I have been doing a lot of reading about trying to create an AI that has the somatic responses of human beings which I guess is the issue I’m hung up on. So I’ve been trying to educate myself to the state of the art. In light of this. I realize some of my comments are a little like a middle schooler sitting in on a PhD class and asking rather dopey questions. I’m a little embarrassed.
However I am struck by two threads in these comments; discussion of AGI And the questions about parenting and what might be the most effective way to raise one’s child.
That’s kind of fascinating in itself to me.
I have raised a couple of kids and some of the issues seem to really crossover
Intresting question. Well like today, we have fat and slim people. Fat people are still made fun of all time, even though they shouldn't be. In a moral society, people would still be treated the same even though they would be able to tell who is richer or poorer depending on how they look. But what is likely to happen is that people will prefer to date/hang out with someone with the "rich"-looking trait than the one of the poor looking trait.
In choosing a spouse, surely being overweight or impoverished would (should?) make a difference. There may be benefits to holding less superficial values, but likewise for observing these common biases.
To what extent is choosing friends/acquaintances/business partners a matter of degree vs a fundamental difference?
What if some politically influential parts of society complain about racial inequity?
Usually they make the assumption that the distributions of intellectual ability or aggressiveness are the same for all the visibly identifiable subpopulations. And a logically consistent person who shares that assumption would have arrive at the same conclusion.
Scott you are one of the few American Jewish public figures who has talked about the Jewish intellect without being apologetic.
It's understandable that many Jews shy away from this topic; after all gentile geniuses tend to be excessively humble too.
Do you think there are differences on average between the various gentile ethnic groups?
If you think there are such differences do you think the general public should be educated about it to counter the racial inequity narrative?
Also in a country that provides a lot of assistance to the poor citizens do you think everyone should have the right to make as many little citizens as they want? Or maybe depending on their genetics that should be controlled?
I'm frustrated and sad that good things I liked might end or might at least be different because people I liked did dumb shit.
Current Affairs was my favourite magazine, but then NJR handled the recent staff thing really badly (he flip flopped on how much authority he wanted, it blew up during a hiring decision between two great candidates—the biggest waste is that the candidate he liked would have been the staff's fave too he just didn't want the decision to be democratic anymore!). Now Lyta, Nate, and Adrian have all written open letters about it and the mainstream and conservative media are talking about it and not all publicity is good publicity, and who knows if the magazine'll even last.
Aubrey de Grey's the bearded longevity-research guy who founded the SENS foundation. Now there are sexual harassment allegations against him; who knows how it'll turn out, but also he idiotically interfered with the investigation (emailing a mutual of one of the allegers to persuade her to implicate someone else, instead of just talking to the investigator), so SENS obviously had to let him go. His idiotic decision is bad for himself of course but also bad for longevity research, which really needs to behave professionally to get respect and shake its image as just, idk, Peter Thiel's rich-people-out-of-touch-with-normal-people's-struggles-pipe-dream, and show that it's a safe and thriving place for young scientists including women to work.
David Sabatini, another big name longevity-research guy (an expert on rapamycin and mTOR) also just got let go from the Whitehead Institute for sexual harassment allegations, and in this case the reaction on twitter makes it sound like it was a really open secret so I'm guessing that they're true whatever they are (no details are public).
The pandemic has done disproportionate damage to worse-off people. What would pandemic response look like in a more egalitarian society? How would risky in-person work be handled?
What David Piepgrass said. As for risky in-person work, what couldn't be eliminated might be done by volunteers from the less vulnerable part of the population (young, healthy), being paid a significant risk premium - and supplied with decent PPE.
Of course this implies that old Joe with emphysema, the expert/foreman in the meat packing plant, would be able to get his income replaced while not working, and/or training for a new role. That would be a very hard sell in the US. And probably a hard sell to him too; few people want to become newbs again.
It's arguable that the reason stockpiles of PPE were inadequate at the start of this was the never ending drive for higher profits and lower costs. I see recent stock market darlings causing major damage locally (hello, PG&E) by cutting corners in the past to enhance their bottom line. There's no reason a government should do the same, not being driven by profit - except that habits of thinking may not follow logic. Hence the expired and non-existent items in US and other government stockpiles.
So there might actually have been adequate PPE at the start of this, at least for those with the highest risk work (treating the sick).
If the concept of "egalitarian" could include the culture of the people themselves, we'd have a lot less Covid going around since people would take vaccines to help their community reach herd immunity. I watched a guy named Yuri yesterday, friend of Weinstein, debunking lots of claims by Weinstein. I thought he did a good job, but he made classic mistakes like decrying the anti-vax campaign as immortal because it's, you know, killing people. Well, judging by YouTube comments, most red tribe members couldn't hear anything he said after that.
An egalitarian society would say "Covid tests are free, and if you catch Covid we'll pay for you to quarantine in a hotel and immediately pay replacement wages for the work you missed. Also, we need you to think hard about who you came into contact with so they can be tested immediately."
> Oh come on. Where's the National Socialist German Worker's Party these days? What happened to Tojo? The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon, home guerilla advantage notwithstanding. There are no Nationalists left in mainland China, and no followers of the late President Thieu bombing the occasional railroad bridge in Vietnam. It is certainly possible to win against a weaker opponent even if he's got the home-ground advantage, can melt into the countryside, is willing to live in caves and eat rats and don suicide bomb vests. It's entirely possible to wipe those people out, root and branch. But it requires focus and commitment, and quite often some pretty ugly decisions. You have to be damn sure that's what you want to do. Being half-assed about it, and not entirely certain what you're trying to achieve definitely doesn't work, and never has.
I don’t think that all of your cited examples are at all applicable.
Nazi Germany certainly not, China, certainly not.
The one exception is Vietnam, and we all know how that turned out.
Am I the only one that gets this issue, where I get an email that someone has replied to me and I hit reply and for a brief moment my comment is highlighted on my screen and then it defaults to some random place in the order of comments?
This is a pretty good indication that there is something about mail in iOS and the comment section here that doesn’t play nice together. I will try it on my computer and see if it persists there.
Sometimes people's blood pressure drops after eating. For some of those people, it drops into dangerous territory, but I wonder whether eating frequently would help some people lower high blood pressure.
I work as a contractor for the US Federal Government, and their rollout of the vaccine mandate has been troubled to say the least. A brief timeline:
2 weeks ago: They are developing a plan to implement Biden's executive order requiring vaccines or recent COVID testing to enter Federal facilities. More information will be released soon.
Yesterday: Starting two days from now, everyone must either sign a sworn affidavit saying they are fully vaccinated or provide a negative COVID test taken within the last 3 days. They aren't sharing vital details like who will pay for the tests, how security officers will evaluate COVID testing results, how they will verify who has signed the affidavit, and how this won't cause massive delays as hundreds of employees enter the building at the start of the shift. You still need a test even if you have received a vaccine if it has been less than two weeks since your last dose, providing an incentive to get J&J rather than Pfizer/Moderna. Most of this doesn't matter though, as most of the unvaccinated will just lie on the form knowing there probably won't be any negative consequences for doing so.
Today: Implementation of the mandate has been delayed. More information will be released soon.
Conclusion: Parachuting for charity costs more money than it raises, carries a high risk of serious personal injury and places a significant burden on health resources.
"The Deeper Crisis Behind the Afghan Rout: Observers abroad see the culmination of decades of American incompetence." By Walter Russel Mead | August 23, 2021
This isn’t a conventional credibility crisis of the kind President Obama faced when he backed down from his Syrian red line. America has demonstrated its commitment to Afghanistan for 20 years and had no treaty obligation to defend the former Afghan government. A competently executed withdrawal could have enhanced American credibility among some Pacific allies, especially if it was accompanied by clear steps to build up U.S. forces in East Asia.
The Afghan debacle doesn’t create a crisis of belief in American military credibility. Informed global observers don’t doubt our willingness to strike back if attacked. The debacle feeds something much more serious and harder to fix: the belief that the U.S. cannot develop—and stick to—policies that work.
Neither allies nor adversaries expected perfection in Afghanistan. Mr. Biden was right to say that the end of a war is inevitably going to involve a certain amount of chaos, and world leaders likely didn’t anticipate a seamless transition. They did, however, expect that after two decades of intimate cooperation with Afghan political and military forces, the U.S. wouldn’t be blindsided by a national collapse. They didn’t think Washington would stumble into a massive and messy evacuation crisis without a shadow of a plan. They didn’t expect the Biden team to have to beg the Taliban to help get Americans out.
It all fuels fears that the U.S. is incapable of persistent, competent policy making in ways that will be hard to reverse. It seems increasingly evident that despite, or perhaps because of, all the credentialed bureaucrats and elaborate planning processes in the Washington policy machine, the U.S. government isn’t good at producing foreign policy. “Dumkirk,” as the New York Post called the withdrawal, follows 20 years of incoherent Afghanistan policy making. Neither the past two decades nor the past two weeks demonstrate American wisdom or the efficacy of the byzantine bureaucratic ballet out of which U.S. policy emerges.
I think everyone realises it was always going to be a mess, but the question is, was it more of a mess than it needed to be? Right now, while it's not great, the Taliban seem to be relatively keeping their heads down (yes, they're executing police chiefs and hunting down journalists, but they're not on a rampage as yet) so it's bad but not rivers of blood bad yet.
And I think that "yet" is what we're all waiting to see: once the Western forces and Western civilians are gone, and it's just the Taliban, what are they going to do?
I can't really blame the army for collapsing as it did; it seems (and again, I'm only going by what the news is telling me, and who knows how true that is?) that any of the officers who had personal power-bases before the US came along to prop up a puppet regime, or who are convinced anti-Taliban, have headed north or back to their own tribal bases to start a resistance, rather than staying and fighting with the army in the expected, conventional sense - and that's probably part of the problem right there, that they trust their own tribal alliances or their own picked men, rather than having any confidence in the troops under them and the army as a coherent national force.
For the rest of the soldiers, it's "stand and fight, but when the government is handed over to the Taliban - and they're already in discussions about handing it over - then anybody who fought the Taliban is for the chop" so of course they got out as fast as they could. Wearing the uniform is painting a target on your back. Why stay and fight for a regime that is already working on surrendering?
It's interesting that Hamid Karzai is still a power broker - so, did the Americans back the wrong horse with Ashraf Ghani, or was it a case of "at the time he suited our purposes"?
See Carl Pham's comment below. You can decide to leave the party, and take your glass and your plate into the kitchen, and find the hostess and thank her for the lovely evening. Or you can sneak out without cleaning up or saying anything to anyone.
I'm trying to find background on Ghani and why he fled but Karzai is apparently secure enough to not alone stay, but be involved in talks, and reading the Wikipedia article on him is just one 🤦♀️ after another:
"He is also the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an American organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens.
In 2005 ...Ghani gave a TED talk in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan
Ghani ran in the 2014 presidential election securing less votes than rival Abdullah Abdullah in the first round, but winning a majority in the second round. Following political chaos, the United States intervened to form a unity government."
I swear, the main difference I see between Ghani - who was conciliatory in speech at least towards the Taliban - and Kharzi - who actively fought against them, yet one has to flee and the other can remain in the country, is their relations with Pakistan: Ghani was cool to frigid with them, Kharzi was on good terms.
Which does sound more like Pakistan pulling the strings of the Taliban. Which is its own entire problem, because this is more smoke and mirrors - what you or don't do when you're negotiating with the Taliban may be an entire waste if Pakistan is in the background putting its thumb on the scales.
I don't usually support Biden, but in pulling out of Afghanistan, he showed political courage and far sightedness. The fall of Kabul is often compared to the fall of Saigon, but the lesson of Saigon isn't that the US should have stayed bogged down in Vietnam for another 20 years. It's that the US should have pulled out much sooner. As Biden said:
"We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future."
Despite the overwhelming financial and military advantages the US gave the Afghan government, the Taliban overran the entire country in just weeks, taking half the country in just a few days. Why? Because 99% of the population supports Sharia. 92% of Afghan *women* support wife beating (https://www.prb.org/resources/most-women-in-afghanistan-justify-domestic-violence/). 79% of Afghans think you should be killed for leaving Islam. Why would Afghans support an immoral, corrupt, incompetent, foreign-backed infidel puppet regime with values diametrically opposite to their own? One that can't even deliver internal peace, the most basic requirement of any state? One propped up by warlords with child sex slaves (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html)? The Afghan puppet regime had no legitimacy. The Taliban does, because the people support its brutal theocratic values.
The Afghan people got the government they wanted. If the Taliban ends the 50 year long civil war, puts an end to the child sex slavery, and provides even the most basic government services, they will have done more for Afghanistan than any government since at least the Soviet invasion of 1979.
Kind of a straw man there. The criticism by Sobchak, which mirrors the general criticism, is not the "what" (concluding the mission in Afghanistan) but the "how." President Biden asserts, laughably, that there was *no* better way to leave then the way we did, or else he moves the goalposts to suggest that those who suggest he royally screwed the pooch on the "how" are arguing about the "what." They're not, and it's dishonest to say they are.
So what better way was there to leave? The WSJ article puts forth no alternative proposal in the non-paywalled portion, even though it's 5 paragraphs long. The moment the US started withdrawing, the Taliban was going to go on the offensive. Judging by recent events, they would have quickly captured the country. It wouldn't have mattered if the US left in 2021, 2030, or 2085. There are people who say Biden pulled out too quickly, but they rarely say how long he should have stayed, if 20 years wasn't slow enough.
Biden did the right thing. A lesser president would have balked at the prospect of the Taliban capturing Kabul on his watch and kicked the can down the road, as the previous 4 presidents did, causing more death and destruction on all sides. Biden ripped the band-aid off quickly and took the political hit for the benefit of the United States--and ultimately, for the benefit of Afghanistan.
Well, at the very minimum, Biden could've ordered all of our equipment and materiel to be destroyed, rather than just allow the Taliban to take it. But that's a pretty low bar; in general, a more gradual withdrawal, covered by continuous airstrikes, would've been more effective (though admittedly more expensive).
Yeah no. I'm pretty sure CENTCOM could have come up with a plan that was loads better than what actually happened. Give me command of 30,000 Marines and associated equipment and even I could do it better.
What plan would that be? What experience do you have commanding large armies? Which wars have you fought and won? Just asserting that you can do better than the professionals of the world's most powerful army isn't very convincing.
I have no experience at all. Which is why I said "even I could do it better." I'm 100% sure the "professionals of the world's most powerful army" could've done it a million times better -- had the President allowed them to do so. But as many stories in the media will tell you, he did not, so all their planning chops were in the event moot.
I think every person working for Central Command, from General McKenzie, could have individually come up with a better plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan; but the organization itself might not.
It's structural: The service chiefs by airplanes, ships, train personnel, do all the work of building a military.
(Another time, we can talk about how this is an incentive for the service chiefs to waste money on useless crap like LCS.)
Then the combatant commanders compete with each other to see who can get the biggest slice of that pie. Aren't they supposed to be competing with China and Al-Qaeda and drug dealers, instead of each other?
I know the seriousness of the charge I'm making (and I really want to emphasize this is a *Meditations on Moloch* style bad system, not a matter of any individual being dishonorable).
But the logic is inescapable. If Central Command's priorities had been twisted by bad incentives to maintain or increase justification for manpower and material Indo Pacific Command also wants, that is it incentive to spend less effort building an Afghan army that can stand on its own and more effort giving them support only we can provide like close air support or air-dropped logistical delivery.
Most importantly, it's an institutional motivation for CENTCOM, the United States military command responsible for Afghanistan, to always be putting off asking the Afghan army to defeat the Taliban; to always find a reason to stay; to never quite be willing to prepare to leave.
And I know that's a shitty motivation and doesn't make Central Command look great. But Central Command has been overseeing all US military activity in the Middle East for the entire time we've been in Afghanistan. If Im mistaken about the combatant commander having an incentive to prolong the conflict, that's means they we're trying to defeat the Taliban the whole time...and failed
What cities in the US would approximately meet these criteria?
Deal makers/breaks:
- Must have good weather (= sunshine) almost round the year (e.g., Miami).
- No snow.
- Must not be in H(awaii)ST (Also, e.g., Miami)
- Must be located in an urban or urban-adjacent location (e.g., San Antonio, TX)
- Must not be poised to get a lot worse climate-wise over the next 10-20 years (excessive heat, more storms, more rains, or floods).
- Must not sit on a geographical fault-line that could going to go boom someday "soon" ;-) (e.g., SFO)
- The local politics must not be the "bubble" kind. That is, it can be right-leaning or left-leaning - but (a) it should not be extreme in either direction and (b) it shouldn't be filled with insular people who have no idea how to get along with 'the others'.
- Must have fiber optic internet generally and easily available.
Strong preferences:
- Should not be in EST (e.g., Miami, NYC are all too far away from the tech-coast, time-zone wise. Might work though).
- Should be near a major or a minor tech center (there used to be only 2.5 tech-centers in the US namely SFO, SEA, NYC, but there are more now). If any of FAANG has a local development office, that's a very good sign.
- Should be cheaper than SFO, SEA, NYC :-)
- Should have direct flights to SFO and SEA (this is just a corollary to 'should be near a minor tech center')
- Should have highbrow culture (theatre, music etc.).
- Should have Amazon Prime easily available in most places ;-)
- Should be low crime, culturally diverse, and expected to sustain these characteristics over the long term (20 year outlook).
Have you thought about dangerous flora and fauna? I grew up outside of the range of most poisonous snakes, insects carrying dangerous diseases, and insects dangerous in themselves. The prevalence of hazards of this kind seems to be increasing over most of the continental US, partly due to non-native pests spreading, and partly due to warmer winters. And unlike larger dangerous fauna (bears etc.) the smaller dangerous pests often do quite well in (sub)urban areas - which is where you'll be if you want highbrow culture and a good internet connection.
Miami's weather in the summer (which lasts 6+ months) is pretty bad. The heat is oppressive and there are daily (brief) thunderstorms. A matter of taste, plenty of people do prefer it to colder climates.
Raleigh is interesting. It's a great idea and seems like an emerging tech corridor. I have to research its potential a bit though in terms of how it will fare over time. I think Atlanta has been getting a lot of recent tech investments/hiring in the south and I wonder if Raleigh is going to keep on being a university-city sized tech-town...
Raleigh will definitely continue to grow. Look up the AI/ML campus that Apple is building. UNC comp sci is great, as is Duke's department, and its a great place to live (driveable to NE and south, good airport, cheap COL, good housing, minimal culture war, close to the outer banks and the NC mountains, amazing in-state schools and tuition deals, good weather), so high human capital people will stay if there are jobs (and they already are). Google also has teams in Raleigh/CH because of all the comp sci profs. I would take the pair trade of Raleigh v Atlanta over the next two decades in a heartbeat. If I were going to start a co in a non-target city I would prob do it in Raleigh.
"Must not be poised to get a lot worse climate-wise over the next 10-20 years (excessive heat, more storms, more rains, or floods)."
