly but the marketing hints at it subtly enough to be deniable, but openly enough that prospective clients get the hint that they can get *exactly* what they pay for.
Assuming the tech works, I don't see that as an obviously worse world than the one we've got, except for generational sneering at people whose parents made obviously fashionable choices.
Since I believe the future will also be silly, there won't just be a blond(e) blue-eyed market, it will be complicated by a substantial "looks like a specific celebrity or athlete" market.
I have no idea whether Simone Biles would make her genetic pattern available, but thinking about it-- I'd be willing to trade my fairly adequate body for her specs assuming that anti-black racism is no worse than it is now and her pattern is generally available so having it isn't a guaranteed win at sports.
My best gymnastics feat was a two-handed cartwheel off a balance beam, and I still remember it fondly. I'd love to know what it's like to go flipping through the air.
A possible thought experiment regarding polygenic screening, gene editing, embryo selection, etc. If someone secretly created a child who was intelligent, physically well or not at risk of cancer with the help of these practices, would those who are opposed be in favor of removing the benefits by way of forced intervention? For example, if a baby was selected for intelligence secretly, would you punish the parents and then give the baby IQ lowering pills? Or if the baby is at lower cancer risk, expose the baby to carcinogens to return to a normal risk level?
Those concerned with "fairness" would have a hard time inflicting harm on an already created being but letting a being come into the world without the benefit of good genes is not recognized as a harm as much. It seems pretty much equivalent morally in my view. I think a consistent "fairness" position would mean that children secretly born with them should be harmed to be more fair. I think that's bad, so it's a good point against prohibiting these things.
The reversal test concerns on deciding what parameter value is the most optimal, and not whether modifying that parameter with a particular method is moral / ethical. For gene editing we all agree that higher IQ value is better (especially since it's a rather small increment), but it's the actual method of obtaining the higher IQ that is controversial. If there was some natural, non controversial way to increase a baby's IQ, I'm sure everbody would be up for it.
In essence nobody is saying that the status quo provides the optimal solution, rather the argument is that the way of modifying the status quo is unacceptable.
The main problem there is that the two obvious anti-eugenics arguments both shrug it off if you actually understand them; Nordmann's right that it's a strawman.
#1: "Tampering with demographics is dangerous unless you know exactly what you're doing; the advantage of the status quo is that it has some proven resilience. Inverting the proposed change is dangerous for the same reason." (Or to put it another way, "status quo 'bias' is not really a bias, but a correction for the risk of unforeseen consequences; it looks stupid in constructed logic puzzles because the brain is designed for the real world and not for constructed logic puzzles".)
#2: "Increasing everyone's intelligence evenly would be good; the issue is with the increased variance that improving *some* people's intelligence would create. Decreasing intelligence selectively would also increase variance, so it's bad for exactly the same reason."
(I'm not saying I necessarily agree with either of these, just saying that this test isn't the sick own Ord and Bostrom seem to think.)
There is also, at this stage, no guarantee that polygenic screening to have the Smartest or Prettiest or Most Athletic baby will indeed produce that, it just increases the chances of such a result. And the unintended consequences may not show up until it's too late; yes, Baby Polly or Baby Gene is Smart, but they also suffer crippling agoraphobia; or they're champion gymnasts because of their hyperflexible joints but it turns out they've also got Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or something down the line that will be the classic "but how were we supposed to know this would happen?"
There *is* a selection - a very stringent one - which is already happening. Even leaving aside the hundred million spermatozoids of which a single one "makes it", there's a stringent selection happening even on the follicular side. Behind the 400 ovulations that a woman is likely to have (for the up to three children that most of them would give birth to), there are millions of original follicules that get trimmed down by "follicular atresia" to the few hundred which ultimately get ovulated.
So there certainly is a selection anyway, it's just that it's a "stohastic" selection, not based on conscious human decisions. And even *this* "natural" selection can turn out quite negative consequences for some (not all) children of the same parental couple.
What's then the problem with humans making the pick of the few children that will really be born, from a scrutinized selection of fertilized ovum? I think that the ethics argument here is more of the "trolley problem" kind - the one where flipping the switch makes *you* the killer of the one person tied to the other track, whereas not touching the switch makes you *not* the killer of the four persons on the original track. (philosophical interpretations differ)
It's not "just" a trolley problem, granted, because we don't really know how many "casualties" lie on which of the tracks. And neither does "nature", although there quite surely is *some* sense in the selections that "nature" makes. The question is when do we become confident enough of our own selection heuristics, to be sure that they will statistically lead to better outcomes than nature's own selection? It's when we do go past that point (as some countries already do with aborting babies with mongoloid disorders), that the trolley problem comes into focus - for the portion where the "provably statistically better" selection still has its flip side in the occasional baby suffering some nasty syndrome, without us having "nature" to blame for it.
Conflating selection on gametes and selection on embryos is completely disingenuous - the problem with most IVF method is not genetic screening, it's de facto abortion of perfectly viable embryos. Genetic screening just add an other reason to abort.
Your accusation of disingenuousness presumes we share certain value judgements, which we quite possibly do not.
My value judgement on abortion is that it's no problem whatsoever if done to a foetus which has no consciousness yet, and atrocious if performed past the point when consciousness has ignited. (the rationale for this is self-evident in my worldview, and might not be self-evident to someone with a worldview sufficiently different from mine)
Whereas I'm >99% sure that a seven-months foetus is conscious, >95% sure that a two-months foetus is not conscious,and 100% sure that a one-month foetus is not conscious.
What's the case for a 3-months foetus? A 5-months one? I *don't know*, and am highly suspicious of anyone who claims to know for sure either way.
From that perspective, aborting a second-trimester foetus (because some medical test detected a serious disorder at that point) might well be an atrocity. Or might not, I'm not sure, but I don't deny the possibility that it might. In contrast, when it comes to the discarding of 19 out of 20 "perfectly viable embryos" -- at that far earlier stage -- I see zero issues with that. They're just a cluster of cells. We're also a cluster of cells but we're not *just* a cluster of cells; we have consciousness. Those embryos do not. "Has the potential to become a conscious human" does not equate to "is one". And this *is* the same for those embryos as it is for a follicule that naturally underwent atresia.
Your value judgements may differ from the above ones, but the stance I had exposed is not disingenious when assessed from my value judgements.
Mostly, the potential for a caste split and permanent underclass a la Draka or Brave New World. Not saying I entirely agree with this (anymore), but that's the boogeyman.
That's addressed by the reversal test though: Should we reduce the variance of intelligence by forcing the most intelligent people to take intelligence-reducing drugs? Or (to correspond more closely to the reverse of the proposed polygenic screening), should we force people who are both intelligent and have rich parents to take intelligence-reducing drugs?
I suppose you're right that it has a reversal, although it's not the strawman one (and also, measurement error and variance in drug response would make a reversal actually quite inefficient; it's much easier to add variance than subtract it). There's also the question of "is 'caste split' a binary or gradient thing, and is it at an improper level now?".
Isn't #1 a universal argument against any change in immigration, emigration or family support policies? Because all those tamper with demographics and at this level nobody really knows what they are doing.
It's a universal argument against policies that change demographics, which isn't quite the same as an argument against a change in policies that affect demographics. The evidence from non-catastrophe is mostly about the state of demographics, not about the state of policies (which could be sending you in the direction of catastrophe and just haven't gotten there yet - fertility collapse + lack of immigration is the obvious case of a policy that works fine for 20-30 years and then sets you on fire).
On the contrary, a consistent "fairness" position is not to punish the child for the stupidity, arrogance, and malevolence of the parents. This is not Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and this argument is not "checkmate, normies!"
To extend your argument to the reductio ad absurdum, not alone should such "secretly cooked up in an IVF lab" babies be "harmed to be more fair", so should all babies and children naturally born with better qualities than the norm. Hence, back to Harrison Bergeron. Nobody wants to do that.
So the argument "well if you wouldn't break the legs of a kid who is good at ballet so they are 'normal', then it's perfectly pip-peachy-pop fine to engage in polygenic screening and destroy the 'defective' - by which we mean no more than 'not the pick of the litter' - embryos to implant one we *hope* will have the desired qualities" falls down on its own grounds. I could equally turn the argument around and ask "say there is a family with four children; of those four, one child is the smartest/healthiest/possesses whatever desirable traits/; are the polygenic proponents are willing to euthanise all the children in a family who do not rise up to the level of the smartest/healthiest child?" because that's what they're doing with polygenic screening.
It moves beyond "this embryo is carrying the genes for a serious, even life-threatening, illness" into "this embryo is capable of developing during a normal pregnancy into an average baby who will grow up to be an average person, it just doesn't have the bestest of the bestest genes by our metrics, so we discard it".
"Fairness" means many different things to many people, but it *usually* doesn't mean punishing children for the crimes of their parents, nor any sort of Harrison Bergeron-style forced "equality". Nor should we want it to.
If I steal a bunch of Pfizer vaccine and go around jabbing a bunch of poor rural Mexican farmers who wouldn't otherwise have been vaccinated until sometime next year, it's probably fair that I should go to jail for theft, but fairness does not demand finding some other disease to expose those poor farmers to so that they won't have an "unfair advantage".
Similarly, *if* we decide that polygenic screening of babies is a bad thing that needs to be prohibited, then we punish the people who *actually do it*. We shouldn't then try to harm the children who may have benefited from this in the name of "fairness".
In neither case does the fact that we're not trying to destroy the benefit that accrued to innocent bystanders constitute an "aha, gotcha!" argument that the people who actually broke the law in the first place have done no harm and that the law is a bad law. There may be a sound argument for that, but you'll have to look for it elsewhere.
"the people who actually broke the law in the first place have done no harm and that the law is a bad law"
That's the main point here. Suppose I have a next door neighbour, Phil. Phil is a horrible person: he terrorises the entire street, he drinks, he's a criminal, he neglects and abuses his spouse and kids, he is a blot on the landscape.
And suppose I get my carving knife and go knock on Phil's door and when he answers, I stab him seventy-six times until he's dead. The world has been improved by Phil's death. His family are much happier, the neighbourhood is much happier, everyone who ever had to deal with Phil in any capacity is much happier.
Am I justified in that? Is the law against murder a bad law? Is it "fair" for me to kill Phil, and if the law doesn't allow me to do that, then the law is preventing an easy solution to improve the lives of many peoples by simply murdering the Phils of this world?
The social contract on murder runs something like: if everyone went around murdering people that they thought were evil, a lot of good people would die, because a lot of people are shit at determining evil, and because people don't like dying there would be an arms race expending large amounts of societal resources on internal conflict. So instead, we have a centralised system for killing/imprisoning evil people, and we don't allow people not authorised by that system to do it themselves. This is not a perfectly-efficient system, but it seems to be one of the better ones, and it seems difficult to carve out an exception for "unless you're really sure this is an inefficiency" without lots of people misapplying that exception.
(Sorry if I'm stating the obvious here.)
In terms of social contract, the first problem with murder kind of applies to abortion, but the second definitely doesn't (zygotes, embryos, fetuses and babies are not capable of meaningfully defending themselves, so legalising killing them cannot result in an arms race).
You may or may not have done a good thing in isolation, if Phil were really horribly bad. But if word gets out that we let you get away with that thing, that's going to encourage a lot of other annoyed people to kill a lot of other "Phils" who aren't actually as bad as Phil was. And the same clever utilitarian logic that you can use to justify murdering Phil, the rest of us can use to justify putting the occasional "innocent" person in prison if the circumstances make it a strong enough deterrent to truly dangerous killers.
Good laws do not have fractal boundaries carefully tailored to prohibit every evil act while allowing every good act within their domain, because that trick never works. Good laws have simple, legible boundaries that sometimes prohibit good acts while allowing evil ones, because those laws can at least work in the real world and result in a better world than the one with no laws.
If we decide that it's a good thing to have laws on genetic screening or engineering of babies, then they're probably going to prohibit some good things while allowing some bad things to go unpunished. One of the bad things that will probably be allowed to stand is that children who are born with what we consider "bad" enhancements, e.g. the Keyzer Soze Polygenic Enhancement Package, will be allowed to keep those enhancements at least until we observe them doing other illegal things.
My cynical view is that we'll get the "camel's nose" version of polygenic screening to soften the public up and get it made acceptable. First will be the "we want to spare parents and babies the Terrible Awful Disease Syndrome so they can have happy healthy lives and not die young in horrible pain". Who could object to that?
Then, once this has become acceptable, the next stage will be: "what's so wrong about selecting the best embryo of the bunch? that only means the chance of a successful pregnancy is increased!"
Again, who could object to that?
And so it goes, until eventually the entire camel is in the tent, and the baseline human is the one outside shivering in the cold night without shelter.
The reversal test is meant to address the objection that polygenic screening would exacerbate inequality by making the children of rich children smarter. It's not meant to address other objections, such as ones based on risk to the children, or on the destruction of embryos.
The objection to your vaccine theft wouldn't be that the Mexican farmers unfairly get a vaccine, but that someone else is deprived of it. The proper reversal of the theft would involve exposing the Mexican farmers to some disease in a way that mysteriously protects whoever would have got those vaccines without the theft from COVID.
On the other hand, the fairness objection to polygenic screening objects solely to some children becoming smarter, without anyone else being deprived of something. (At least directly; some versions of the argument may involve the smarter children outcompeting others for resources.)
Those who make this objection would generally prefer polygenic screening to be unavailable/banned. You say that fairness usually doesn't mean punishing children for the crimes of their parents. But is reducing the child's intelligence to the level it would be in the absence of polygenic screening punishment, while banning the screening in the first place isn't? After all, taking away stolen goods is not usually considered punishment, and it's considered appropriate even when punishment isn't (e.g. if the current possessor, perhaps the child of the thief, was unaware that they were stolen). So the intelligence-reducing pill seems like an appropriate reversal to me.
Granted, some of the objection to the intelligence-lowering pill is to the coercion involved in forcing people to take a drug, rather than to reducing their intelligence in the first place. I can't judge that; I'd consider it monstrous to force them to take intelligence-reducing pills, but I'd also consider it monstrous to forbid people from making their children smarter for no other reason that it's not available to everyone.
The creators of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ran the thought experiment and decided that that the Federation would ban genetically modified humans (no mention of other species) from serving in Starfleet or practicing medicine. In the real world, you could effectively "equalize" the children by forbidding them from obtaining any occupational licenses.
My memory of those episodes is that the ban was because, due to the processes used, the children had a host of mental health and behavioural issues. Yes they were very very smart but they were also very damaged.
If you're talking about Julian Bashir who turned out to be secretly modified, I think the idea of the ban was that (1) genetic modification of this sort was highly illegal (2) in order to join Starfleet, he had to hide his actual medical history (3) the ban was because the process was so dangerous and also because it was an 'unfair advantage', and if Starfleet allowed genetically modified humans then it would be too much of a rationalisation for ambitious parents - "I want my kid to be a starship captain!".
It's more similar to athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs; you may say "this is so outdated a rule, scrap it and let them juice themselves up to the max for entertainment purposes - exactly *how* fast can a human run, how high can a human jump, how much weight can a human lift?" but the downsides are that such drugs exert a price.
The actual reason for the ban was the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s featuring one Khan Noonien Singh. It's about protecting the Federation from God-Emperor Bashir.
By contrast, the Honorverse has widespread prejudice against "genies," but there's no mention of legal disability except on the planet Mesa, where they are bred as slaves. The main character has some subtle modifications that she keeps quiet about, but she's not afraid of losing her job if it gets out.
I feel I should point out that because it's, y'know, a post-scarcity utopia, genetically-modified people aren't exactly starving in the street. The only ones that are institutionalised are the ones that are dangerously insane and/or incapable of normal functioning.
(Also, the procedure as described there is something done as an edit to existing children, not prenatal. This probably explains the failure rate.)
The problem with writing Current Social Problem Morality Tale episodes in skiffy shows is that the premise falls apart once you look at it.
Yeah, the problem was trying to enhance existing children which obviously had bad results, and the ban arising out of the Eugenics Wars (which was the well-intentioned effort of scientists to create supermen and superwomen who would be above the base human follies and would take charge and lead society, which backfired by creating the superior beings who did take charge and lead society - right into wars of conquest against each other) made sense.
But when you look at it - things like Julian's intellectual developmental delay (which was the reason his parents originally sought the genetic enhancement, then his dad got ambitious and went for 'better than normal super-smart version' instead of the 'bring him up to bright average where nobody will pick up he's been enhanced'), or Geordi's blindness, or other problems could and would have been diagnosed in utero and fixed then. Or if the injury happened after birth, then replacement organs could have been grown and used. You'd expect medical science and improvements in education and so on to have gone to the stage where there wasn't a need for childhood meddling with genes or wearing VISORs.
If you ban GMO humans from certain professions, what about their kids? Assume two GMO humans have an unmodified child, but one that inherits their modified genes nonetheless?
If the ban only applies to being modified *directly*, there might appear groups of people who decide to "sacrifice" one generation for the benefit of the next one. Imagine a subculture where every odd generation is genetically modified and every even generation is born naturally (to people from the odd generation), and the people from the even generations pay an extra tax to support their parent generation. -- This would probably be difficult to coordinate, and slow enough for the society to notice this and adjust the laws.
If the ban applies to everyone whose ancestors were genetically modified... then we create a hereditary underclass. Hundred years later the "purebloods" may be a minority that holds all positions of power.
I want to run a survey where I ask people to give confidence estimates on various predictions. A number of these predictions are a of the form: "Which of these mutually exclusive options do you think is going to happen?" I'd like the survey tool to force the sum of those predictions to be 100%.
Google forms, which I used previously for a similar survey, doesn't allow you to do this (as far as I know), does anyone know a good, preferably free, tool that does?
Relative likelihoods is a good suggestion. I'm trying to stick to percentage chance because I think it's more intuitive for a lot of people. Last time I just asked in the question's text that the answers should sum to 100% (which a lot of people ignored) and then normalized everyone's responses, which I think is mathematically the same as asking for relative likelihoods, but is somewhat less elegant.
Guidedtrack indeed looks like it's a little bit too much effort for what I am trying to do.
You could just ask for the probability of all but one of the options, while telling the user that the prediction implies that the probability of the remaining one is 100%-(the sum of the other ones). Although the choice of which one's probability you don't ask could bias users.
That doesn't work if the other options already add up to more than a hundred percent (for instance, if there are four options and somebody just enters 70% for all of them).
In discussions about free will, determinists will say that all particles are subject to the same rules of causality including the ones between your ears. I do not find this convincing because appealing to current knowledge about the physical world would cause us to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure. However, that is absurd because we experience these things directly!
Imagine arguing with an android about the feeling of anger. The android keeps telling you that you are mistaken. You do not experience anything like anger. What happens is electrical signals in your brain and hormones in your body. They make you clinch your fist and squint your eyebrows. The android says that it is merely an illusion that you think you have this experience. The android says that chemicals cannot cause experience because no chemicals in the entire world cause these so-called "feelings." You are merely uttering words that your brain told you to and tricking yourself to think a feeling is real.
This is what it feels like when discussing free will. I experience free will directly. I make choices and the fact that I make choices is the reason I even have a concept of free will to believe in. If I had no experience of anger, I would not conceive of anger. If there was no free will, life would be like a movie. This is conceivable but this is not the present state of affairs. So, why can a bunch of particles create consciousness, emotions and pain but it cannot allow us to have choices?
Many people experience free will in situations in which they do not have it. E.g. the experience of psychokinetic powers is quite common. So I do not think that life being deterministic would imply that life would be experienced as deterministic.
> I do not find this convincing because appealing to current knowledge about the physical world would cause us to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure.
Instead you appel to our current knowledge about how the brain works, which is even more scant. Nothing that we currently know about it would suggest that the subjective experience of consciousness (the perception of free will included) requires anything beyong what our current understanding of physics provides.
The amusing thing about this whole "controversy" to me is that while determinism is almost certainly true, non-determinists have better life outcomes, the "illusion" of free will apparently works better if you don't doubt it. The ultimate irony of the universe.
What about determinism is inconsistent with free will? There's nothing in determinism that says you can't choose X or that you can't consider between X and ~X before choosing ~X. Determinism's premise is that you know the state of a person at a Godlike level of precision, and predicts that *given that state of that person at that time* it's possible to predict their actions.
The concept of free will, before compatibilist redefinition, seems to involve a belief that your choices aren't subject to the laws governing mere matter. That would be inconsistent with determinism (and possibly also inconsistent with physicalism + quantum randomness because being random doesn't really sound like freedom).
But that's not the thing we have experience of. What I experience is that *my* emotions, decisions, intentions, etc. cause some actions, while other behaviors have their causes outside my head. I don't have any experience of whether my emotions are constituted by matter or not.
I mean, that's the sort of questioning one gets driven to by a certain philosophical theory about what free will is. But it's not part of the ordinary conception of freedom as distinguished from compulsion.
> But what causes your emotions, decisions, and intentions? (Ask recursively if needed)
The core of the matter is why those causes are relevant. Free will has become a bit of a grab-bag of all sorts of things, and teasing them apart to make the debate well-defined drives some people crazy because any definition necessarily leaves some of those things out.
The most important matters of free will concern responsibility for choices. Whether your emotions or physical makeup are determined by deterministic processes seems immaterial to the question of whether you are responsible for choices that are driven by that makeup. The deterministic processes may have structured the universe such that you wanted to and did assault someone, but the fact still remains, you *wanted to and did assault someone* and holding you responsible for those actions will reshape how you evaluate your actions in the future.
How that responsibility is ensured is a question of justice.
I should probably elaborate on the scenario "well, what if there's a perfect predictor that predicts your actions, and then upon hearing its prediction you try to defy it?"
The answer is "a predictor which can perfectly predict the result of a process that has access to the predictor's own output is impossible". This is literally the way you prove that the halting problem is undecidable: no finite-time algorithm X can predict whether an arbitrary algorithm completes in finite time, because if there were such an algorithm, I could write an algorithm Y that runs X on Y's own source code (and by assumption this takes only finite time) and then does the opposite of what X said.
And the one who chooses whether its X or non-X that you couldn't have choosen otherwise... is still you. You are still the part of the "circumstances" that makes the decision, event though after you choice have been made, this decision can be marked as "inevitable".
Yes,but so what? That's not an answer to libertarians, because they are not complaining about not being causally involved at all.
Determinism doesn't allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are -
Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn't allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. That additional, non-redundant, sense of control is what would have been required to answer the concern that libertarians actually have.
Just that. For me understanding it helped to resolve my personal struggles with determinism and free will. And I don't think I'm so special that no one else will find this line of thinking usefull.
The probabilities are in the mind. Through our actions in deterministic universe we can affect ours and others probabilistic estimates and we directly cause the future to be the way it is.
I understand the intuitive appeal of the idea that when we are making a choice, we are choosing between different possible futures. But this model seem to be not entierly correct. There are no objective possible futures, they exist only conterfactually in the mind of the one making a choice. But there is still choice. And it's arguably even more important as the thing you are choosing will have turned out to be the only future there is! When I think about it it feels much more fullfiling and a much bigger responsibility.
I notice that I'm confused about this libertarian position. I do not see how it's a coherent idea to control the future without causing it. Can you give an example? What kind of non-deterministic universe would allow such a thing?
But freedom doesn't require that I could have done not-X - it requires only that I could have done not-X *if I had wanted to*. Determinism is perfectly compatible with that counterfactual.
It's fine for compatibility free will and terrible for libertarian free will. Libertarians think they can change their minds, that they are not psychologically determined.