Alarmist rhetoric greatly exaggerates the speed of climate change. Global warming so far, since 1913, has been less than one and a half degrees C. It may have speeded up more recently, but in 10-20 years it is unlikely to change the temperature of any city by enough to be visible through the noise of random variation. That fact is obscured by the tendency of the media to blame any unpleasant weather on climate change. Similarly, the high end of the IPCC sea level rise projection for the end of the century, as of the 5th report, was about half the difference between high tide and low tide — there are not many places where that makes much of a difference, and your concern is with a much shorter time period.
As annoyed as I am by climate science deniers, I do think the media has often exaggerated the threat. For instance, the common ECS estimate of doubling CO2 causing 3°C warming is something that is supposed to happen over hundreds of years, and the media often leaves out the "hundreds of years" part while failing to report the shorter-term warming expectation (TCR) which is more in the neighborhood of 1.75°C. I am more concerned with the effect of warming in more southern locations that didn't cause the warming - the Philippines, Central America, etc.
I would also add that I perceive the climate where I live - very close to David Friedman - to have gotten somewhat worse in the 24 years I've lived here. I use air conditioning more. I experience more smoke days. (None noticeable in my first decade here.) I'm not sure whether drought being more common is climate change or coincidence - I moved here during an unusually wet year, which somewhat affected my expectations. But watering restrictions are now a constant presence.
It's also changed (for good or ill), such that plants that used to be grown commercially here no longer set fruit longer reliably enough to be worth growing locally. (Of course growers would probably have moved anyway, since (sub)urban growth means the land is currently more valuable with buildings than with orchards.)
What we haven't seen locally is catastrophic levels of change, though some of those burnt out of semi-local areas may disagree. People are not dying of heatstroke in extended periods of bad weather, except for the usual desert hiking mishaps (not all that local to me). People aren't being flooded out of their homes. We aren't having once in a century major storms. We're still only seeing those things as news coverage.
The only thing I know of that A) was grown locally and B) has some trouble growing now is lady apples, but they were (and presumably still are - you see them in the grocery stores) grown in orchards in the hills, and the only place I've seen them have trouble growing is our yard (great harvest this year though - and most years, I'd guess our tree only fails to set fruit one year in three or so) which is... not in the hills. It's a significant climate difference!
There's definitely less good fresh fruit around than when I was a kid, but as far as I can tell it's mostly a "we need the land for houses" problem (so the farms get pushed farther out), not a "the tree won't grow/bear fruit here" problem, with an added-in "the Cosintino brothers retired, and none of their kids wanted the business, so the best produce shop closed despite being profitable" problem. (Why none of the local chains expanded to fill the niche I can't answer - my best guess is that sourcing good produce is hard.)
Are you thinking of a Central Valley problem, maybe? Because Silicon Valley was Prune Valley, and all kinds of plums and apricots still grow here really well - cherries too. It's just that's not the land's main value now. But I don't know the Central Valley as well.
I was thinking of cherries, and my understanding there was that they'd gone unreliable, though of course there was the double whammy of people wanting the land for houses, offices, etc.
We get a reliable crop from every cherry tree except one of the two Dad planted without knowing if they would bear in our zone (answer: one yes, one no) every year. We'll have a reliable crop from that one too when Dad finishes mastering grafting. I don't know that we're using the commercial varieties, mind, we have less variety in cherries than apricots or peaches, but my understanding is our sweet cherry was dead standard when we put it in, which was probably between twenty and twenty-five years ago - it was one of Dad's first. It's had various health problems - it's getting to be an older tree and we're a lot better at planting than at troubleshooting problems, especially fifteen feet above our heads - but fruit set has never been one of them.
It's possible someone was planting marginal varieties (but why? A variety that's seriously marginal now was mildly marginal twenty years ago, nobody but crazy amateurs* plants trees that won't bear even one year in ten), or that it's a problem in Gilroy, or somewhere else hotter than here - my Gilroy friends who have fruit trees do fine *but* the only cherry I know was bought recently so is presumably a modern variety - I don't know any 20-year-old cherry trees anywhere but here. But um, at least one point of evidence against.
(... and if you ever want to plant your own cherry tree, I promise you should be able to get a good one that will still bear perfectly. No such promises on apples, though; our successes are all weird so no good data on exactly how warm they go.)
Water restrictions are more common for a simple and obvious reason: California's water infrastructure was designed in the 50s, mostly built between 1960 and 1975, and hasn't had any major addition at all since 1997. Meanwhile, the state's population grew from 16 million in 1960 to 30 million in 1990 to 40 million today. Simple math tells you the rest.
The *worldwide average* warming has been 1.5 °C, but there's much more warming over land than over water, and at medium and high latitudes than near the equator, so the amount of warming on temperate-zone land has been more like 5 °C, which is nothing to scoff at (it means that 35 °C days are as common as 30 °C days used to be, 30 °C as common as 25 °C used to be -- actually even more than that, as the variance has also increased as well as the average)
Er, the worldwide average warming has been more like 1.1°C with 1.6°C over land.
Generally those figures look much too high to me, but I would say scientists are bad at marketing, otherwise we'd be talking about the Paris target of 5°F land warming instead of the equivalent 2°C global warming.
I will continue to work on learning more about this, although I'd been under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that I was both well read and clearheaded about the topic of climate change.
Perhaps my time horizon should be longer than 20 years, and I should think about a 40–60-year time-span.
Sea level is not my only concern, although it's an important consideration. Things like drought/water table (and relative population vs water consumption, think problems in CA), abundance of electricity availability (think TX and local problems specific to its grids) etc are also of concern to me. Some of these can be overcome (TX for e.g, one can just install a generator) but others are harder to overcome (like drought).
If you're looking at shorter time horizons, drought is still something to worry about. The Colorado river has been overdrawn from for the past century, and the latest droughts (which may or may not be exacerbated by climate change) have not helped that situation.
On the other hand, I'm uncertain if that affects your average city-person (it seems like a much bigger problem for farmers). Water regulators might start metering and charging for excessive use, but I don't see Americans in major cities dying of thirst.
Buying a generator may keep your AC on, but a power outage means you're not getting internet. I'm assuming your career is computer-related (since you specified fiber optic internet as a deal breaker), so maybe put weight on avoiding counties/states that can't keep the lights on.
Thanks - I'm open to it. For e.g., sporadic snow may be something I'm willing to handle. I live in the Pacific NW now and have live in British Columbia near the US/WA border in the past, I can easily work with some snow each year.
For e.g., I've been toying with Austin, TX and nearby places as a potential option. It meets most of the expectations, expect it gets some snow, power is a bit wonky but can be worked around if willing to own a home generator. Climate is the big question-mark in Austin and makes me hesitate.
As DLR has suggested, Tucson is a nice idea, and Melvin's suggestion of San Diego also seems like a good choice modulo wildfire smoke problems (which can be worked around a bit with full A/C in a house).
I used to think that Portland, OR could be a nice option, until Portlandia stopped being a parody :-( I used to really enjoy driving down to Portland, NewPort etc. to see friends and it was such a nice place 10-12 years ago. Sigh.
In terms of heat, drought, fire and cost of living, Oregon is well on its way to becoming Northern Northern California. To me that's much worse than it being a political/cultural bubble.
Santa Fe probably gets too much snow -- a half dozen or so snow events, sometimes of a foot or so. I'm from Tucson and like it well enough, though it's pretty hot, bigger than I'd like, and water is an issue. The mountains are close enough for relatively easy summer day trips, which is nice.
Anything north of LA in CA is likely to be negatively affected by wildfires in the coming years: dense smoke, power blackouts, freeway closures, and, of course, the actual fire (depending on location). These negative effects will be sporadic, however.
Thanks Melvin & Bugmaster. I visited San Diego years ago and enjoyed it, and my wife was on a conf trip and also liked it well enough. It has great Italian food which is a huge plus ;-) for us - we'll have to think about it some. We're in PNW so already familiar with fire+smoke problems - that's definitely a downside. Also worried about drought + water availability problems long term. I grew up in Chennai/Madras and never want to deal with water availability problems in my life again if I can avoid it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Chennai_water_crisis was the culmination).
Life is a bit more complicated (and correspondingly a lot more fun) when factoring in a significant other ;-) If I were single, this would be easier. If my spouse had no roots in the US and were an immigrant like me, perhaps this would be easier as well. If she didn't have strong opinions or a career to think about, this would be easier yet. If we didn't have to optimize for future needs like older in-laws potentially moving nearby, things might be simpler. And so on...
I've spent plenty of time in the cold, from childhood trips to Badrinath the Himalayas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badrinath - I don't recall the oxygen levels being a problem, I was running around and didn't skip a beat, no idea why everybody thinks 10k ft is a big deal) to walking around in downtown Montreal on New Years Eve in -30C ;-) I've also spent plenty of time in Equitorial places in 105F heat. I've become soft and comfortable now, so that's what I'm looking for next :D
ACX has covered progeria and aging before, so perhaps some will be interested in a new paper that helped co-author that investigated the underlying cause of disease. Hope you enjoy!
I'm in the UK and, like most, received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. It seems pretty clear that the UK government has given up any pretense of trying to control the disease, despite the country being solidly in the middle of a third wave of infections. I'm fortunate to have a job that can be done from home, and to have had family and friends to live with (so I've not died of loneliness), but until the pandemic my life completely revolved around the swing dance scene: I danced and taught classes several nights a week, and spent most of my annual leave travelling to dance events around the world.
Obviously everything was cancelled, and for a long time, but now dance events are beginning to appear in my calendar again and I'm trying to do the risk/benefit analysis of doing what I love vs. staying safe.
On the one hand, when I put some (pretty conservative) numbers into microcovid.org, it's clear that partner dancing—even on an outdoor, fairly sparsely-populated dance floor—is a REALLY bad idea right now, even at a 10%-per-year "risk mitigation" budget. On top of this, I know quite a number of friends (including one of my teaching partners) who were unlucky enough to catch COVID back in ~March 2020 (despite precautions) and have still not fully recovered from it.
On the other hand, catching colds is an occupational hazard for partner dancers and a risk I have alway been happy to accept—and so far everyone I know who's caught COVID post-vaccination has been either symptomless or has had a minor illness for a few days and then been fine.
It seems plausible that if a vaccine provides a good level of protection against serious illness then it might also greatly reduce the chance of suffering long-term effects. What does the science say?
Many event organisers have requested that participants take lateral flow tests before coming, but few have enforced it—especially for outdoor events that are open to the general public.
You must have some pretty different assumptions about what an outdoor dance looks like. My guesses lead to it reporting an eye-watering 4% chance of catching COVID in a single 2h event. This seems obviously wrong, since if the risk were that high I would certainly have heard reports of new dance-acquired infections from recent events here—but it is not immediately obvious where the computation has gone wrong.
I assumed fewer people close to you, MRNA vaccines which have a higher multiplier, and silent/normal level of talking (do you talk to people loudly while dancing with them?) LFT requests probably give a decent multiplier too, depending on how many people you think comply and to what extent noncompliance is concentrated in risky people.
> Do you talk to people loudly while dancing with them?
It's not unusual—especially if you haven't seen them in 18 months!
> LFT requests probably give a decent multiplier too, depending on how many people you think comply and to what extent noncompliance is concentrated in risky people.
One thing that makes me and some of my friends quite nervous is that, at the moment, the most cautious people are still staying home, while the people who are going out dancing are (by definition) less cautious—and therefore potentially at above-average risk of having caught COVID. A remarkable demonstration of this phenomenon was provided by one local dancer who had given a sample for a PCR test on a Saturday morning in preparation for international travel, danced outdoors on Saturday afternoon and indoors on Sunday evening, and then learned on Monday morning that they had tested positive. Fortunately they 'did the right thing' by posting about it conspicuously on one of our local FB groups, so that people they'd danced with could get themselves tested, for which they were quite rightly praised—but when it subsequently coming to light that this person had elected not to be vaccinated reactions were decidedly more mixed: most were astonished and appalled, a stalwart few applauded, and the bayesian reasonsers figured, "well, that figures!"
This scenario has all 20 people listed as less than a foot away from you, which is very implausible. More realistically you should enter this as two scenarios and add the risks: one person a foot away, and 19 people 6+ or 10+ feet away.
The base scenario (2h on the dance floor with average person 3m away) then works out to 1000µCov, and it's another 700µCov for 8 minutes (~2 songs) dancing with one person. If I dance with 10 people (about 2/3rds of the 2h event) that gives a grand total of ~8mCov, which seems plausible but still a bit risky.
I know at least two partner dancers who'd had 2x mRNA vaccines (likely sometime in Apr/May '21 timeframe) who got breakthrough infections. The best I can tell from social media, neither suffered from long COVID. One of them was in early 40's and very healthy/active, other not sure what age group - likely late 30's to mid 40's range.
(c) is a bit of a weak-link, but I've read a bunch of other anecdotal studies that the attack-rates might be similar for both vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts, so I'd love to see evidence to the contrary - that would make me feel better (assuming the evidence shows lower attack-rates for vaccinated cohorts).
And finally I've seen some anecdotal evidence suggesting that long COVID happens irrespective of vaccination status. I've also read arguments suggesting that when someone is vaccinated, their high neutralizing antibodies will keep infection levels low and thus COVID symptoms would be minimal, and also means long COVID unlikely. The premise here is that COVID symptoms and long COVID severity are correlated. I haven't found good studies that substantiate this intuitively appealing and logical claim.
What mechanism exists within the medical billing establishment to prevent hospitals, providers, or drug/device companies from generating arbitrary billing? E.g. anesthesiologists seem to always be sending us bills long after the fact, either from our children's c-sections or my umbilical hernia surgery, demanding payment. In the case of the c-sections I am certain the one claiming payment wasn't there. Likewise Apria just seems to periodically sprout new bills for a cpap machine long paid off every time I change insurance companies.
About as often as not we argue with the billing entity and they say "Whoops, I guess we screwed up", but the other times they threaten to send the bill to corrections. That of course has rather negative consequences down the road, even if you win in a small claims case. Anyway, getting off track, sorry.
So it seems that there is very little stopping a medical provider from just making up bills to send to people, either by mistake or malice, and very little one can do to fight those bills, despite there being no evidence that the bills are justified. Am I missing something here?
I've downloaded the entire Covid dataset from [ourworldindata](https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data), cut out all countries with <10000 overall cases, bucketed the remaining ones into three groups based on median age, and then made XY scatterplots, one data point per country, with X-value = total % fully vaccinated and Y-value = [avg new cases in the surrounding 5 day area]. (Both at a specific date only; I've tried 2021/06/01 and 2021/07/01.) The correlation is positive in all cases, i.e., countries with a higher % of people fully vaccinated have more cases. It remains positive if you add a 3 week delay to cases.
What's going on here? Anyone got a simple explanation? (Also, would you have expected this outcome?)
While I'd like to see clearer evidence for that claim, the explanation that comes to mind (if true) is that, time after time, whenever there are signs that the situation is getting better, there is a tendency for governments to immediately make things worse by loosening restrictions. In my home base of Alberta, for instance, they apparently saw that 50% of the population was vaccinated and decided that it was time to end the mask mandate (Delta? What's Delta?). As vaccination rates rose, they doubled down with new rules
> close contacts will no longer be notified of exposure by contact tracers nor will they be legally required to isolate — although it still recommended.
> The province will also end asymptomatic testing.
The conservative government backpedaled somewhat when Covid cases predictably shot up in response.
In addition to "the same countries can test and can vaccinate" point that other people are making, there's also the fact that some countries choose to double-down on the non-pharmaceutical interventions route (e.g. Australia notoriously has a slow vaccine rollout but a strong lockdown, I think Japan and South Korea might be in the same bucket?).
I think you would also need to plot in how much testing each of those countries do in order to get any kind of useful data. The countries with the most vaccines are also the countries doing the most testing. Lots people are tested in the US not because they have symptoms but because their job or school requires it on a weekly or even daily basis.
Also, countries that got the vaccine widely distributed also felt safe removing all the social distancing and mask-wearing restrictions (such as in the US), which essentially just let the virus rip among the many remaining unvaccinated.
Sure. Ask yourself what fraction of COVID cases are actually reported and available on the Internet in the United States versus, say, Iran, Mexico, or Burma. That will tell you why the countries with the highest vaccination rates are also reporting some of the largest number of cases.
What is that supposed to be a chart of? Canada is X=6 Y=23 which means what? Whatever it is, outliers like UK might be having an outsized effect. I've been wondering why the UK has had so much Covid, any ideas?
It's X=percent fully vaccinated, Y=new daily cases per million, averaged over a 5 day period and with a 3 week lag. The lag was probably unnecessary as I said in the other comment (and UK is no longer a big outlier if you remove it).
Actually it kind of does when you remove the delay, which is does probably not make sense given that the x-axis tracks fully vaccinated people. Nonetheless, the effect is not nearly as clear-cut as I was expecting before I made these.
I've also created graphs for new deaths rather than cases, they all have a bit weaker correlations but not as much as you would predict. (Rich countries only and deaths gives a negative correlation, but not a particularly strong one)
A delightful example of Simpson’s paradox, with x = vaccination status, y = measured cases, and the problem being that measured cases goes up as measurement capacity and vaccination status go up with development. (If that’s why)
I've heard a lot of stories (including a recently popular twitter thread) about children claiming to remember past lives, down to factories they worked at, the names of their parents, or details about the past (a certain building that used to be a different building).
In Tibetan tradition, the Dalai Lama is chosen in part by having the candidate choose their toys from a previous incarnation. Of course, it's entirely possible that this process be manipulated. The number of adults who claim to remember anything about their previous lives is very small. A credulous defender may argue that society conditions people not to make claims like that.
My priors tell me that this should not be believed, but I'm curious: what's your take, not necessarily on reincarnation, but on memories from prior lives? What proof would convince you?
Possible if we're talking about ancestral memories, but unlikely per se.
More likely that the brain is doing something weird, like it does *all the damn time*. Like, simulating an alternative life isn't even that unusual, given stuff like dreams and reading fantasy novels, or how we rehearse imagined conversations all the time.
People remembering things that can be verified and not available right now. For example someone claiming to be a reincarnation of an ancient king and locating several previously unknown archeological locations.
Or digging out their stash of gold coins.
And this repeating multiple times. One can be an excellent archeologist and have weird spiritual beliefs so it is not foolproof. Or they could plant this coins earlier. But at least it is not fakable by looking at all photos.
But I would not bother with verifying it on my own, it is about as likely that Harry Potter was documentary.
This simple experiment would convince me: I whisper a secret into subject A's ear. I then kill subject A. Subject B then repeats to me the secret. This experiment could be ethically performed using those about to be euthanized or executed.
Problem is they probably don't remember all the specifics, and you don't know if their soul or whatever you want to call it, ends up in a predictable location.
Yeah, the purpose of this experimental design is for positives to be convincing. To correct for the low power, you could just repeat it a million times or whatever.
It would take a while though. You would have to create somewhat memorable but weird enough phrases and visuals so that they are uncommon enough. And you would have to keep it secret, which would be hard to do So every time a person is dying, you bring a posse of clowns and let them dance and say weird phrases. And then have those clowns sign non disclosure agreements and threaten to sue them if they tell anyone.
And then you would have to ask a lot of parents of children claiming past lives to try and get specific information, and match that against your secret database of those artificial experiences given to dying people. And if you get a high enough % of children describing these weird experiences, then it would increase the probability of past lives? As long as the sample of children asked is not large enough so that randomness could explain why some got it right by accident.
And I have put way too much thought into this already.
We don't really have any idea what things would be memorable post mortem, do we? So I'd just go with randomly generated "correct horse battery staple" type phrases (just making them long enough to make false positives extremely unlikely) and then have a web site where the first person to enter a correct phrase would win a billion dollars or whatever.
I probably could not be convinced, as any information such a person could share that could be corroborated could also be gamed. If someone could teach them the information, then that's going to be the more likely reality. I suppose the strongest proof would be for them to describe something that no one living could have seen, for instance a sealed room or perhaps something extremely remote. The key would be that no one living could have known what was in the room/place, and then after the prediction it could be verified directly. Even that kind of scenario leaves a lot of room for someone to game it. In fact, that's something most of us would scoff at if a famous magician offered to do it. We wouldn't find it fantastical enough to even be interesting, as it would be so easy to fake.
In Western societies, neither materialist nor religious beliefs allow room for such a belief to be very likely. Materialist approaches would point out the lack of mechanism by which memories could be transferred. Christianity has very specific beliefs about what happens to your soul, to the exclusion of other possibilities.
I’ve been trying to frame Afghanistan in terms of the trolley problem. Here is my result, and I’d like to hear comments/feedback. Obviously, it has two semi-intentional features-not-bugs, namely (a) it only captures a subset of the scenario and (b) it’s a bit reductive.
The Afghani Time Travel Trolley Problem
=====
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks.
Ahead, on the tracks, there are a few thousand civilians tied to the tracks, as well as a couple of hundred soldiers, and 45 bn US dollars worth of arms + supplies. When the train reaches them, most of the civilians will die, the goods will perish, the arms will be stolen by enemies, but the vast majority of the soldiers will probably escape only with injuries.
You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks.
However, you notice that there are 20 million women tied to the other set of the tracks and unable to move. If you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to those other tracks and will head straight for them.
Instead of killing them, it will transport the women to 9th century. In the 9th century, these women will have to wear burqas, give up most of the common freedoms women have had in the 21st century, and become chattel slaves to the men in society. Many of them will die due to maladaptation and shock. But overall, most of them will live.
You have two options:
1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill a few thousand civilians, destroy 45 bn dollars of stuff and injure (or let die) many soldiers.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will make near-slaves out of 20 million women and their female progeny.
Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
Isn't this just an elaborate way of asking, "would you sacrifice millions of women to save some soldiers (but not equipment)" ?
The whole point of the trolley analogy is to render an ethical problem down to its most basic terms; it stops working unless the setup is cartoonishly simple.
In real life, the decision-making process is never that simple, since you are forced to reason under uncertainty. All of your decisions are probabilisitc, and the tradeoffs are never crystal-clear. In addition, in this specific case, the decision is not between "save some soldiers" vs. "save all women", but rather, between "continue losing lives and money every day" vs. "hopefully save a few women some of the time over a generation if not a longer period of time". And this doesn't take into account the global geopolitical situation, long-term effects on terrorism, the ethics of cultural hegemony, etc. etc. You'd need to spawn a whole trainyard of uncertain trolleys if you wanted to illustrate this problem.
For the $45bn figure, you'd be talking about the per-year cost I'd gather? It would still be understated, if so. Afghanistan was a >$1bn/week adventure, lasting decades.
For the returning-women-to-the-9th century, you mean returning them to the 20th century, right? 20th century *Afghanistan*, of course. Apples to apples.
And which fraction of the women are we discussing here, even? Yes I know that there has been a surreal two decades where some Afghanesses could enroll into Critical Gender Theory studies at university, the whole show essentially bankrolled by foreign taxpayers at an absolutely ludicrous overall cost. But even during those two decades those were mere oases in Afghanistan -- modern liberal versions of Potemkin villages, if you will. The western invasion did not change the mentality across the overwhelming majority of the country by *one inch*. If the astonishing speed with which the whole house of cards collapsed after the US military withdrew has not awoken you to this fact, I'm not sure what else could. You see, the Taliban are not genius military strategists, achieving this record-breaking reconquista with some new and unstoppable military innovations such as the phalanx or the blitzkrieg. They are simply an organized faction that's *way* more aligned with the mentality of the overwhelming majority of the population, than the western invaders ever were. They encountered virtually no resistance. The US leaving decent modern weaponry to a small minority before pulling out, has not made much of a difference.
For most women there, things will not change that much in 2021, simply because things had not changed that much since 2001. But at least now Western Academia can hold a string of parties to celebrate the fall of that bastion of vile western neocolonialism, the defeat of those horrible supremacists who openly held their culture to be superior to an equally-valid indigenous one, and who used mechanisms of oppression to impose their values on a subjugated people -- some of whom have even ended up internalizing the opressor's worldviews. (OK admittedly I might be wrong on that one, as I'm generally too dumb to understand modern Western Academia)
If we only consider women in Kabul (~2 million) and $60bn / year, then in purely monetary terms this gives $30,000 per woman-life-year of being able to study critical gender theory vs. living in the traditional Afghani society. This is within the range of things considered cost-effective in the Western world, although not necessarily cost-effective globally.
Are you quite sure about your denominator in the calculation which gave you the "cost-effective estimate by Western standards"?
How many of Kabul's female population (cca 2.3 million, ages 0 till death) would be able to go to university, regardless of the curriculum taken?
No, bar that; how many women *had* been going to university while the US-propped government was in place?
(sidenote: a UNICEF report that predates the Taliban take-over accounted 3.7 million children country-wide out of school, 40% boys 60% girls - in a country of 39 million people overall)
OK, bar that. Let's not even insist on university. How many women's lives were actually changed, in terms of them having an independent source of income from their work - even including women without university degrees?
The denominator will shrink to *quite* less than 2 million, I'm afraid, even with all those extra inclusions. And the quotient will increase to *quite* above the yearly salary of the average American who got taxed to make this happen.
I am confused about the factual claims you're making. Are we looking at the same plot, https://tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/labor-force-female-percent-of-total-labor-force-wb-data.html? It shows a jump from ~15% to ~22% of the workforce being female; I can't find a way to change it to absolute numbers (maybe I need a subscription to do that). To be consistent with your numbers, this would require the entire workforce to be about 12 million out of a 40 million population now (and 5 million out of 20 million population in 2000). That doesn't match my intuition for the Afghani unemployment rate? Tradingeconomics (https://tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/unemployment-rate) asserts that unemployment rate has been somewhere around 10%, and the 2020 Afghanistan population pyramid (https://www.populationpyramid.net/afghanistan/2020/) takes ~25% of the population out of the workforce, but that still gives me (22% - 15%) * (75%) * (90%) * (40M) = 1.9M women who are employed now and otherwise wouldn't be. (At, therefore, foreign taxpayer cost of $32,000 per year per woman.)
As Scott pointed out during lockdown analysis, in the West medical interventions are considered cost-effective up to ~$100,000-$150,000 per quality-adjusted life year. That, too, is a very large number; part of my point is that very expensive interventions are sometimes considered cost-effective.
We're looking at different numbers. You're giving percentages of female-workforce / total-workforce. I gave the total-female-workforce numbers -- as said, 0.8M in 2000, 2.4M in 2021.
Ignoring the doubling of the population, you'd be looking at a delta of 2.4M [@2021] - 0.8M [@2000] = 1.6M more women employed.
NOT ignoring the doubling of the population, the apples-to-apples delta would be 2.4M - 1.6M = 0.8M, the figure I used.
You're making unfounded presumptions about which portions of the population pyramid do or do not engage in work in Afghan society. You might be copying criteria that makes sense in the west, and that criteria can wildly miss the mark in Afghanistan. Published unemployment figures are practically useless to determine labor force participation, even in the west.
Scott's figures of $100k - $150k per QALY are taken *intra-society* -- i.e. if Society S has a product P per person per year, then we're discussing exchanging 2*P to 3*P for a QALY. In plain english, US has a GDP per capita around $50k, and two or three years of such product could be spent to give a US citizen one more QALY.
Fair enough. But perhaps more typically relating to the final few years of one's life "reclaimed from nature", than to an open-ended decades-long arrangement.
Afghanistan's GDP per capita was $330 before US started pumping in the billions, and went up to $570 after it did. No "k"s involved.
I'm not asking you to multiply those GDP figures by 3, I'm asking wherefore do you assert a duty of a US taxpayer to fund Afghan QALYs while applying a calculation that is based on the US economy?
A reasonable amount of stability was ensured with a much smaller fraction of troops as you can see on that graph. So I think the real cost is possibly at least 5x lower. And arguably even lower if you consider that those soldiers and military equipment might be stationed somewhere else now. It isn't like all those soldiers were just fired over night.
So if you consider the above, than the marginal cost of keeping the Taliban out of Afghanistan might be in the thousands of dollars not tens of thousands. Spread out over multiple countries.
brown.edu puts it somewhere north of two trillion, in an estimate that is slightly more substantiated than the graph you pasted above.
I agree that some of those expenses would exist even without the Afghan engagement, and there could have been some overestimations -- so I'm operating with about half that figure in my other comments.
The CRT comment sounds facetious at best. In my experience at least, people don't go from "I have nothing" to "I want self actualization", they usually go through a few intermediate steps that often looks like "I want to better my people" (I want to become a doctor/lawyer), "I want to gain *lasting* status/money" and so on. CRT in specific, and literature/history/sociology style humanities in general, rarely pave the path to enduring freedom for first generation oppressed individuals in 3rd world countries. This is not to say that art, history, humanities can't contribute to these struggles - they can - but investing in formal education pathways along art/history/humanities specialization is not how people (with very little, who've experienced duress most of their lives) tend to spend their one shot at betterment.
Even in an improved Afghanistan, I'm generally skeptical that society would allow girls to study beyond high school/10th grade very often. If you want to keep fine-tuning the cost-model, then you'd have to account for the fact that mere high-school education costs upwards of 75k USD/year for many girls out there under the "NATO/US militaristic help" model, assuming all of the military expenditure's goal is/was women's education (and nothing else).
I wouldn't model success in terms of degree acquisition alone BTW - that doesn't sound like a good measurement. To me, things like basic literacy are excellent indicators to look at. Next, female lifespan is another indicator (which ought to correlate well with increased literacy levels), and infant mortality rates (also gets better with high maternal literacy and well being), the role women play in informal employment sector (i don't know how we'd measure it but it seems important that we account for this), rates of child marriage (this ought to drop to count as good), education attainment levels in the next generation (increase in maternal education will have a positive impact across the board on the next generation) and so on. I don't have good references to show that these sorts of interdependencies ought to work, but these were all taken as a given in India in the 80's/90's when I was growing up there and formed the background tapestry of public discourse, and my sense over the years is that most of it worked the way it was posited.
But I also admit after all's said and done and some more clever math is undertaken, it could all still amount to a net RoI that's not very attractive to most.
It's fine if you wish to call my remarks facetious. I think I mentioned CGT not CRT, but I also mentioned I'm too dumb to understand modern Western Academia anyway. I don't want to linger on those remarks because they are hardly the bulk of my point.
The point is that forcing western liberalism as a value system has practically not left a *dent* on the mentality of the Afghan population at wide -- in spite of two decades of military engagement, plethoras of NGOs and insane amounts of money burned. In 2000, 8% of the female population was employed. Two decades and *over a million of millions of dollars later*, 12% are employed. I'm not that hard to impress, but I'm not impressed.
The point is how blind a large portion of the west is to just how *spectacularly* the project of imposing western liberalism has failed there. The cognitive dissonance is sometimes so bad that people have started manufacturing trolley problems which posit that no less than a full 100% of the ~20 million women in Afghanistan had been basking in the light of western liberalism, until the wild money hemorrhage has been stopped, causing them to return to 9th century Afghanistan. More like 20th century Afghanistan, and even that only for a fraction of the women; the vast majority of women weren't much affected by the western-liberalism bit anyway, but could occasionally be affected by the persistent-low-grade-warfare bit.
You say that Afghanis are oppressed individuals fighting for freedom. I'm not following, *who* do you mean they are they oppressed by? By western invaders? By some undemocratic forces? By themselves?
> Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
Haven't we just gone through a few centuries of colonialism and imperialism, and in retrospect, now see that this kind of thinking was wrong?
What is your confidence that how you've defined the two tracks is both precise and accurate? Frankly, I think it's near zero. Furthermore, does your argument not clearly extend to policing the whole world, and thus basically justify starting a new world war?
Finally, there are more than two tracks so your scenario is a false choice. For instance, it seems like it would cost significantly money and lives to simply help anyone who wants to leave Afghanistan. Then you can just leave it to the Taliban.
Ahead, fading into the distance, you see an infinite number of identical track switches along the current track, each one of them leading to either thousands of dead civilians, 45 bn dollars lost, and a couple of hundred soldiers maimed or dead.
The number of potentially time travelled women on the opposite track increases at every switch, but the tracks with the women always end at a trolly stop instead of another switch.
You can either let infinite civilians and soldiers die and let infinite money be wasted or you can at some point send some finite number of women to the 9th century where they will mostly survive.
>You can either let infinite civilians and soldiers die and let infinite money be wasted or you can at some point send some finite number of women to the 9th century where they will mostly survive.
I don't think we can discount their descendants from this, about half of whom would also be women in any given generation.
It seems pretty implausible to me that we can at all accurately predict what afghanistan will look like in even ~3 generations, and even more implausible that it would specifically be exactly what the taliban want.
How confident are we about how the switches in the trolley work? The classic trolley problem is good because a physical switch that moves tracks is a familiar device we can be confident in. The variation where we are told that a large person on a footbridge can be pushed off by me and will certainly stop the trolley involves overriding our physical intuitions about how these situations work (which may still be playing a role in our moral intuitions). With the Afghanistan trolley problem it seems likely that the switching circuits involve lots and lots of feedback loops, so that it's unclear whether option 1 will *also* lead to many women being forced to live in 9th century conditions, and also whether option 2 will *also* lead to the deaths of many civilians and the destruction of skyscrapers or other physical goods.
Many women live in 9th century like conditions today in parts of rural South East Asia and the middle east, yet we don't describe those parts of the middle east and SE Asia as a whole as regressive 9th century like societies. I concede that there is truth in your observation that #1 would also lead to many women being forced to live in a highly regressive society, but it would still be a flawed 21st century society with regressive features. Implicit in my trolly-problem framing is my fear and prediction that under Taliban, the society of Afghanistan would stop resembling a "21st century society with flaws" (at least for women) and become much more like a 9th century society. For me at least, there is a stark difference in values between those two kinds of societies.
How many of these trolleys do you have? One a year? One a century? One ever? (The last one seems optimistic in Afghanistan.) What quality of life do the women have while the trolley is running through the civilians, goods, and arms? (Civil wars, even 20th century ones, are generally not great to live through.)
I think this one got me thinking, and I'm going to settle on "one (over a long duration, equivalent to 'ever')".
In practice, what we've learned in Afghanistan over the past 20 years is that the quality of life isn't anywhere close to someone in a western society would come to recognize, but it was (is!) still much better than life under the Taliban before. At the minimum, for women, coerced marriages haven't been endemic (although I'm skeptical of reports that they're gone now - they still happen in places like India, so I doubt they're erased from Afghanistan in mere 20 years), women can go to school and work, and aren't forced to cover their faces and so on. I doubt these are universal personal freedoms (again, because these legal freedoms aren't yet universal personal freedoms in all of SE Asia, so Afghanistan couldn't have leapfrogged SE Asia in mere 20 years) but I think this was a significant+good start.
The way I see it, the trolleys themselves are metaphors for choices we make, and in this instance, they are about trying vs. not trying to improve conditions. The framing in Option #1 feels (perhaps is) overly specific to trying via one methodology (foreign, mostly US, coercion/"help"/troops). I don't know if direct militaristic intervention needs to be the 'try' approach, but that's the one I was most familiar with, and I felt like that's what would resonate with readers.
I'm trying to point out through the trolley problem that giving up on trying is much worse than not trying, or at least it shouldn't be so easy to pick option 2 over option 1, and anyone in favor of option 2 should really be in favor of a better "option 1" and saying "it's their problem" is really an awful thing to say - and because of those reasons we should work very hard to find different/improved ways of preventing Afghanistan society from falling all the way back to pre-modern times for women.
Now, maybe this point cannot be made as long as Option 1 stays in its current form (perhaps it's a socially/politically toxic option and presenting it in any form makes the discussion untenable), or maybe the lesson here is that the trolley framing isn't the right vehicle (;-)) for making this argument.
It wasn't helpful to answer your question head-on, or a make other risk/reward decisions carefully, but it added enough uncertainty to make me wonder whether getting an early booster was really worth the effort.
Since J&J is similar to AstraZeneca, I'd imagine that the study translates well to J&J, but I haven't seen studies that start with mRNA and then add viral-vector later on - these studies all seem to start with a viral-vector dose, then add an mRNA dose on top of that. Maybe it's reasonable to assume commutativity, maybe it isn't - hard to say.
OK, well, it's not complicated. In both cases you've got a bit of nucleic acid as the key cargo, and in both cases the nucleic acid specifies the structure of the S ("spike") protein* on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is what docks with the human ACE2 receptor and allows the virus to gain entry to the cell. It's the "lockpick" that opens the door, so to speak. The idea is that you'll fool the vaccinated cells into building a crapton of S proteins, which they will express (show) on their surfaces, and which will by complicated mechanisms lead to your immune system realizing some of its cells are infected and need to be killed, and by the way we should be on the lookout for this S protein thingy, which is the marker of evil invaders.
The first importance difference between the two vaccines is that the J&J vaccine uses the DNA that codes for the S protein, while the mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech), as the name implies, use messenger RNA**. The DNA has to get incorporated into the chromosomes of the cell, where it is then transcribed in the usual way to your own mRNA, and then translated to S protein by ribosomes. The mRNA vaccines skip this step by directly flooding the cell with mRNA transcripts. (That does mean the vaccinated cell has its chromosomes messed up, but it's about to be killed by the immune system anyway, so it doesn't matter.)
The second important difference is the delivery vehicle. In the mRNA vaccines they enclosed the RNA in a lipid nanoparticle, a bunch of ordinary fatty acids plus cholesterol plus some stabilizing derivatives of polyethylene glycol, a common polymer used in stuff that goes inside the body. This gunk surrounds the mRNA, shielding it from immediate degradation, until the lipid shell makes the particle fuse with cell membranes, releasing the mRNA into the cell. On the other hand, the J&J vaccine uses a hollowed-out wild adenovirus (a common form of cold virus), #26 in the list of families, called Ad26. The DNA is inside the adenovirus, which gains entry to cells in the usual way such viruses do. The important distinction here is that if you have ever been exposed before to Ad26, then you may have some pre-existing immunity to that virus, in which case, it may well be destroyed before the vaccine has a chance to do much -- this has happened before, and is why J&J chose a more unusual adenovirus, to which fewer people have already been exposed. It's also why there is just one shot -- once you've used Ad26 as a vector, you can't really use it again, because by then by definition your patient has been exposed to Ad26 and any future vaccine based on it won't work very well.