I mean, sure, given the information I had two days ago and my mental state at the time, (according to determinism) it was determined that I wouldn't murder my neighbours and paint the walls with their blood that evening. For one, I didn't even consider the possibility, for two, I avoid murdering innocents, and for three, I'm too lazy to paint the walls with people's blood unless there's some good reason (which did not exist).
What about this would be a violation of my free will? The determination is a *consequence* of my will - it's the ripples from me moving around, not a straitjacket binding me.
Determinism is usually seen as a consequence of basic physical laws. You could argue that there are deterministic psychological laws,that make actions completely determined even if physics isn't. It it doesn't seem prima facie likely, because that would most people experience feeling torn or unable to make up their minds sometimes. And the fact that you definitely would not murder your neighbours doesn't mean there is so me unique other thing you definitely would do.
How is feeling torn or being unable to make up one's mind evidence against determinism? "Person picks X but feels guilty about it" and "person refuses to choose" are valid determinable outcomes.
I was speaking specifically about psychological determinism. If the argument for psychological determinism is that, in any decisions, one desire is overwhelming and defeats the others, then torn decisions are evidence against it.
You seem to be talking from a standard confused perspective on the freedom of will. I'd recommend you read the Solution to Free Will by Yudkowsky https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will
There is an obvious non sequitur in "all particles are subject to the same rules of causality therefore we have to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure". It's a difference between explaning something and explaining something away.
Consider this. When humanity figured out how electricity works, when we understood that no gods throw lightning bolts from the sky, we didn't start to claim that lightnings do not exist. We explained away the gods of thunder but the thunder itself is as real as before, in a sense knowing how a phenomenon actually works makes it feel even more real. The difference between abstract ignorance and detailed schematics of knowledge.
Same logic goes for feelings. When someone claims, for instance, that love doesn't exist because it's mere chemical reaction, they are getting it wrong. On the contrary, Love does exist and we know it because we've pinned down a corresponding chemical reaction, social conditioning, evolutionary history of such adaptation etc. The mystery is explained away. But the real phenomenon is still here.
Here is where your android arguing example falls short. If the android isn't made from straw but is properly programmed so that they are not confused about the matter, they will see that there is nothing to argue about. Android will know how your anger maps to electrical signals in your brain and hormones. They will know that these reactions cause your feelings. That it's simply how the algorith feels from inside. A really smart and curious android may even model these reactions in a simulation in order to experience anger themself.
And the same logic goes for the freedom of will. Bunch of particles do allow us to make choices in a completely deterministic universe. We may not know the exact mechanism of our decision making but we can extrapolate well enough from the way chess program makes its decisions. Can you even imagine in good details how it can be the other way around? Suppose we live in non-lawful, non-deterministic, non-predictable universe. How can we possibly plan and make choices there?
While it's true that we haven't completely reduced consciousness to matter yet, it's just a technical problem. All the required philosophy to understand the process in broad terms and get rid of the majority of confusion is already done. Just as heat and motion are not some different entities united by bridging laws, same is with chemical activity of the brain and qualia.
Also I don't think that qualia are very relevant to the problem and solution of freedom of will.
I'm sorry, I have troble parsing your comments charitably here.
Shouldn't you at first make a claim in favour of qualia being relevant to the discussion before I'm obliged to argument against it? Burden of proof and all that. So why do you think that qualia are relevant here?
Also is your second comment just an appeal to authority, pointing out that there are some high status individuals who disagree? It's not that philosophy is an effective market optimized for figuring the one true approach to the problem. Rather than it's more of a document all possible perspectives.
"Shouldn't you at first make a claim in favour of qualia being relevant to the discussion before I'm obliged to argument against"
It's a completely standard claim in contemporary philosophy.
"Also is your second comment just an appeal to authority, pointing out that there are some high status individuals who disagree"
It's an attempt to parse "philosophy is deconfused". It turns out not to be a claim about philosophy as a whole , but rather about your favourite school. But multiple schools of philosoohy claim to have solved everything.
If there really is an off-the-shelf set of bridging laws relating qualia to electrochemical activity, then qualia aren't much of a problem. But there isn't.
The Ancient GeekWrites RationalityDoneRight·just now
"Just as heat and motion are not some different entities united by bridging laws, same is with chemical activity of the brain and qualia."
We don't actually have the bridging laws for qualia. If you could supply some, that would be worthy of a Nobel -- solving the hard problem on its own terms. Otherwise, its nothing special to say they *will* exist, or *should* exist
We can't predict biology, or superconducting, or economics either, and yet all of those things clearly exist. Some would say we can't even predict molecules or water either, because our theories of those things are so woefully incomplete as well.
Some would say that in some cases we have enough in the way of bridging laws to make reducibility plausible even if it is also computationally intractable...and in other cases we don't.
David Hume in "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" (1748), discussing free will (which he refers to as "liberty") and determinism (which he refers to as "necessity"):
"But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science; it will not require many words to prove, that all mankind have ever agreed in the doctrine of liberty as well as in that of necessity, and that the whole dispute, in this respect also, has been hitherto merely verbal. For what is meant by liberty, when applied to voluntary actions? We cannot surely mean that actions have so little connexion with motives, inclinations, and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other, and that one affords no inference by which we can conclude the existence of the other. For these are plain and acknowledged matters of fact. By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains. Here, then, is no subject of dispute."
Hume's position is that our will is the product of various sentiments, for instance love, avarice, etc. These sentiments are generated deterministically, and are entirely predictable - the whole point of getting to know someone is you learn what sentiments drive them and how those sentiments typically interact. To the extent that behavior is unpredictable, it is simply because the interaction of sentiments is complex and our understanding is imperfect. But nonetheless, people are generally predictable.
Hume then says that "liberty" (his term referring to free will) is simply when a person's will, the product of their sentiments, is the causal force behind their actions. Hume even suggests that non-deterministic behavior would, indeed, simply be random, and would be therefore disconnected from the will and the sentiments, and therefore not the product of a person's will.
You don't even have to appeal to reductionism to conclude that the concept of "free will" is at least a little confused. The relevant question here is what is the "will".
Is it a system of rules, whereby you are a consistent person who will act according to some values or functions, however internal, opaque, and unknowable, that factor in your internal state and the external state and make a conclusion? If it is entirely this thing, then your will is deterministic; it may merely be the case that the rules by which your will is determined live entirely inside your own head. You may at best be unpredictable by any outside agency, or even yourself, but you are still following some rules of causality, no matter what sort of rules they are.
Is it something random, which breaks the rules? Well, unless that rule-breaking is itself rule-governed - shaped by your own values, choices, etc. discussed above - then it really can't be meaningfully _you_ doing the breaking of the rules. If you act with total randomness, then yes, your actions are not determined, but you are no more "free" than a coin toss is typically considered "free". You've delegated your decisions to randomness.
Is it some combination of the two? Perhaps a decision (conscious or otherwise) about when to use randomness (e.g. "if X, I will do Y, but if X', I will flip a coin to decide whether to do Y or Y'"), or a random distribution shaped by the facts about your mind (e.g. "if X, I will do Y0 with 10% probability, Y1 with 30% probability, or Y2 with 60% probability")? Well, we've shown that the two components - making a decision causally determined by the state of your mind and some processes embedded in it (determinism), and making a decision without at all causally consulting the state of your mind and its rules (randomness) don't lead to something we might reasonably identify as "free will".
The only difficulty in reconciling reductionist, physicalist determinism and conscious experience that I know (disclaimer: I am no form of expert) of is that we don't know exactly how particles moving around in a certain configuration we call a brain produces conscious experience, or what a "conscious experience" is in terms of particles and fields and the like (though this is a gap in our present knowledge, not a declaration of incompatibility with our current paradigm, any more than our lack of knowledge of the number of planets orbiting the star Icarus (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/hubble-uncovers-the-farthest-star-ever-seen) is a failure of the fundamentals of astrology). But that is not a challenge for the demonstration that "free will" is a confused concept, and would still be even if the human mind consisted of homunculi made of phlogiston calling out to each other over the luminiferous aether.
"appealing to current knowledge about the physical world would cause us to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure."
I don't understand. Why does current knowledge of the physical world cause us to reject these things? It doesn't cause me to reject the existence of an undiscovered beetle species in Cuba, even though beetles play no more role in physics than emotions do. These are just putative higher level things that we haven't yet found direct physical correlates of.
1. Some people do, eg. Dennet. 2.Theres nothing in physics that implies the existence of any kind of subjectivity. If everything is physical, everything should be objective.
3. Its not "more of the same" in the sense that yet another beetle is just a beetle , and not something sui generis.
Determinism and free will aren't mutually exclusive. (You may have heard of a position called "compatiblism", and that's what this is.) I agree that we have free will that has causal effects upon the world - the mental affects the physical. But we also don't see the violation of any laws of physics when we make decisions and act upon them - only the physical can affect the physical. Therefore, the mental must be physical.
I get the feeling that most people talk past each other on this topic. And although it seems important, actually nothing is at stake. Determinists have sometimes tried to apply it to make an argument against punishment, but these seem weak. That is, the effectiveness of punishment is an empirical issue, and we should abolish it or double down depending on what evidence we have for it working, not on an a priori argument. If punishing robots makes the robots work better, then punish, and if not, don't. If we're not robots, it’s still an empirical issue.
What practical result follows from a position on free will?
The only practical argument I know of uses determinism to attack the idea of punishment, as in, if my actions are determined, it makes no sense to punish me for them. But this seems wrong, since determinism does not preclude the possibility that punishment could influence my behavior, could be part of the deterministic causal mechanism. Further, this is a moral objection to punishment, not a practical one. If determinism is true, what is the significance of moral objections to anything? If determinism is true, how do moral objections matter? I guess that is determined, too.
I wasn't alone in thinking this was an overly optimistic prediction. Yet SpaceX seems to be making steady progress towards that end. The first flight of the full stack is likely to be suborbital for safety reasons and is planned to take place in the next few months. It's not inconceivable that starship reaches orbit by the end of the year.
Wait, is discussing the previous post political or not?
Wanted to discuss this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eugenics/ and how most people's views on this board seem to be matching 2.3 (Obligations to Enhancement) and 2.3.2 (Social Good Maximization).
Though I guess I can't technically talk about what my opinion would be, it's kinda comforting (not really), to see that the moral arguments have all been had before.
I mean, at the very most you should only be upset with subscribers for their response or lack thereof to a subscriber-only post, no? Surely I can't disgust you by failing to have an opinion on something I've never seen or heard of.
I find the pearl clutching transparently disingenuous. I am not Deiseach defender, but she obviously meant the KYS as an insult, not a literal suggestion. She meant KYS as literally as jstr meant 'GFY'. Now even so, that kind of comment is below the bar of SSC commenting, so perhaps deserves a minor temporary suspension; but then 'GFY' probably also falls in this category and should also receive a suspension.
I read the chain, and it certainly read to me as you being disingenuous. Thus, I enjoyed watching @Deiseach rough you up a bit. I never got the impression she was telling you to kill yourself, and think that that impression is difficult enough to reach from a natural reading of the thread that I, again, think you're being disingenuous. Both there and here, you seem to be histrionically and intentionally misunderstanding things for a perceived rhetorical advantage.
If you're not doing that, then I'm sorry. But that's genuinely how this reads to me. Based on the reactions, or lack thereof, I'm guessing I'm not alone in that interpretation.
If your reactions, there and here, are genuine, well, I don't know what to say. Text flattens out context, I suppose.
Wait, hang on, I recall a comment by Deiseach a while back about being a man working in a female-dominated field. You sure you got your pronouns right?
Well holy hell. I honestly have no idea how I got that impression. As much as I've tried to root out my own biases I guess there's still some hanging on? Or maybe I just totally misinterpreted something you said.
Oh, no problems here! You're not the first to mistake my gender (or is it sex?); I've often been mistaken for a man online and in those "is your prose style more like a man or a woman writer? test it here!" online quizzes.
Perhaps it is my, um, robust argumentative style or maybe I should blame it on internalised male voice when writing due to lack of sufficient exposure to diverse and inclusive women writers at an impressionable and formative age? 😀
I suppose such takes should make me more sympathetic to the trans issues, but in fact I think I find them to have the opposite effect; some of the popular arguments on that topic seem to present a simplistic "boys are blue, girls are pink; boys are snips and snails and puppy dog tails, girls are sugar and spice and everything nice" view of gender/sex, hence if a boy likes pink or a girl engages in what are traditionally masculine-coded interests, they may/must be trans and Steps Must Be Taken To Affirm Them As Such.
I'm influenced by the older school of feminism which was "so what if a girl likes dump trucks or a boy likes baking? that doesn't make one butch or the other effeminate!" Boys can like girl things, girls can like boy things, they're all human things! They say nothing about gender or sexuality.
Interesting stuff. By coincidence I had looked into the idiom a couple months ago. Weird how we can use and understand these expressions with no clue to their literal meaning. Language is a lot of fun Right up there with math for me
For what it's worth (and I'm uncertain, actually, what this is worth to you), despite the occasional commentary flippancy that swoops close enough to my trans fiancee that I'm attempted to throw beer in your face, I generally appreciate your insights and have never considered your comments ban-worthy. Maybe worth a night in the small town jail for being a public nuisance.
Thank you for the supportive comment. All flung items (beer, vegetables, shoes) received gratefully and will be donated to a charity of your choosing.
As one of the parties in the dispute, I think I should not comment on the whole matter. I intend not to engage with jstr any further in any context. I am not going to litigate this in a comment thread, as that is a great way to start a row going (and for once, that is not what I want to do). The next step is up to Scott, if he wishes to examine jstr's complaint.
Beer in the face? Okay, now I’m paying attention. Small town jails? Ah, they’re not so bad. I’m not seeing anything beyond the pale here, but then I was born and raised in the US version of beyond the pale. Hold my beer. This is getting interesting.
Same here, which is probably why I'm not flustered by Deiseach's flippancy. Took me some time to learn Pale etiquette. I'll never forget getting in trouble at school for spitting.
You sure you want me to hold your beer? It might get flung at someone.
Hey Scott, I don’t know if you know who Paul Skallas is but he’s plagiarized some of your writing on his substack. The NY Times did a profile on him a few weeks ago (he’s the Lindy effect guy) so I checked out his sub stack and he’s been lifting entire paragraphs from other writers. He plagiarized your writing about new atheism here: https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/new-american-identities-part-3
I haven’t read an article by him that doesn’t include copy/pasted content from other writers. It’s actually insane that he’s been getting away with this…..
Atheism is age-old, but Internet atheism was its own thing. The term "New Atheism", while not officially restricted to the Internet, tries to capture a sense that a more strident grassroots atheist movement formed around the beginning of the Information Age, and not unrelated to it.
New Atheism dominated a certain type of Internet discourse from its murky beginnings all the way until the early 2010s. During its golden age, it produced a dizzying array of atheist blogs, webcomics, videos, websites, and spaghetti-monster-themed merchandise. Its celebrities - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc - travelled the globe, preaching a message that atheism vs. religion was the ur-conflict that fueled all other conflicts, the single most important thing to get right. Hitchens was "absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion and organized religion...absolutely convinced of that".
Then it all collapsed - gradually enough that it was hard to notice at the time, but suddenly enough to be startling in retrospect.
[Graph of "Atheism on Google Trends"]
Its death did not mark the triumph of its arch-enemy, religion. People were just as atheist as before, maybe more so. They just all suddenly agreed it was stupid to talk about it and anybody who did was a fedora-wearing euphoric loser. …
——————————————————————————————
From Skallas's essay linked in the above comment (with the copied passages >marked thus<; archived at https://archive.is/qEO2y ):
——————————————————————————————
Remember Internet Atheism?
[The same graph of "Atheism on Google Trends"]
One of the cheaper ways to engage in identity diversification is to go online and post content. It’s free. And since people are afraid to post under their real name for fear of repercussions from their job they create an anonymous account. Free of the shackles of any reputation harm, they post whatever they like or cluster into different groups. Which is probably different than the groups or things they say in real life. Which is why some social media platforms are both funny but horrifying at the same time. One of these early trends people clustered into was internet atheism.
New Atheism was a movement that sprung up in 2004, led by prominent authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. For them, religion was just a protoscience — our first attempt at biology and history and physics. These celebrities>- travelled the globe, preaching a message that atheism vs. religion was the ur-conflict that fueled all other conflicts, the single most important thing to get right. Hitchens was "absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion and organized religion...absolutely convinced of that.”<
This movement coincided with the rise of social media so it >dominated a certain type of Internet discourse from its murky beginnings all the way until the early 2010s. During its golden age, it produced a dizzying array of atheist blogs, webcomics, videos, websites, and spaghetti-monster-themed merchandise.<
[Picture of man in fedora with "The God Delusion" in background]
>Then it all collapsed<. >Its death did not mark the triumph of its arch-enemy, religion.< >They just all suddenly agreed it was stupid to talk about it and anybody who did was a fedora-wearing euphoric loser.<
What they didn’t realize is that Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: they both take religion too literally.
Instead, atheism merged with a broader version of modern mainstream internet culture. Which includes scientism, amongst other trends.
——————————————————————————————
These passages appear to have been sloppily copy-pasted: the "author" didn't even check that they completely made sense in their new context, e.g. he needlessly kept the hyphen before "travelled the globe, preaching…" and copy-pasted "They just all suddenly agreed…" without the referent of "they".
There are comments here and there about specific instances of his plagiarism, but it looks like the NYTimes didn't know about it and that no one's pointed out the full extent of it. His writing style is so distinct (in a bad way) that it is incredibly jarring and obvious when he is suddenly lifting paragraphs from other people. And, like Michele, I've not seen an article yet that didn't have easily "googleable" plagiarism.
“Before the modern era, food availability was unpredictable and highly irregular. Drought, war, insect infestations, and disease…” is from Jason Fung’s book on fasting.
He also copies a bunch from David Sinclair’s book Lifespan.
He steals a bunch from Slate Star Codex (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/bach.html), one example being “Humans started becoming more than just another species of monkey when we started transmitting culture with high fidelity. Humans evolved big brains in order to be able to maintain cultural-adapted practices (like making a fire). Everything that separates us from the apes is part of an evolutionary package designed to help us maintain this kind of culture, exploit this kind of culture, or adjust to the new abilities that this kind of culture gave us.”
I read that NYT article and the guy sounds like one of the canny hucksters who make a Brand out of one notion or idea or concept (e.g. Chicken Soup for the Soul). He did it with Lindy, which he did not originate but picked up from someone else (hmm, sounds like we have a pattern here!)
He's churning out his own little Lindy Line O' Self-Help but why the NYT decided it was worth running a piece on him, I have no idea. Desperate for filler material?
Also, the article has one of his tweets where he is acting superior to Catholics (do I detect Greek Orthodox bias at work here, if we're talking vegan Great Lent?) and I'm going to take that as a challenge: yeah Mr. Skallas, talking about "picking and choosing", how about the commandment about theft? Don't steal the work of other people!
"I've been informed catholics "give up" twitter for lent.
You can pick and choose what you give up?
Because I have to go vegan for 40 days in lent. Part of the lindy serial cycling diet that is beneficial to human health and is an ancient tradition.
He probably picked up the Lindy concept from Nassim Taleb (who, IIRC, didn't invent it either), but he is pretty open about that (he said on a recent podcast(?) that he started out as an "NNT reply guy"). I never thought of Skallas as a particularly important voice, but I would not have expected him to plagiarize text.
All of us have asked ourselves why the NYT has singled him out for promotion. I suspect they wanted to hop on the based/alt-lite bandwagon with one foot at least (for all its wokeness, the NYT still has an ambition of covering all important cultural currents, and this kind of FOMO occasionally wins out; see also Ben Smith's cancel beat), and found him to strike the proper balance between acceptable and interesting (not to mention that for certain reasons lost to ancient history, a lot of the most interesting people won't talk to the NYT).
The NYT isn't one single-minded entity. I'm pretty sure the reason Paul Skallas was "singled ... out for promotion" was that Ezra Marcus (a fellow at NYT and not a full hire, so he's not even with them anymore) really liked Paul Skallas's Twitter account. Ezra Marcus may be into the "based/alt-lite bandwagon", but I think he packaged Paul Skallas in such a way that the editors of the Style section didn't consider Paul to be "based/alt-lite", instead he came off as smart, quirky, and concerned with the negative health effects of modernity, i.e. the perfect person to have a bio in the Style section.
I would guess that Ezra Marcus has seen Paul Skallas's offensive tweets. My guess is that the editors hadn't. I also guess that neither Ezra Marcus nor the editors were aware of Paul Skallas's plagiarism.
I've been over-abstracting the NYT, but sure I'm aware that it's not single-minded; the point still stands:
1. The (loosely defined) neo-trad/based community (the word "alt-lite" is probably suboptimal, as it can mean several different things) is on the rise online and exerts a cultural pull that NYT editors are not good at withstanding even though it goes against the grain of much of their staff.
2. However, none of the really colorful and influential personalities can be interviewed by the NYT (because they have shitlisted the NYT and/or their presence would cause a moral panic among the staff).
=> Someone relatively insignificant and milquetoast ends up being the proxy avatar of the movement for the readership of the NYT.
Note that I'm not viewing this as bad or good, just observing the behavior like a media entomologist.
I understand you're being sarcastic, but it is worth knowing that the article was written by one of their fellows (it's kind of like a one year internship) and was written for their "Style" section. So, the journalist who did it was probably less interested in writing something substantial and more interested in a lighthearted, quirky piece.
That said, I still think it's weird to write an article about a guy without either the journalist or editor ever reading any his articles (or if they did read them then I think it's weird they didn't pick up on his broken English mixed with obvious plagiarism).
Questions which close early give out the same amount of reward as questions which close late. This incentivizes pumping up the probabilities that an event will happen at the beginning, because if the event happens the question closes early, you get a lot of points, but if the event doesn't happen, your score for those early predictions is averaged with your better predictions over a larger period of time.
Thanks! Maybe I missed it, but I think you may be missing one factor. If the odds of the question resolving Yes over 52 weeks is 10% uniformly over the period, then the odds of that Yes resolution within 2 weeks should be .1*(2/52). It looks like you weight that expectation correctly for the No scenario but for Yes consider the odds to be .1 instead of .1*(2/52).
Young talents are consistently undervalued globally, but even more so in the Old Economy. I write about what it means to be a Rebellious Intellectual Curious Hustler, and how these talents fare in the Old Economy. https://www.jack-chong.com/newsletters/newsletter-5/
I think you’re missing out on the concept of variance. SV is built on the model of taking 50 bets, having 40 fail outright, 7 break even, 2 moderate successes, and blockbuster hit.
Young people have higher fluid intelligence and lower crystallized intelligence (you can reframe that as wisdom or judgment if you want). That makes betting on them a high variance strategy. Most of the time conventional wisdom is correct and the hotshot contrarian will fail miserably. But sometimes it’s wrong and no one has noticed yet. That’s where the blockbuster wins come in.
So it’s not that the old economy is run by a bunch of prejudiced fools and the new economy is run by a more enlightened group of people, rather it is just that they are pursuing different, valid strategies.
I am interested in doing some traveling internationally with a family of four (I am from the US). Ideas for places to visit? Here are our constraints/interests:
- Must have cheap cost of living. We would like to be able to stay for several months, renting a house/apartment and buying groceries, rather than living in hotels and dining from restaurants. (though, if eating from restaurants/streetside vendors is cheaper, or at least offsets the costs of having a kitchen, we'd do that too)
- Must be safe enough that I can take 6- and 10-year-old kids with me. We're probably fine in uncomfortable/unusual situations, but I just don't want to be somewhere where there's a decent chance of violence or kidnapping.
- Should have vegetarian food options easily available.
- I speak English natively, Spanish at a somewhat awkward conversational level, and can probably get to awkward conversational level of another language in the 6-12 months before we travel.