It's also the case that the remnants of the vaccine are disposed of slightly differently. The remnants of the Ad26 are just random proteins, and get chopped up and digested in the normal way. The normal lipids in the mRNA nanoparticle do the same thing, but some of the less common molecules make their way to the liver, great detoxer, where they get oxidized into more ordinary (disposable) molecules over a few weeks (this was explicitly studied in rats before they tried it on people).
Key takeaways:
1) So far as anyone knows, all the foreign material is gone after 2-3 weeks, so there's nothing left of it by the time your second shot comes around.
2) The mechanism of immune provocation is essentially identical in both cases, after all the hokey pokey all you're doing is tricking cells into expressing S protein, which the immune system takes as a heads-up that it should be on the lookout for this weirdo.
3) There will certainly be slight to modest differences in how strong the immune response is, because I don't think the modified S protein they use is exactly the same, and the variations in how you are tricking the cell into making S protein. There's a bunch of subtlety about how the body does this whole process that is still unknown, and could fling some interesting wrinkles in, e.g. how well does one method defends you against variants, et cetera. But none of these things should cause evil synergy between the two vaccines, so far as anyone knows -- just a question of how much good synergy there might be.
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* It's actually the code for a slightly-modified form of the S protein, which is stable by itself, as the normal S protein needs to be embedded in the virus outer coat to be stable.
** Actually they use a modified mRNA, which contains slightly weird nucleotides so it resists degradation, as there is machinery in the cell that would otherwise chew it to pieces in no time flat.
Sorry, I realize something I said above was ambiguous: it's the J&J vaccinated cell that has its DNA messed up, but that doesn't matter because it's a dead cell walking. It's also why we don't care whether the cell is deranged in some way by having its ribosomes hacked to manufacture a billion copies of viral S protein. The cell is going to get killed anyway.
Everything immunologists have been saying publicly about immune theory suggests that being exposed to any form of the virus (different vaccines, or different strains of the virus) should boost your immune protection, if anything, a bit more than being exposed to that form when you've already been exposed to that form. The only study I am aware of to get empirical results about mixing vaccines used AstraZeneca and BioNTech/Pfizer (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01359-3), and they seemed to suggest that the mix-and-match in either order was about as good as two doses of the mRNA vaccine in terms of antibody response, and better than two doses of the adenovirus vaccine, with slightly higher fever-type side effects. I don't think the study was big enough to determine whether the rare blood clot side effect of the adenovirus vaccine was made more or less likely.
If vaccine passports remain important in many cities for a long time, and if Texas continues to make it difficult to access electronic records of our vaccination, then I have been considering getting a dose of Johnson&Johnson on a visit to a coastal city in order to have a good electronic record of a vaccine, even though I already have two doses of Moderna and a paper card recording them. So I would also be interested to know if anyone who actually works on this stuff has further thoughts beyond what I've gathered from media discussion.
Who all remembers the SSC posts, "Legal systems different from ours, because I just made them up" and "Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism"? Inspired by those, and by the various ACX posts on ZEDEs, I set up a subreddit (r/archipelago)! Right now it only has a handful of seed posts by me intended to give a sense of the purpose of the subreddit, but I hope others contribute and it becomes a repository of many such ideas, ranging from the practical like ZEDEs to mere fictional amusements like the legal systems post.
Why? Some of us write such things for fun. Some of us write such things to explore the range of the politically possible, in hopes of developing ideas that will influence the future. I think it's potentially valuable for both purposes to have a publicly accessible collection of designs for alternative political systems. So if you agree, come on by https://www.reddit.com/r/archipelago/ and share your ideas!
Oh wow - I had been seeing this headline when I glanced at the news the past few days, but hadn't actually clicked, so I didn't realize the information it contained was the result of a new transparency law! I had assumed it was just the NYTimes compiling numbers that insurance agencies had already been able to see for years. Since it appears this is newly public information, that could well shake a lot of things up!
(I noticed in an article about inflation the other day that health insurance was apparently one of the few expenses whose cost had been going up dramatically before the pandemic, but started actually going down during the pandemic - I wonder if this transparency law is somehow related.)
My guess was going to be all the elective surgeries that got postponed because people didn't want to go anywhere near a hospital if they didn't have to.
I would be surprised if a reduction in spending for one year would have propagated through to prices that quickly, but I know little enough about insurance pricing that I can't rule it out. It seems more plausible to me that changes in negotiated prices they pay hospitals would change their plans, and thus prices they charge for coverage, but saying it out loud like this does make me skeptical of this too.
New Parents / Expecting Parents discussion anyone? It seems like we've had a few in this group based on some past points.
Do you guys think there are certain innate differences in how babies respond to fathers vs. mothers? We have a 3 month old, and often she gets so tired that she starts getting more agitated and wound up, and as much as I try troubleshooting (diaper, food, burp, these are easy), I can't calm her down and get her past that high agitation state when she needs to sleep. My wife is very successful at it, even if it takes a while. She's had a lot more practice though, since she was off 12 weeks, and now she's left work.
Also daycare is such an incredible challenge, frustration and expense that we are now a one income household. With our baby struggling to gain weight and around the 6th percentile in weight at 3 months old, we couldn't stick it out with our daycare. They would barely try to feed her or deal with her little mannerisms that seem like she doesn't want to eat.
We live in a small city, but the wait time to sign up and expense of daycare is still quite bad, I can't imagine how it would be in a big city.
My experience (5 children) is that children respond differently to each parent, from the moment of birth, and it will vary all through their lives. There are times when you'll be the favorite parent, and other times when your wife will be, and I don't think you can predict it. It probably won't even have anything to do with what you or she do, so I wouldn't try to analyze it too far or try to change what you do -- it's probably just what's going on inside their tiny little heads, how all the neurons are jostling around, making and breaking connections.
It helps to cultivate a state of Zen acceptance about this stuff. Do your best, but don't let the occasional weirdness stress you out or make you doubt yourself*. And don't expect things to be picturebook perfect either. Children are little people, and they have all the quirks and individual strengths and weaknesses of people in general. Furthermore, probably only half the outcome, now or later, is dependent on what you do. A lot of it depends on their nature, and on what they do -- and even at a very young age, children start to make decisions on their own, at least a little independently of what you do.**
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* Consider it training/prep for the high-school years.
** Which is ultimately a good thing, it's how children avoid acquiring some of the worst habits of their parents.
I was unfortunate(fortunate?) enough to have step kids who were past the small child stage and into high school before my tiny was born. I did not fare well with the very small stage (under 1 year) but am doing much better at the 3yo stage. The whole "I need IO that I can parse" is a very big part of what makes parenting possible for me.
Yes, I think most parents have the experience of being "better" at certain ages. I certainly feel that way. There are certain ages I feel I can handle very well, and others where I feel more than ordinarily stupid. I should probably ask my oldest, who are old enough to have a sense of humor about it, whether they see the same thing (about me). It would be interesting if they did, and it would be also interesting if they didn't.
When our (now two year old) daughter was little, my husband stayed at home with her while I went to work. It was still much easier for me to calm her than him, but I suspect that was breast feeding related. He would have to carry her around for a long period of time before she would settle, whereas I could just nurse her, and it was a much different experience than bottles. It was also much easier for me to put her in a soft wrap and walk around with her than him -- I think something about having already adapted to having a baby in that location? Which she liked a lot.
I've got another coming, and will see if it's different or not.
My daughter reacts differently to my wife and I. My wife is better at calming her down for bed or to take a bottle if she's really worked up. That said, I'm not sure the difference is significant. We both do it reasonably okay.
My learning from the last six months has been: patience. Often she's crying her loudest and seems most inconsolable moments before she's asleep. I just grit my teeth and keep rocking her while continuously reminding myself of that fact.
We also (early, 1-3 months) did this thing that we just started calling "yo-yoing". She'd be inconsolable and then seemingly dose and then start screaming a few moments later and then dose again. Initially I would get super frustrated when she'd wake up each time, having just thought I was finally in the clear. But after a few attempts I noticed the pattern: each scream was shorter and each dose was longer until she was finally asleep. So I just mentally prepared myself for a half-hour to an hour of yo-yoing and suddenly it didn't seem so bad: each period felt like progress.
All of this was psychological and mostly just learning to be patient (I'm not). Shortly after she was born, I heard this great Sam Harris episode on "framing any given moment as your potential last time doing X". Using this mental framing helped me to wait out those long bouts of crying. Sure enough, I've already put her down in her bassinet for the last time because she just upgraded to her crib. I already wish I had appreciated it more the last time I did it.
All the best! Holy hell is it a lot of work, but I love being a Dad.
Do kids react differently to different parents? I haven't seen a child who doesn't. My daughter didn't want anything to do with me for the first two years of her life. When my life left the house, she would scream from the time the door shut to the time my wife came back. My son was totally different. All he wanted as an infant was to take naps on my stomach while I took a nap in the recliner. They both grew out of it after a while.
In twenty years, you'll likely be glad your traded income for more kid-parent time. It sucks now, but take solice in your future self's preferences!
This was also something I noticed with our kids while they were little. For the most part I attributed this to the fact that, like your wife, I stayed at home with the kids which I think has two effects.
First, on the baby's side, I think there's just an innate recognition of Parent Who Is Always There, the effects of which are more pronounced when the baby is upset and/or sleepy, like the situation you described. With our first, it was basically impossible for my husband to calm her down or put her to sleep for the first year.
On the parent's side, I found that because I was with the kid all the time, I just really became attuned to every little thing that worked/didn't work. There were just little quirky things that I figured out worked for the baby that, when I tried to give suggestions to my husband, just made me sound like an insane person. ("She likes being held upright at first, but then you've got to shift to a cross-body cradle position once she gets drowsy enough. When is she drowsy enough? Oh, I have no idea how to tell you that. It's just something I can tell when it happens.... Also, once she starts closing her eyes, you've got to bounce every few steps.")
I also realized once my kids had gotten older that their difference in response to my husband also largely tracked with how their personalities developed. My oldest, who gave my husband fits, is now a very independent kid who is loving and affectionate, but a bit standoff-ish. She doesn't like being hugged too tight and isn't really "cuddly" by nature. Our second, who tolerated my husband much more than the first is now a very demonstratively affectionate kid who gives hugs and kisses left and right and still loves to be held and cuddled.
Kid #3 is still a baby, but he absolutely loves dad and it's very rare that my husband can't handle him when he's fussy and/or needs to go to sleep. Beyond what I mentioned above, I also attribute this partly to the fact that after a couple kids you're not nearly as neurotic about things and babies can tell when you're stressed out or relaxed.
Just hang in there! All of this is inherently stressful, and when you slap on weight gain issues as well, everything gets dialed up to 11. Our oldest was very low birth weight because of medical issues on my end (less than 1 percentile!) and had nursing/feeding issues because she was so small. It was a very rough first couple months. If it makes you feel better, she didn't get out of the 5th percentile till she was 9 months old! Once we introduced solid food she jumped from the 8th to the 17th to the 30th within 3 months. Before that, we went from 4th (2mo) to 3rd (4mo) to 0.9th! (6mo).
Very encouraging on the stories of different kids being different. Yes, we are still in that neurotic stage. Also, encouraging to here how your oldest recovered.
My wife and I are both very short. I'm near the 1st percentile in height for men, so I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that our baby would struggle with that, but we joke that she's going to be tall and skinny because she's jumped up in her length much more quickly than weight.
Same age kid here. I think there are innate differences with response to mom/dad, but they probably aren't as big as you think they are.
I plan to hire a nanny come December (right now, baby is looked after by my husband and Mother in law during the day). My main concerns with daycare are illness + lack of individualized care: not enough people to comfort him right away when he's upset or needs help going to sleep. I would be much more open to daycare once my kid is physically stronger and able to socialize with other kids.
With illness, are you specifically looking to trade "illness now" for "illness later"? My understanding was that they will be exposed to about the same amount of different diseases over the course of a lifetime anyway, so with most childhood illnesses you only get to pick when, not whether, they happen. (Although there's definitely a few that are particularly common in small children, e.g. ear infections and croup are a lot more of a young child problem due to young child anatomy, so you do get to just skip them.)
The other thing yo be prepared for is that with a kid in child care, you will get sick a lot more often too. I went from getting a cold every few years to getting a few colds every year.
Of course now you've got to worry about covid as well.
Yep. I think it's better to postpone sicknesses for when he's older, because he's less likely to have severe complications and can emotionally cope better with being sick.
Makes sense -- my son's first cold (~3 months old) sucked, and when he was ~5 months and a visiting ~9-month-old passed off his cold to us, I remember thinking "I wish we were at the point where you can be that cavalier about a runny nose..."
Don't underestimate those 12 weeks your wife spent with the baby. It may be a matter of time and patience, and you may need to spend an equal amount of time soothing the baby so that she is just as comfortable with you as with her mom. Calming an agitated baby can be extremely stressful, and knowing that your partner can just take care of it will be a strong temptation. How you move forward will depend on you and your wife's tolerance for taking the time and arranging your schedules. My wife took on that responsibility in our household, and the kids were more easily soothed by her most of the time. I was still involved enough to be able to do it fairly well, so that I could step in when really needed (aka my wife on edge and needing a break). Our middle child got really bad gas around 11pm almost every night for months, and would be up crying non-stop until it passed. My wife and I would take turns trying to sleep and carrying around the baby. Oddly enough that's a good memory now, despite being a really hard experience at the time.
Yeah I agree she's had more time and that's a big deal. I tend to walk around with and burp our baby more often, but sooth her less. She likes being over my shoulder and she's got really good at keeping her head straight. I have to remind myself still sometimes that she needs head support because usually she doesn't pretty good.
I know this memories will be fond ones, and more I can share the less overwhelming it will be for my wife. Our baby's at the stage where she's doing a lot with her hands now, she whipped the glasses off my head yesterday.
Children vary a lot in how they respond to parents. My oldest was fine with either my wife or myself, and middling decent with other caregivers, but our youngest only wanted mom. With the younger I could, after a lot of time and struggle, get her to take a bottle or go to sleep for a nap but most people (grandparents, sitters) couldn't. We were super lucky to find a day care with a very experienced infant caregiver who could get her to take a bottle or nap but I'm not sure what we would have done if we hadn't (my wife probably would have had to stay home like yours).
I would mostly just advise you to cultivate extreme patience on the issue: after trying the usual suspects you mentioned just keep holding and rocking. Keep the head elevated as you do so to help with reflux. It may take you longer than your wife, and you may never be as good at it, and just remember that it may have more to do with the child's preferences than anything you're doing or not doing.
Some good tips. Good to hear some positive experiences of daycare. We got on the list at several places as soon as we knew for sure and only got a response a few months before my wife was supposed to go back to work.
I'm sorry your daycare didn't work out, for us it improved the parenting experience so much! (Mostly just because we both prefer the company of adults and computers to that of babies, but also, they somehow taught our kid to enjoy tummy time.) We didn't have to wait to sign up, but we were able to shop around (bigger city advantage?) and find a place we liked that was able to take us. We were doing this about 3 months before the kid, so about 6 moths before starting the daycare. In a big city on a coast, I hear you may need to start even earlier.
No idea on mothers vs. fathers, I don't recall a major difference with ours; some of the time the favorite parent is clearly the dog.
Good luck getting out of 6th percentile! We went through that when the kid was 1 month and discovered he just really preferred bottles to breast, which of course then made daycare much easier. (He went from 6th to 96th to just being a large kid.) We did have to experiment a little with bottle types, there was one he liked even less than the breast.
Yeah my wife didn't think she could do a good job with breast, so we did formula right from the start, but we've changed formula and now we are on the Nutramigen (expensive) stuff, and we've found an anti-colic bottle that seems to help her too.
Does anyone know from where the (Christian) position that after death you will get to know everything (from the meaning of life to who ate your sandwich one day) comes from, or starts at? Is it there in the Old Testament or is it some human universal or what? Sorry, I know nothing about religions, I grew up in a mainly atheist society built on a previously Christian one, but all through my life I've vaguely noticed claims that if you reach Paradise you'll Know It All.
There's a strong argument that the old Jewish and early Christian understanding of the afterlife is not the same as the modern Christian one. Prof. Bart Ehrman has written a book on this. Here's an interview about it: https://text.npr.org/824479587
A version of this idea is already there in Plato. In the Meno, Socrates argues that since an uneducated boy is able to learn that the diagonal of a square is the side of the square with double area, merely by answering questions Socrates asks and without being told anything, therefore the knowledge must already have been present and just needed to be recalled. He generalizes this to suggest that when souls are disembodied (before birth and after death) they are in contact with the forms and therefore have all knowledge, and in life, what we think of as learning is mainly recollection.
This idea sounds similar enough to what you're describing as a Christian view, and I know many early Christian views were heavily influenced by neo-Platonism, that perhaps this is a relevant influence.
In the Meno, Plato's Socrates does indeed advance the theory of learning as recollection - but he doesn't present it as his own theory. Before introducing it, he says that he learned of it from "priests and priestesses" (ἱερεῶν and ἱερειῶν). This suggests that while Plato might be the first *extant* Western source, he is likely not the origin point for the idea, and that it has a deeper and earlier foundation in Western religious tradition.
Also, it's anybody's guess whether Plato actually meant to suggest that Socrates actually believed the theory. By the end of the dialogue, consideration of the theory hasn't helped them answer the core question of the dialogue - whether virtue can be taught. I think Socrates is stepping Meno through a number of hypotheses about knowledge, all of which he thinks are wrong, intending to make Meno dissatisfied with all of them; the theory of recollection is introduced primarily to lever Meno towards conceiving of knowledge as something that must be supernatural. The answer Socrates actually believes himself would (of course) be the Forms, as detailed in the Republic or the Phaedo. But that's just my own personally favored interpretation, and I think most people disagree with me and think Socrates actually endorsed the theory of recollection, so YMMV.
Weird. A friend of mine, AFAIK well versed in theology, once told me that (at least according to some) once a sin is confessed and absolved it is effectively "erased", so that in the afterlife nobody knows who ate your sandwich at all.
But of course I can't find anything to back that up right now.
In Dante's Inferno the spirits of the damned can only foresee what will happen in the distant future; their clairvoyance vanishes the more the events are near in time. They know nothing about what happens in the present.
"Most believe that what he says applies to all the damned, e.g., Singleton in his commentary to this passage (Inf. X.100-105). On the other hand, for the view that this condition pertains only to the heretics see Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), pp. 29-31. But see Alberigo, his soul already in hell yet not knowing how or what its body is now doing in the world above (Inf. XXXIII.122-123)."
The thing that we call "knowledge" on earth is completely different from how things are in heaven. To the point that Paul (the writer of 1 Corinthians) isn't even willing to call what happens in heaven "knowledge" without a bunch of qualification. Earthly knowledge is full of complexity and distortion and misunderstanding, like looking at an object in a messed-up mirror. Heavenly knowledge is like looking straight at the object. Another example he gives is that earthly knowledge is like the incoherent babbling of a baby, and heavenly knowledge is like straightforward adult speech.