- We don't intend to be doing lots of touristy things or sightseeing, but would like there to be some nice natural environments for us to enjoy.
- Should have a culture that is friendly to foreigners, even if we're outside of main tourist hubs. (Not sure exactly what the failure of this would like, but perhaps, e.g., people giving me a hard time about being clueless and not having much grasp of the local language)
- I'm imagining we'd be traveling in winter, but could change our travel time based on when would be best to visit.
So yeah, pretty broad. Just want to spend time away from home, explore a new culture, enjoy nature. I'd love to hear your suggestions (even if they don't particularly fit my constraints!)
---
So far, I have heard the suggestions: Thailand, rural parts of first-world countries generally, and European Mediterranean during offseason. I also came up with Peru as an option... my son is interested in the Amazon. My other son is interested in seeing pyramids, and Incan ruins seem more feasible than Egyptian pyramids. But it doesn't actually look like things in Peru would be that cheap... the tourist-y things like visiting Macchu Picchu or getting an Amazon tour seem quite expensive, and cost of living still seems to be severalfold that of a place like Thailand. So if anyone has specific experience traveling in Peru or elsewhere in South America, I am curious.
Found https://livingcost.org/cost could always start at the bottom of the country list and work up. A lot prob. depends on major city vs not and if living as a typical expat vs. more of a local. Inspirations from that list: A secondary city in India perhaps? Argentina (particularly outside of Buenos Aires)? Brazil is quite low on their list, maybe something in the south outside of Sau Paulo (which is quite expensive as an expat at least) and Rio (but close enough to visit them).
My first thought before looking at that list was Costa Rica, Ecuador and Nicaragua (which on that list all beat Thailand, but then on that list so does Peru) which certainly can be cheap (for Costa Rica requires being outside the main touristy areas but the country is small enough that's not a huge impediment).
Ecuador? They use the US dollar, and Ingapirca isn't the tourist trap that Macchu Picchu has become. At least when I was there ten years ago, I got lunch at Ingapirca for 1.50 $, and the hotel in Cañar was 12 $ a night. Of course, it might have changed somewhat, I don't know (e.g. in Quilotoa they've been building a lot), but I presume prices are low due to corona.
Safety: Take your usual precautions. I never had a nasty experience in Ecuador so far. But the sierra and oriente is generally safer than the costa. Avoid especially the north coast (Esmeraldas) and the huge cities (Guayaquil, Quito -- depending on the neighborhood, of course).
Usually the food is not really vegetarian, but you should get something if you ask for it. E.g. order llapingachos without the chorizo, or volquetero without the tuna.
Awkward conversational Spanish is a must. Many don't speak English. But their Spanish is much more understandable than that of Spain, for example.
Nice natural encironments, lots and lots. The sierra (volcanoes, mountain lakes) and oriente (trees) are breathtaking. Well, the latter I haven't penetrated any further than Rio Verde and El Puyo, but those are already great.
People are very friendly to foreigners. In the bakery in Ambato, they used to call me the "gringito". On the markets, they might charge you a little higher if you look foreign, but they will be friendly. In the touristy places (Baños, Otavalo) there might be more people trying to interest you in a purchase than in the slightly less exciting towns of Latacunga, Ambato or Riobamba. But they're never as obnoxious as some people you might meet in Havana.
Travelling in winter is good, that is mango season. The weather doesn't change very much around the year, but July is a bit colder than January.
From Scott's earlier blog, scenes when he was in India. Tl;dr: lots of aggressive panhandling, selling, attemts (sometimes successful) to scam and rob. I've no personal experience, but it could be an issue in any very poor country where you obviously look like a (comparatively) rich foreigner.
As for you dreaming question, I guess I missed it. In the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism there are exercises to take control of ones dreaming (what psychologists in the West call active dreaming). I've not read the texts that describe this praxis, but I've been told that they focus on two things: visualization and interaction with meditation deities (that one can generate in one's own mindstream), and the accessing meditational states while in your dreams. I'm not sure if any of these texts have even been translated into English from the Tibetan, but Robert Thurman gave an interesting lecture on practicing the Dharma while sleeping. The Tibet House (in NYC) website used to post these lectures, but I'm not sure if they're still up there.
In Nahaut shamanism, one learns to access to, and to move about in, one's dreams in dream world called Tlalocan. Tlalocan is a name that European anthropologists have translate as the "underworld", but it's only an underworld as far as it's something underneath consciousness. At least that's how one of my Anthropologist friends described it to me. Although Nahuat practitioners dream the get to it by going down a cave (Alice in Wonderland, anyone?). Timothy J. Knab has written about his personal experiences with this form of shamanism, and he's also written an academic summary of practices and the underlying beliefs.
What's interesting to me, as someone who's tried to actively control my dreaming, is that without even trying I experience a landscape full of cities, forests, farms, and rivers. After reading Knab, I realized that the layout of my dream landscape corresponded quite closely with layout of Tlalocan that Knab describes. While in my one personal dream landscape, I frequently interact with the same dream people (entities? dream constructs?) who live in the various cities and houses that I can visit over and over again in my dreams.
Also, another fun exercise (if you're an active dreamer, that is) is to find another active dreamer, and try to dream about each other in your dreams. I tried to do this several times over the years with people I've been simpatico with (lovers and good friends, who have mystical bent) without success. However, recently I had an unintentional dream about former lover whom I had lost contact with. A week later I got an email from her, saying she had dreamed about me (she apologized for not reaching out sooner, but she had had to get may current email address from a mutual friend). Anyway, I said, that's funny I had a dream about her the past week. I said that in our dream we walking around Paris (though the dream city looked nothing like Paris). She concurred that she was with me in Paris in her dream, too. So, ESP? It may be a coincidence because we had both spent time in Paris. But I found that the whole experience sent chills down my spine. ;-)
Once upon the time somewhere on the interweb I've run into a list of something like "100 useful concepts" containing things like "Explore / exploit trade-off" and the like that most people here will be mostly familiar with. Recently I wanted to look at it in case I'm missing something interesting, and it turned out I didn't bookmark the page and the name is completely ungooglable. Probably because my recollection isn't very clear, it could've been "50 important notions" or anything like that.
Anyone here knows what I'm talking about? I think some standard fallacies and biases and probably nash equilibrium were also on the list, but the only thing I remember certainly is "explore / exploit trade-off". And afair it was not on any resource explicitly associated with ratiosphere, definitely not on LW or SSC.
I'm planning a trip to London, mainly to see some friends. What should I do/see when I'm over there? Anything that this community finds particularly cool? Doesn't have to be in London.
I would definitely visit The British Museum, The National Gallery and Westminster Abbey. These are all top tier in my opinion.
Some other nice places to visit: Churchill War Rooms, Science Museum,
Royal Air Force Museum (quite a bit away from the center, but fairly easily reachable with public transport).
Some places to admire from the outside: Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament (keep in mind that much of the nice stuff is close together near the center, so be sure to just plan some time to admire the views, rather than rush between locations).
The Tate Modern has a nice rooftop patio that complements a walk along the South Bank. It's free to enter so feel free to skip the (incredibly weird) art if that's not your thing.
It's very pleasant to wander through Regents Park (much nicer than Hyde) then spend some time in Camden Town. Another great "nature" experience is Kew Gardens.
If you like Indian food, Brick Lane is quite an experience - not the best curry in the UK, but worth exploring. Quite a few nice bars in the Spitalfields area as well.
I'll second Aapje's recommendation for the British Museum, even if you can only spare 2-3 hours to see the highlights. Tickets are free, but you need to book online in advance.
Overall most things are within walking distance and there is so much to see on the way, so pack some decent walking shoes. Underground maps are deceptive about distances between stops, so check distances in Google before you pay for a tube to take you two blocks. On a similar note, the tube is fairly expensive, and if there are a few of you it's often cheaper to take a taxi (and I assume Uber is even more cost effective these days).
Main thing to remember is that you're never going to see everything in one trip, so just wander around and enjoy the atmosphere.
Probably extremely minor anecdote: When I was biking, the phrase "Scott Anderson" suddenly appeared in my head, and I spent at least ~five minutes trying to figure out who this person was before realizing that the name was a mashup of the author and "Scott Aaronson".
Before Scott revealed his real name, it was still floating around the internet. In order to counteract that, a few people said his real last name was "Scott Alexander Aaronson" as a misdirection.
Some folks in this thread might be interested in my own Substack, which is a weekly dive into tech policy issues, studies, and then a long read on a topic. This week I wrote on platform legibility channeling the work of James C Scott and Neil Chilson: https://exformation.substack.com/p/every-way-of-seeing-like-a-platform. Here is the key point: "[L]egibility is a fraught project, where slippage occurs and information doesn’t properly capture reality. Similarly, platforms are collecting information about individuals to understand them, but it is not perfect. Illegibility exists." Let me know what you think!
Do geothermal power plants raise the Earth's surface temperature? The answer might sound like an obvious "Yes, " but it's not so clear to me.
The Earth's core and mantle are hot, and some of that temperature makes it all the way to the surface and radiates into space. If God snapped his fingers and made the Earth's interior 20°C, then the soil under your feet would get slightly colder.
So, if a geothermal power plant is built, it moves heat from near the mantle to the Earth's surface. The machinery at the power plant gets very hot as a result. However, the ground beneath the station also gets colder.
If the machinery gets 50 degrees hotter, but a larger amount of land around it gets 1 degree cooler, then geothermal power plant should have no net effect on local surface temperatures.
I thought geothermal plants drew heat from far below the surface. If so, they're heating up the plant (which is on the surface), and the place that's getting cooled down is far away from the surface.
In the long run, though, the Earth's internal heating power is fixed (it's largely due to radioactive decay, which is an essentially-unalterable exponential process).
The real answer is "it doesn't matter anyway". Earth's internal heating is 44 TW (and mankind's total electricity consumption is something like 20 TW), while insolation delivers 174 PW. Outgoing longwave goes up as the fourth power of temperature; removing (or, equivalently, doubling) Earth's internal heating wouldn't even shift surface temperatures by 0.1 degree Celsius (at least in the short-term; in the long-term there's an indirect effect as internal heating drives plate tectonics which put CO2 back into the atmosphere which affects the insolation/longwave balance).
Why would one assume a geothermal plant would introduce more heat into the atmosphere than any other steam turbine power plant, considering the heat is more or less proportional to the electricity generated?
sounds super interesting :)
Long thread on Maimonides, rationalism, and religion. https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1410612795712802822
Love to read about Maimonides. But on Twitter? Thank you very much, but no.
In that case read Moshe Halbertal’s amazing book
Thanks Zohar
Life and Thought or Law and Mysticism?
life and thought
Arrived today. Diving in now. Thanks for the tip.
Thankfully there are ways to make Twitter readable e.g. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1410612795712802822.html
That's some good nominative determinism, Zohar.
I'm toying with the idea of starting a blog. I feel this community, for good or ill, knows what I have to offer and how I write. I'm curious if there's any thoughts as to: First, what people would be most interested in me talking about. Secondly, stylistic or delivery advice that people would like to see. Thanks in advance!
Ghost and Substack are both fine and easy to use and you can add monetization on either later if you want or keep them free. I say go for it.
Thanks. I'm not so worried about platforms. I more meant user experience or stylistic preferences. Or any particular topics.
I've been blogging[1] for... geez probably over a decade now and basically I do a couple of things:
1) Professional progress updates (I'm a game developer so I post monthly progress reports for a game I'm working on)
2) Analysis pieces on trends (again in the games industry)
3) Anything that I want to be able to put into one authoritative work and then be able to link to people from then on
4) I often use twitter, forums, or blogs as "rough drafts" for an article. They say the best way to get correct information on the Internet is to post wrong information, and all that. After I've felt out an idea and gotten a bunch of feedback and corrections to obvious mistakes I blogify it.
5) I have an academic background so I had to slowly work my way out of that style (never use the word "I", lean too much on passive voice) into a more informal one that fits me better
3) in particular has been useful for me and where some of my most read works have come from.
[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com
Thanks!
Oh hey, you're that guy! I like your writing, nice work on all the HN front-pages recently.
My only advice, as someone unsuccessful at blogging regularly, is:
1) to not overthink what you're writing about, where you're publishing or anything details that don't involve sitting at a keyboard and typing words. Set a schedule and start writing, and you'll figure out what topics resonate with both yourself and your audience. It's very easy to bikeshed unimportant choices when the #1 way to fail is to not get around around to actually writing.
2) don't be embarrassed about self-promoting. Someone has to do it.
Thanks! I'm afraid I'm prone to overthinking. I do have a list of topics though. Also, I'm aware self-promotion is necessary. I'm not so much afraid of that. But I do feel like fame is a sword with no grip, as our host knows.
I enjoy your comments and would look forward to this. Let me know when you start so I can signal-boost you.
Thanks! I'll definitely take advantage of this.
You should do it. Talk about what you want to and make it enjoyable for yourself.
Thank you! I'm afraid if I talked about what I wanted it would be so incredibly scattershot that it would be hard for the blog or audience to have much of an identity...
You gave me the advice to go for an identity but can't your identity be a very intelligent and interesting blogger? What exactly is Scott's identity? He writes about everything but he's extremely successful.
I'd say Scott's a rationalist blogger that deals with the more humanistic side of things. Psychology, politics, philosophy, etc. The blog mostly appeals to rationalist type adult men, so well educated STEM types and the like. I'm not sure if he set out to appeal to a specific demographic but the blog has a very defined identity and audience.
You left out the whimsy-- I'm not sure if it's a major draw, but it's definitely part of what Scott does.
In any case, Scott's success seems to prove that a very wide range of topics can be held together by personality.
One thing that I'd throw in to the pot of advice is not to be be married to the particular blog focus you decide on at first. I had an idea of what my blog would be at first, and then started writing those things and the fit/feel was off. I don't think it would have been sustainable in the original form I thought about. The nice thing about the beginning part is nobody in particular is reading yet - you can try a few a things and see what you like before it's affecting anything much.
You need to write more things ! :-/
Agreed! Something should be going up tomorrow morning. I'm trying to actually get on a schedule, it's screwing me up.
Yeah, I'm definitely going to have to see what works and pivot.
Also, yes: You need to write more things.
You definitely need to write more, I find your stuff very interesting
You have a lot of knowledge about a bunch of things, so I suggest to write what you know best. As for delivery, I think you write overly tersely and confidently. I suggest loosening up the writing style a bit, so it sounds like someone more your age.
Thanks. It's picking the topic that's the issue. I'm torn between the instinct to write about whatever interests me and the need to winnow it down to a specific theme. But certainly there are topics I know more or less and I'll stick with more.
Thanks again for the advice on my voice. I'm afraid this is pretty close to how I talk. But I can definitely soften my voice in a writing piece. There I'm trying to inhabit an explicit tone and mood. And that voice can be more uncertain and longform.
If substack includes tagging, I recommend tagging your posts so people can find what you've got on a topic.
Thanks, yeah, I'd definitely do my best to make it digestible.
Ancient history, preferably. As far as delivery goes, I think for a blog post (as opposed to a forum comment) you need to expand on the details a lot, and it would help if you would cite your sources, because a lot of your posts on history are interesting but handwavy. For example, I didn't come away from your criticisms of Bret Devereaux (like his Marxist assumptions in the bread series) with any sense of where the Marxist analysis goes wrong or what the alternative is. I said privately at the time:
> [Erusian] says for instance that Devereaux's presuming that labor vs capital in this mode of production matters most for power distribution. Okay, sounds pretty Marxist to me, but where it is *wrong*? What matters more?
Yeah, my comments are kind of handwavy because they're me just sitting down and saying what I think. It's also why they have typos. Actual posts would, I hope, be higher quality. This is in some way graduating to a higher level because I've reached the point where I'm being treated seriously.
I don't have advice for you, but I would be interested in reading your blog.
Thank you!
My threshold for interest in reading someone's writing is lower when it's possible for me to respond, and lower still when it's reasonably likely that a conversation will result.
This is true in general, and not at all specific to you.
Wait what? This doesn't make any sense to me at all. I feel the exact opposite.
I am going back and forth on comments. I'll take both your opinions into account.
And Arendt vs. Strauss on solitude https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1411831108883337220
Do you edit Wikipedia? Why or why not?
Used to, wanted to add to big database of human knowledge. Have stopped because of the internal politics.
Notability and the cadre of "We'll delete any article on this subject no matter how well researched, sourced, and written!" deletionists makes it difficult to mentally invest in anything but minor fixups.
Same. Also: articles on important subjects that are permanently watched by obsessives with axes to grind who know how to wikilawyer all contenders to exhaustion really sap the will to bother out of me.
I do wish there was a "big database of human knowledge" fork of Wikipedia that continually pulls in all the Wikipedia content while also allowing the extra articles: a lower bar for notability, less concern about whether a topic is befitting of a traditional print encyclopedia, curation of effort-articles which were deleted from Wikipedia etc.
I would love that. Good point that "database of human knowledge" and "encyclopedia" are subtly different things
That would be wonderful. I'm not sure whether my framing of "wikipedia but with more sensible policies" is quite the same thing.
My dream is an "evidence clearing house". A site where you just input data (and links to data), and then aggregate claims based on that, in a hierarchical way where authors recursively build bigger and more interesting claims out of hierarchies of smaller claims, with all claims ultimately backed legibly by data.
+1. I have considered contributing to Wikipedia but the thought that some stranger can just revert it stops me from doing so. Would I even be notified if my work was reverted? Could I appeal? What's the probability that I get reverted? Without some assurance there isn't a delete-happy editor overseeing whatever I edit, I'm reluctant.
Occasionally. The bureaucracy that's grown up is really tiresome, though.
I started to recently, mostly making small improvements to articles I read rather than adding substantial amounts of new information; I have not noticed the problems other commenters mention, though that is probably because I haven't been active there for very long.
Yeah, making typo fixes and wording improvements won't generally wake up the dreaded WikiZombies.
Yes. It always feels great to be able to ‘give back’ every now and then.
Me too.
Editing wikipedia seems like homework. I would rather write on my blog if I am writing something and have it attributed to me. It's probably just a psychological difference. I can't say either side is correct in this.
Prior to becoming an active Wikipedian I think I had this idea about categorizing everything I read by topic, but then I realized that this was basically the function of the encyclopedia. So now what I do is I blog or comment if I have a Super Original Take(tm) or a life update, and write wikipedia text for everything else.
Sometimes. I translated an article from English into Dutch one time, but mostly I correct typos and grammar mistakes.
My eleventh GA is currently at FAC and I passed 10k edits a couple weeks ago. Multiple people have told me they have my RfA watchlisted; some of them are pretty big names.
I have gone through a great deal of trouble to acquire the highest level of expertise in several subjects, none of which is internal wiki-admin politics. So, no, I don't edit Wikipedia. They've made it clear that I will be at most grudgingly tolerated, and there's no respect or reward in it for me. and if your plan is "other people will produce valuable content for our project because it is the Right Thing To Do; we shall reward them with Grudging Tolerance", then they can sod off.
I do on occasion write essays and articles that other people use as sources when they edit wikipedia, which seems to me wholly superior in that A: it results in wider distribution of knowledge, both through wikipedia and through specialist media, and B: it results in more credit for me,.
Where do you post these essays and articles?
A lot of my North Korea work is at 38 North, https://www.38north.org , though I had to pull back from that when my classified day-job work started overlapping my open-source arms control and non-proliferation work.
The other day I glanced at the Wikipedia entry on Fabio. I noticed that the article mentioned his sponsorships and reality TV show, and the goose incident, but didn't mention that he is primarily known for being on the cover of romance novels. I left a comment asking about this on the talk page, and now it's there, but still only as two minor sentences, as opposed to full paragraphs about his sponsorship from Nintendo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabio_Lanzoni
I've seen a few articles are written on the assumption that the reader has a basic knowledge of the subject.
I stopped when every change resulted in a comment that said, "please read these 10000 word policies on notability when it comes to films, tv shows, plays, entertainment, entertainers, and jugglers before contributing."
I fix typos once in a while.
Currently, I almost never edit Wikipedia, but I used to.
The three and a two half reasons:
- the software has been getting harder and harder for me to use. I'm very comfortable with markup; not so comfortable with tool bars etc. And the templates (macros) get more and more complex - and less and less documented - every year, as well as being more and more required.
- (half reason) the rules for how to write, what may be written, what constitutes a source etc. seem to get both harder to follow and more often ignored.
- Wiki-politics is ugly, and tends to drive away editors and administrators I like and respect. I also get the impression that wikimedia foundation, like Stack Exchange, is keen to monetize a volunteer effort they are also sabotaging, e.g. by tone deaf attempts to promote oppressed minorities.
- I just don't have the time.
- (half reason) I'm rather more of an essayist than e.g. a science journalist. I don't especially enjoy writing balanced, carefully-sourced descriptions of consensus knowledge. And it's a complete PITA looking for "reliable sources" for e.g. particular computer algorithms and where they are used. (Note "reliable source" is a technical term on wikipedia, and while it's intended to mean what it says, it's actually more of a set of bureaucratic regulations.)
I don't edit Wikipedia except for a few minor efforts, but thank you for a question which has gotten a bunch of interesting responses.
I tried a few times, but never to good result. One set in particular really turned me off, where I was updating wiki articles with citations to relevant articles the academic journal my PhD advisor ran. Sometimes this was just a further reading link, other times I would add a paragraph or so if the article was in conflict etc.
Every single one of these changes got rejected, sometimes with a nastygram attached to the effect of "we don't like your kind here" and little else. Whether this is due to political economy being a little touchy a subject, or the general culture of Wikipedia, I don't know, but that put me off pretty well.
"Political economy"?
Nope. High quality writing doesn't come easy to me, and I'd get stressed and a bit obsessed. Also, when I go to Wikipedia it's usually to learn stuff that I don't know much about, so I don't often bump into articles to which I could contribute significantly without having to study quite a bit first (and I bet there aren't many anyway). Occasionally, I read stuff that I feel I could improve a little, but not often enough to make it worth learning the Wikipedia rules and inner workings.
Some people talking about visions when falling asleep:
https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1405171528140951556
https://twitter.com/vihartvihart/status/1405343268242530313
My experience: I almost never remember dreams, but while I'm falling asleep, my imagination becomes incredibly vivid and self regulating.
EG, I can tell myself a story and not know what's going to happen next.
Never had visions but I always try to pay attention at that border. Thoughts controlled by what I think of as ‘me’ get increasingly scrambled, but I try to follow the process. Usually my body will experienced a little myoclonic jerk at that liminal point.
Rarely when I'm lying in bed I will have hallucinations (usually still or moving images, rarely audio) that are clearly the start of my brain's dreaming subroutine, but occurring while I'm still somewhat lucid, mobile and able to abort the going to sleep process. When I was a kid and did a lot of bedtime reading this usually took the form of suddenly realizing that I had closed my eyes from tiredness so it did not make sense that I was still perceiving book full of words, these days I think it's rarer and it's more like experiencing a couple seconds of a totally random dream with no connection to my current experience.
I have hypnogogic hallucinations sometimes upon waking or approaching sleep, one of many fun symptoms from having Narcolepsy. I describe it as having scenes from a dream superimposed on reality, kind of like painted animation cels.
It started a year ago. When I fall asleep I immediately begin to see dreams for 30- 60 minutes but my brain can't turn off and as soon as I fall asleep for the first time I instantly wake up. And after that I fall asleep normally
I had infinite universe black/white visions as a child. They didn't come during sleep/wake transitions but came at random. They were visions in the true sense that I lost my regular sight and started seeing this stuff. It was nuts.