That makes it very hard for theologians and pastors to teach about what heaven is like, when one of Christianity's main sources basically says that earthly human thought is defective and is going to be replaced by something better. "The first thing I have to teach you about this is that anything I teach about it is definitely wrong."
The tradition I was raised in would probably say if you wanted to know it all you could, but when you get to heaven you aren’t concerned with earthly things so you probably wouldn’t try to find out.
Book of Revalations is probably the number one source for the eternal afterlife with God. My understanding though is that you do not instantly know everything; rather you have an infinite amount of time, and access to God, who does know everything.
Also, you apparently get to live in a Pluto-sized arcology constructed in space after Earth is destroyed, following a war in which trillions or quadrillions of people are killed by bombing (possibly orbital bombardment).
Or at least, that's the literalist way of reading Revelation.
Super interesting question. I'm an ex-orthodox jew but the same question could apply. My understanding is that the Old Testament doesn't mention the afterlife at all and its clearly a newer invention of monotheistic religions. I think the afterlife is sufficiently abstract and unsupported enough that every commentator could add their own flourishes all the time on what you get once you die. If I had to guess, I'd say that as religious commentators became more philosophical to match the philosophies of their time period's they got really into the idea that the afterlife meant "none of the limitations of the physical world". So not being held back by "time" means experiencing past, present and future simultaneously. Not having eyes means "you can see everything". etc. etc. This is obviously more of a guess answer and I'm sure their are actual experts here who can be a lot more specific.
I love this guy and I'm sure he'll have the best solution:
Casually, I’ve heard that “when you die, you go to god and are with god, and god is all knowing, and you talk to god, so you can ask god stuff, and it’s heaven so you have all good stuff.” For a history of heaven a brief overview is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven#Hebrew_Bible. Different Christian cultures and denominations and times and peoples develop the idea of afterlife and heaven and such in complex and different ways. There’s a lot of thinking and folk ideas and variation and differences there. I don’t know much about it
I have some doubts about the plan to throw so much money at the "global climate problem". Please explain to me where I go wrong or with which points you disagree the most:
1. So far, the world is ca 1 degree C warmer compared to the preindustrial era (leaving aside doubts about the precision of estimating preindustrial era temperatures). So far, nothing terrible is happening, extreme weather events are not more devastating. The damages as portion of GDP have plummeted and the number of "extreme weather deaths" too, despite the much bigger world population. I sort of don't expect following strong non-linearity to be true: compared to the preindustrial past, one degree up, nothing happens (or things even improve), another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose. Is there some magic number saying "this is the exactly correct global temperature"?
2. Some countries seem to actually benefit from modest, say 2 C, temperature increase. Canada, Sweden, Russia etc. There are surely some losers, but the net balance may even still be positive.
3. Even the IPCC, which overall sounds quite alarmist to me, estimates the GDP global loss from "untackled" global warming only at couple percentage points by 2100 (when the global GDP is expected to be 4 or many more times higher than today).
4. CO2 seems to be fairly beneficial in some ways: agricultural yields are estimated to be 15 percent higher compared to a situation with pre-industrial concentrations. It is the main plant food: some deserts are already shrinking, the planet is greening. Surely it is a good thing?
5. Global warming seems to be saving lives even now: the drop in deaths from cold is several times higher than the increase in deaths from heat. No one seems to care for this, though.
6. The green deals seem to be extremely expensive, with lot of the funds going as subsidies to inefficient technologies (solar, wind). If you argue that these technologies are already efficient, please explain why they need subsidies. This and new taxes have the potential to choke economic growth. I believe that my grandchildren would be better off in a world that is 4 times richer and 2 - 3 C warmer than in a world that is only 1 C warmer but economically stagnating. After all, rich Gulf countries have no problem operating in 50 C outside temperatures. And we are still talking about a difference of only 2 C, not going from 20 to 50 C. The necessary adjustment seems very minor to me, with plenty of time to adjust.
7. If things really seem to go bad, there are several geoengineering projects that might work. And these would be still two or more orders of magnitude cheaper than those green deals.
8. Many alarmist messages go hand in hand with subliminal or open "we have to end capitalism" or "our only chance is degrowth". Somehow I fear that for many people this might be the real agenda.
9. China, India etc still keep building coal power plants at a fast rate. What if they (as I expect) will not play along? Should the West economically suffer and let them outgrow us (when they emit the CO2 we save, undermining all the green deals of the world)? Will a much stronger China be kind to us?
Regarding the temperature, 1 and 2, the problem is feedback loops. For example, snow is shiny, reflects a lot of light back into space. If the ice caps melt, the albedo drops, and then earth absorbs more energy directly. Another dangerous feedback loop is the permafrost: a bunch of frozen plant matter in the soil in Northern Canada and Russia that's been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. If it thaws (which it allegedly will at +2C), all that dead plant matter will decompose into GHG, and the amount of mass we're talking about here is greater than the amount of GHG we've emitted so far. These nonlinear processes make specific predictions hard, but they point very strongly to "bad."
Re 7, I agree, but we still need to fund these projects, and that requires believing there's a problem in the first place.
Re 8, I suspect it's true, there are people who don't REALLY worry about climate change except as an auxiliary argument for their pet issue, be it socialism or some spiritual environmentalism. It's important, though, not to let wrong people cause you to reflexively adopt a different wrong position (like "we don't have evidence that climate change will be bad."). Some people are dumb and have bad arguments, but do you really want to shape your worldviews based on the bad arguments dumb people have?
I also have the impression that the bad effects are overplayed and the good effect underplayed.
But on the other hand, there are some effects that deserve to be called catastrophic, and that can not easily be solved by throwing money at them:
- The oceans become more acidic (carbonic acid). This will kill a lot of species, plain and simple. Even for species not affected directly, there might be secondary effects. The marine ecosystem might look really different from today if the earth is 4 or 6 degree warmer.
- The same might hold for land-based species, but here it's less clear what happens. Ecosystems might or might not collapse.
- Our civilization has thrown a lot of money and effort into optimizing infrastructure for the environmental conditions that we have now. Like, the population density is highest close to the coastlines, and the most valuable buildings are there. If the sea level really rises a lot, this means a lot of people will be displaced, and a lot of value lost. If some 100 million people from Bangladesh have to move, that is a problem that can threaten stability. If some parts of California just turn desert, this is a problem. The answer "California is just a place, we can move elsewhere" is not completely false, but has lots of ramification.
A problem is that the changes have a momentum of centuries. If we want to avoid changes, then it is not an option to wait and see whether they are good or not, and re-engineer climate if it becomes unpleasant. Once the Greenland ice shield becomes unstable, it's gone, and re-reducing the temperature will probably not change that. A lot of other things are like that. Once the jetstreams or the gulf stream are gone, it's very unclear whether they come back in cooler climate.
So it comes down to a gamble. I don't think that we know it's going to be desastrous. But the chances for desaster are non-vanishing enough that I would like to avoid them, even at high costs now.
Fair enough, surely one valid point of view. Just a note towards the acidification: oceans are alkaline, this "acidification" is actually only a tiny move towards neutral pH. People tend to imagine a sea of acid, a terrifying thought for sure.
I still agree that this change might be lethal to some organisms even so.
Yes, it's not going to be harmful to humans. But afaik, even the current changes are already problematic for animals which use calcium carbonate, which is quite common in the sea. (Sea shells, algae, sponges, ....)
On 6, governments subsidise a bunch of things for a bunch of reasons. In particular, fossil fuel subsidies are much greater than subsidies for renewables.
Solar and wind are extremely cheap and effective. (I saw one discussion that it costs less to build and operate a wind farm than it does just to operate an existing coal power plant of the same energy output, but I can't find it right now.) But it's hard for them to compete against the level of lobbying, inertia, and financial support of coal.
But even if they weren't competing with a subsidised fossil fuel market, there's an argument for subsidising them to make the transition happen sooner. (Obviously this only applies if you accept that global heating is bad, which most experts do.)
I just took a look at the OCI Shift the Subsidies database which is allegedly the underlying data behind the linked article. I’m super unimpressed with this data source. Most oil companies globally are nationalized so, yea, they use their status as a state owned entity to get preferential credit. That doesn’t mean those projects wouldn’t get financed otherwise. (also, financing isn’t a subsidy). In fact, I suspect more projects might be financed given how inefficient state owned enterprises tend to be. These people have a huge agenda that taints the entirety of their data collection.
The Oil and gas industry is both immense and profitable. Probably because oil and gas gets used in almost everything we do and touch. You can critique the industry for all sorts of things but saying it wouldn’t be profitable without government subsidies is completely nuts. In the US, the government gets a share of the mineral right so it probably looks more like a net tax than a subsidy.
Coal plants are a hassle to operate. Nobody wants to buy them in the US right now. But they’re also way more effective at providing base power which matters a lot, like at night. They don’t need lobbyists to ensure their existence. Renewables need a base power value proposition and coal will be done.
As you can probably tell, I’m not very tolerant of the excessive excuse making by the renewable crowd. Just about everyone has bent over backwards to make wind and solar a thing and it’s time to either let them compete unfettered in the energy markets or move on to other technologies.
I never said fossil fuels need subsidies to be profitable (if the site I linked to said that then I apologise for not reading it thoroughly). But in general if you've got two competing products that would each be profitable on their own, then the amount of subsidies they get still has an impact on the relative market share.
I kind of take your point about the data gatherers having an agenda, but also, is there anybody without an agenda who's done this kind of analysis? If I'm right, and global heating is a big bad thing, and governments are doing too little too late, then anybody who looks at the data will come to believe that if they didn't already. When they present their data they will have a strong opinion and you'll be able to accuse them of having an agenda.
I agree that you need base power. I'm pro nuclear for that reason. Also putting batteries in houses.
I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I don't really think "the excessive excuse making by the renewable crowd" is at all fair, and the idea that anybody has bent over backwards... I'd characterise that as a few token drops in the ocean so that governments can look like they're doing something. But I'm not sure we'll get very far by trading perceived hyperboles.
I'm sure there are a bunch of places where wind and solar are the best choice for the majority of electricity generation. But those technologies are already mature and competitive, so they have tons of investors and don't need extra help. The nuclear industry, on the other hand, was almost completely wiped out around 1980. It doesn't just need to be rebuilt, it needs new technology to survive in the modern regulatory environment. So on the margin, I'd put all my money on R&D for Generation IV nuclear, especially molten salt reactors.
I don't think I can answer that. First of all it depends on the country how important each is. Second, I think they need different things. Wind and nuclear suffer from NIMBYism. Regulations need to be eased to make it easier to build on-shore wind farms and nuclear power plants. One problem in the UK is that the government has a lot of MPs in rural areas with gentle rolling hills and conservative citizens who don't want their view to be changed. So you don't necessarily need to spend money on subsidising wind farms in those places, but you do need to have a government that's prepared to risk throwing some of its MPs under the bus for the sake of the country (and planet) as a whole. Of course their incentives make that basically impossible.
For solar, I want to see new build houses having more than a token 3m^2 of solar panels built into their roof. The government doesn't need to spend any money at all here: just impose regulations on house building. (I recognise this will increase the cost of that housing but I think it's worth it.)
I also think nuclear fusion is important in the long term. But I don't know enough about the state of the research to know if it needs any help at the moment.
I have many more thoughts on the precise ways to encourage those three areas, but I'll spare you the full version. But I hope I've explained why I don't want to talk about spending hypothetical points.
> I sort of don't expect following strong non-linearity to be true: compared to the preindustrial past, one degree up, nothing happens (or things even improve), another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose.
Wow. What if I told you that a glance at a phase diagram would demonstrate that thermodynamics is really *all* about nonlinear effects? If you're not convinced, maybe try an experiment: vary the temperature of an ice cube linearly and try to see if you notice any nonlinear effects.
Fair point, but still: I believe that there are some non-linear effect, and possibly even positive feedbacks (although nature is rather full of negative ones). Nevertheless, NOTHING bad happened so far (within some statistical noise). Why should we be suddenly at a tripping point? Such that ALL HELL IS GOING TO BEAK LOOSE AND WE ALL BURN TO DEATH (paraphrasing the geist of most media coverage that come to my attention).
Is there anything special about 15 C global average so that say 17 C is terribly dangerous?
Aside from the mass extinction (which isn't really a problem for humanity), the big issue is the amount of stuff near sea level and the amount of shift in crop-growing regions. It's not that the state of the world is better at 15C than at 18C, but that the optimal distribution of stuff in an 18C world is significantly different from that in a 15C world and "location of cities/farms" is difficult to change quickly without mass deaths (Siberia is going to become a lot more habitable and Bangladesh a lot less so, for instance, but "relocate all the Bangladeshis to Siberia" involves substantial retraining of farmers, construction of infrastructure and simple transportation difficulties).
WRT sea levels it should be noted that there are engineering margins of error basically everywhere; when those margins of error are exceeded, well, you're going to go from "not a big problem unless you get hit by a hurricane" to "a bunch of CBDs are underwater" fairly quickly. It should also be noted that sea levels are very slow to react - we've got +1C, but we haven't got the full +1C worth of sea level rise yet.
You're definitely right, though, that human extinction isn't going to happen from this. Even in the worst-case scenarios you're looking at ~1-2 gigadeaths; runaway greenhouse ("Earth turns into Venus 2.0, everything dies") has pretty much been ruled out (as in, "it's possible with sufficient amounts of GHG, but there aren't enough fossil fuels on the planet to make that much CO2, and the super-effective GHG like CFCs have been successfully phased out").
> "relocate all the Bangladeshis to Siberia" involves substantial retraining of farmers, construction of infrastructure and ...
... and Russia deciding it will issue millions of visas to Bangledeshis. But this is unlikely, as is Mexico/US/Brazil granting visas to Central Americans, etc. So anti-immigrant sentiment is one major reason I'm concerned about global warming.
magic9mushroom left a suicide note in OT203 on Dec. 26. So... bye again.
I'd say "Nothing bad has happened so far" is also an exaggeration.
Consider the level of drought and food insecurity we are seeing now, vs. 20 years ago, even with modern technology.
I'm involved peripherally with agrobuinsess personally, and shit is fucking precarious for lots of high value crops already. If rain becomes any more unreliable, we could see some staple crops in becoming likewise unreliable (in certain areas. EG, there is less snowpack on the sierra's year over year for 25 years, and if the trend continues it will be BAD for the worlds largest class 1 farming zone.)
Look at GSCI and BCOM. The market trades within a range and generally downward.
If you feel the future will be different, put on the trade. But you can’t cherry-pick a particular crop and use that to support some broader climate agricultural catastrophe that isn’t happening.
It feels to me like there's an intuitive disconnect between "1 degree is a small amount of temperature shift" (true in any of my day-to-day experiences) vs. "1 degree is a HUGE amount of temperature shift for a planet-wise average". In particular, when you say "another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose," you seem to be treating 1 degree and 2 degrees as similar amounts of temperature shift, whereas I think for a planetwise average they're really not.i
Another thing is that there's much less warming on water than on land, and much less warming near the equator than at medium and high latitudes, so each 1 °C increase in the global average is a rather larger increase on temperate land.
But why? Even the "planetary average" I believe is an ill defined concept. No single place on Earth cares too much about planetary average. It cares about the specific temperature it experiences. I have myself seen a change of - 44 degrees in 24 hours (Czechoslovakia 1979). We had some "coal holidays" because of that, the coal froze and was hard to unload from the freight trains. So heat and electricity was rationed. Lot of fun back then. Local plants and animals are still well adjusted to such wild swings, why would they suffer so much in say 2 C per century drift? Some things will change for sure, but some things will change in all other scenarios too.
I think e.g. rainfall is driven by much larger-scale patterns than what you would normally experience. If you held everything else constant but just raised the temperature 1 degree C I think many places would be ok (unless that 1 degree C went from -0.5 to +0.5 and now solid ice becomes liquid water), but I don't think everything else is constant, fundamentally I assume because somewhere on earth lots of solid ice is turning into liquid water.
After all, my understanding is that the last ice age was only 4-5 degrees lower than current average; 4-5 degrees lower than current also doesn't feel like that big a deal (I live in a place with >30C summers, subtracting 4-5 degrees doesn't exactly cause water to freeze), but manifestly was.
Point taken. On the other hand, rainfall patterns change all the time, adaptation might be much easier and cheaper. Because of more evaporation there would be probably more rain overall, which is probably mostly a good thing. Speaking of ice ages, well, there is a problem we should be eventually much more worried about imho. Maybe we actually should save the carbon, to use it for preventing the next ice age in the future.
The optimal temperature is probably whatever temperature human civilization has developed at, since temperature change results in large changes needed. Also, on a personal note, I suspect the cost of a species going extinct might be enormous, since biotechnology has barely begun, and every time a species goes extinct, we lose a potential set of biotechnological tools.
3. The above study estimates global GDP might be reduced by around 23% by 2100. The IPCC probably wouldn't make a super specific estimate like that, since there is huge political pressure on them to be as conservative as possible. However, even though that may represent the total GDP loss - there will be many who are far worse off. People in hot, dry areas may be forced to seek asylum elsewhere.
Also, the risk of triggering positive feedback loops would be a pretty major cost [IPCC AR6 WG1, SPM section C3, p37]
Solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels (https://doi.org/10.25919/16j7-fc07) however our electricity infrastructure hasn't been built for variable, distributed generation. We currently lack energy storage on our electricity grids to "firm" the supply. However, we can simply build large batteries - lithium batteries will probably get a lot cheaper very soon - this still will require public investment, but we can't afford more climate change. Or we could just use nuclear. Or we could just tax carbon like the vast majority of economists want to (https://www.econstatement.org/)
7. What projects are you thinking of, and what are their costs? Geoengineering technologies for climate change are all in their very early stages - have you considered the risk that they won't work?
8. It could turn out that those people are right, couldn't it? What do you think?
9. China's net zero commitment is super vague and the CCP has delayed climate action before (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas). However, it's nearly finished implementing an emissions trading scheme, putting it a few steps ahead of America, Australia et al. But, in any case, climate change is a global problem - no one country can stop it. That's why international agreements such as Paris are so important for us to stick to, and not feel emboldened by laggard countries to be laggard ourselves.
8: It is of course possible that anti-capitalism would be the best system in certain contexts, at least (e.g. I'm sure that some form of fairly extreme socialism is optimal for *some* level of technological sophistication, population size, biome of government types around the world, etc., whereas capitalism would be optimal for others, almost no matter how you define "optimal"). But if that's the case, that should be argued on its own merits, rather than trying to make the (fairly weak and almost universally poorly argued, IMO) case that it is the ONLY solution to climate change.
Well, the heuristics is fairly straightforward: capitalism (market economy) works, nothing else does. Ever. Something else might hypothetically work in the future, when there is a total abundance of everything thanks to robots etc. My guess is though that without capitalism we will lose democracy - because the political class will be hundreds of times more powerful than today, deciding ALSO about the allocation of all the resources. Or some kind of AI, or a blend of the two. What could possibly go wrong, eh?
Just to pick a small part of this to demonstrate my frustration with these discussions:
"By 2100, 300-600 million people might be displaced by sea level rise alone"
Is that number based on humans doing nothing in reaction to rising sea level? Why would we do nothing?
I'm aware of the fact that Cape Town was able to reclaim several blocks of land where there used to be sea and this was decades ago. Hundreds of years ago the Netherlands performed miracles with water and land reclamation. It's just so hard for me to believe we won't be able to save New York / London etc with some engineering and human ingenuity. We're masters of using technology to adapt to the elements.
My main concerns remain: A. People not wanting to leave their air-conditioned homes and B. Loss of bio-diversity.
I think most cities that have "reclaimed" land from the sea usually took places where the sea was very shallow, added additional rock/soil/etc to raise it above sea level, and then built on it. It almost goes without saying that those locations were unbuilt before they added rock/soil/etc, because those locations were underwater.
I think the process of taking a place that was already build and raising it is much harder. The only example I am aware of is the Raising of Chicago in the mid 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
I suspect that some cities might be able to do this with some of their relevant neighborhoods, but very few particular places are going to be worth investing this much effort in - the costs of this sort of raising would thus be even greater than the costs of displacement of the several hundred million people that live on land that will end up below sea level. (I suspect that New York, Miami, London, etc. will be worth investing in, but the hundreds of millions of people displaced are mostly in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and other low lying highly populated places.)
No, it's based on a few different projections of what emissions could end up being, from little action to high action. Obviously there are some big unknowns and uncertainties - this is always going to be the case for a topic like climate change, which encompasses basically everything on the planet. Read the study here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z
What proportion of the world has air-con (or would if they could afford it)? I live in Southern Europe and the first time I saw an air-con unit was when I visited America.
I hope to get back here when I have more time. Right now only this:
8. - as someone who spent half of his life in non-capitalist country (Czechoslovakia), I am absolutely sure, I mean absolutely, that you don't want to lose capitalism. It is the engine that makes all the money you need to eventually take care of the environment and everybody's needs in fact. When we got rid of the communist rule in my country, the environment improved incredibly, within few years. I even think that without capitalism you lose democracy (there was never any successful democratic country without capitalism - meaning market economy. Scandinavian countries have market economies, to be sure). As for degrowth - I believe that without growth you have a recipe for a social disaster. Everything becomes a zero sum game suddenly - good luck with that. From another angle, the more rich is a country, the easier it is for it to handle emergencies, disasters and problems in general. More growth means more wealth.
9. Chinese communists will do absolutely nothing to threaten their economic growth. It is a part of their social contract and power is all they seek. Also, they cannot be trusted, the communist assholes they are. I have seen this in and out, they can be forced to do something, at best. Do we have enough force?
I don't think your assumption regarding a link between capitalism and environmental improvement is correct. Between the 60s and the 90s, the US also vastly improved environmental conditions...got rid of acid rain, cleaned up water and air, etc., and that had nothing to do with becoming more capitalistic, it was because of better knowledge, technology, and regulations. China has improved too. I see no link whatsoever between using technology to implement environmental improvements and and whether that is funded by private or public ventures (indeed, there is often no profit motive there, so it usually has to be implemented by public investment or regulations).
He didn't say "capitalism is the only thing that can lead to environmental improvement." What he is referring to is the reputation Stalin and Mao's regimes had for astounding degrees of waste. When you remove the price mechanism for fuel, for waste disposal, for resources, none of the workers or middle-managers or project czars have any incentive for efficient use of resources. If they need more coal to build some bridge, they ask the party for more coal and it gets sent over. No one keeps track of how much resources they consume because no one has to pay for it.
We find, just empirically, that the price mechanism keeps everybody more on their toes about resource consumption.
From Poland. The problem with communism was that massive part of economy was completely dysfunctional, interest of anyone utterly detached from any sort of productivity.
So you got the worst parts of capitalism with no benefits.
> better technology
made available in Poland thanks to collapse of communism, the other two also but this was clearest one
> The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products.
China economic systems is about as communist as I am chinese
> I see no link whatsoever between using technology to implement environmental improvements and and whether that is funded by private or public ventures
the problem is not "public" part, it is "dysfunctional as fuck" part (guaranteed in centrally planned economies that are detached from actually doing something useful)
8. In general, I agree that capitalist societies have done a lot better. I certainly don't forsee this trend continuing once AI becomes capable of replacing humans at nearly everything. But there is a major flaw in capitalism if the costs of climate change remain external to the market.
9. Although China certainly burns a lot of coal, decarbonization is also a major opportunity for them - they make a large proportion of solar panels and batteries. My feeling is that the best approach to tackling the CCP is to continue raising tariffs and slowing international trade with China, until their government agrees to democratize and respect human rights.
Just to expand on your point about richer countries handling disasters better, it often illuminating to ask the climate-alarmed which climatic extreme kills the most Americans and what is that death rate? You know, so we can compare it to the 30 odd thousand who are shot to death or the similar number who perish in road accidents.
Its floods which are the most deadly of all the climate disasters - about one hundred Americans lose their lives to flooding every year.
Such a relief that AR6 doesn't suggest that flooding is getting worse (despite what some headlines might misleadingly hint at)
"At 1.5°C global warming, heavy precipitation and associated flooding are projected to intensify and be more frequent in most regions in Africa and Asia (high confidence), North America (medium to high confidence) and Europe (medium confidence)"
So, if flooding does (eventually) increase by 10% might we expect an extra 10 Americans to die every year? No; because deaths from all climate phenomena have been plummeting, everywhere, for as long as there have been records. Extreme weather was a vastly greater problem in the past than it is now, and will be in the future.
That is what irritates me most: every weather event is "because of AGW", according to most media. As if these things did not happen before. It is ok to use statistics to prove the point, but they mostly don't do that.
If it was not for the media coverage, 99% of people would not be able to make any conclusion, whether it is getting warmer or cooler or whatever. Except for the subjective cognitive bias "this did not happen when I was young".
I've seen groups like World Weather Attribution quoted in news articles to justify linking extreme weather events to climate change. Some news sources might not, but I've definitely noticed it happening. This is a group that estimates what percentage of an extreme weather event can be attributed to climate change, check them out - https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/
This chimes in with Scott's thoughts on cost-benefit studies from the last links post. William Nordhaus estimated that the optimum level of global warming would be about 3.5 degrees C. Of course then you realize why nobody else has bothered to do a cost-benefit analysis - it doesn't fit anybody's narrative. Seeing as BAU is taking us in the vicinity of 3.5 degrees, we merely need to carry on doing what we're doing - 3 or 4 hundred billion a year in subsidies for renewables and all will be well. The 'Very Alarmed' simply cannot have that - as Gurdjieff nearly said, people will give up anything you care to mention, except their alarm. And the 'Very Sceptical' also simply cannot have that because it would necessitate accepting that 3 or 4 degrees of warming could be created by our carbon emissions.
You would think that with such a supposedly big problem with vast potential costs, the helpfulness of assessing costs and benefits would be great, but it seems not.
Even capping warming on 3.5 degrees requires substantial investment, though.
I am no expert, but what I´ve read about the topic strongly suggests that while countries formally commited to 2 degrees, there is no real expectation that this goal will be without some unexpected technological (or political) breaktrough. So we will get much higher rise in temperatures than planned, but lower than if we did nothing.
There have been a number of cost-benefit analyses. The most well-known are Stern (2006) and Garnaut (2008). Both found reducing GHG emissions had higher benefits than costs.
I don't know Garnaut, but I know the Stern review uses some quite nonstandard assumptions to reach that conclusion - specifically it assumes that costs and benefits depreciate at 1.4% per year as you project them into the future.
The model Stern (and basically every economist) uses here is that money can either be spent on things we like now, or saved / invested and then we have MORE money to spend in the future. When we're talking about intergenerational transfers of wealth (which we are when we talk about climate change) then everything we spend now preventing climate change 'steals' money from the future that they could use for other things they want. So the question is, how much would money that could be 'gifted' to the future now via investment actually worth when the future rolls around? Alternatively, what do we 'steal' from the future when we spend money now on making the world better for them?
NB - Apologies that 'steals' is a bit of a pejorative term - I couldn't think of another phrase that meant that you're taking money from future generations without their consent, but in this case you're taking the money with their best interests in mind whereas most people who steal don't do so with good intentions.
Stern says that the answer is that we 'steal' 1.4% of the value of the money each year by spending it now rather than investing it. This means that Stern argues that the £100 we spend preventing climate change now would only be worth £400 in 100 years time (so if the value of the improved environment we gift the world is worth >£400 it is positive expected value to improve the environment). However, it is really not clear where this 1.4% comes from; the UK government uses 3.5% as a much more standard discount rate, which would imply that £100 spent now 'steals' £3000 from the future which is nearly ten times higher. Stephen Watson below suggests that the Nordhaus analysis (which I haven't read) uses 5% implying we 'steal' nearly £12500 from the future!
I ended up a big sceptic on Stern - discount rate is almost single-handedly the parameter which leads to his eye-catching conclusion, and yet it is different from the standard value given by the UK government for future planning, Stern doesn't really explain where 1.4% actually comes from and there is inadequate sensitivity analysis around this key number. It wouldn't surprise me if preventing climate change did have a positive cost-benefit ratio, but it felt to me like Stern decided that that was going to be his conclusion and made the data fit his theory rather than the other way around.
Note - discounting is not just about the rate of return on investment, but also about the relative importance we put on future suffering/pleasure compared to present suffering/pleasure. A 1.5% discount rate might be low on financial investments, but it is probably high to put on the suffering/pleasure itself - it seems quite plausible that 0% is the appropriate discount rate for the actual hedonic value.
I think the hedonic argument is plausible, but money really isn't hedonic value, because money can be invested. Even if we assume 0% hedonic discounting, in 100 years we could have 400x the money to spend on whatever hedonic thing we want. So suffering/pleasure doesn't become worth less, but it does become cheaper at a regular financial discount rate.
Sorry, I should add that it wasn't like Stern pulled the number 1.4% out of thin air - he argued (probably correctly) that the discount rate depended on the situation with the global economy, and that the global economy would react to different climate scenarios differently. So Stern didn't actually have any single discount rate, but rather a range of discount rates of which the average was about 1.4%. But then as per my original comment this is significantly less than the UK government projects while looking at the same data, so at least one of either Stern or the UK Government is materially wrong here, and Stern does a less convincing job of identifying where his numbers come from IMO
There's a pretty good chance Nordhaus has a flawed approach to discounting social costs and benefits - when weighing up intangible benefits into the future, he usually discounts them with a rate similar to the economic discount rate, 5% or so. Though there is considerable divergence on the issue, and many think it should be even higher, the most common opinion among experts nowadays is that this discount rate should be zero. The average is 2.6%. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26529055.pdf
This seems like more of an argument for climate change being good, as opposed to a criticism specifically of either climate charities and policy or say Stripe’s carbon removal pilot program? I share concerns about overreach here but ... this seems like a disconnected and relatively unsupported list of questionable reasons that barely tie together, so idk how useful it is to respond to them all.
1. Not an expert here, but there are petabytes of arguments about why climate change is, in fact, bad for the environment.
2. Not an argument? What reason is there to believe “the balance maybe positive?” That’s just a disconnected statement
3. A couple percentage points isn’t great! Normal policy stuff barely had the ability to increase GDP that much. Free trade agreements individually raise GDP by ~0.01% and that’s also probably the ballpark of most other policies. It’s especially not great for the people and areas the loss is concentrated in. But a x% GDP loss could mean anything from Beijing getting nuked (bad you would think) to the entire fast food, cosmetics, most of fashion, video game cosmetics, most of marketing, MLMs, and those sorts of industries getting outlawed, which would be awesome, to the pandemic, in between. But 3% GDP estimated loss, which probably isn’t that exact, could correspond to something bad. Probably worth directly discussing that instead lol
4. Again, not an argument. Yeah co2 increases ag yields by a decent amount, that is known and taken into account, well or not. Why would that be better than the harms climate change might cause? What are those?
5. Source? What? How am I supposed to understand this? The IPcC predicts lots of Serbs and displacement from climate change, likely on net, how am I supposed to even begin to think about why? Where can I learn about this?
6. Current expert consensus is that solar and wind are already price competitive in some areas. And they will continue to follow a learning curve and decrease. Are they wrong? Why? The GND might be too expensive and might decrease growth, but how much and why? How could it crater GDP by a factor of 4 relative to future?
7. Estimates? Huh?
8. Yes they are kind of dumb. But say stripes program or Biden’s goals don’t seem to include that?
9. Some theories are that solars price competitiveness will lead to worldwide adoption. And that US energy consumption has stopped growing due to much more efficient products.
For all I know, climate change isn’t real. But this doesn’t convincingly argue that.
Look I'm definitely no expert, just a guy with opinions. But I think a lot of people are underestimating extreme discomfort as a reason for concern.
I'm pretty confident general infrastructure advances can mitigate a lot of the bad effects of GW, and the whole "wars fighting over resources threat" always struck me as silly and unhinged.
But it's going to really suck if large parts of the world have unbearably hot summers where you sweat your arse off whenever you leave air conditioning. That might be hard to put a price on, but I'd argue global comfort is on par with ideals like "space exploration" and worth throwing a ton of money into.
Of course we also don't want to make a ton of wild animals go extinct either.
I think cheapish go-engineering is becoming more inevitable every day.
> But it's going to really suck if large parts of the world have unbearably hot summers where you sweat your arse off whenever you leave air conditioning
Right now large parts of the world have unbearably cold winters where you freeze to death if you go outside without heavy clothing. It seems like swings and roundabouts to me.
Even a three-degree change doesn't seem like a big deal to me. An "unbearably hot" day for me is anything above 40C; that happens a few days a year where I live, and maybe would happen twice as often if the weather were three degrees hotter... but that still doesn't seem like that big a deal.
How many people live in places where you'll freeze to death if you go outside without heavy clothing, compared to places with unbearably hot summers? I can't be bothered to do the math, but my guess is that the difference is at least a factor of three. Is it worth it if one billion people are less at risk of freezing to death if it means that three billion people are more at risk of dying of heat stroke?
My guess is a factor of ten the other way round - lots of guesses going on!
I'd add that if you look at the destination of people who move from one place to another, it is generally towards warmer places. People retire to Florida, not Alaska.
Also the vast (mostly) uninhabitated parts of the planet (Siberia, Mongolia, Greenland, Antarctica) are just too damn cold for Human Beings. After all, we live in an ice age!
Another way to look at the graph you linked to is to ask 'What is the temperature of the places people choose to live in?' And the answer is - warm places rather than cold. Near the equator rather than the poles.
Why is the whole of Northern Canada almost completely empty and the Southern United States nearly full??
If we didn't have artificial skin (clothes) and vast amounts of heating, the majority of people on the planet would simply die of cold. Before the discovery of fire, we could never have left Africa.
What is the difference in the energy spent on heating as opposed to cooling?
The average temperature of Earth is about 15 degrees and the optimum for humans is significantly higher than that.
My temperature concerns are generally reserved for the speed of change, not particularly the amount (up to Nordhaus's 3 or 4 degrees)
So maybe I guess the thing to calculate is cost of moving significant numbers of people to cooler areas.
Like sure if we redistributed everyone to Siberia that could be nice. But remember that most of the world population are in China, India, and to a lesser extent Africa. All have very hot climates already. In Hong Kong they have these cool air conditioned bridges between buildings to escape the heat but still get around but that's not a viable solution for most of humanity.
Also I'll add, I live in a hot country and don't mind super hot days either because I work in air-conditioning. But I enjoy camping and it's super important how many days of the year I'm able to go enjoy the outdoors with my kids. Less outdoor time for most of the world seems super sad to me. Even if everyone watching tv indoors doesn't have any concrete gdp downsides
My in-laws moved to Georgia a few years ago, and they originally struggled with the vastly hotter summers. Then they realized that they could just do more outdoor activities in the spring and fall. That's a bit of an issue with kid's school schedules, but Georgia specifically has more time off during the school year (two weeks in October and March or April IIRC).
I hear some people saying the US "should have waited longer" to leave Afghanistan, and other people saying "they waited 20 years, what good would another few months have done"?
Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan? Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
Also, are people who aren't evacuated quickly enough really in danger from the Taliban? Why would the Taliban want to kill Westerners and anger Western powers? Isn't it in their best interest to let all the Westerners leave in an orderly fashion?
To your first question - was that not the intention? As late as 12th August leaked reports were suggesting Kabul could fall in 90 days (and that was seen as alarmist) e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58187410 giving a reasonable timeframe to evacuate. Unfortunately even the worst case scenarios planned for were optimistic.
There will be disputes over things like foreign currency reserves, debt, sanctions and aid over the next months, and the Taliban will need to decide if they want to co-operate with the West on evacuations to show good faith, or go the Iran/North Korea blackmail route and seek any opportunity for leverage (e.g. de facto hostages). Who knows their approach but I wouldnt hang round Kabul to find out
There are already a lot of people dead. Im only seeing stuff about Afghani collaborators and nothing about US citizens, but i have little doubt that the Taliban would gladly kill US citizens if they werent worried about getting caught. If it helps, think of them as the Afghanistan version of the KKK and Know-Nothings.
"She was whipped by Taliban fighters on one attempt to get through, she said. A man standing near her was shot in the head on another try, leaving his wife and baby in tears.
> Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan? Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
The military learned that a commander in chief was serious when he said he wanted to get out. They'd been able to persuade every prior President to stay and commit more money and troops.
I only spent limited time around senior leadership but here's my intuition:
>Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan?
Evacuation was never enumerated as a operational priority. Getting interpreters out has been a huge hassle for ages. For evacuation to be a priority someone very senior in the administration has to make that a strategic priority. It's not the kind of thing that happens via inertia. Lastly, I can't overemphasize the level of denial in considering the possiblity & timeline of Kabul falling. And staff officers don't make plans around scenarios they're collectively in denial about.
>Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
Learned about what? How to evacuate people? I would guess we're learning a lot about evacuating people and running a Berlin airlift style operation. I would also guess we're going to learn a lot about cohabitating in Kabul with the Taliban where you can't just airstrike them whenever they're visible because they're everywhere now.
>Also, are people who aren't evacuated quickly enough really in danger from the Taliban?
Depends who they are and what they did. Pashtunwali is a real thing so I wouldn't expect some Khmer Rouge style executions. But yea if you were an interpreter with a US partner force then you might get shot. Navigating Pashtunwali is complex and there are a lot of relatively cosmopoltian Afghans in Kabul that would rather not live under a redneck regime.
>Why would the Taliban want to kill Westerners and anger Western powers? Isn't it in their best interest to let all the Westerners leave in an orderly fashion?
I'm mostly checked out of the news so I'm very surprised if this is happening. A running question has always been how monolithic and organized the Tablan is. I have experience at a much more local level and my strong prior is that the new regime will probably be fairly orderly interspersed with some mob violence and maybe some symbolic shows of force - like killing some jews or christians or something. In the category of "a thing you're not allowed to say but is true" would be that the Taliban is often better at governance than the Afghan government. I'm not talking complex policy but just the everyday expectations of local government.