I get hypnagogic hallucinations while falling asleep or waking up, with associated sleep paralysis, but they are generally auditory-only, or if they're visual at all they're incredibly vague and indistinct, more like confusion over the interpretation of what I'm seeing vs seeing something that isn't there.
I assume this is related to the fact that I seem to be aphantasic (or uh, hypophantasic, if that's a word). This thread prompted me to go read a bit about aphantasia, and to discover this recent new study on the topic: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7308278/
Re. Further weird shit Covid does:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210618/Alarming-COVID-study-indicates-long-term-loss-of-gray-matter-and-other-brain-tissue.aspx
Any thoughts, or further developments?
Study seems pretty solid, as it is comparing subjects to themselves; but who knows long term.
Another take on that study:
https://theconversation.com/covid-linked-to-loss-of-brain-tissue-but-correlation-doesnt-prove-causation-163183
https://revealnews.org/podcast/the-ticket-trap-2021/
Discussion of scam ticket-selling sites. They resemble the actual venue, but vastly overcharge and don't deliver tickets reliably.
The federal government makes some efforts to stop them, but is fairly ineffective partly as a result of not being well-funded for the size of the job, and I suspect that the size of the job keeps increasing.
This gets to the question of what can be done about fraud, and also issues of what makes for a high-trustworthiness society. If a tenth of a percent or so is defecting a lot, they do a good bit of damage.
Re point 3, I regularly experienced an "expansion" feeling, something like what Shulgin described, while falling asleep when I was younger. It was like my body was inflating or being elongated to incredible lengths. (I've occasionally wondered if Lewis Carroll had similar experiences which inspired the size change magic in Wonderland.) I don't recall anything quite like those other visions, though, certainly not on a regular basis.
When I was a kid I had similar experiences whenever I would have a high fever - sensations of my body being enormous, or extremely small, in an infinite and otherwise empty universe. It would always freak me out. I assumed the feeling was happening because I was sick.
That reminds me of the bizarre fever dream experience described in this post, which also mentions expansion and shrinking:
https://bogleech.tumblr.com/post/182230727313/that-fever-dream-episode-of-rugrats-was-way-too
"Then there was a recurring one I can barely describe except that I suddenly perceived all spoken words as large, puffy, rubbery letters, like gigantic pasta shapes, that I was digging through with my hands as I processed their meaning. I would only understand the words once my fingers felt the tiny “bones” inside them, but the sensation of finding those bones made kid-me start BAWLING."
Huh, I always thought that segment of Comfortably Numb was artistic license, or "for effect". Thanks for sharing, this is an interesting shade of the human experience!
Hi! Amazed to hear your description. I had this too for many years as a child. However it would happen without a fever, and without going to sleep. I would just randomly be playing in my room and then suddenly have these sensations/visions of infinitely sized objects next to impossibly large/small ones.
Question: do you remember if your visions were in color or monochrome?
I don't remember for certain about the chromaticity of my fever visions, but since I almost never have regular dreams in color, my guess is that they would also have been the same. (Now I almost want to run another high fever and do some self-observations!)
While lying in bed, I sometimes got the sensation that my room was far larger than it really was, with the walls and ceiling very far away. I wouldn't call it a "vision", because nothing *looked* out of the ordinary; the sensation was separate from my eyesight.
I have the same sensation, especially when not feeling well (but sometimes when I feel fine). In my case, I attributed it to a practice of trying to make my room as dark as possible, especially eliminating well-defined light sources. If the only thing I can see when trying to sleep is just the diffuse glow from the translucent curtains covering the edges of the blinds, there really isn't anything to use as a reference for scale, and my tired mind probably loses the ability to judge distances with binocular vision. Fixed light sources break the effect, especially if they're not red. My current house has a smoke detector with a small green LED, which is sharp enough to fixate on if it's in my line of vision.
I don't remember my room being that dark, but it was an awfully long time ago.
I used to have similar experiences as a kid, especially when sick, of my body parts pulsating between being immense and tiny. Not visual at all, just at the proprioception level. Not an unpleasant experience necessarily, just weird
Same here! Exact same hallucinations when I was sick or feverish, or sometimes just when I was trying to sleep. It was relatively rare and stopped completely as I got older.
Later I discovered that this may be called “Alice in Wonderland syndrome”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome
This definitely also happened to me. I attribute it to my "body image" not having fully coalesced at that age. I am still able to modify the shape of my proprioceptive body at will, but it doesn't go haywire on me like that when I'm not paying attention any more. This coincided pretty closely with the age (pretty late, maybe mid-teens) that I stopped being sort of surprised and taken aback every time I looked in a mirror because what I saw seemed unexpected somehow.
Same, except not when I was younger; I've had the experience as recently as a few months ago.
Here is the full New England Journal of Medicine article: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l1gklud7udot4jj/nejmsr2105065.pdf
On one hand the article seems to suggest that this technology is not very effective. On the other hand it expresses concerns about exacerbating inequalities. I feel like at most one of these two concerns can be valid; not both at the same time.
There is a section "unintended consequences" that says that selecting for high IQ would also increase the risk of bipolar disorder. What's not mentioned is that selecting for high IQ would decrease the risk of most other diseases. Bipolar disorder is an exception in that regard. Genetically, most good things cluster together with other good things. So the majority of unintended consequences of selecting for high IQ would actually be positive.
Keep in mind that scientists in western countries can't simply publicly endorse polygenic embryo screening without taking major career risks. Condemning it on the other hand is relatively safe.
So just a question from a layperson - why would good things cluster together in genetic terms? Isn’t genetic variation usually random?
Suppose somebody's been exposed to a mutagen and then has kids. A mutagen is likely to cause thousands or tens of thousands of mutations, most of which don't do anything and most of the rest of which are bad. As such, the kids are going to have problems in lots of different ways.
If you have a population, half of which has been exposed to mutagens and the other half of which hasn't, there will therefore be a positive correlation between good outcomes in their children - because the non-mutated kids are going to be statistically superior to the mutated kids in almost everything.
There are a variety of things which can cause high mutational load IRL, like maternal/paternal age, hence these correlations. I'm *not* sure whether this correlation would hold up when performing IVF, as the mutational load of the parents is largely fixed (it's the same two people, at the same time in their lives).
It's because a single broken gene can have negative effects on multiple functions. E.g. consider all the symptoms of Huntington's disease. The same thing happens for mutations with less dramatic effects.
I think it's just a consequence of the fact that good things cluster together phenotypically. High IQ tends to be correlated with all sorts of positive life outcomes, including an (often slightly) lower risk for many diseases. Probably not because there is a direct causal link between IQ and disease, but because there is some other common underlying causal factor. If that other common underlying causal factor is partially genetic - and it will be, because everything is partially genetic - then this will mean that on average genetic variants that are associated with a higher IQ will also be associated with lower disease risk.
I feel I should point out to you that this is not an explanation - it's just restating the fact that good things go together, without explaining why. The reasons *why* are pleiotropy, non-independence of criteria (i.e. high IQ makes you get higher test scores which makes you more competitive in the labour market which makes you richer) and the non-uniform mutational load which makes broken things correlate with other broken things.
You're right, my explanation doesn't go all the way down the causal ladder, it's just stating that we should expect selection for IQ to have mostly positive side effects if it mostly has positive correlations with other positive traits (low disease risk). Positive phenotypic correlations usually translate into positive genetic correlations.
I don't know if we can be certain at this point about genetic mechanisms that are causing this. The mutational load argument sounds compelling and is certainly true to some extent, but polygenic predictors and genetic correlations are both based on common genetic variants that have very little in common with the very rare genetic variants that people have in mind when they talk about mutational load. The reason for that is that on average you can predict a polygenic trait much better by considering a large number of individually unremarkable, common variants, than by considering a necessarily smaller number of rare, large-effect, mutational-load variants.
The varations are likely random, but remember that the initial genome being varied is not random, but has survived lots of selection and is far more functional than a genome created at random. So random changes are much more likely to have negative rather than positive effects. Therefore if one system is observed to have been corrupted by random changes, it is likely that others are as well. By analogy, a car that has had parts changed at random with those of different models is likely to end up worse in every measure, because the original car was a carefully selected combination of parts.
To me the article seems generally on board with the idea as long as its caveats and limitations are properly communicated, although someone else might read this as "polygenetic selection is a scam and should be banned". It did suggest that companies shouldn't be charging for this until they can prove it works, which seems like a great way to kill it, but it's probably not that expensive to throw in a few extra tests into disease screening so maybe it could still work. The reference to the evils of eugenics seemed like it was only there because it had to be included, it's important to regularly remind everyone that you think Involuntary Sterilisation Is Bad.
"someone else might read this as "polygenetic selection is a scam and should be banned"
Not something that had occurred to me prior to reading your comment, but oh yeah. Every cowboy and dodgy doc in the business will jump on the chance to offer "polygenic screening for a better baby!" the way dodgy clinics are currently offering "stem cell cures":
https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/18/separate-scientific-scam-stem-cell/
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/07/16/the-bottom-of-the-stem-cell-barrel
"There is a section "unintended consequences" that says that selecting for high IQ would also increase the risk of bipolar disorder" -- OH NO, NEURODIVERGENT PEOPLE!
From where I'm standing, allism and simultypy are severe, crippling disabilities that are obviously completely incompatible with any kind of good life, and purging them from the population is a self-evident good, and any allist or simultype who disagrees with me is just blinded by having a weird brain that thinks wrong things. *Mysteriously*, this position is far less common than its inverse.
What is simultypy a dysphemism for here?
"Schizo" to "split" gives you "simul" to "together". I used to identify as autistic, on account of being diagnosed with it for longer, but "what were you diagnosed with first, according to what was trendy when you were a kid to label a given cluster of weird kids with" is not the be-all and end-all of a given person's neurotype and if the schizotypal liberation movement ends up consisting of me and me only, well, that's an improvement on it consisting of no one.
I am unconvinced of the degree to which I believe the statement above and the degree to which I think it's a worthwhile thing to say independent of its truth, because of everyone else believing the exact opposite thing. I *do* strongly and sincerely believe that letting allistic and simultypal people decide what the correct balance of neurotypes is may as well be signing society's death warrant, that there's no possible way it could result in a non-dystopian world, and that the current balance of those neurotypes in the population is too low rather than too high.
I realise you've already said you're not sure whether this statement is true later in this thread, but I'm curious about this scenario, regardless - so here's a genuine question from my point of ignorance:
If we were to treat allism as a disability and mankind were to abandon empathy (as in, the illusion of knowing what other people are feeling), is that not a loss from a game-theoretic point of view?
I'm unfamiliar with how cooperation with people you expect to only ever meet once arises and remains stable in this scenario (something that seems fairly crucial to civilisation as we know it). Would we depend on laws and their consequences to regulate all those scenarios (bland example - the person you just gave five dollars to should give you the thing you're buying with those five dollars, otherwise they will be punished by society)?
Or is the argument that you shouldn't, precisely because it's illogical (and therefore civilisation as we know it potentially needs serious changes)?
I'm reasonably sure this is probably covered by a 101 somewhere, but I'm not sure how to find it. Feel free to just slap a link my way that covers this!
I think lack-of-cognitive-empathy *is* one of the disabling effects of autism. My experience is you can solve much of this problem with psychedelics, so...work backwards from there.
As an autistic person, my experience is that non-autistics have precious little empathy for autistics, to the point of resembling the caricature descriptions of autistics sometimes produced.
AFAICT, most non-autistics get away with projecting their own feelings (in similar circumstances) onto others, and calling that "empathy". They get away with it because when they do this with "normal"/high status people, they are often right, and those judging them don't care about "weird"/lower status people.
Strongly agreed. I first noticed the pattern when reading Temple Grandin's memoir and realizing what a hard time her mother had empathizing with her.
Also, what passes for empathy with neurotypicals can be pretty mechanical-- a hand on the shoulder at the right time can make people feel a lot better even if the person supplying the hand isn't feeling much of anything.
Indeed and when autistic people project their own feelings/desires on others, this is called a lack of empathy.
It's really rather ugly. Like a supercharged version of the stereotypical 'ugly American' who starts shouting at a local who doesn't understand English when visiting a foreign country. Only this time the person is even accused of being illiterate, their mastery of the local language being completely ignored.
I wonder how much of the alleged normie empathy is actually recognizing someone else's emotion... and how much is an unwritten social contract to be so bland that they can freely project their emotions on each other, and to never contradict each other when doing so.
If the normie has a model of you, and you show that this model is wrong -- for example by expressing interest in something the normie considers boring, and therefore automatically assumes you also consider it boring, -- the normie feels discomfort, because their illusion of empathy was broken. The normie will then project, and blame you for not having empathy.
I don't think that's it. I think the normie thing is to have beliefs (predictive processing?) which is usually not too far off from most people's actual emotions.
Empathy the skill and empathy the character trait are different things.
Autistic people aren't *inherently* great at empathy-the-skill targetting neurotypicals, although we can learn it. (I'm not sure of the state of the research on how well autists read other autists.)
We have empathy-the-character-trait, though. That is to say, we care but don't always know how you feel. (This is the reverse of a sociopath, who knows but doesn't care how you feel.)
The majority of autists find lying deeply upsetting and don't generally do it, so I imagine you'd actually have to worry about fraud less than usual. There are potential issues with an all-autistic society, but it's the sort of thing that's probably worth a try to see if it pans out.
Not really an all-autistic society, but a great movie anyway:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1058017/ The Invention of Lying (2009)
Anecdotes are not data, I realise, but my exposure to one case of someone with schizophrenia did not convince me that they were living their best life.
Regularly go off their meds, lose their job because of that, then spiral down until they came into the office claiming that people were breaking into their house to smear faeces on their walls, visibly upset and distressed and convinced this was true (it was not) - I don't see that as helping that person or society in general.
Best to worst case: neurotypical -> neurodivergent but can stay on their meds -> neurodivergent, can't stay on their meds, become more and more enmeshed in their disorder until they're a danger to themselves and/or others.
Neurodivergent is a wide catagory. So wide I don't think it can be said to be better or worse in aggregate. In specifics, sure, the kid with an 80 IQ that can't communicate with his parents is a painful life. The adult with a high-paying job in a technical field who doesn't give two shits about social pressures to spend beyond their means is a great life.
Anecdata is not data. My anecdata is that psychosis is not an impediment to my life, and is often an improvement to it. My anecdata is also that I've never taken neuroleptics and don't plan to; there is a fair amount of interesting suggestion in the direction they are not a net positive, but rather a contributor to the disability that people with some neurotypes experience.
If you don't mind, what sort of psychosis?
Fun for you. Not so fun for the people who have to deal with you pissing and howling on the floor. If you aren't one of the people who get so bad that they do end up pissing and howling on the floor, congratulations. But then what you are saying is "I can manage my symptoms/my symptoms are not so bad that they impinge on my ability to lead an independent life".
You're like someone who says "Well I only need glasses, plainly trying to cure river blindness is oppression of the differently abled by the ignorant and repressive majority!"
When nerdy people say they are "a little autistic," are they being a little cheeky, or do they mean it in a way that is continuous with a clinical diagnosis of autism? Is it legitimately just a matter of degree?
I think the answer has changed recently, when the DSM started treating Autism as a spectrum disorder.
People can have traits that would be in that direction on a spectrum from none to lots, but not far enough along the spectrum for a diagnosis.
That makes sense. I recently heard myself described as "a little autistic" for the first time, and while that description makes a lot of my traits more legible, I'm still not sure how much I or other very mildly autistic people should lean into it. At first glance it feels vaguely insensitive to use the same term to both describe my excessively mechanistic approach to social interactions / inability to tune out background noise, and someone who is autistic to the point of being non-verbal.
I’ve wondered if the whole “spectrum” idea might one day fall apart, or schism into multiple spectra. I personally have never understood how we came up with a spectrum that has my high-functioning friends on one end and the kind of profound autism that leaves you institutionalized on the other. The traits we identify with autism don’t seem like they slide along a scale the way something like hearing loss does.
Consider for instance Temple Grandin. She was non verbal as a kid, only learned to speak after speech therapy. Was falsely diagnosed with brain damage. It seems like the only thing separating her and a "classical case" of autism was the dedication of her parents. If you agree to put Temple in the same category as a "classical autism" case, then what is the difference between her now and your "mild autisic" high functioning friends?
I’m not sure I had a “classical” idea of autism. But there are a lot of people on the spectrum who are sufficiently high functioning that they’re only diagnosed as adults, if at all. And there are others in institutions whose condition would seem to defy any amount of parental or professional dedication. Surely there’s some difference between those two groups, and maybe that difference warrants two distinct diagnoses.
In my view, it’s totally fine to use descriptions along the line of “a little bit autistic”. Unless you are in the context of a psychiatric institution, the majority of autistic people that you’ll interact with are probably going to be the high functioning ones (such as myself), and there really is a meaningful category of people that have some traits associated with (predominantly high functioning) autism, while not being to the point of qualifying for a diagnosis.
I do find it a bit odd how much popular perception of autism conflates the high functioning (to the degree that you might not know they have autism from a casual interaction) with the low functioning (to the degree that they cannot really live without significant chaperoning).
This is similar to my view. I have never been diagnosed myself, but my son was. What the doctor described as the tells/symptoms were things I myself had as much or more, but had learned to cope with. (My son had sessions with a therapist for a while and now has no obvious or outward signs that are distinguishable from regular shyness or social awkwardness. He is also high functioning and doesn't meet most people's perceptions of what autism looks like, though it was more obvious before the sessions).
I don't tell people I'm autistic, because I'm high functioning enough that very few people would ever notice and I was never diagnosed. I even work in a people-oriented field, having figured out lots of workarounds to being a genuine people-person.
> I'm still not sure how much I or other very mildly autistic people should lean into it
In general I think we are doing a bit too much leaning into labels. Once you decide who you are is a foobarist you end up buying foobarist clothes, going to foobarist parties, and agreeing with foobarist policy positions. It’s true that this can give a comforting sense of belonging but it also closes you off to a lot of possibilities that you end up rejecting out of hand because they aren’t foobarist.
AFAIK the spectrum is from Asperger's to low-functioning autism, not from neurotypical to autistic.
Yes. I have Asperger's and mostly fit in without people knowing it.
https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient
Tried the questionnaire, got to "I am fascinated by dates (agree/disagree)" and couldn't figure out whether they were talking about fruit, social interactions, or calendars. Unfortunately my answer is very different depending.
To add on to this, it is to be noted that very, very often we *hear* 'spectrum' but *envision* a _gradient_ — i.e., a scale going from more to less affected by a 'color' (the condition), when the intended meaning is usually a collection of different 'colors' (ways of being affected).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_disorder
https://neuroclastic.com/2019/05/04/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/
I think (as Brian said), that the clinical diagnosis is a spectrum, so that helps it be consistent. But it’s also a good shorthand for a lot of behaviors and traits; saying someone is “mildly autistic” actually has a pretty high information content about them. Even if a few bits of information are wrong in what’s conveyed, the mass of information can be worth it to use as a phrase.
wrt whether it’s insensitive, maybe? but it’s not clear to me who it’d be problematic for. I think people can be offended by basically anything, but generally I think if you’re using it as a legitimate descriptor, rather than as a pejorative term, you’re within the normal bounds of insensitivity, since it’s a spectrum and there isn’t anyone who seems to have a clear case for being offended by its usage.
Obviously if someone can present a clear case for why it’s problematic I’m open to changing my mind, but otherwise I view it as other spectrum words like “disabled” “hearing impaired” or “buff”
They're probably being cheeky. I could see this sort of thing as mildly bothersome to autistic people. But psychological conditions do seem to be on a spectrum. So if someone does describe themselves as a little autistic, what they are saying could make sense depending on why they said it. Just like someone could say they're a little bit borderline or bipolar or traumatized but generally those terms are reserved for more serious cases. I think everything is just a matter of degree.
It's legitimately just a manner of degree, and an inconsistent one. I have an ASD diagnosis since toddlerhood; most people in the ratsphere, including the ones who swear up and down that they're not, are far more characteristically autistic than me.
Can't speak for nerdy people generally, but when I say it I mean I have something like a subclinical form of autism. I have all the usual deficits/strengths, but they're minor enough that I really don't think I'd be diagnosable.
I suspect there some who are cheeky, some who try to point out some traits on the continuous spectrum of symptoms, and some are doing a little bit both, often inadvertently. It is difficult to self-diagnose ones self-psychology, and its contingent on reference points one has available.
They're doing the best they can to describe how they think their brain works, now that the Very Serious Medical Authorities have told them they're not allowed to use the word "Asperger's" for that purpose. I'm not sure it's an improvement to treat everything from what used to be called mild Asperger's, to someone who will spend the rest of their life in an asylum screaming, a "spectrum", but that's what we're stuck with unless we want to fight a language war to reclaim "Asperger's".
Wasn't a lot of this a push-back from parents of autistic kids, who didn't want their kids to be stigmatised as the "have to wear a helmet 24/7 or they will beat their brains out against a wall" (an instance I encountered during my working life) type, so they insisted that the Asperger's and 'high functioning' be folded into the entire autism definition and that it be put on a spectrum?
There *is* a wide spectrum between "socially awkward but can handle their symptoms" to "noticeably autistic but functional" to "will bite off their own fingers, will always need institutional care" autism, but I think that the very severe cases are not on the same line as the autists formerly known as Aspies.
I hadn't heard that theory as to the origin of the "spectrum" diagnosis, but it seems plausible. And I agree, we may not be dealing with just a single axis where the helmet-Autistics just have more of what the Aspies have. Actually, now that I think about it, this is something I'd expect Scott to be familiar with; he's written a few things sort of adjacent to it before, but I don't recall him addressing it directly.
I'm going mostly on what I've heard/read elsewhere. Currently working in administrative capacity in a centre for children with additional needs. They get referred to it by the local Early Intervention Services Team. Includes children with autism but also other developmental needs. Generally "mild to moderate" cases. I haven't seen any of the severe cases in this job.
The really severe one was a previous job, where part of the work was administering grants for home improvements for medical reasons. One family had two teenage/young adult sons with autism, and they wanted to build an extension to have a padded room so the older son could go there when getting stressed out, and so he could take off the motorcycle helmet he had to wear 24/7 because in the padded room even if he did knock his head against the walls he couldn't damage himself.
I haven't seen any of the 'savant' types. I do think keeping Asperger's Syndrome separate was more helpful, as there are definitely 'clusters' - the mild to the moderate to the severe types.
Are Tony Atwood´s Aspie criteria (http://www.tonyattwood.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=79:the-discovery-of-aspie-criteria) known to everyone here? When I was re-diagnosed with ASD as an adult I found them quite helpful.
I worry that a lot of it is the same as when type A personalities describe themselves as "a little OCD". It's possible that some of them are right, but I've got to imagine that a lot of self-diagnosis is just people who have no idea what the real condition is like.
Depends on what you think about taxonometrics. If you take their word for it, there isn't a bimodal distribution of autistic and non-autistic people.
Troll answer: they don't know any better to compare two (morally loaded) concepts which have significantly different magnitudes. In this case, nerdiness and autism.
Hang on, I thought Scott's taxometrics post said autism was a taxon?
I'm starting a self-experiment to see if melatonin can help prevent me from waking up, and am hoping to get some feedback/critique of my experimental design. Anyone have any suggestions?
I realize melatonin is typically used to control when you go to sleep, but I'm hopeful that it will last long enough in the bloodstream that it might impact time asleep as well.
Based largely off of this SSC post (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/), I've selected the following protocol:
- Study duration: 4 weeks
- Doses: 0, 0.3, and 3 mg, taken 30 min. before bedtime
- Randomization: pills placed in opaque gelatin capsules, randomly assigned to each day by an assistant (i.e. blinded)
- Measurement: time fell asleep, time woke up, time asleep, HRV, sleeping pulse, fasting blood sugar, change in blood sugar, measured by Apple Watch/Autosleep app & Dexcom G6
- Analysis: effect size and p-value tested for melatonin vs. blank. If meaningful effect size is observed, experiment will be repeated with that dose to confirm.
*Any suggestions on improving the protocol or other interventions would be greatly appreciated.*
For those who are interested, full details, including self-collected data that motivated the study, at: https://www.quantifieddiabetes.com/2021/07/please-critique-my-experiment-design.html
A variant you might try is to set an alarm for 2 or 3 hrs after you go to sleep, and take the pill then. This is my go-to trick for periods when my sleep cycle gets funky and I wake up nightly after 4 or 5 hours and can't go back to sleep. Don't think I've ever done this with melatonin -- have used diphenhydramine or lorazepam. For me, anyhow, an alarm that goes off in the first 2 or 3 hours pulls me out of a dead sleep, and I can go right back to sleep after taking the pill. Taking the med at that point in the night means it kicks in at around the time I would normally had my too-early spontaneous awakening, and its effect lasts til I've been asleep 8 hours or so.
Interesting. I'm only waking up 20-30 min. early, so I don't think this would be worth it for me. I'll recommend it to my wife, though. She frequently wakes up 3-4h after going to sleep.
You may also want to experiment with extended release melatonin.
Thanks, didn't know that was available. Do you know of any studies that indicate the optimal dose? Looking around, I'm seeing mostly 3-10 mg
Found a 0.3 mg extended release (https://www.amazon.com/Life-Extension-Melatonin-Released-Vegetarian/dp/B00CDABRUW?th=1). So looks like I can match doses for extended and regular release.
I'm struggling with how much I can expect from a partner with ADHD. We have a young son who requires a lot of attention, and my husband just doesn't seem to have the patience required to spend long periods of time playing with him. I can deal with it, but I'd sure like to just hang out and play video games also. Am I being ablist to think he should just suck it up and split the time equally?
When my son was young, my wife and I would sometimes hire a babysitter when we were both home so we could each get work done.
I'm not really qualified to give advice here, but is there something else helpful he could be doing? If he genuinely can't handle long play sessions it won't be good for anyone to try to force it; but if he spends that time doing something fun and easy and unproductive, you will understandably be frustrated and also somewhat suspicious (not necessarily that he's being cynical or deliberately dishonest, but that he's subconsciously making more of a choice than he'd admit to himself or you). If there are household tasks that he can handle, and that you might otherwise have to do yourself, maybe he could put some extra time into those while you're playing with your son.
I would try to recast your question to ignore the ADHD, because it's not necessarily relevant. I used to love playing with our little kids. My wife has always been unable to do it, and she doesn't have any kind of mental health issue. Ability to play with young children simply varies from person to person. What she could do, on the other hand, was plan day trips and put the kids in the car and go and look at a Thing (whereas I found that kind of process utterly enervating and pointless). With parenting, ultimately you just have to accept what the other person can or cannot do with the children; you can't force it.
The other issue is that you seem to suggest that when your husband isn't on kid duty, he goofs off and plays games. I don't know if you're a woman, but this sounds like quite a common male/female dynamic, and my very very very very strong advice is to be very explicit with him about it. (Apologies for horrible stereotyping to follow, obviously this is not true of everyone, but...) Men really really think differently about stuff, and we really really won't realise that we're annoying our partners until a row blows up. If you want your resident male to do more about the house, instructing him directly on what to do and when to do it is much more likely to get good results than any other tactic.
Completely agree. Some people just do not enjoy playing with small children. Does not mean they have attention deficit disorder or a cold heart. Think of a task your husband can do to help the household and free you up some, something he does not find irksome and weird, and ask him to do more of that. It's likely that when your child is older your husband will find him much more fun to hang out with.
If you are just in the same room as your kids and they play by themselves, you are not neglecting them. Kids do most of their playing that way. Sometimes they need direct attention and it can be fun to get on the floor and play with them, but if you are not doing that, they'll still do fine.
This. The expectation that parents constantly play with their kids, Bluey-style (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJkn-r-rJJY) is very, very new and not necessarily good. You say you have a young son who "requires a lot of attention," but are you absolutely certain that's true?
I obviously don't know anything about your son, so maybe it is true. But unless he's too young to be trusted not to choke himself to death swallowing a toy or he has a developmental issue, he should be able to play without your constant involvement! Lego, Play-doh, caring for baby dolls, digging a hole in a sandbox, going down the slide of a swing set, imagining a story with friends...until 20-30 years ago, these were activities parents generally didn't get directly involved with. They might admire the end product of a Lego fort or a clay snake, but they didn't usually put their hands on the toys.
I'm 41, have memories going back to 2.5 years old, and I don't remember my parents *ever* playing with my toys (or my younger brother's) as if they were a peer. In fact, from 4 years old on, if my mother "caught" me acting out a story with My Little Pony figurines, I would stop and wait for her to leave the room before getting back to it. Every parent of every kid I ever knew had similar boundaries. An adult joining us in imaginative play would have been way too intimate and intrusive.
Obviously none of this answers your question about your husband's involvement in child-rearing, but it is worth considering: What if you gradually assert some boundaries on you son's demands for your attention, and insist that he learn how to entertain himself without you (or your husband) actively engaging him every minute? If your son can act out a dinosaur war on the living room rug or sculpt a Play-doh family to live in the Lego house he built while your husband and/or you read a book or play a video game nearby, you'll all benefit.
It's just something to consider.
Yeah, there are a lot of good points here. I think part of my problem is guilt from having him at daycare 40 hours of the week. I feel like I need to "make the most" of the time I am there with him. He feels that too. It's a constant refrain of "Mama Mama Mama"
Strictly anecdotal example coming up, but I don't think we can assume daycare actually impacts clinginess/sense of loss/etc!
How old is your little guy? My best friend is a stay-at-home mom with an almost four year old girl. Between normal maternity leave and the pandemic, her kid has never even met a hired babysitter, much less been in daycare. She has quite literally spent her whole life exclusively in the company of her parents' adult pod (grandparents, an uncle, a couple of her parents' friends), and her mom was present for way more than 99% of those gatherings.
Her kid is "Mama Mama Mama" with 20 minute meltdowns if she wants to leave the kid with her doting grandparents and go to the grocery store by herself.
My friend has *maybe* had 150 total hours away from her daughter in her daughter's whole life. And yet her kid throws huge fits whenever they part, as if she's being abandoned in the woods to hungry bears.
So I'm just saying. It might not be daycare, it might just be that your kid is programmed by evolution to solicit maximum engagement from you so he survives to adulthood. That doesn't mean he actually needs it in your safe 2021 home.
I'm sure you're a great mom. Don't accidentally deprive him of the opportunity to be totally self-absorbed in autonomous play. He'll figure out that it's an pleasure different from playing with adults.
A couple of things jump out at me here.
1) Kids will behave how you condition them, and you condition them with both rewards and punishment. If the constant refrain is "Mama Mama Mama" its because it leads to good results for him. You need to find ways to recondition him. That first invovles figuring out what you want out of him. More autonomy? Maybe. Trying to handle things himself first? Maybe.
2) From above, it sounds like you have a marraige type that I call "equal," where your foundational principal is that the two adults are equal partners who contribute equally. You should do half the kid playing, and your partner should do the other half.
(Totally personal opinion here) This, frankly, is a bad way to structure your marraige, expecially once kids show up. How can a kid be equal with the parents.
Instead, think about moving your marrage from a marraige of equalit to one of mercy. It is the job of each adult to give each member of the family (including themselves) what they need. Full stop. The same way two renters are 100% responsible for the rent. It doesn't mean you need to kill yourself to serve everyone else - that's not giving yourself what you need.
But my wife hates hates hates scrubbing the bathroom. If find it fine, but old cold wet food gives me the willies. So I scrub the bathroom and she does the dishes. Simple example, but it applies to larger things. I work an intensive, long-hour job. My wife just isn't up to it. She makes about 12% what I do in a part time job. If I demanded she have a job like mine, it would burn her out.
Now you throw in a kid, who doesn't know how to be fair. He's going to throw a wrench into any equal plans you have because he's a child. I bet you suspend the equal thinking when your partner has the flu or whatever. Well, a kid is needs that 24/7 for at least the first decade of life.
You can play with the kid for a certain amount of time before you get burned out. Partner can play with the kid for a shorter amount of time. That's all the two of you can give. Your job is to figure out how to make it enough, and to give your kid what he needs.
But I bet he needs a lot less than you think. You should read Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - it really illuminates how over-worked the modern American parents are in a way that has no benefit on their children.
It seems to me, as others have said, that you ought to be able to find room for your husband to watch the kid without the husband needing to exhaust himself by "playing" in what sounds like a fairly specific and, for him, exhausting way.
It's totally fine for the husband to just keep an eye on the kid while he plays by himself, watches TV, or does whatever. The husband can also go take the kid for a walk around the neighborhood, go visit the park, or just take the kid with him on a run to the store or something. It could also be that your husband can find his own way of playing with the kid - if he has a hobby or interest of his own, maybe he can find ways to share parts of that with the kid, which might feel much more meaningful than whatever banal playtime activities are currently normal.
Ultimately though, it's not ableist to ask your husband to step up and do his part. But it probably is ableist to expect that your husband's interactions with the kid will look exactly like your interactions, and that his parenting style will exactly match your own specific preferences.
I'm surprised that nobody here has asked if you've tried medication for ADHD? If you have and it didn't work or if you haven't and have reasons for that stance, perhaps you'd explain in a further post.
Christina The Story Girl has replied to you in an excellent post with which I fully agree. It seems to me your thinking is taking you on a dangerous path that may not end up anywhere nice for your family.
I just did a podcast episode with Greg Cochran on UFOs. We both think there is a reasonable chance that some of the UFOs seen by the Navy are aliens. Scott once wrote that Greg had "creepy oracular powers". https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521/cochran-on-ufos-part-1
Is there a transcript somewhere? I read much faster than people talk.
Sorry but no.
This! ^ I’m glad audiobooks and podcasts exist for those who enjoy them, but to me it’s a maddeningly slow and inefficient method of getting information.
I'm listening to it rather gradually, and I recommend the first 20 minutes or so as good about high altitude lightning (sprites) that pilots simply didn't talk about in public because it would make them seem too weird. There was also a problem with it being visible to humans but so brief that it was difficult to photograph.
So I'll recommend cachelot.com - a collection of essays arguing a fascinating case for cachalots (aka sperm whales) being human-level intelligent. If nothing else, it shows just how little we really know about cetacean and especially whale intelligence, even now. The site also includes a blog on animal intelligence in general, written more rationalist-adjacently than other stuff I've seen on the subject.
Looks like a major research effort is underway to decode their hypothetical language!
https://www.projectceti.org/
Something I’ve been thinking about a little recently:
Is it surprising how much intelligent people disagree?
I’m often amazed by the extent to which people of roughly equal intellect arrive at such divergent conclusions, even when they are forming opinions based on the same information and possess similar expertise. I also find it fascinating when people that I agree with on one issue express views which I find utterly illogical elsewhere. Intuitively, I am surprised by these observations, but maybe I shouldn’t be.
Interested to hear others’ thoughts.
A lot of intelligence is creative and performative - it's not like a prediction market where all the points are for being right. Especially with armchair thinking (no skin in the game), having opinions is more like building something out of lego than finding the "right answer". From that perspective, it's not surprising that people can reach different conclusions from the same set of initial blocks.
They may have vastly different priors, and confirmations bias does the rest of the work. In general, I'd say that human brain didn't evolve to be able to reliably arrive at objective truth, and rationalism's expectation that it's feasible to overcome this is naive at best.
I'm not sure that two people (say Alice and Bob) being presented with the same information is enough to ensure that they come to the same assumptions. Even if Alice and Bob have approximately the same priors coming into it,
1. They could have differing update rules. How do they incorporate new evidence into their model of their world? Alice might weight new information much more than Bob.
2. They could just experience the information differently. Alice might see the dress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress) as white and gold, Bob might see it as black and blue. Silly example, but if we can't even agree on something as foundational as color it's possible we could subjectively disagree on more abstract information.
3. What if they just "think differently", but still rationally?. If Alice tends to think in terms of causal descscion theory and Bob tends to think in evidentiary descscion theory, are either of their positions on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox more justified than the other's?
People have different personalities and moral foundations. If something is an issue related to morality or something political, then it is difficult for people to think clearly. Moral reasoning is a complicated process and different views can lead to different outcomes. Political beliefs are built on moral reasoning. Political and moral beliefs inform a lot of thinking about empirical issues like minimum wage and unemployment or climate change. If something is non-controversial, non-moral and non-political, it is easier to agree but intelligent people are still subject to biases.
I think some of it is that people differ in how conformist they are, i.e. if there is an objectively correct viewpoint and a different socially correct viewpoint, equally intelligent people will disagree simply based on different levels of conformity. Another factor is that eureka moments happen randomly.
Pointer: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Aumann's_agreement_theorem
Aumann's Agreement Theorem describes the broad area you speak of. Here's a pointer to Yudkowsky's essay on the subject, "complete" with some comments/discussions below from the rationalist community:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NKECtGX4RZPd7SqYp/the-modesty-argument
I'd say that the concept is unrealistic and useless. The profoundly unrealistic part is condensed in these five words: "based on the same information".
On tabula-rasa AIs, maybe. Not on humans.
The "information" based on which you assess situations, has accreted over decades and decades, depending on your age. There's megabits and megabits of such information involved, a significant portion of which can be a factor in how you view and judge any given issue. When you "state" any given issue from your perspective, you might state it with a few dozen bits of information, and you'll be under the illusion that those few dozen bits are "really it", that they fully cover your judgement of that issue, and there can not be any disagreement in the judgement if there's no disagreement upon those few dozen bits of information.
That view is, in almost all cases, false. There will be kilobits, hundreds of kilobits of information that really goes into that judgement which you *think* is fully expressed by those few dozen bits. The other 99% you "naturally take for granted", whereas granted it is not. If you took someone whose judgements you "find illogical" and locked yourself in a mountain hut for a whole week, doing nothing but descent into the differences between all your priors, you might still emerge a week later having covered no more than one percent of the *actual* information space from which your different judgements stem.
Scott's blog - much more so than Yudkowsky's - is the zone where people come to engage in such activities. (minus the mountain hut)
There’s a theorem by Scott Aaronson that says that actually you don’t need to exchange that much information to arrive at agreement.
Aumann's Agreement Theorem doesn't require the information be common, only the priors and the posteriors (the differences in posterior being the disagreement). The example he gives at the end of the paper (http://www.dklevine.com/archive/refs4512.pdf) does a good job of showing it -- the parties are exchanging their posteriors, not the actual evidence they used to form it. The common prior assumption is strong, but not as strong as requiring all information to be shared. Some even say common knowledge of rationality is enough to meet common priors (https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/prior.pdf) .
As I understand it, the "point" of the theorem is less that rational agents presented with the exact same evidence in total should come to the same conclusion, and more that if you trust that the other agent is rational you should use that when refining your own posterior. It's practical value (which I agree is dubious), is to point you to be more modest in your disagreement if the other agent is honest and rational.
Human intelligence is not really optimized for finding the "correct" view on something - it is optimized for mounting a rhetorical defense of an arbitrary, pre-selected position.
If your social community believes obscure religious idea A, and a neighboring social community believes a contradicting obscure religious idea B, your selection of obscure religious idea to believe will simply be a factor of whether you can to remain a member in good standing with your current community or if you see a benefit to jumping ship to a new community.
In either case, the ability to mount creative and clever arguments for your chosen position will place you in high regard in whichever community you choose to affiliate with, and may even be respected within the rival community in a "worthy opponent" sort of way.
This sort of social game is what human intelligence is optimized for. We are not optimized at all for looking at the world with unbiased eyes and forming an accurate map of the territory, because that sort of behavior tends to make you popular with nobody, and it is only in very recent times that the rewards for seeing clearly may come to be as worthwhile as the rewards for being a member in good standing with the community.
If you are surprise by it, you are running off the wrong theory of rationality/epistemology, because the right theory would predict the facts.That should be obvious, but a lot of the rationalsphere insist on using broken theories ,like Aumanns theorem.
Issues that are sufficiently deep, or which cut across cultural boundaries run into a problem where, not only do parties disagree about the object level issue, they also disagree about underlying questions of what constitutes truth, proof, evidence, etc. "Satan created the fossils to mislead people" is an example of one side rejecting the other sides evidence as even being evidence . Its a silly example, but there are much more robust ones.
Aumanns theorem tacitly assumes that two debaters agree in what evidence is: real life is not so convenient.
Can't you just agree on an epistemology, and then resolve the object level issue? No, because it takes an epistemology to come to conclusions about epistemology. Two parties with epistemological differences at the object level will also have them at the meta level.
Once this problem, sometimes called "the epistemological circle" or "problem of the criterion" is understood, it will be seen that the ability to agree or settle issues is the exception, not the norm. The tendency to agree , where it is apparent, does not show that anyone has escaped the epistemological circle, since it can also be explained by culture giving people shared beliefs. Only the convergence of agents who are out of contact with each other is strong evidence for objectivism
Experts are selected not for accuracy, but for improving our theorizing about a phenomenon. In the long run that should lead to accuracy, but in the short run it's better to have lots of people proposing weird theories like hollow earth, heliocentrism, etc., some of which will be right and most wrong.
I am not sure experts are even selected for that. It seems to me that experts are chosen based on how much they agree with existing experts, or just the relevant prior beliefs of the relevant selection group.
I don't think that's right. You don't become a respected academic by agreeing with everyone - you absolutely *must* say something weird and new. There are definitely limits of the type of weirdness and newness, but someone who just agrees with all the conventional wisdom won't get far.
Not at all. The vast majority of every conference I have attended is made up of papers that poke a little at the edges of what is generally known and find "Yup, what we thought was true is pretty much true", with the caveat that they can demonstrate it at p <= .05.
Now, if you want to be in the top say 5% of a field, you want to try and mix it up quite a bit. That might get you in the door. From that position, you then dictate what "respectable" means.
Further, note that there is a difference between your research conforming to beliefs about what the current state of research is and beliefs about how the world should work. If you are say, Card and Krueger, you can get famous publishing an article that goes against established economic theory, that raising the minimum wage lowers employment, but goes along with the prevailing political (for lack of a better word) beliefs of the academic community, that raising the minimum wage is good and something we should do.
In fact, doing that is a big win because people WANT to believe it. All those academic economists that are ashamed to point out at faculty gatherings that raising the minimum wage probably hurts employment prospects now can merrily join the consensus of the rest of the faculty. Whew! No more cognitive dissonance!
So yea, if you want to be respectable, that is, hold your job and get tenure, you need to toe the damned line. That line is drawn both by what current experts agree is true, and what the group wants to be true. After you get tenured you can maybe afford to get a little weird, but even then you'd better be careful.
*Note* My experiences are from the field of economics, with a little dabbling in philosophy and sociology. The sciences that are farther from politics are possibly not so bad, but any science that suggests what governments should do in some fashion gets corrupted really quickly. Jane Goodall might have some fun stories about how people pushed back against her work, however, and chimp behavior is pretty far from human society. Well, at least in how we apply it.
> even when they are forming opinions based on the same information
That's never the case. There's literally always divergence in information, most often in personal experiences that shaped their reactions and intuitions around certain topics. Couple that with pervasive cognitive bias and divergence in conclusions shouldn't be logically surprising. Much like the unexpected hanging paradox, we're often surprised nonetheless.
This is extra interesting in the case of differences in Protestant theology. We're all working off the same source material, which we hold to be self-consistent and infallible. Most of us will quote identical maxims about taking the text as it stands, not theologizing off experience, etc. We'll even agree about the order of suprency of the books. But consider the Calvinists vs the Lutherans - a tiny (and I do mean tiny) difference in how to weight pure logical consistency vs. our human inability to fully comprehend the Divine, and they wind up disagreeing about a whole slew of things. It's astonishing how much of a divergence small differences can produce.
In my experience, some highly intelligent people develop such a powerful distrust of the intellectually average that they end up a little too self-reliant when it comes to forming opinions about the world, effectively insulating themselves from other people's perspectives and opinions even when those people have far more expertise behind those perspectives and opinions. Meanwhile, smart people are still susceptible to bias. So you end up with some very biased and insulated smart people convinced of really weird ideas, despite having access to the same information as everyone else, because they won't let anybody talk them out of it.
There are a lot of good responses to your question, but I'll also add one other thing to consider. You are looking at the differences, which are sometimes pretty extensive and important. If you looked at the similarities, you may find that even smart people who disagree vehemently on certain topics actually agree on the vast majority of topics. Not too many smart people disagree about the rough shape of the earth, the existence of countries, the structure of the periodic table of the elements, and thousands of other details.
We concentrate on the differences because there isn't that much to say about where we agree. "Argentina is a real country." - "Okay, I agree." That's pretty much our response to tons of random factoids, unless or until we disagree. Scott's Link posts contains lots of cool information and nobody says much about them. When they disagree, it spawns comment threads and that's most of what people will read about the Link posts.
Even in fields where disagreements are notorious, like economics, there is mostly agreement on basic principals and facts. If two "intelligent people" agree on 98% of all relevant facts, it is certainly noteworthy that they could still disagree on conclusions and important details, but I think it's less noteworthy than the fact that they agree on so much in the first place.
Human reasoning is heuristics stacked upon heuristics. Expect chaotic outcomes.
Diversity cultivates more broad experimentation, which invites more serendipity. I’m not sure how an evolutionary mechanism would reward that, though. Even if being part of a diverse society helps everyone, the individual payoffs might still encourage convergence. Since we observe divergence, maybe not.
On polygenic screening - a recent article in the Guardian gives some evidence that public opinion (in the UK at least) might be positive towards the broad family of genetic screening. Of course, just one data point, and this is post-natal not embryonic, but I think this is useful for context as there was some speculation about whether the tech would be outright banned.
Of course I could see this going differently in the US vs. Europe.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/04/whole-genome-sequencing-of-all-uk-newborns-would-have-public-support
That's not eugenics, though, because you aren't selecting the babies with the lowest risk; killing the babies with high risk of X gets you arrested for murder.
Another piece of evidence is that in Denmark, almost all mongoloid children are killed before birth. It's difficult to imagine any principled argument against extending this to other serious defects (and then to less serious ones).
The term is Down Syndrome
Hello Eloise. I would appreciate it if you did not try to impose your personal linguistic preferences on me. Have a good day.
I won't ban you for now, because probably you're from Denmark and I don't know how things work there, but in the US this is considered offensive and I'd prefer you use the standard term.
"a recent article in the Guardian gives some evidence that public opinion (in the UK at least) might be positive towards the broad family of genetic screening"
Of course it will be, depending on how the question being put is asked. There's a difference between "do you think we should use genetic screening to prevent Terrible Awful Suffering (insert photo of severely disabled child here)?" and "Do you think we should try breeding the Superman (insert Aryan ideal photo here)?"
People will be very inclined to be sympathetic to "Hi, my name is Jill. I have a family history of Terrible Awful Syndrome. I've seen aunts, cousins, and my granny dying in horrible pain and suffering from this. I am a carrier of the gene for Terrible Awful Syndrome. I want to use polygenic screening so my child can have a happy, healthy, normal life. Won't you help me achieve that?" and photo of appealing mother with bouncing baby at the top of the article.
Who could possibly be against Niceness and Happiness?