Ignorant opinion here: the moment the US started evacuating people, this would indicate a pull-out, and the collapse of everything (the army literally dropping weapons and scattering, the president filling a car full of cash and heading for the UAE) would have happened sooner. See this story from a pro-Ghani source: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/20/asia/afghanistan-ashraf-ghani-taliban-intl/index.html
""In the days leading up to the Taliban coming in Kabul, we had been working on a deal with the US to hand over peacefully to an inclusive government and for President Ghani to resign," he said.
"These talks were underway when the Taliban came into the city. The Taliban entering Kabul city from multiple points was interpreted by our intelligence as hostile advances," the senior official said.
"We had received intelligence for over a year that the President would be killed in the event of a takeover," the official added."
The pull-out or handover or whatever you want to call it was predicated on "there's a government in place, there are armed forces, they can step up and take over while we evacuate" but in reality that didn't happen. So even if the US forces had said "We are leaving over the course of an entire year", the only thing the native Afghan forces would listen to is "We are leaving" and they'd be out the door to save their own necks in seconds flat (and given the entire history of the country, who can blame them? It's a record of everything from "invaded by the Islamists, invaded by the Mongols, invaded by the Mughal, overthrew them and set up our own kingdom, then an empire, oops internal dissent knocked that on the head, to a monarchy, sort of invaded by the Brits they were peddling influence during the Raj, to a monarchy that was sort of reformist and progressive, to a civil war over those reforms, to a monarchy again, to a democracy part one: I overthrew my cousin the king and declared myself president, to a Communist regime, to invaded by the Russians who set up a Soviet-backed regime, to more civil war, to the Taliban, to invaded by the Americans, to a democracy part two: this time for real - yeah right the Americans are going home and that brings us up to date, with the only constant being that as soon as the new regime takes over, the followers of the old regime are for the chop).
I'm also seeing a lot of talk about this was deliberate on the part of some section or other of the American administration, that (take your pick of) the generals or the intelligence agencies or the hawks or the Deep State or the fairies at the bottom of the garden didn't want to leave and deliberately FUBARed the withdrawal in order to damage Biden and lead to calls for US forces to go back in. How true or not this is, I have no idea, there's a lot of gossip and rumour going around right now.
The obvious problem is that our evacuation would set off the collapse. The obvious solution is to have enough U.S. troops on site to hold the parts of Afghanistan that we need in order to evacuate our people for the month or so it takes.
A) Some people will not start evacuating until after the evacuation window has closed. August 16th was not the end of that window, but it does appear to have been a significant wake up call that there were only a couple of weeks left. Less, now.
B) Is that not what we're doing? Everything I've seen indicates that US citizens in Afghanistan are nominally free to make their way to the airport in Kabul (plus or minus the general dangers of ground travel in the area), where they will find 5k US troops running the evacuation effort. That is planned to end with the month, but if Biden extends it I doubt the Taliban will seriously contest control in the short term.
(SIVs are a complicated debacle that ought to be addressed separately.)
I normally disagree with you, but I wholeheartedly agree here. On top of troops, we're pretty good at airstrikes, as well, so I don't see why our only two options must be "stay another 20 years" or "pull out haphazardly, leaving our local allies to die".
In Germany, that is exactly what the current debate focuses on, since a few weeks before the collapse, the government was divided in the question of whether to pull out civilian helpers.
They decided against it because the Afghan government begged them not to pull out, backed by the US and other allies. So for Germany, very concretely, this was *the* reason why they didn't evacuate civilian helpers beforehand.
I mean this is just like timing the stock market. Yes of course the ideal time to cut and run is right before everyone else does. But cutting and running is causally influential to everybody else doing the same.
No it isn’t, it’s like insider trading, which can work. Biden controlled both the time of troop withdrawals and to a lesser but significant extent the timing of US citizen and afghan staff and current refugee evacuation. The second was allowed to happen after the first because they expected Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan to fall slowly. That was a poor expectation, and should’ve been either better understood or just, for security reasons, ignored. And then the second should’ve happened before the first. And US troops are a stronger incentive to not invade than US citizens and kabulis running is a reason to invade
I just don't agree. To speak just about the Americans for the moment, everyone was advised in June that they should leave. Many people did. Think about the mindset of somebody already ignoring their government's advice to leave a warzone. These people weren't going anywhere until they felt personally threatened. Should we have forced them out at gunpoint? I think that would have been bad both for reasons of personal liberty and optics. Could we have sent them another memo, where we somehow convinced them that "no really, you should really leave, but the Afghan government is really totally fine, we think, don't tell any of the locals that you're leaving." I just don't think that's realistic.
As for our local friends, it's really a similar story, but even more obvious to see how we couldn't get them out without precipitating the collapse. This is their home. These people are probably friends and relatives of people in the Afghan government. They have families. There really is no "get these people out but otherwise don't accelerate the collapse of the government." This is magical thinking.
Of course, we could have had the military do that. We obviously could have said "forcibly evacuate all of these people," and gotten everyone out while troops guarded the whole city of Kabul and then evacuated themselves. I think, though, that we'd just be blamed for more directly causing the fall of the Afghan government that way.
This just all seems like Monday morning quarterbacking to me. If there's anything I want to criticize, it's that a 20-year nation-building operation couldn't stand on its own feet for a few days. Proportionally, criticizing the exit seems like a really strange use of attention.
They probably would have left sooner if the US had made clear that Kabul could fall within a week. And many Afghans would’ve left sooner if the us government had offered them transportation, sped up the visa process, and made that clear.
The collapse was gonna happen anyway. If we started with the evacuation, rather than ending with it, that’d be better.
But yeah this is somewhat low significance, but it does demonstrate that even to the end they didn’t know at all what they were doing
1. Evacuating Civilians / People - The people we'd want to evacuate are the people who were responsible for maintaining the civil order we were trying to project in Afghanistan. I heard this from some buddies in country, so take it only as an anecdote, but as troop deployments decreased, compensation for private security over there guarding infrastructure and individuals got increasingly lucrative. As long as the nation wasn't actively enemy controlled, these people have no incentive to leave early and the US had no incentive to get them out early.
2. Are they in danger from the Taliban - probably not... The Taliban's incentive right now is to act as much like a normal government as possible for while, which means doing their best to present a unified front that can maintain domestic control and not indiscriminately slaughter people. That being said - the Taliban has actively begun hunting down people they believe to be "collaborators," non-western afghani's deemed to have helped the occupying forces (so, police investigators, military officials and the like) so they've got good reason to fear for their safety. Westerners are probably safe from mainline Taliban forces... but do you trust every component of the Taliban to have the discipline to hold to the party line of "don't trust westerners?" What about non-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan... how much would you trust the Taliban to protect you against random looters?
My take is that Afghanistan just got drastically less safe overall, and this is what's prompting the flee not some kind of specific threat the individuals are running from.
One consideration is that the bulk of the State Department people are doing a one-year tour, and they are often pretty isolated from the general population. Afghanistan is a pretty undesirable post, generally avoided by State department employees with clout. A bunch of short-term, mildly incompetent bureaucrats, and a mixed bag of incentives. It is not surprising that this ended poorly for so many Afgan civilians. The Americans don't seem to be dying in droves during this evacuation, and this is the main incentive.
There was a zoo in Massachusetts that tried to stop a government budget cut by announcing that such a cut would cause them to kill animals. It didn't work, but the general principle is that to stop someone else from doing X you make the consequences of X as painful as possible for the decision maker. Intelligently preparing to leave would have made it politically easier to leave. The "deep state" didn't want the US to leave Afghanistan and so didn't take the proper preparations. Evidence of the deep state's desires is the surprising amount of media criticism Biden has gotten from his Afghan position, despite the fact that it could cost the Dems the California governorship and thus potentially control of the Senate given the advanced age of one of California's Senators.
The Taliban compete with other Islamic groups for global influence and funding. Killing fleeing Americans might be a "reasonable" PR strategy to use against their Islamic competitors.
It can't. Newsom is only in trouble because of COVID. My personal guess is that a lot of his Hispanic LA base is pissed off at the restrictions that caused their small businesses to implode last year. They might have been OK had it stopped COVID in its tracks, but it didn't seem to this winter, when there was a huge surge in LA.
That's really what it comes down to. He'll keep his white Bay Area FB engineer vote, but the question is whether he keep the brown LA house painter/construction worker vote. If not...he's toast. I think he'll squeak by, but it will be close.
Right now the recall election is polling within the margin of error as to whether Newsom stays or goes. If he goes, it's not totally clear who will win, but for many weeks a right-wing talk radio host was leading the polls (because Democrats were mostly planning to leave that part of the ballot blank) though now there's a left-wing YouTuber who has suddenly jumped in the polls because no one else in the race has a D by their name.
The recall election on Sept 14, 2021. My guess is that a lot of voters lump together all the politicians of a party and so hearing negative things about Biden lowers the opinion of many people of Newsom.
Definitely not an expert, but my sense is that it isn't US (or UK etc) citizens that are in danger, or who might not get evacuated. It's the Afghans who worked for America who are going to have problems.
It's probably a very unfair comparison, but the French who collaborated with the Nazis were treated rather badly when the Nazis 'left'.
Because you might think there's a moral difference between collaborating with Nazis and collaborating with the US-backed government of Afghanistan, and it's quite possible that this moral difference will be reflected the treatment of these people by the new regime (though it's also possible it won't be).
My completely non-expert opinion is that it was an attractor effect. Once enough Afghani powers decided that the Taliban were likely to win, they switched to supporting the Taliban.
So instead of having a protracted attrition war, we ended up with a sudden switch that didn't even wait for the troops to leave. So, ironic enough, you can't even put a number on "how many days the Afghan government lasted by itself" - it's negative.
So there was no evacuation because the official plan was for a long term war instead of an overnight change of power.
But how could the US be so surprised by this? I don't think they were. I just think that the decision makers work at simulacra levels that are decoupled from reality. Once the official plan was to leave, you can't move information upstream that would sensibly change the plan. I just can't imagine how this would work, institutionally. From everything I've seen in the past years, including the pandemic, I just don't think US has the capability of changing committed plans based on object level, competent analysis. When did it last happen?
I recently read an article by the guy who planned the withdrawal for the Trump administration. He blamed the solid September 11 withdrawal date that Biden's team selected. The plan under Trump was to leave sooner, but with a transition-based criteria system. If the Taliban didn't meet their end of the agreement, the US was not going to leave. According to the article, that means the US could have stayed indefinitely under the old plan, but that the Taliban was cooperating in order to get the US out. When September 11 was initiated as the "have to be out" date, the Taliban lost any incentive to hold back, knowing that the chain of command would struggle to reverse, and may be incapable of changing the plan.
I've read other discussions that basically say that the Taliban has been quietly massing outside all the regional capitals in farms and surrounding villages for the better part of a year due to the Trump plan, ready to take everything the minute we had drawn down. Other articles point to the May~October period as the heavy fighting time due to weather constraints, so figuring that regional capitals have been falling for about a month, that build up could have been as recent as March or so of this year. Either way, it looks more to me like the Taliban were playing nice up through about the official Trump withdrawal date and the general govt collapse was predictable after that short of a 40000 troop deployment and about 700 billion dollars worth of new bombing campaign.
That's still in line with the article I was referring to, as everyone knew the Taliban would take over once the US left. What is in question is whether civilians, equipment, etc., would be evacuated prior to that takeover. We'll never knew for sure the alternative world where the Trump plan continued, but there's a plausible scenario where we held to a goal-based timeline instead of an end date timeline.
I just read a headline that says that the Taliban will not announce a new government as long as there is still one US soldier present. It gives credence to Mr. Doolittle's suggestion because even now the Taliban is holding back to some extent because there is still a chance, however minor, that US can reverse a course and attack them. I don't know what kind of deal was with Trump. Depends on details but I can imagine that if they promised something like only a partial participation in the government then that would be the deal that the Taliban would have to accept eventually.
If that's true, the Biden's plan was very stupid. I also think that the US should have stayed in Afghanistan until they were sure that some things they introduced, would stay. Throwing all that was achieved away is always easy, it doesn't require smart thinking or anything. But there are real people in Afghanistan and they deserved better.
Oh come on. Where's the National Socialist German Worker's Party these days? What happened to Tojo? The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon, home guerilla advantage notwithstanding. There are no Nationalists left in mainland China, and no followers of the late President Thieu bombing the occasional railroad bridge in Vietnam.
It is certainly possible to win against a weaker opponent even if he's got the home-ground advantage, can melt into the countryside, is willing to live in caves and eat rats and don suicide bomb vests. It's entirely possible to wipe those people out, root and branch.
But it requires focus and commitment, and quite often some pretty ugly decisions. You have to be damn sure that's what you want to do. Being half-assed about it, and not entirely certain what you're trying to achieve definitely doesn't work, and never has.
Nobody who's paid attention to American politics for more than 25 years is surprised that a plan of Biden's was stupid. They guy has been somewhat of a joke for the past umpty-five times he's run for President -- and that was when he was younger and faster on his feet. He's always been just a good ol' boy Irish bullshitter, with very little of a clue. It's kind of stunning that he eventually made it over the top, and a real testament to how many people ended up disliking Trump, and how chaotic the Democratic primaries were in the midst of COVID. Even the guy who picked him for Veep (Obama) thinks Biden's a lightweight and pointedly declined to endorse him as a successor in 2016.
> Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan
I assume that people who made such decision intended to abandon most of local Afghanistan people who helped US forces (interpreters, cooks, translators, etc etc).
>a) the State Department issued advisories months ago telling Americans to leave, but can't compel them to
This is the part I keep coming back to - nobody went to sleep in the US and were shocked to find out that they somehow woke up in Afghanistan. The official State Department Level 4 "leave on a commercial flight ASAP" advisory was April 27th. By June 15th, the boilerplate language had been updated to:
>If you have concerns about your health or safety in Afghanistan, now is the time to leave. Commercial transportation and infrastructure are intact and operating normally. Strongly consider this option. If you decide to remain in Afghanistan, carefully consider all travel and limit trips only to those that are absolutely necessary. Given security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited.
If someone chose to stay after that, they were signing up for the uncertainty of whatever came next. To the extent that those people now regret their actions, that is not a failure of US planning.
The problem with the "crisis of confidence" is that the US intelligence community knew the Taliban would retake the country. If we knew it, surely the locals did as well. You can't count on the Afghani soldiers holding out for a few months and then giving up, when they know that's the end game plan. They have every incentive to switch sides and avoid fighting at all, maybe getting a place in the government. It's one thing to think that the new government would hold, and then asking the Afghani military to do their part. It's another thing to know that it wouldn't hold, and still expecting the military to fight under those circumstances.
People do fight for the lost causes, when they believe in them. The US establishment bristles at comparisons to Vietnam, but in this aspect they are very apt. The Afghan government was an obvious sham, thoroughly corrupt, incompetent and alien to the native culture, only propped up by the US dollars and military presence.
However, publicly admitting this would be tantamount to declaring that decades-long American policy was a colossal mistake, so the kayfabe had to be maintained in defiance of common sense and humanitarian concerns.
It was a colossal mistake but theoretically they could have supported more grassroots government even if it meant to include the Taliban. It seemed that the US pushed too much their values. The US embassy in Afghanistan had a LGTB support announcement very recently. If you think about how controversial it was just a few years ago even in the US. I am sure even the most progressive Afghan society would be still very biased against those things and we pushed too much of those and too little of basic human things, for example, that better court system, better economy, better healthcare and even education is beneficial to everyone, including the Taliban itself. Their are many Islamic countries who uses all those benefits while being very conservative like Saudi Arabia etc. It is not what we think is optimal but it is much better than Afghanistan. But we had no such perspective, we didn't value what they could achieve in those aspects and therefore we threw away everything.
Can you find anyone in a serious position within the US government who thought the Ghani-led government would remain in power after the US left? I've seen lots of predictions about how long it would hold out, but nobody seriously thought they would be around a few years from now. Most that I've seen were hoping to make it to the end of the year. Even a year ago the Taliban had taken control of so much of the country that the Ghani government couldn't be said to actually be in control of the country anymore. The steady Taliban gains throughout 2021 should have made that obvious to people months ago, when there was still time to make changes to the plan.
I used a program where you type in something and an artificial Intelligence makes art based on what you typed. I typed in a bunch of movie titles and made a quiz. Can you guess the movie titles based on the art? This will test how well you understand how an AI thinks. Or how many movies you watch. There are no sequels or prequels.
Did you just type the movie titles? It looks like the AI has seen lots of the publicity art for these movies online, and has only been diverted from that in cases like Gladiator, Cleopatra, and Elephant Man, where the words in the movie title are common enough outside the movie that generic images took over. (I'm a bit surprised that Labyrinth is so associated with David Bowie's hairstyle rather than a Minotaur though!)
Just the titles, though it produces a series of images, and I tended to choose the easiest image. Except sometimes most of the title would appear as text, too easy.
In general I'm very sympathetic to Scott's views on education. I don't believe we've got any system that teaches kids more than basic numeracy and literacy. But I'm curious which of the following people think more plausible
1. People are plastic and develop intellectually in any stimulating environment. If they focus their attention on one area they'll develop pretty much to their potential in a few years.
2. We're just awful at teaching anything and getting people anywhere near their potential.
With than in mind, what level would Magnus Carlsen reach if he picked up chess at 15? Johnny von Neumann math at the same age? Simone Biles gymnastics at a decrepit 10?
You can begin to sketch an answer for (2) with birth month data among Canadian players in the NHL. Since youth hockey might start at age 6, the arbitrary calendar cutoff pits 6.99 year olds against 6.00 year olds. Consider the following toy model:
OT = -c1 * (23 - a) + c2 * t + c3 * r
Where 'OT' is observed talent, 'a' is age, 't' inborn talent, and r is both the quality and quantity of training received. This assumes that you will come into your full hockey powers at age 23. If c1 is big enough compared to c2, and r is zero, the difference in observed talent between a 6.99 year old and a 6.00 year old is huge even if they have the same inborn talent.
The fly in the ointment here is that training is a scarce resource. There are only so many good coaches, good opponents, and ice time. As a consequence of this, we give out the best training resources at age n to those who were better at age n-1. And this tracks all the way to the NHL level where Canadians born from July to December make up just 42% of the players. So even if Carlsen had it in him to pick up chess at 15, if he needed any help at all to do so, it would have been very tough to get. But this would have come from "The System" not Carlsen himself.
One could make the argument that we should not structure society in such a way that if a talented person fails to board their train by age 6 it's impossible to catch up. But that's not the one we've built.
I see your argument, but it also seems completely consistent with (1). Like there are plenty of people out their with the talent, and they could be developed even at advanced ages, but our sieve system doesn't admit that.
It seems like more of a criticism of the system than a means to choose between 1 and 2.