Meanwhile, the clinics that are promising parents "we will give you a smart, tall, handsome, Nobel Prize Winner Olympian Tech Billionaire Entrepreneur baby" will not put that into the publicity for the general public, because it sounds too much like the bad name eugenics got from trying to breed the Ubermensch. It will be discreetly mentioned to the potential clients, but worded vaguely enough that it can't be pinned down as a promise.
All the stories and press releases they feed the media will be the "Help Cure Terrible Awful Syndrome" type instead. Public opinion is malleable, and once you have them by the heart-strings, you can get on with the profitable stuff.
I think I agree with you in direction, but not in magnitude of certainty -- while I think it's most likely this will play out with the end state that you narrate, I can see a few paths by which this tech could get banned at a national level. I'd be very surprised if it gets banned everywhere though.
The most obvious path to banning would be if in 5 years' time, 90% of embryo screening products end up being "make your child blonde haired, blue eyed, and high IQ" style products and not the "Terrible Awful Syndrome" treatments as you put it. (I'm phrasing this in a deliberately and hopefully-illustratively inflammatory caricature, I am not trying to smuggle objections to this tech into the argument here.)
I'll stay out of the political rabbit-hole here, and just say that there are permutations of the discretionary genetic engineering product that would trigger pretty much every group with cultural influence. (Speculating: would it be easier to launch non-medical screening services, which don't make any FDA-regulated claims on health? If so, this would seem to make this failure path more likely to happen.)
> It will be discreetly mentioned to the potential clients, but worded vaguely enough that it can't be pinned down as a promise.
I think this is perhaps a bit optimistic. In this day and age I'd expect investigative journalists or twitter to find out about this practice approximately immediately, if there's any substantial access below millionaire and/or upper-class tiers. More concretely, at the prices quoted in the previous article I'd be surprised if it didn't get offered in every IVF clinic in the US; if it's really just +10-20% onto the ticket price it would be strange for this to not see wide adoption. So I think we have to fall back on weighing whether the positive optics of "helping sufferers of TAS" outweighs the negative optics of how this tech will be spun, rather than hoping that the negative interpretations will somehow not be noticed.
Five years down the line, as long as nobody explicitly says "sure, we're aiming for the blue-eyed blond genius market", it will be too late. People will have accepted TAS screening. Any attempts to put a limit on it will be treated the same way any attempts to limit abortion. "So you want to ban this treatment? You want to force women to carry to term children who will only live short, painful lives? You monster!"
Investigative journalists will only investigate if they think they can make a story out of it. The people who will be pro- this technique will be the Blue Tribe, because Science and My Body My Choice and all the rest of it. And investigative journalists are Blue Tribe, too. They would run a story on it if they could spin it as "Republicans for white supremacy", but Red Tribe will probably not be pro- this technique.
Even if such a company wanted to advertise that they had the ability to help select for physical attributes, surely they'd be smart enough to run ads with an interracial couple featuring a word bubble next to a black woman saying "Thanks to SelectCo, I was able to ensure my daughter had hair like mine!"
That's the way to do it; be impeccably woke. Ads with smiling inter-racial same-sex and opposite-sex couples cuddling their cute bundles of joy. Delighted testimony from satisfied customers about how the threat of their family medical history was hanging over them until SelectCo sensitively and caringly helped and advised them. "My wife and I wanted to be sure our child would look like us both", says Jane, "and with SelectCo's patented technology, now everyone tells us our daughter looks just like her moms!"
That SelectCo also helps you pick out the Best Baby along the blond blue-eyed genius route isn't touted openly but the marketing hints at it subtly enough to be deniable, but openly enough that prospective clients get the hint that they can get *exactly* what they pay for.
Assuming the tech works, I don't see that as an obviously worse world than the one we've got, except for generational sneering at people whose parents made obviously fashionable choices.
Since I believe the future will also be silly, there won't just be a blond(e) blue-eyed market, it will be complicated by a substantial "looks like a specific celebrity or athlete" market.
I have no idea whether Simone Biles would make her genetic pattern available, but thinking about it-- I'd be willing to trade my fairly adequate body for her specs assuming that anti-black racism is no worse than it is now and her pattern is generally available so having it isn't a guaranteed win at sports.
My best gymnastics feat was a two-handed cartwheel off a balance beam, and I still remember it fondly. I'd love to know what it's like to go flipping through the air.
Blue's pretty dog-eat-dog, actually. "X secretly Nazis, kill them" plays pretty well regardless of who X is. See "Living by the Sword" back on SSC.
A possible thought experiment regarding polygenic screening, gene editing, embryo selection, etc. If someone secretly created a child who was intelligent, physically well or not at risk of cancer with the help of these practices, would those who are opposed be in favor of removing the benefits by way of forced intervention? For example, if a baby was selected for intelligence secretly, would you punish the parents and then give the baby IQ lowering pills? Or if the baby is at lower cancer risk, expose the baby to carcinogens to return to a normal risk level?
Those concerned with "fairness" would have a hard time inflicting harm on an already created being but letting a being come into the world without the benefit of good genes is not recognized as a harm as much. It seems pretty much equivalent morally in my view. I think a consistent "fairness" position would mean that children secretly born with them should be harmed to be more fair. I think that's bad, so it's a good point against prohibiting these things.
Killing the baby does not "undo" the assault. It harms a third party. So is it analogous?
Sounds like the Reversal Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversal_test
Oh, wow. Yes, it definitely does. Thanks for the link.
It's not quite it though, I think.
The reversal test concerns on deciding what parameter value is the most optimal, and not whether modifying that parameter with a particular method is moral / ethical. For gene editing we all agree that higher IQ value is better (especially since it's a rather small increment), but it's the actual method of obtaining the higher IQ that is controversial. If there was some natural, non controversial way to increase a baby's IQ, I'm sure everbody would be up for it.
In essence nobody is saying that the status quo provides the optimal solution, rather the argument is that the way of modifying the status quo is unacceptable.
The main problem there is that the two obvious anti-eugenics arguments both shrug it off if you actually understand them; Nordmann's right that it's a strawman.
#1: "Tampering with demographics is dangerous unless you know exactly what you're doing; the advantage of the status quo is that it has some proven resilience. Inverting the proposed change is dangerous for the same reason." (Or to put it another way, "status quo 'bias' is not really a bias, but a correction for the risk of unforeseen consequences; it looks stupid in constructed logic puzzles because the brain is designed for the real world and not for constructed logic puzzles".)
#2: "Increasing everyone's intelligence evenly would be good; the issue is with the increased variance that improving *some* people's intelligence would create. Decreasing intelligence selectively would also increase variance, so it's bad for exactly the same reason."
(I'm not saying I necessarily agree with either of these, just saying that this test isn't the sick own Ord and Bostrom seem to think.)
There is also, at this stage, no guarantee that polygenic screening to have the Smartest or Prettiest or Most Athletic baby will indeed produce that, it just increases the chances of such a result. And the unintended consequences may not show up until it's too late; yes, Baby Polly or Baby Gene is Smart, but they also suffer crippling agoraphobia; or they're champion gymnasts because of their hyperflexible joints but it turns out they've also got Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or something down the line that will be the classic "but how were we supposed to know this would happen?"
There *is* a selection - a very stringent one - which is already happening. Even leaving aside the hundred million spermatozoids of which a single one "makes it", there's a stringent selection happening even on the follicular side. Behind the 400 ovulations that a woman is likely to have (for the up to three children that most of them would give birth to), there are millions of original follicules that get trimmed down by "follicular atresia" to the few hundred which ultimately get ovulated.
So there certainly is a selection anyway, it's just that it's a "stohastic" selection, not based on conscious human decisions. And even *this* "natural" selection can turn out quite negative consequences for some (not all) children of the same parental couple.
What's then the problem with humans making the pick of the few children that will really be born, from a scrutinized selection of fertilized ovum? I think that the ethics argument here is more of the "trolley problem" kind - the one where flipping the switch makes *you* the killer of the one person tied to the other track, whereas not touching the switch makes you *not* the killer of the four persons on the original track. (philosophical interpretations differ)
It's not "just" a trolley problem, granted, because we don't really know how many "casualties" lie on which of the tracks. And neither does "nature", although there quite surely is *some* sense in the selections that "nature" makes. The question is when do we become confident enough of our own selection heuristics, to be sure that they will statistically lead to better outcomes than nature's own selection? It's when we do go past that point (as some countries already do with aborting babies with mongoloid disorders), that the trolley problem comes into focus - for the portion where the "provably statistically better" selection still has its flip side in the occasional baby suffering some nasty syndrome, without us having "nature" to blame for it.
Conflating selection on gametes and selection on embryos is completely disingenuous - the problem with most IVF method is not genetic screening, it's de facto abortion of perfectly viable embryos. Genetic screening just add an other reason to abort.
Your accusation of disingenuousness presumes we share certain value judgements, which we quite possibly do not.
My value judgement on abortion is that it's no problem whatsoever if done to a foetus which has no consciousness yet, and atrocious if performed past the point when consciousness has ignited. (the rationale for this is self-evident in my worldview, and might not be self-evident to someone with a worldview sufficiently different from mine)
Whereas I'm >99% sure that a seven-months foetus is conscious, >95% sure that a two-months foetus is not conscious,and 100% sure that a one-month foetus is not conscious.
What's the case for a 3-months foetus? A 5-months one? I *don't know*, and am highly suspicious of anyone who claims to know for sure either way.
From that perspective, aborting a second-trimester foetus (because some medical test detected a serious disorder at that point) might well be an atrocity. Or might not, I'm not sure, but I don't deny the possibility that it might. In contrast, when it comes to the discarding of 19 out of 20 "perfectly viable embryos" -- at that far earlier stage -- I see zero issues with that. They're just a cluster of cells. We're also a cluster of cells but we're not *just* a cluster of cells; we have consciousness. Those embryos do not. "Has the potential to become a conscious human" does not equate to "is one". And this *is* the same for those embryos as it is for a follicule that naturally underwent atresia.
Your value judgements may differ from the above ones, but the stance I had exposed is not disingenious when assessed from my value judgements.
What is the problem with increasing the variance of intelligence in a population that the people making the second argument anticipate?
Mostly, the potential for a caste split and permanent underclass a la Draka or Brave New World. Not saying I entirely agree with this (anymore), but that's the boogeyman.
That's addressed by the reversal test though: Should we reduce the variance of intelligence by forcing the most intelligent people to take intelligence-reducing drugs? Or (to correspond more closely to the reverse of the proposed polygenic screening), should we force people who are both intelligent and have rich parents to take intelligence-reducing drugs?
I suppose you're right that it has a reversal, although it's not the strawman one (and also, measurement error and variance in drug response would make a reversal actually quite inefficient; it's much easier to add variance than subtract it). There's also the question of "is 'caste split' a binary or gradient thing, and is it at an improper level now?".
Isn't #1 a universal argument against any change in immigration, emigration or family support policies? Because all those tamper with demographics and at this level nobody really knows what they are doing.
It's a universal argument against policies that change demographics, which isn't quite the same as an argument against a change in policies that affect demographics. The evidence from non-catastrophe is mostly about the state of demographics, not about the state of policies (which could be sending you in the direction of catastrophe and just haven't gotten there yet - fertility collapse + lack of immigration is the obvious case of a policy that works fine for 20-30 years and then sets you on fire).
On the contrary, a consistent "fairness" position is not to punish the child for the stupidity, arrogance, and malevolence of the parents. This is not Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" and this argument is not "checkmate, normies!"
To extend your argument to the reductio ad absurdum, not alone should such "secretly cooked up in an IVF lab" babies be "harmed to be more fair", so should all babies and children naturally born with better qualities than the norm. Hence, back to Harrison Bergeron. Nobody wants to do that.
So the argument "well if you wouldn't break the legs of a kid who is good at ballet so they are 'normal', then it's perfectly pip-peachy-pop fine to engage in polygenic screening and destroy the 'defective' - by which we mean no more than 'not the pick of the litter' - embryos to implant one we *hope* will have the desired qualities" falls down on its own grounds. I could equally turn the argument around and ask "say there is a family with four children; of those four, one child is the smartest/healthiest/possesses whatever desirable traits/; are the polygenic proponents are willing to euthanise all the children in a family who do not rise up to the level of the smartest/healthiest child?" because that's what they're doing with polygenic screening.
It moves beyond "this embryo is carrying the genes for a serious, even life-threatening, illness" into "this embryo is capable of developing during a normal pregnancy into an average baby who will grow up to be an average person, it just doesn't have the bestest of the bestest genes by our metrics, so we discard it".
"Fairness" means many different things to many people, but it *usually* doesn't mean punishing children for the crimes of their parents, nor any sort of Harrison Bergeron-style forced "equality". Nor should we want it to.
If I steal a bunch of Pfizer vaccine and go around jabbing a bunch of poor rural Mexican farmers who wouldn't otherwise have been vaccinated until sometime next year, it's probably fair that I should go to jail for theft, but fairness does not demand finding some other disease to expose those poor farmers to so that they won't have an "unfair advantage".
Similarly, *if* we decide that polygenic screening of babies is a bad thing that needs to be prohibited, then we punish the people who *actually do it*. We shouldn't then try to harm the children who may have benefited from this in the name of "fairness".
In neither case does the fact that we're not trying to destroy the benefit that accrued to innocent bystanders constitute an "aha, gotcha!" argument that the people who actually broke the law in the first place have done no harm and that the law is a bad law. There may be a sound argument for that, but you'll have to look for it elsewhere.
"the people who actually broke the law in the first place have done no harm and that the law is a bad law"
That's the main point here. Suppose I have a next door neighbour, Phil. Phil is a horrible person: he terrorises the entire street, he drinks, he's a criminal, he neglects and abuses his spouse and kids, he is a blot on the landscape.
And suppose I get my carving knife and go knock on Phil's door and when he answers, I stab him seventy-six times until he's dead. The world has been improved by Phil's death. His family are much happier, the neighbourhood is much happier, everyone who ever had to deal with Phil in any capacity is much happier.
Am I justified in that? Is the law against murder a bad law? Is it "fair" for me to kill Phil, and if the law doesn't allow me to do that, then the law is preventing an easy solution to improve the lives of many peoples by simply murdering the Phils of this world?
The social contract on murder runs something like: if everyone went around murdering people that they thought were evil, a lot of good people would die, because a lot of people are shit at determining evil, and because people don't like dying there would be an arms race expending large amounts of societal resources on internal conflict. So instead, we have a centralised system for killing/imprisoning evil people, and we don't allow people not authorised by that system to do it themselves. This is not a perfectly-efficient system, but it seems to be one of the better ones, and it seems difficult to carve out an exception for "unless you're really sure this is an inefficiency" without lots of people misapplying that exception.
(Sorry if I'm stating the obvious here.)
In terms of social contract, the first problem with murder kind of applies to abortion, but the second definitely doesn't (zygotes, embryos, fetuses and babies are not capable of meaningfully defending themselves, so legalising killing them cannot result in an arms race).
You may or may not have done a good thing in isolation, if Phil were really horribly bad. But if word gets out that we let you get away with that thing, that's going to encourage a lot of other annoyed people to kill a lot of other "Phils" who aren't actually as bad as Phil was. And the same clever utilitarian logic that you can use to justify murdering Phil, the rest of us can use to justify putting the occasional "innocent" person in prison if the circumstances make it a strong enough deterrent to truly dangerous killers.
Good laws do not have fractal boundaries carefully tailored to prohibit every evil act while allowing every good act within their domain, because that trick never works. Good laws have simple, legible boundaries that sometimes prohibit good acts while allowing evil ones, because those laws can at least work in the real world and result in a better world than the one with no laws.
If we decide that it's a good thing to have laws on genetic screening or engineering of babies, then they're probably going to prohibit some good things while allowing some bad things to go unpunished. One of the bad things that will probably be allowed to stand is that children who are born with what we consider "bad" enhancements, e.g. the Keyzer Soze Polygenic Enhancement Package, will be allowed to keep those enhancements at least until we observe them doing other illegal things.
My cynical view is that we'll get the "camel's nose" version of polygenic screening to soften the public up and get it made acceptable. First will be the "we want to spare parents and babies the Terrible Awful Disease Syndrome so they can have happy healthy lives and not die young in horrible pain". Who could object to that?
Then, once this has become acceptable, the next stage will be: "what's so wrong about selecting the best embryo of the bunch? that only means the chance of a successful pregnancy is increased!"
Again, who could object to that?
And so it goes, until eventually the entire camel is in the tent, and the baseline human is the one outside shivering in the cold night without shelter.
The reversal test is meant to address the objection that polygenic screening would exacerbate inequality by making the children of rich children smarter. It's not meant to address other objections, such as ones based on risk to the children, or on the destruction of embryos.
The objection to your vaccine theft wouldn't be that the Mexican farmers unfairly get a vaccine, but that someone else is deprived of it. The proper reversal of the theft would involve exposing the Mexican farmers to some disease in a way that mysteriously protects whoever would have got those vaccines without the theft from COVID.
On the other hand, the fairness objection to polygenic screening objects solely to some children becoming smarter, without anyone else being deprived of something. (At least directly; some versions of the argument may involve the smarter children outcompeting others for resources.)
Those who make this objection would generally prefer polygenic screening to be unavailable/banned. You say that fairness usually doesn't mean punishing children for the crimes of their parents. But is reducing the child's intelligence to the level it would be in the absence of polygenic screening punishment, while banning the screening in the first place isn't? After all, taking away stolen goods is not usually considered punishment, and it's considered appropriate even when punishment isn't (e.g. if the current possessor, perhaps the child of the thief, was unaware that they were stolen). So the intelligence-reducing pill seems like an appropriate reversal to me.
Granted, some of the objection to the intelligence-lowering pill is to the coercion involved in forcing people to take a drug, rather than to reducing their intelligence in the first place. I can't judge that; I'd consider it monstrous to force them to take intelligence-reducing pills, but I'd also consider it monstrous to forbid people from making their children smarter for no other reason that it's not available to everyone.
The creators of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ran the thought experiment and decided that that the Federation would ban genetically modified humans (no mention of other species) from serving in Starfleet or practicing medicine. In the real world, you could effectively "equalize" the children by forbidding them from obtaining any occupational licenses.
That's at least a good enough premise for science fiction. I assume the modified humans would develop their own credentialing systems.
My memory of those episodes is that the ban was because, due to the processes used, the children had a host of mental health and behavioural issues. Yes they were very very smart but they were also very damaged.
If you're talking about Julian Bashir who turned out to be secretly modified, I think the idea of the ban was that (1) genetic modification of this sort was highly illegal (2) in order to join Starfleet, he had to hide his actual medical history (3) the ban was because the process was so dangerous and also because it was an 'unfair advantage', and if Starfleet allowed genetically modified humans then it would be too much of a rationalisation for ambitious parents - "I want my kid to be a starship captain!".
It's more similar to athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs; you may say "this is so outdated a rule, scrap it and let them juice themselves up to the max for entertainment purposes - exactly *how* fast can a human run, how high can a human jump, how much weight can a human lift?" but the downsides are that such drugs exert a price.
The actual reason for the ban was the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s featuring one Khan Noonien Singh. It's about protecting the Federation from God-Emperor Bashir.
By contrast, the Honorverse has widespread prejudice against "genies," but there's no mention of legal disability except on the planet Mesa, where they are bred as slaves. The main character has some subtle modifications that she keeps quiet about, but she's not afraid of losing her job if it gets out.
In Heinlein's _Friday_, there's a tremendous amount of prejudice against APs (Artificial People), but I don't think there were legal constraints.
Most people on Mesa are genies, not just the slaves.
I feel I should point out that because it's, y'know, a post-scarcity utopia, genetically-modified people aren't exactly starving in the street. The only ones that are institutionalised are the ones that are dangerously insane and/or incapable of normal functioning.
(Also, the procedure as described there is something done as an edit to existing children, not prenatal. This probably explains the failure rate.)
Cutting potential practitioners off from interesting work isn't nothing. Neither is preventing clients from getting excellent work.
I realize this original Star Trek, but perhaps genetically modified ship designers would have included seat belts.
The problem with writing Current Social Problem Morality Tale episodes in skiffy shows is that the premise falls apart once you look at it.
Yeah, the problem was trying to enhance existing children which obviously had bad results, and the ban arising out of the Eugenics Wars (which was the well-intentioned effort of scientists to create supermen and superwomen who would be above the base human follies and would take charge and lead society, which backfired by creating the superior beings who did take charge and lead society - right into wars of conquest against each other) made sense.
But when you look at it - things like Julian's intellectual developmental delay (which was the reason his parents originally sought the genetic enhancement, then his dad got ambitious and went for 'better than normal super-smart version' instead of the 'bring him up to bright average where nobody will pick up he's been enhanced'), or Geordi's blindness, or other problems could and would have been diagnosed in utero and fixed then. Or if the injury happened after birth, then replacement organs could have been grown and used. You'd expect medical science and improvements in education and so on to have gone to the stage where there wasn't a need for childhood meddling with genes or wearing VISORs.
If you ban GMO humans from certain professions, what about their kids? Assume two GMO humans have an unmodified child, but one that inherits their modified genes nonetheless?
If the ban only applies to being modified *directly*, there might appear groups of people who decide to "sacrifice" one generation for the benefit of the next one. Imagine a subculture where every odd generation is genetically modified and every even generation is born naturally (to people from the odd generation), and the people from the even generations pay an extra tax to support their parent generation. -- This would probably be difficult to coordinate, and slow enough for the society to notice this and adjust the laws.
If the ban applies to everyone whose ancestors were genetically modified... then we create a hereditary underclass. Hundred years later the "purebloods" may be a minority that holds all positions of power.
I want to run a survey where I ask people to give confidence estimates on various predictions. A number of these predictions are a of the form: "Which of these mutually exclusive options do you think is going to happen?" I'd like the survey tool to force the sum of those predictions to be 100%.
Google forms, which I used previously for a similar survey, doesn't allow you to do this (as far as I know), does anyone know a good, preferably free, tool that does?
You could also ask for relative likelihoods, in the form 2:40:10, and then not have that problem.
Otherwise, https://www.guidedtrack.com/ definitely has this functionality, but probably has a largish learning cost.
Relative likelihoods is a good suggestion. I'm trying to stick to percentage chance because I think it's more intuitive for a lot of people. Last time I just asked in the question's text that the answers should sum to 100% (which a lot of people ignored) and then normalized everyone's responses, which I think is mathematically the same as asking for relative likelihoods, but is somewhat less elegant.
Guidedtrack indeed looks like it's a little bit too much effort for what I am trying to do.
You could probably build this with a no-code tool like Bubble
You could just ask for the probability of all but one of the options, while telling the user that the prediction implies that the probability of the remaining one is 100%-(the sum of the other ones). Although the choice of which one's probability you don't ask could bias users.
That doesn't work if the other options already add up to more than a hundred percent (for instance, if there are four options and somebody just enters 70% for all of them).
Indeed.
In discussions about free will, determinists will say that all particles are subject to the same rules of causality including the ones between your ears. I do not find this convincing because appealing to current knowledge about the physical world would cause us to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure. However, that is absurd because we experience these things directly!
Imagine arguing with an android about the feeling of anger. The android keeps telling you that you are mistaken. You do not experience anything like anger. What happens is electrical signals in your brain and hormones in your body. They make you clinch your fist and squint your eyebrows. The android says that it is merely an illusion that you think you have this experience. The android says that chemicals cannot cause experience because no chemicals in the entire world cause these so-called "feelings." You are merely uttering words that your brain told you to and tricking yourself to think a feeling is real.
This is what it feels like when discussing free will. I experience free will directly. I make choices and the fact that I make choices is the reason I even have a concept of free will to believe in. If I had no experience of anger, I would not conceive of anger. If there was no free will, life would be like a movie. This is conceivable but this is not the present state of affairs. So, why can a bunch of particles create consciousness, emotions and pain but it cannot allow us to have choices?
Many people experience free will in situations in which they do not have it. E.g. the experience of psychokinetic powers is quite common. So I do not think that life being deterministic would imply that life would be experienced as deterministic.
> I do not find this convincing because appealing to current knowledge about the physical world would cause us to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure.
Instead you appel to our current knowledge about how the brain works, which is even more scant. Nothing that we currently know about it would suggest that the subjective experience of consciousness (the perception of free will included) requires anything beyong what our current understanding of physics provides.
The amusing thing about this whole "controversy" to me is that while determinism is almost certainly true, non-determinists have better life outcomes, the "illusion" of free will apparently works better if you don't doubt it. The ultimate irony of the universe.
What about determinism is inconsistent with free will? There's nothing in determinism that says you can't choose X or that you can't consider between X and ~X before choosing ~X. Determinism's premise is that you know the state of a person at a Godlike level of precision, and predicts that *given that state of that person at that time* it's possible to predict their actions.
The concept of free will, before compatibilist redefinition, seems to involve a belief that your choices aren't subject to the laws governing mere matter. That would be inconsistent with determinism (and possibly also inconsistent with physicalism + quantum randomness because being random doesn't really sound like freedom).
Do you think believers in free will actually define it that way?
But that's not the thing we have experience of. What I experience is that *my* emotions, decisions, intentions, etc. cause some actions, while other behaviors have their causes outside my head. I don't have any experience of whether my emotions are constituted by matter or not.
But what causes your emotions, decisions, and intentions? (Ask recursively if needed)
I mean, that's the sort of questioning one gets driven to by a certain philosophical theory about what free will is. But it's not part of the ordinary conception of freedom as distinguished from compulsion.
Could you (re)explain your position? I’m confused on what you believe here.
> But what causes your emotions, decisions, and intentions? (Ask recursively if needed)
The core of the matter is why those causes are relevant. Free will has become a bit of a grab-bag of all sorts of things, and teasing them apart to make the debate well-defined drives some people crazy because any definition necessarily leaves some of those things out.
The most important matters of free will concern responsibility for choices. Whether your emotions or physical makeup are determined by deterministic processes seems immaterial to the question of whether you are responsible for choices that are driven by that makeup. The deterministic processes may have structured the universe such that you wanted to and did assault someone, but the fact still remains, you *wanted to and did assault someone* and holding you responsible for those actions will reshape how you evaluate your actions in the future.
How that responsibility is ensured is a question of justice.
I should probably elaborate on the scenario "well, what if there's a perfect predictor that predicts your actions, and then upon hearing its prediction you try to defy it?"
The answer is "a predictor which can perfectly predict the result of a process that has access to the predictor's own output is impossible". This is literally the way you prove that the halting problem is undecidable: no finite-time algorithm X can predict whether an arbitrary algorithm completes in finite time, because if there were such an algorithm, I could write an algorithm Y that runs X on Y's own source code (and by assumption this takes only finite time) and then does the opposite of what X said.
Determinism says you could not have chosen not-X under circumstances where you chose X.
And the one who chooses whether its X or non-X that you couldn't have choosen otherwise... is still you. You are still the part of the "circumstances" that makes the decision, event though after you choice have been made, this decision can be marked as "inevitable".
Yes,but so what? That's not an answer to libertarians, because they are not complaining about not being causally involved at all.
Determinism doesn't allow you to influence the future in a way that makes future A more likely than future B , as a result of some choice you make now. Under determinism, the probabilities of A and B are what they are -
Determinism allows you to cause the future ,but it doesn't allow you to control the future in any sense other than causing it. That additional, non-redundant, sense of control is what would have been required to answer the concern that libertarians actually have.
Just that. For me understanding it helped to resolve my personal struggles with determinism and free will. And I don't think I'm so special that no one else will find this line of thinking usefull.
The probabilities are in the mind. Through our actions in deterministic universe we can affect ours and others probabilistic estimates and we directly cause the future to be the way it is.
I understand the intuitive appeal of the idea that when we are making a choice, we are choosing between different possible futures. But this model seem to be not entierly correct. There are no objective possible futures, they exist only conterfactually in the mind of the one making a choice. But there is still choice. And it's arguably even more important as the thing you are choosing will have turned out to be the only future there is! When I think about it it feels much more fullfiling and a much bigger responsibility.
I notice that I'm confused about this libertarian position. I do not see how it's a coherent idea to control the future without causing it. Can you give an example? What kind of non-deterministic universe would allow such a thing?
I think you got it backward. The idea is that we cause the future without controlling it.
"There are no objective possible futures, they exist only conterfactually in the mind of the one making a choice. "
If the universe is deterministic , then there is no libertarian free will.
But it's not a fact that the universe upis deterministic.
"I notice that I'm confused about this libertarian position. I do not see how it's a coherent idea to control the future without causing it"
No one is saying that.
"There are no objective possible futures, they exist only conterfactually in the mind of the one making a choice."
Is that a fact? I would say that it's equivalent to determinism, but determinism is not a fact.
But freedom doesn't require that I could have done not-X - it requires only that I could have done not-X *if I had wanted to*. Determinism is perfectly compatible with that counterfactual.
But determinism also means you wouldn't have wanted to.
Right, but that's perfectly fine for free will.
It's fine for compatibility free will and terrible for libertarian free will. Libertarians think they can change their minds, that they are not psychologically determined.
I mean, sure, given the information I had two days ago and my mental state at the time, (according to determinism) it was determined that I wouldn't murder my neighbours and paint the walls with their blood that evening. For one, I didn't even consider the possibility, for two, I avoid murdering innocents, and for three, I'm too lazy to paint the walls with people's blood unless there's some good reason (which did not exist).
What about this would be a violation of my free will? The determination is a *consequence* of my will - it's the ripples from me moving around, not a straitjacket binding me.
Determinism is usually seen as a consequence of basic physical laws. You could argue that there are deterministic psychological laws,that make actions completely determined even if physics isn't. It it doesn't seem prima facie likely, because that would most people experience feeling torn or unable to make up their minds sometimes. And the fact that you definitely would not murder your neighbours doesn't mean there is so me unique other thing you definitely would do.
How is feeling torn or being unable to make up one's mind evidence against determinism? "Person picks X but feels guilty about it" and "person refuses to choose" are valid determinable outcomes.
I was speaking specifically about psychological determinism. If the argument for psychological determinism is that, in any decisions, one desire is overwhelming and defeats the others, then torn decisions are evidence against it.
You seem to be talking from a standard confused perspective on the freedom of will. I'd recommend you read the Solution to Free Will by Yudkowsky https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/free-will
There is an obvious non sequitur in "all particles are subject to the same rules of causality therefore we have to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure". It's a difference between explaning something and explaining something away.
Consider this. When humanity figured out how electricity works, when we understood that no gods throw lightning bolts from the sky, we didn't start to claim that lightnings do not exist. We explained away the gods of thunder but the thunder itself is as real as before, in a sense knowing how a phenomenon actually works makes it feel even more real. The difference between abstract ignorance and detailed schematics of knowledge.
Same logic goes for feelings. When someone claims, for instance, that love doesn't exist because it's mere chemical reaction, they are getting it wrong. On the contrary, Love does exist and we know it because we've pinned down a corresponding chemical reaction, social conditioning, evolutionary history of such adaptation etc. The mystery is explained away. But the real phenomenon is still here.
Here is where your android arguing example falls short. If the android isn't made from straw but is properly programmed so that they are not confused about the matter, they will see that there is nothing to argue about. Android will know how your anger maps to electrical signals in your brain and hormones. They will know that these reactions cause your feelings. That it's simply how the algorith feels from inside. A really smart and curious android may even model these reactions in a simulation in order to experience anger themself.
And the same logic goes for the freedom of will. Bunch of particles do allow us to make choices in a completely deterministic universe. We may not know the exact mechanism of our decision making but we can extrapolate well enough from the way chess program makes its decisions. Can you even imagine in good details how it can be the other way around? Suppose we live in non-lawful, non-deterministic, non-predictable universe. How can we possibly plan and make choices there?
The hard core of the problem is still there, because we can't predict qualia from physics , or explain why they cost at all.
While it's true that we haven't completely reduced consciousness to matter yet, it's just a technical problem. All the required philosophy to understand the process in broad terms and get rid of the majority of confusion is already done. Just as heat and motion are not some different entities united by bridging laws, same is with chemical activity of the brain and qualia.
Also I don't think that qualia are very relevant to the problem and solution of freedom of will.
"All the required philosophy to understand the process in broad terms and get rid of the majority of confusion is already done"
And all philosophers agree that on that?
I'm sorry, I have troble parsing your comments charitably here.
Shouldn't you at first make a claim in favour of qualia being relevant to the discussion before I'm obliged to argument against it? Burden of proof and all that. So why do you think that qualia are relevant here?
Also is your second comment just an appeal to authority, pointing out that there are some high status individuals who disagree? It's not that philosophy is an effective market optimized for figuring the one true approach to the problem. Rather than it's more of a document all possible perspectives.
"Shouldn't you at first make a claim in favour of qualia being relevant to the discussion before I'm obliged to argument against"
It's a completely standard claim in contemporary philosophy.
"Also is your second comment just an appeal to authority, pointing out that there are some high status individuals who disagree"
It's an attempt to parse "philosophy is deconfused". It turns out not to be a claim about philosophy as a whole , but rather about your favourite school. But multiple schools of philosoohy claim to have solved everything.
"Also I don't think that qualia are very relevant to the problem and solution of freedom of will."
People think Al sorts of things. You need proof, or at least a good argument.
If there really is an off-the-shelf set of bridging laws relating qualia to electrochemical activity, then qualia aren't much of a problem. But there isn't.
The Ancient GeekWrites RationalityDoneRight·just now
"Just as heat and motion are not some different entities united by bridging laws, same is with chemical activity of the brain and qualia."
We don't actually have the bridging laws for qualia. If you could supply some, that would be worthy of a Nobel -- solving the hard problem on its own terms. Otherwise, its nothing special to say they *will* exist, or *should* exist
Qualia might be relevant because the feeling of making choices is a matter of qualia. It's just not as flashy as sensory qualia.
We can't predict biology, or superconducting, or economics either, and yet all of those things clearly exist. Some would say we can't even predict molecules or water either, because our theories of those things are so woefully incomplete as well.
Some would say that in some cases we have enough in the way of bridging laws to make reducibility plausible even if it is also computationally intractable...and in other cases we don't.
Its not like no one has ever thought about this.
TIL I'm an android
David Hume in "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" (1748), discussing free will (which he refers to as "liberty") and determinism (which he refers to as "necessity"):
"But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science; it will not require many words to prove, that all mankind have ever agreed in the doctrine of liberty as well as in that of necessity, and that the whole dispute, in this respect also, has been hitherto merely verbal. For what is meant by liberty, when applied to voluntary actions? We cannot surely mean that actions have so little connexion with motives, inclinations, and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other, and that one affords no inference by which we can conclude the existence of the other. For these are plain and acknowledged matters of fact. By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains. Here, then, is no subject of dispute."
Hume's position is that our will is the product of various sentiments, for instance love, avarice, etc. These sentiments are generated deterministically, and are entirely predictable - the whole point of getting to know someone is you learn what sentiments drive them and how those sentiments typically interact. To the extent that behavior is unpredictable, it is simply because the interaction of sentiments is complex and our understanding is imperfect. But nonetheless, people are generally predictable.
Hume then says that "liberty" (his term referring to free will) is simply when a person's will, the product of their sentiments, is the causal force behind their actions. Hume even suggests that non-deterministic behavior would, indeed, simply be random, and would be therefore disconnected from the will and the sentiments, and therefore not the product of a person's will.
Hume was a smart guy and IMO he nailed this one.
I agree - with both Hume's smartness and his nailing this one.
You don't even have to appeal to reductionism to conclude that the concept of "free will" is at least a little confused. The relevant question here is what is the "will".
Is it a system of rules, whereby you are a consistent person who will act according to some values or functions, however internal, opaque, and unknowable, that factor in your internal state and the external state and make a conclusion? If it is entirely this thing, then your will is deterministic; it may merely be the case that the rules by which your will is determined live entirely inside your own head. You may at best be unpredictable by any outside agency, or even yourself, but you are still following some rules of causality, no matter what sort of rules they are.
Is it something random, which breaks the rules? Well, unless that rule-breaking is itself rule-governed - shaped by your own values, choices, etc. discussed above - then it really can't be meaningfully _you_ doing the breaking of the rules. If you act with total randomness, then yes, your actions are not determined, but you are no more "free" than a coin toss is typically considered "free". You've delegated your decisions to randomness.
Is it some combination of the two? Perhaps a decision (conscious or otherwise) about when to use randomness (e.g. "if X, I will do Y, but if X', I will flip a coin to decide whether to do Y or Y'"), or a random distribution shaped by the facts about your mind (e.g. "if X, I will do Y0 with 10% probability, Y1 with 30% probability, or Y2 with 60% probability")? Well, we've shown that the two components - making a decision causally determined by the state of your mind and some processes embedded in it (determinism), and making a decision without at all causally consulting the state of your mind and its rules (randomness) don't lead to something we might reasonably identify as "free will".
The only difficulty in reconciling reductionist, physicalist determinism and conscious experience that I know (disclaimer: I am no form of expert) of is that we don't know exactly how particles moving around in a certain configuration we call a brain produces conscious experience, or what a "conscious experience" is in terms of particles and fields and the like (though this is a gap in our present knowledge, not a declaration of incompatibility with our current paradigm, any more than our lack of knowledge of the number of planets orbiting the star Icarus (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/hubble-uncovers-the-farthest-star-ever-seen) is a failure of the fundamentals of astrology). But that is not a challenge for the demonstration that "free will" is a confused concept, and would still be even if the human mind consisted of homunculi made of phlogiston calling out to each other over the luminiferous aether.
"appealing to current knowledge about the physical world would cause us to reject consciousness, emotions, pain and pleasure."
I don't understand. Why does current knowledge of the physical world cause us to reject these things? It doesn't cause me to reject the existence of an undiscovered beetle species in Cuba, even though beetles play no more role in physics than emotions do. These are just putative higher level things that we haven't yet found direct physical correlates of.
1. Some people do, eg. Dennet. 2.Theres nothing in physics that implies the existence of any kind of subjectivity. If everything is physical, everything should be objective.
3. Its not "more of the same" in the sense that yet another beetle is just a beetle , and not something sui generis.
Determinism and free will aren't mutually exclusive. (You may have heard of a position called "compatiblism", and that's what this is.) I agree that we have free will that has causal effects upon the world - the mental affects the physical. But we also don't see the violation of any laws of physics when we make decisions and act upon them - only the physical can affect the physical. Therefore, the mental must be physical.
Why do you expect the android to think that way? Suppose the android said "I get mad too, knowing it is due to electrical currents doesn't help"?
I get the feeling that most people talk past each other on this topic. And although it seems important, actually nothing is at stake. Determinists have sometimes tried to apply it to make an argument against punishment, but these seem weak. That is, the effectiveness of punishment is an empirical issue, and we should abolish it or double down depending on what evidence we have for it working, not on an a priori argument. If punishing robots makes the robots work better, then punish, and if not, don't. If we're not robots, it’s still an empirical issue.
What practical result follows from a position on free will?
The only practical argument I know of uses determinism to attack the idea of punishment, as in, if my actions are determined, it makes no sense to punish me for them. But this seems wrong, since determinism does not preclude the possibility that punishment could influence my behavior, could be part of the deterministic causal mechanism. Further, this is a moral objection to punishment, not a practical one. If determinism is true, what is the significance of moral objections to anything? If determinism is true, how do moral objections matter? I guess that is determined, too.
Does this game have any stakes?
> 22. Starship reaches orbit: 60%
I wasn't alone in thinking this was an overly optimistic prediction. Yet SpaceX seems to be making steady progress towards that end. The first flight of the full stack is likely to be suborbital for safety reasons and is planned to take place in the next few months. It's not inconceivable that starship reaches orbit by the end of the year.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/07/booster-3-super-heavy-test-campaign/
Even Virgin Galactic is making strides these days... that actually surprises me more.
Wait, is discussing the previous post political or not?
Wanted to discuss this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eugenics/ and how most people's views on this board seem to be matching 2.3 (Obligations to Enhancement) and 2.3.2 (Social Good Maximization).
Though I guess I can't technically talk about what my opinion would be, it's kinda comforting (not really), to see that the moral arguments have all been had before.
A point of general information: for anyone else who thinks I, or my commenting style, is beyond the pale -
Yes. Yes, it is. That is because I was born, bred and buttered outside of The Pale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale 😁
I'm not seeing this - was the offending comment deleted?
That's concerning, I didn't get either of them, and they don't seem to be in spam.
I mean, at the very most you should only be upset with subscribers for their response or lack thereof to a subscriber-only post, no? Surely I can't disgust you by failing to have an opinion on something I've never seen or heard of.
Fair enough.
I find the pearl clutching transparently disingenuous. I am not Deiseach defender, but she obviously meant the KYS as an insult, not a literal suggestion. She meant KYS as literally as jstr meant 'GFY'. Now even so, that kind of comment is below the bar of SSC commenting, so perhaps deserves a minor temporary suspension; but then 'GFY' probably also falls in this category and should also receive a suspension.
She didn't do that. She made fun of you for using GFY.
I read the chain, and it certainly read to me as you being disingenuous. Thus, I enjoyed watching @Deiseach rough you up a bit. I never got the impression she was telling you to kill yourself, and think that that impression is difficult enough to reach from a natural reading of the thread that I, again, think you're being disingenuous. Both there and here, you seem to be histrionically and intentionally misunderstanding things for a perceived rhetorical advantage.
If you're not doing that, then I'm sorry. But that's genuinely how this reads to me. Based on the reactions, or lack thereof, I'm guessing I'm not alone in that interpretation.
If your reactions, there and here, are genuine, well, I don't know what to say. Text flattens out context, I suppose.
Wait, hang on, I recall a comment by Deiseach a while back about being a man working in a female-dominated field. You sure you got your pronouns right?
I am definitely not a man *looks down front of clothing to double-check because these days you never can tell* Nope, not a guy!
So I think you may be confusing me with someone else?
Well holy hell. I honestly have no idea how I got that impression. As much as I've tried to root out my own biases I guess there's still some hanging on? Or maybe I just totally misinterpreted something you said.
Oh, no problems here! You're not the first to mistake my gender (or is it sex?); I've often been mistaken for a man online and in those "is your prose style more like a man or a woman writer? test it here!" online quizzes.
Perhaps it is my, um, robust argumentative style or maybe I should blame it on internalised male voice when writing due to lack of sufficient exposure to diverse and inclusive women writers at an impressionable and formative age? 😀
I suppose such takes should make me more sympathetic to the trans issues, but in fact I think I find them to have the opposite effect; some of the popular arguments on that topic seem to present a simplistic "boys are blue, girls are pink; boys are snips and snails and puppy dog tails, girls are sugar and spice and everything nice" view of gender/sex, hence if a boy likes pink or a girl engages in what are traditionally masculine-coded interests, they may/must be trans and Steps Must Be Taken To Affirm Them As Such.
I'm influenced by the older school of feminism which was "so what if a girl likes dump trucks or a boy likes baking? that doesn't make one butch or the other effeminate!" Boys can like girl things, girls can like boy things, they're all human things! They say nothing about gender or sexuality.
Interesting stuff. By coincidence I had looked into the idiom a couple months ago. Weird how we can use and understand these expressions with no clue to their literal meaning. Language is a lot of fun Right up there with math for me
Oh Jebus. And I thought this was all about an interesting idiom. Not part of some larger back and forth exchange
I certainly intended it as the idiom. I am not engaging in any exchange with the aggrieved party beyond what has already gone down.
It all makes so much sense now
For what it's worth (and I'm uncertain, actually, what this is worth to you), despite the occasional commentary flippancy that swoops close enough to my trans fiancee that I'm attempted to throw beer in your face, I generally appreciate your insights and have never considered your comments ban-worthy. Maybe worth a night in the small town jail for being a public nuisance.
Lol nothing wrong with being a gentleman on someone else's behalf.
Actually my comment (and the beer) was aimed at Deiseach. But it's nice to see the beer so well-received by both of you.
They're good impressions and I thank you for sharing them.
Thank you for the supportive comment. All flung items (beer, vegetables, shoes) received gratefully and will be donated to a charity of your choosing.
As one of the parties in the dispute, I think I should not comment on the whole matter. I intend not to engage with jstr any further in any context. I am not going to litigate this in a comment thread, as that is a great way to start a row going (and for once, that is not what I want to do). The next step is up to Scott, if he wishes to examine jstr's complaint.
Of course. You may give the beer to your mother, or whoever had to put up with you as a kid.
My mother, God rest her, wasn't afraid of man, dog or divil 😁
I believe that. May she rest in peace with as much beer as she wishes to be flung upon her grave (or not).
And as much or little peace as she wants.
Flippin eh! A woman after my own heart.
Beer in the face? Okay, now I’m paying attention. Small town jails? Ah, they’re not so bad. I’m not seeing anything beyond the pale here, but then I was born and raised in the US version of beyond the pale. Hold my beer. This is getting interesting.
I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
My first career was a laborer in an iron mine. My own skin is pretty thick. I sometimes forget that sort of background is hardly universal
Again, my apologies.
Same here, which is probably why I'm not flustered by Deiseach's flippancy. Took me some time to learn Pale etiquette. I'll never forget getting in trouble at school for spitting.
You sure you want me to hold your beer? It might get flung at someone.
Hey Scott, I don’t know if you know who Paul Skallas is but he’s plagiarized some of your writing on his substack. The NY Times did a profile on him a few weeks ago (he’s the Lindy effect guy) so I checked out his sub stack and he’s been lifting entire paragraphs from other writers. He plagiarized your writing about new atheism here: https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/new-american-identities-part-3
I haven’t read an article by him that doesn’t include copy/pasted content from other writers. It’s actually insane that he’s been getting away with this…..
From Scott's culture war essay (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture):
——————————————————————————————
II. New Atheism, New Feminism, New Anti-Racism
Atheism is age-old, but Internet atheism was its own thing. The term "New Atheism", while not officially restricted to the Internet, tries to capture a sense that a more strident grassroots atheist movement formed around the beginning of the Information Age, and not unrelated to it.
New Atheism dominated a certain type of Internet discourse from its murky beginnings all the way until the early 2010s. During its golden age, it produced a dizzying array of atheist blogs, webcomics, videos, websites, and spaghetti-monster-themed merchandise. Its celebrities - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc - travelled the globe, preaching a message that atheism vs. religion was the ur-conflict that fueled all other conflicts, the single most important thing to get right. Hitchens was "absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion and organized religion...absolutely convinced of that".
Then it all collapsed - gradually enough that it was hard to notice at the time, but suddenly enough to be startling in retrospect.
[Graph of "Atheism on Google Trends"]
Its death did not mark the triumph of its arch-enemy, religion. People were just as atheist as before, maybe more so. They just all suddenly agreed it was stupid to talk about it and anybody who did was a fedora-wearing euphoric loser. …
——————————————————————————————
From Skallas's essay linked in the above comment (with the copied passages >marked thus<; archived at https://archive.is/qEO2y ):
——————————————————————————————
Remember Internet Atheism?
[The same graph of "Atheism on Google Trends"]
One of the cheaper ways to engage in identity diversification is to go online and post content. It’s free. And since people are afraid to post under their real name for fear of repercussions from their job they create an anonymous account. Free of the shackles of any reputation harm, they post whatever they like or cluster into different groups. Which is probably different than the groups or things they say in real life. Which is why some social media platforms are both funny but horrifying at the same time. One of these early trends people clustered into was internet atheism.
New Atheism was a movement that sprung up in 2004, led by prominent authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. For them, religion was just a protoscience — our first attempt at biology and history and physics. These celebrities>- travelled the globe, preaching a message that atheism vs. religion was the ur-conflict that fueled all other conflicts, the single most important thing to get right. Hitchens was "absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion and organized religion...absolutely convinced of that.”<
This movement coincided with the rise of social media so it >dominated a certain type of Internet discourse from its murky beginnings all the way until the early 2010s. During its golden age, it produced a dizzying array of atheist blogs, webcomics, videos, websites, and spaghetti-monster-themed merchandise.<
[Picture of man in fedora with "The God Delusion" in background]
>Then it all collapsed<. >Its death did not mark the triumph of its arch-enemy, religion.< >They just all suddenly agreed it was stupid to talk about it and anybody who did was a fedora-wearing euphoric loser.<
What they didn’t realize is that Atheists are just modern versions of religious fundamentalists: they both take religion too literally.
Instead, atheism merged with a broader version of modern mainstream internet culture. Which includes scientism, amongst other trends.
——————————————————————————————
These passages appear to have been sloppily copy-pasted: the "author" didn't even check that they completely made sense in their new context, e.g. he needlessly kept the hyphen before "travelled the globe, preaching…" and copy-pasted "They just all suddenly agreed…" without the referent of "they".
Wow, yeah, he definitely did that. Is his plagiarism widely known?
There are comments here and there about specific instances of his plagiarism, but it looks like the NYTimes didn't know about it and that no one's pointed out the full extent of it. His writing style is so distinct (in a bad way) that it is incredibly jarring and obvious when he is suddenly lifting paragraphs from other people. And, like Michele, I've not seen an article yet that didn't have easily "googleable" plagiarism.
If someone links me examples, I might post them.
Here are 4 examples. Like I said, there are probably as many examples as there are articles by the guy.
(1) Fractal Architecture as Therapy (https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/fractal-architecture-as-therapy-part)
"Fractal forms exhibit certain essential qualities that make them unique and pique human interest and appreciation...."
This sentence and many others are all lifted from James Harris's book Fractal Architecture: Organic Design Philosophy in Theory and Practice
(https://books.google.com/books?id=Aj4viv_8KxMC&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=%22Fractal+forms+exhibit+certain+essential+qualities+that+make+them+unique+and+pique+human+interest+and+appreciation.%22&source=bl&ots=RB8PjrqlLI&sig=ACfU3U0XbhfLU1D9KGqrLTvPwIHBQA443Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiby8C61KfxAhVTLs0KHXfcCGMQ6AEwAHoECAIQAw#v=onepage&q=%22Fractal%20forms%20exhibit%20certain%20essential%20qualities%20that%20make%20them%20unique%20and%20pique%20human%20interest%20and%20appreciation.%22&f=false)
(2) Lindy Music #8 (https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/lindy-music-8)
“Schubert’s songs are a mirror to real life. There really is nothing highbrow about this music…” is taken from a Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/04/schubert-songs-a-mirror-to-real-life-wigmore-hall).
(3) Lindy Music #9 (https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jan/04/schubert-songs-a-mirror-to-real-life-wigmore-hall)
“A solemn opening adagio segues into a brisker andante at 0:50, with the left hand marking the rhythm in eighths…” is taken from this article (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/bach.html).
(4) On Diet (Part 1) (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/bach.html)
“Before the modern era, food availability was unpredictable and highly irregular. Drought, war, insect infestations, and disease…” is from Jason Fung’s book on fasting.
He also copies a bunch from David Sinclair’s book Lifespan.
He steals a bunch from Slate Star Codex (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/bach.html), one example being “Humans started becoming more than just another species of monkey when we started transmitting culture with high fidelity. Humans evolved big brains in order to be able to maintain cultural-adapted practices (like making a fire). Everything that separates us from the apes is part of an evolutionary package designed to help us maintain this kind of culture, exploit this kind of culture, or adjust to the new abilities that this kind of culture gave us.”
“Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, lists praepropere…” comes from this Atlantic article (https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/music/bach.html)
It looks like the last three links got messed up on this
He plagiarized verbatim an Edward Norton interview. Look at the passages about "Chinatown" and "Mad Men": https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/is-culture-stuck
Edward Norton: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/07/magazine/edward-norton-interview.html
He steals heavily form Matthew Crawford in this post, even from the headline of the original material: https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/creating-an-environment-part-3
Original: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/12/matthew-crawford-distraction-is-a-kind-of-obesity-of-the-mind-the-world-beyond-your-head
I read that NYT article and the guy sounds like one of the canny hucksters who make a Brand out of one notion or idea or concept (e.g. Chicken Soup for the Soul). He did it with Lindy, which he did not originate but picked up from someone else (hmm, sounds like we have a pattern here!)
He's churning out his own little Lindy Line O' Self-Help but why the NYT decided it was worth running a piece on him, I have no idea. Desperate for filler material?
Also, the article has one of his tweets where he is acting superior to Catholics (do I detect Greek Orthodox bias at work here, if we're talking vegan Great Lent?) and I'm going to take that as a challenge: yeah Mr. Skallas, talking about "picking and choosing", how about the commandment about theft? Don't steal the work of other people!
"I've been informed catholics "give up" twitter for lent.
You can pick and choose what you give up?
Because I have to go vegan for 40 days in lent. Part of the lindy serial cycling diet that is beneficial to human health and is an ancient tradition.
I don't choose."
He probably picked up the Lindy concept from Nassim Taleb (who, IIRC, didn't invent it either), but he is pretty open about that (he said on a recent podcast(?) that he started out as an "NNT reply guy"). I never thought of Skallas as a particularly important voice, but I would not have expected him to plagiarize text.
All of us have asked ourselves why the NYT has singled him out for promotion. I suspect they wanted to hop on the based/alt-lite bandwagon with one foot at least (for all its wokeness, the NYT still has an ambition of covering all important cultural currents, and this kind of FOMO occasionally wins out; see also Ben Smith's cancel beat), and found him to strike the proper balance between acceptable and interesting (not to mention that for certain reasons lost to ancient history, a lot of the most interesting people won't talk to the NYT).
The NYT isn't one single-minded entity. I'm pretty sure the reason Paul Skallas was "singled ... out for promotion" was that Ezra Marcus (a fellow at NYT and not a full hire, so he's not even with them anymore) really liked Paul Skallas's Twitter account. Ezra Marcus may be into the "based/alt-lite bandwagon", but I think he packaged Paul Skallas in such a way that the editors of the Style section didn't consider Paul to be "based/alt-lite", instead he came off as smart, quirky, and concerned with the negative health effects of modernity, i.e. the perfect person to have a bio in the Style section.
I would guess that Ezra Marcus has seen Paul Skallas's offensive tweets. My guess is that the editors hadn't. I also guess that neither Ezra Marcus nor the editors were aware of Paul Skallas's plagiarism.
I've been over-abstracting the NYT, but sure I'm aware that it's not single-minded; the point still stands:
1. The (loosely defined) neo-trad/based community (the word "alt-lite" is probably suboptimal, as it can mean several different things) is on the rise online and exerts a cultural pull that NYT editors are not good at withstanding even though it goes against the grain of much of their staff.
2. However, none of the really colorful and influential personalities can be interviewed by the NYT (because they have shitlisted the NYT and/or their presence would cause a moral panic among the staff).
=> Someone relatively insignificant and milquetoast ends up being the proxy avatar of the movement for the readership of the NYT.
Note that I'm not viewing this as bad or good, just observing the behavior like a media entomologist.
> NYTimes didn't know about it
How is that possible? They are the paragon of journalism!
I understand you're being sarcastic, but it is worth knowing that the article was written by one of their fellows (it's kind of like a one year internship) and was written for their "Style" section. So, the journalist who did it was probably less interested in writing something substantial and more interested in a lighthearted, quirky piece.
That said, I still think it's weird to write an article about a guy without either the journalist or editor ever reading any his articles (or if they did read them then I think it's weird they didn't pick up on his broken English mixed with obvious plagiarism).
I follow Skallas on Twitter and generally enjoy his comments/takes/style, but I had never heard this and it is definitely disappointing.
I have a forecasting newsletter which might be of interest to some here. Here are the last few issues together with some highlights:
- https://forecasting.substack.com/p/forecasting-newsletter-june-2021: Some Superforecasters start a substack (https://supers.substack.com/), as does Dominic Cummings (https://dominiccummings.substack.com/); Good Judgment Open's scoring rule is not proper & other problems with current forecasting platforms.
- https://forecasting.substack.com/p/forecasting-newsletter-may-2021: Hypermind experiments with new methods of eliciting, incentivizing and scoring long-range forecasts; Augur launches Augur Turbo on Polygon, but gets very little trade volume
- https://forecasting.substack.com/p/forecasting-newsletter-april-2021: Polymarket is being attacked by “sandwiching” bots; Metaculus launches “Forecasting Causes”. In Reflective Bayesianism (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vpvLqinp4FoigqvKy/reflective-bayesianism), Abram Demski outlines questionable and implicit assumptions which Bayesians make.
Can you explain briefly why Good Judgment Open's scoring rule is not proper?
JackSparrow33, is that you?
Questions which close early give out the same amount of reward as questions which close late. This incentivizes pumping up the probabilities that an event will happen at the beginning, because if the event happens the question closes early, you get a lot of points, but if the event doesn't happen, your score for those early predictions is averaged with your better predictions over a larger period of time.
You can see an example in page 17 here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.11248.pdf
Thanks! Maybe I missed it, but I think you may be missing one factor. If the odds of the question resolving Yes over 52 weeks is 10% uniformly over the period, then the odds of that Yes resolution within 2 weeks should be .1*(2/52). It looks like you weight that expectation correctly for the No scenario but for Yes consider the odds to be .1 instead of .1*(2/52).
No?
No, in page 17 I'm considering 10% probability of it happening over the first two weeks.
Young talents are consistently undervalued globally, but even more so in the Old Economy. I write about what it means to be a Rebellious Intellectual Curious Hustler, and how these talents fare in the Old Economy. https://www.jack-chong.com/newsletters/newsletter-5/
I think you’re missing out on the concept of variance. SV is built on the model of taking 50 bets, having 40 fail outright, 7 break even, 2 moderate successes, and blockbuster hit.
Young people have higher fluid intelligence and lower crystallized intelligence (you can reframe that as wisdom or judgment if you want). That makes betting on them a high variance strategy. Most of the time conventional wisdom is correct and the hotshot contrarian will fail miserably. But sometimes it’s wrong and no one has noticed yet. That’s where the blockbuster wins come in.
So it’s not that the old economy is run by a bunch of prejudiced fools and the new economy is run by a more enlightened group of people, rather it is just that they are pursuing different, valid strategies.
Reposting from the hidden open thread:
---
I am interested in doing some traveling internationally with a family of four (I am from the US). Ideas for places to visit? Here are our constraints/interests:
- Must have cheap cost of living. We would like to be able to stay for several months, renting a house/apartment and buying groceries, rather than living in hotels and dining from restaurants. (though, if eating from restaurants/streetside vendors is cheaper, or at least offsets the costs of having a kitchen, we'd do that too)
- Must be safe enough that I can take 6- and 10-year-old kids with me. We're probably fine in uncomfortable/unusual situations, but I just don't want to be somewhere where there's a decent chance of violence or kidnapping.
- Should have vegetarian food options easily available.
- I speak English natively, Spanish at a somewhat awkward conversational level, and can probably get to awkward conversational level of another language in the 6-12 months before we travel.
- We don't intend to be doing lots of touristy things or sightseeing, but would like there to be some nice natural environments for us to enjoy.
- Should have a culture that is friendly to foreigners, even if we're outside of main tourist hubs. (Not sure exactly what the failure of this would like, but perhaps, e.g., people giving me a hard time about being clueless and not having much grasp of the local language)
- I'm imagining we'd be traveling in winter, but could change our travel time based on when would be best to visit.
So yeah, pretty broad. Just want to spend time away from home, explore a new culture, enjoy nature. I'd love to hear your suggestions (even if they don't particularly fit my constraints!)
---
So far, I have heard the suggestions: Thailand, rural parts of first-world countries generally, and European Mediterranean during offseason. I also came up with Peru as an option... my son is interested in the Amazon. My other son is interested in seeing pyramids, and Incan ruins seem more feasible than Egyptian pyramids. But it doesn't actually look like things in Peru would be that cheap... the tourist-y things like visiting Macchu Picchu or getting an Amazon tour seem quite expensive, and cost of living still seems to be severalfold that of a place like Thailand. So if anyone has specific experience traveling in Peru or elsewhere in South America, I am curious.
Found https://livingcost.org/cost could always start at the bottom of the country list and work up. A lot prob. depends on major city vs not and if living as a typical expat vs. more of a local. Inspirations from that list: A secondary city in India perhaps? Argentina (particularly outside of Buenos Aires)? Brazil is quite low on their list, maybe something in the south outside of Sau Paulo (which is quite expensive as an expat at least) and Rio (but close enough to visit them).
My first thought before looking at that list was Costa Rica, Ecuador and Nicaragua (which on that list all beat Thailand, but then on that list so does Peru) which certainly can be cheap (for Costa Rica requires being outside the main touristy areas but the country is small enough that's not a huge impediment).
Ecuador? They use the US dollar, and Ingapirca isn't the tourist trap that Macchu Picchu has become. At least when I was there ten years ago, I got lunch at Ingapirca for 1.50 $, and the hotel in Cañar was 12 $ a night. Of course, it might have changed somewhat, I don't know (e.g. in Quilotoa they've been building a lot), but I presume prices are low due to corona.
Safety: Take your usual precautions. I never had a nasty experience in Ecuador so far. But the sierra and oriente is generally safer than the costa. Avoid especially the north coast (Esmeraldas) and the huge cities (Guayaquil, Quito -- depending on the neighborhood, of course).
Usually the food is not really vegetarian, but you should get something if you ask for it. E.g. order llapingachos without the chorizo, or volquetero without the tuna.
Awkward conversational Spanish is a must. Many don't speak English. But their Spanish is much more understandable than that of Spain, for example.
Nice natural encironments, lots and lots. The sierra (volcanoes, mountain lakes) and oriente (trees) are breathtaking. Well, the latter I haven't penetrated any further than Rio Verde and El Puyo, but those are already great.
People are very friendly to foreigners. In the bakery in Ambato, they used to call me the "gringito". On the markets, they might charge you a little higher if you look foreign, but they will be friendly. In the touristy places (Baños, Otavalo) there might be more people trying to interest you in a purchase than in the slightly less exciting towns of Latacunga, Ambato or Riobamba. But they're never as obnoxious as some people you might meet in Havana.
Travelling in winter is good, that is mango season. The weather doesn't change very much around the year, but July is a bit colder than January.
If you want to see pyramids, you'll have more luck in Mayan an Aztec regions in Central America (Honduras to Southern Mexico).
You should consider Belize which
>speaks English (as well as Spanish and Mayan)
>has jungle
>has pyramids, and is within day-trip distance of Tikal in Guatemala.
>safer than other parts of Central America
>expensive in the touristy coastal regions, not so much in the jungle interior
I'd also suggest Costa Rica, in my experience you're more likely to see wild sloths, monkeys, parrots etc there than deep in the Amazon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate says Belize is middling in Central America in terms of safety, and ridiculously dangerous by any other standard. Costa Rica is the safest in Central America (when it comes to homicides at least).
https://web.archive.org/web/20141230034500/http://squid314.livejournal.com/226276.html
From Scott's earlier blog, scenes when he was in India. Tl;dr: lots of aggressive panhandling, selling, attemts (sometimes successful) to scam and rob. I've no personal experience, but it could be an issue in any very poor country where you obviously look like a (comparatively) rich foreigner.
As for you dreaming question, I guess I missed it. In the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism there are exercises to take control of ones dreaming (what psychologists in the West call active dreaming). I've not read the texts that describe this praxis, but I've been told that they focus on two things: visualization and interaction with meditation deities (that one can generate in one's own mindstream), and the accessing meditational states while in your dreams. I'm not sure if any of these texts have even been translated into English from the Tibetan, but Robert Thurman gave an interesting lecture on practicing the Dharma while sleeping. The Tibet House (in NYC) website used to post these lectures, but I'm not sure if they're still up there.
In Nahaut shamanism, one learns to access to, and to move about in, one's dreams in dream world called Tlalocan. Tlalocan is a name that European anthropologists have translate as the "underworld", but it's only an underworld as far as it's something underneath consciousness. At least that's how one of my Anthropologist friends described it to me. Although Nahuat practitioners dream the get to it by going down a cave (Alice in Wonderland, anyone?). Timothy J. Knab has written about his personal experiences with this form of shamanism, and he's also written an academic summary of practices and the underlying beliefs.
What's interesting to me, as someone who's tried to actively control my dreaming, is that without even trying I experience a landscape full of cities, forests, farms, and rivers. After reading Knab, I realized that the layout of my dream landscape corresponded quite closely with layout of Tlalocan that Knab describes. While in my one personal dream landscape, I frequently interact with the same dream people (entities? dream constructs?) who live in the various cities and houses that I can visit over and over again in my dreams.
Also, another fun exercise (if you're an active dreamer, that is) is to find another active dreamer, and try to dream about each other in your dreams. I tried to do this several times over the years with people I've been simpatico with (lovers and good friends, who have mystical bent) without success. However, recently I had an unintentional dream about former lover whom I had lost contact with. A week later I got an email from her, saying she had dreamed about me (she apologized for not reaching out sooner, but she had had to get may current email address from a mutual friend). Anyway, I said, that's funny I had a dream about her the past week. I said that in our dream we walking around Paris (though the dream city looked nothing like Paris). She concurred that she was with me in Paris in her dream, too. So, ESP? It may be a coincidence because we had both spent time in Paris. But I found that the whole experience sent chills down my spine. ;-)
Once upon the time somewhere on the interweb I've run into a list of something like "100 useful concepts" containing things like "Explore / exploit trade-off" and the like that most people here will be mostly familiar with. Recently I wanted to look at it in case I'm missing something interesting, and it turned out I didn't bookmark the page and the name is completely ungooglable. Probably because my recollection isn't very clear, it could've been "50 important notions" or anything like that.
Anyone here knows what I'm talking about? I think some standard fallacies and biases and probably nash equilibrium were also on the list, but the only thing I remember certainly is "explore / exploit trade-off". And afair it was not on any resource explicitly associated with ratiosphere, definitely not on LW or SSC.
Was it this? https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/100-little-ideas/
No, but that also looks interesting, thank you.
You're welcome.
Maybe this? https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d
I'm planning a trip to London, mainly to see some friends. What should I do/see when I'm over there? Anything that this community finds particularly cool? Doesn't have to be in London.
Visit the Jeremy Bentham pub?
Blechley park is just outside?
I would definitely visit The British Museum, The National Gallery and Westminster Abbey. These are all top tier in my opinion.
Some other nice places to visit: Churchill War Rooms, Science Museum,
Royal Air Force Museum (quite a bit away from the center, but fairly easily reachable with public transport).
Some places to admire from the outside: Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament (keep in mind that much of the nice stuff is close together near the center, so be sure to just plan some time to admire the views, rather than rush between locations).
Overrated IMO: Tower of London
Keep in mind that a lot of these require many hours to do them justice.
Another spot to look at from the outside is Nr 10. It's quite interesting how different it looks in real life than on the telly.
The Tate Modern has a nice rooftop patio that complements a walk along the South Bank. It's free to enter so feel free to skip the (incredibly weird) art if that's not your thing.
It's very pleasant to wander through Regents Park (much nicer than Hyde) then spend some time in Camden Town. Another great "nature" experience is Kew Gardens.
If you like Indian food, Brick Lane is quite an experience - not the best curry in the UK, but worth exploring. Quite a few nice bars in the Spitalfields area as well.
I'll second Aapje's recommendation for the British Museum, even if you can only spare 2-3 hours to see the highlights. Tickets are free, but you need to book online in advance.
Overall most things are within walking distance and there is so much to see on the way, so pack some decent walking shoes. Underground maps are deceptive about distances between stops, so check distances in Google before you pay for a tube to take you two blocks. On a similar note, the tube is fairly expensive, and if there are a few of you it's often cheaper to take a taxi (and I assume Uber is even more cost effective these days).
Main thing to remember is that you're never going to see everything in one trip, so just wander around and enjoy the atmosphere.
Probably extremely minor anecdote: When I was biking, the phrase "Scott Anderson" suddenly appeared in my head, and I spent at least ~five minutes trying to figure out who this person was before realizing that the name was a mashup of the author and "Scott Aaronson".
https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/jAixPHwn5bmSLXiMZ/open-and-welcome-thread-february-2020/comment/qTSS2D9cZRKh4J2P5 The other other Scott A.
I'm not super surprised tbh. There are a lot of Scott A's in the world anyways.
(Also: click https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scott_Alexander&oldid=1032212161 for a surprise.)
Before Scott revealed his real name, it was still floating around the internet. In order to counteract that, a few people said his real last name was "Scott Alexander Aaronson" as a misdirection.
Some folks in this thread might be interested in my own Substack, which is a weekly dive into tech policy issues, studies, and then a long read on a topic. This week I wrote on platform legibility channeling the work of James C Scott and Neil Chilson: https://exformation.substack.com/p/every-way-of-seeing-like-a-platform. Here is the key point: "[L]egibility is a fraught project, where slippage occurs and information doesn’t properly capture reality. Similarly, platforms are collecting information about individuals to understand them, but it is not perfect. Illegibility exists." Let me know what you think!
From a link on Tumblr (no, don't turn away in disdain): the Saga Of Wally The Delinquent Welsh Walrus from around April to right now, as he moves from Wales to the coasts of France, then Spain, then back around to the Scilly Isles: https://donnaimmaculata.tumblr.com/post/656142135645667328/becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys
Do geothermal power plants raise the Earth's surface temperature? The answer might sound like an obvious "Yes, " but it's not so clear to me.
The Earth's core and mantle are hot, and some of that temperature makes it all the way to the surface and radiates into space. If God snapped his fingers and made the Earth's interior 20°C, then the soil under your feet would get slightly colder.
So, if a geothermal power plant is built, it moves heat from near the mantle to the Earth's surface. The machinery at the power plant gets very hot as a result. However, the ground beneath the station also gets colder.
If the machinery gets 50 degrees hotter, but a larger amount of land around it gets 1 degree cooler, then geothermal power plant should have no net effect on local surface temperatures.
Or maybe it does. What's the answer?
I thought geothermal plants drew heat from far below the surface. If so, they're heating up the plant (which is on the surface), and the place that's getting cooled down is far away from the surface.
In the long run, though, the Earth's internal heating power is fixed (it's largely due to radioactive decay, which is an essentially-unalterable exponential process).
The real answer is "it doesn't matter anyway". Earth's internal heating is 44 TW (and mankind's total electricity consumption is something like 20 TW), while insolation delivers 174 PW. Outgoing longwave goes up as the fourth power of temperature; removing (or, equivalently, doubling) Earth's internal heating wouldn't even shift surface temperatures by 0.1 degree Celsius (at least in the short-term; in the long-term there's an indirect effect as internal heating drives plate tectonics which put CO2 back into the atmosphere which affects the insolation/longwave balance).
Why would one assume a geothermal plant would introduce more heat into the atmosphere than any other steam turbine power plant, considering the heat is more or less proportional to the electricity generated?
Suppose Truth were a woman. What then?