Largely (1), in my opinion with some nod to the general interest level of the student in question. Honestly, this is sorta what Mike H and Marvin and the rest of the responses seem to be saying -- (2) is true if you're asking can we force knowledge into someone and for everyone generally interested in learning new things, (1) is a reasonable description. Speaking from personal experience, I rose to about 80% level of whatever group I was in, which is really really really good when you're around some incredibly brilliant people, but it took time in that environment and once away from it, it hasn't terribly improved. That said, looking back on how easy it is to comprehend new math after a master's in engineering, I think there's a certain amount of repetition and reinforcement that good pedagogy can really help with in people who aren't actively resistant.
I make this argument all the time, occasionally with people in the public education system. Weirdly enough, they admit most of this stuff, but their primary defense of education as a system is that for apparently a large percentage of these kids the 8-10 hours of stability they get at school is literally the least dangerous and potentially healthiest time in their day. That all the education is just a smokescreen to get kids out of largely bad situations and, hopefully, allow for intervention in the case of the absolute worst examples.
My guess is that the reason our system exists is some percentage this, some percent the benefits of free childcare for workers.
There was a comment in a recent thread along the lines of "Modern public schools teach a wide variety of topics so that kids can figure out what they want to do later in life. The things they want to learn about they practice and get better at, everything else they forget." That rings pretty true for me, where I can remember some math, some grammar, etc., but mostly I remember the things that I took further in college or had a natural interest in.
It's an expensive sorting system, where we value the ability of every (at least a strong most) student to get a feel for the options available and select between them. Not everyone is very good at those things, but they have the opportunity to look at them for both occupational and hobby interests. By the time they're 18 or so, they have been mostly sorted and the sorting seems to be pretty good.
If you look at K-12 education in that lens, it seems to do a pretty good job. If this hypothesis is true, then both #1 and #2 from your list can be simultaneously true, but maybe irrelevant to the goals of our education system.
I think the sorting is actually quite bad. You still have lots of people who go to law school, for instance, because they're not sure what else to do. They then find they hate being a lawyer. Most of the things you do in school have little to do with real jobs. There are also tons of kids who do know what they're interested in but have to spend time taking lots of other subjects they don't care for. While I think math is cool, I think 3-4 years of it in high school for people who don't care for it is ridiculous as a sorting mechanism. The whole system rejects the idea that kids should be able to do what they're interested in.
I don't really disagree. The primary issue is that schools rarely coordinate with employers, so they don't align expectations. They prepare EVERY student to be able to do just about any introductory field, whether that makes sense for the person or not. I'm seeing a shift in emphasis towards technical fields, which I think is positive, but it's not really enough.
Current public schools tend to do a good job of helping students realize what they enjoy doing, but a poor job of aligning that desire with actual jobs and in demand fields.
What I know of current research, there is very little parents can do _on purpose_ to significantly influence their kids. I think at most is stuff like "basic interpersonal skills", which is non-inherited and teachable. Otherwise it's genetic, home environment and peers, which yes, all depend on parents, but aren't really easy to change at will. You are who you are, and you kids will learn from you.
So what about László Polgár? I think these are extreme cases where you have much higher than normal competence and expended effort, and which probably can deliver results. But the fact that they exist doesn't mean there aren't sharp decreasing marginal benefits on effort.
So I don't think it's ok to generalize from such cases, (and I think there's an inherent bias that will tend to make parents treat their kids as special anyways). Most likely correct answer is 1, for the current state of educational science. Might it change in 50 years? Hopefully, but I doubt it's around the corner.
I know there's good evidence for the limited influence of parents on IQ and personality. But is there similar evidence on say, the ability to play and instrument, ride a bike or speak a language? These may sound trivial, but are much more relevant to the discussion.
I chose extreme cases because if they didn't exist then it's almost impossible to reason about 2. If everyone got average results then it's impossible to draw any conclusions about the state of our teaching. If some get spectacular results it's worth asking why.
I'd go for 2. Also note that most of the people being taught are heavily resisting it. Simply selecting for lack of resistance should already have a major effect (cf. Mike H's example of Khan Academy). As a university level teaching assistant, my teaching approach always emphasizes that learning is an activity on part of the student. I believe the same would hold at other stages of education, except that the students are often not ready to actually take responsibility for their own learning. Therefore, effective learning requires a certain amount of intrinsic motivation on part of the student. Schools offer plenty of extrinsic motivation to compensate, but that risks getting Goodharted. (in fact, in plainly does, see "teaching to the test") So, I think it is questionable how much improvement would be gained by starting the learning path at an earlier age if this motivation has not yet developed. In general, it follows that it is more effective to let young children "play around" with advanced toys ("hey kid, check out this Commodore 64"), rather than putting them on a lesson plan ("Ok, let's start with lesson one of "learning to program with the Commodore 64" ").
My own example would be how I learned to read English (I'm not a native speaker). Basically, I learned it by playing Pokemon Gold. I sometimes daydream about "Pokemon Ruby: educational edition". This hypothetical game would not force learning, but simply increase learning opportunity by adding an inbuilt dictionary, gradually increasing the difficulty of the language as the game progresses, and perhaps add some direct rewards for mini-games based on language (something in the flavor of the trick house from Ruby would probably work). Another example would be the "Donald Duck" comics (or at least, the Dutch version). Since the comics are pretty easy to follow without reading the text balloons at all, the text inside does not shy away from more advanced language, and uses a large amount of figures of speech. (the frequent reader of the Open Threads may recall that the Dutch language is enriched with many beautiful figures of speech, such as "Zoals de waard is, vertrouwd hij zijn gasten" ("The host will trust his guests as much as (he is trustworthy) himself"))
In general, it seems there is a lot of untapped potential in this space of "non-forcing" educational games. Young children have a very good learning ability, but lack the discipline to focus it towards ends that are known to be productive. Let their learning river flow downhill, I say, rather than trying to direct it with channels.
I wouldn't go that far. Schooling as currently practiced often does, but I don't think any far reaching pedagogical reforms would be nessecary prevent destroying motivation. Rather, I believe the problem is that obtaining motivation for useful (in the sense that they will be useful after the schooling has finished) topics in the first place is a difficult problem to solve, and even more so en masse in the school setting. Solving this problem does require more radical action, I believe. I don't think letting the kids have some choice over more a traditional curriculum is enough, as both freedom of exploration as well as useful guidance are nessecary. This demands an amount of attention that I think is not scalable, unless we can digitize and "gamify" it effectively.
Have any non-Europeans had experience traveling to the EU during COVID?
I know you can get into your first European country by showing proof of vaccination and a negative test at the airport, but what happens if you want to go to another country (eg from Portugal to Spain, or Spain to France)? Do you have to get another test? Or do they assume anyone coming in from friendly European countries is okay?
I'm a US citizen. I flew from New York to Amsterdam in July. I had to have a negative PCR test to board the plane. No one cared about my vaccination status (I am of course fully vaxxed). In Amsterdam I changed planes to go to Tanzania. There I had to take another covid test to exit Kilimanjaro Airport. It was pretty much just a rip-off. I certainly didn't get covid between New York and Tanzania on planes that had a negative covid test as an entry requirement. Anyway, it doesn't directly answer your question about one EU country to another EU country, but it is a case of an EU country to another foreign country.
I traveled to Austria a few weeks ago, and then to Spain a few days ago. I managed to get into Austria (connecting in Germany, if that matters) just with my vaccine card, but in order to get into Spain I had to get tested (which is really easy in Austria).
Remember that you also need to get tested to go back to the US, regardless of your vaccination status, and that Europeans in general are still barred from the US.
Each country has it's own requirements, which you can usually find very easily by searching for "{country} covid entry requirements" and you will find some official government website. You need to present vaccine or other proofs whenever crossing a border, and some countries require you to fill in an online declaration before arriving.
As European, this depends on the country you are travelling to. I had to do a test for some countries, while for others showing proof of vaccination was sufficient. I don't know how this is for non-Europeans, but I imagine this is the same for you.
For +-30 year-olds, what is the better choice for Covid vaccines (we have J&J and Pfiser available to us)?
The primary consideration would be protection against possible long Covid, but other considerations (including potential side effects, infecting older, vaccinated, family members, etc.) are also factors.
Personally, I favor the mRNA vaccines (Modern and Pfizer) but only because I'm older and it's possible I've already been exposed to the Ad26 vector of the J&J vaccine -- which could make it much less effective. I think if you're younger that would be less of a concern because you've met fewer adenoviruses.
I think you've mistaken what that paper is about. It's a discussion of the possible factors that underly a stronger antibody response in people who have been *infected* and then given a vaccine. It's true at the end they surmise in one sentence that a mixture of vaccines "may" have similar effects, but they offer no detailed argument for that, nor point to any actual real-world evidence of it.
I would be cautious about reading too much into an Oxford study saying that the Oxford vaccine is fading less quickly, especially given that for all the charts, the highest confidence line of each vaccine is still outside the error bars of the other, and there are lines within the error bars of each one that have higher or lower slope than the highest confidence line for the other. It does seem suggestive, but I would want to see actual studies showing an actual period where mRNA protection is lower than adenovirus vector protection before being confident that this difference in fading is real.
Andrew noted that it was expected beforehand that would be the case, and it wasn't clear to me why that would be a priori (admittedly, I hadn't heard of either mechanism prior to COVID). It might be related to the fact that some vaccines are designed to optimize just antibodies and not T-cells:
Please stop spamming it in every thread. Also, "content across tech, finance, art, media" is hopelessly vague - no suprise that you need to resort to spamming.
I know nothing about the research an AI technically. I have no training in computer programming or mathematics so I will admit my ignorance. But I have a question. Is there an algorithm for what I will term
the will to live??
Bear with me.
Imagine your life under the most intolerable circumstances. You are in a concentration camp, you are in solitary confinement and subject to random torture and other abuse. The rational conclusion seems to me that you should just get out of it anyway you can. But human beings don’t seem to behave that way.
You don't need a fancy AI to implement "the will to live". You could make a really simple robot car that would roll around on a tabletop, and avoid falling off the edge -- and you can build it out of purely analog components, no computers needed. This car arguably has as much "will to live" as a mouse (I mean, the furry kind, not the computer peripheral kind).
"Algorithm," isn't really the term you want here. The algorithm isn't the thing which is alive or dead, so an algorithm alone cannot compute, "the will to live."
As we move from narrow intelligences to more general intelligences, we tend to turn our systems into "agents." An agent has some physical substrate. In order to effectuate self-preservation, the agent needs to have a model of what physical form it exists as, and then it can make decisions which avoid its destruction. Many narrow intelligences already have agent-hood and self-preservation. Take a self-driving car: it knows its physical dimensions avoids crashing into things. You might say a self-driving car has a will to live, as we keep seeing them make decisions which avoid their destruction.
Even digitally, many of OpenAI's video-game playing AIs exhibit this. They move away from hazards and towards the end of the game. The engineers create some scoring function in order to evaluate the AI's performance. In order to get the AIs to do something rather than nothing (because in some games, not moving will never win the game but it will avoid death), time was made to negatively impact the score: not only should the AIs move towards the end of the game, but they should do so quickly. From this time pressure immediately emerged suicide: if the AI was unsure it could make a certain amount of progress without dying, it might immediately kill itself to avoid the time penalty of trying. Obviously they had to come up with more sophisticated ways to score progress from then on.
So in general, is some analog of "the will to live" present in our systems? I think we generally just call it "self-preservation" but yes, if we want our agents to survive for very long, we generally need to design in some self-preservation. It's not really an algorithm, more a quality of the agent.
There is a well understood scheme, explaining how properties similar to "will to live" are emerging in a smart enough goal directed agent.
Agents will do actions that increase the chances to fulfill their goals, score more points on their utility metrics and try to prevent the actions that decreses it. In most cases being active increases the chances of success therefore "will to live" is an instrumental goal for most agentsю Obviously there are exceptions. If whole goal of an agent is to have a cup of coffee delivered to you and someone is already bringing you some coffee, such agent wouldn't mind being shut down. Special environments can even motivate agents to commit suicide if it is somehow the best strategy to accomplish the goal.
Humans goals are complicated and multidimensional. So it's not that easy to say what will be the optimal behaviour in your example. Some people may value the tiny chance to escape and accomplish their goals in the future more than they dislike all the torture and abuse now. Some may not. Some will commit suicide, some will not.
It's also easy to understand how humans can sacrifice their lives for some greater cause, or knowing that this sacrifice will help accomplish their goals, or how people die in peace, knowing that their goals are accomplished. It seems to me that the difference between AI preservation as an instrumental goal (will to score) and human will to live is only the difference in the utility functions.
Is this some kind of GPT-3 generated comment? If so, it's disappointing.
If a human wrote this, then I would say that your use of the word "algorithm" doesn't make sense in this context, and you should consider rephrasing without that word because with it, it's incoherent.
I started taking 400mg of SAM-e, based on the discussion in the depression post. I am seeing pretty dramatic results-- depression gone; much less anxiety; much less rigidity, ie more flexibility, more 'openness to trying new things'; also greater motivation, or, perhaps, less of a hump to get over to get myself to go do something; and, last but not least, greater happiness, and more enjoyment in life. A real life changer. Thank you.
I had the same experience about 10 years ago. The first 3 days frankly felt like I was on a low dose of MDMA. Then it leveled off, but still lifted me out of a pervasive depression. I stopped taking it after a few years. Occasionally I've tried it again, but it never seems to have anywhere near the effect of that first round.
I'm curious whether anyone caught Tesla's "AI Day". I did. They showed off their neural network, explain how they convert 8 camera video feeds into a 4D vector space, then have a planning engine on top of that they decides what to do. They also showed off their new from-Silicon up "Dojo" Neural Network training computer that is optimized for the task.
They also showed a new Tesla humanoid robot, and said they plan to build a prototype next year. The idea is that it can do basic and boring human tasks. Elon casually mentioned that long term, he supports UBI.
I'm curious if this causes any updates in people's thinking about AI risk timelines, and also people's thinking about UBI in general.
Coincidentally, I read a very sad news story today about a fatal crash involving a Tesla on Autopilot mode (the self-driving but not really mode).
The fault clearly is down to human error (the guy was driving on a back road at night, he was talking on his phone, he dropped the phone and bent down to look for it, is it any wonder the car crashed into another?) but equally obviously the family of the dead person are suing Tesla because that is the entity here with deep pockets.
The story is surprisingly negative, it contrasts what other car manufacturers do to what Tesla is set up in such situations (i.e. making drivers keep their damn eyes on the damn road) and has one quote from Musk a few years back that reads badly in this context.
So I think whatever about AI risk, this demonstrates yet again that the big risk is not from the AI, it's from the way humans use it.
"One of a growing number of fatal crashes involving Tesla cars operating on Autopilot, McGee’s case is unusual because he survived and told investigators what had happened: he got distracted and put his trust in a system that did not see and brake for a parked car in front of it. American Tesla drivers using Autopilot in other fatal crashes have often been killed, leaving investigators to piece together the details from data stored and videos recorded by the cars."
"It’s hard to miss the flashing lights of fire engines, ambulances and police cars ahead of you as you’re driving down the road. But in at least 11 cases in the past three and a half years, Tesla’s Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system did just that. This led to 11 accidents in which Teslas crashed into emergency vehicles or other vehicles at those scenes, resulting in 17 injuries and one death.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has launched an investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system in response to the crashes. The incidents took place between January 2018 and July 2021 in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas. The probe covers 765,000 Tesla cars – that’s virtually every car the company has made in the last seven years. It’s also not the first time the federal government has investigated Tesla’s Autopilot."
Hmmm. Now, I'm not saying there isn't something wrong with Tesla's autopilot, only that nothing in the above post should be thought of as being equivalent to "tesla's autopilot is unsafe compared to humans". It is very unlikely that any self driving system will be 100% safe. Thus deaths will occur. It is almost certain that the type of deaths will be different to those we are used to.
Personally, I'm interested in my absolute risk of dying in a car, not the particulars of how that occurs. So, the real question is: on a per 100,000 km basis, which is safer? Me driving a Telsa manually or letting the autopilot?
By all means figures out why flashing lights freak it out, but that is kinda not the real point, is it?
The Tesla website has some pretty big numbers that sound pretty compelling. https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport (I know autopilot engaged does not equal reading a book in the back seat)
So far using "self driving" in cars appears to be about the same risk level as driving slightly drunk: as long as everything is normal, you're OK. But if something weird and unpredictable happens, you've got a problem.
And of course, the usual argument for why we need self-driving cars is because humans occasionally drive drunk, sleepy, et cetera. If the self-driving cars can only handle themselves confidently under the conditions a drunk or sleepy human could...meh.
Boston Dynamics spent over 20 years figuring out how to make a bipedal robot move as gracefully as a human, and Tesla thinks they can do it in a year? Good luck with that.
And that's just for moving around, in a controlled industrial environment. Musk wants a robot you can tell "pick up that wrench over there and tighten that bolt," which is several steps beyond that.
I've long stopped believing (if I ever did) any of Musk's announcements. He's a modern-day P.T. Barnum who is a master of hype and what will get the public excited, delivery of same is a completely different matter.
I have to admit, SpaceX seems to be working, so that is in the plus column for him. But autonomous robots that will do the grocery shopping for you? Starting from this time next year? I'm more inclined to put my faith in "I need a new pair of shoes, I think I'll see if there are any leprechauns around to make a pair for me".
My partner recently got a new pair of shoes - we've been into minimalist shoes for years, but he tried this new company, and their shoemaking elves had great service: https://www.softstarshoes.com/about-us#meetus
To be fair, he did not promise robots that do grocery shopping, or really anything more than _maybe_ a prototype built next year.
I think Musk's successes go beyond SpaceX. Tesla is overall looking quite positive and has forced change in the auto market towards electrificiation soon than would have otherwise happened.
While I personally think Musk is a dumb idiot asshole who lucked into his fortune and mainly sponges off of actual talented people, Tesla took a bunch of technical risks that look like they payed off/will pay off big, and having him as a front man helped massively.
Yeah, after how many years? of promising totally self-driving cars, now it's fully general ai-driven human robots. This, like 90% of the announcements coming out to the company, is nonsense aimed at investors and branding.
The humanoid robot thing seems pretty dubious. But it is a good distraction to change the news away from Tesla getting slapped with some investigations from the Feds over the Full Self-Driving Program.
Musk likes to trot out Cool New Stuff whenever there's bad news afoot for Tesla or SpaceX. It gets reporters talking about how the Cool New Stuff is cool, or stupid - but either way they're talking about it.
This seems overly cynical. Musk likes to trot out Cool New Stuff because Musk is the kind of guy who really likes Cool New Stuff.
I don't know why people, even the sort of people who usually like this sort of thing, have to be so cynical about Musk. There's seven billion people on this stupid planet, and sometimes it seems like Elon is the only one who is actually doing anything worthwhile. In most other contexts, people seem to understand that big technological bets are hard, and that if even 10% of your big bets succeed then you're doing pretty well. But when conversation turns to Musk, who has a much better strike rate than just about anyone else while also pursuing more ambitious goals than anyone else, all you hear about is the fraction of his projects which failed or else weren't delivered on time.
> sometimes it seems like Elon is the only one who is actually doing anything worthwhile
This sounds like Musks' reality distortion field hiding everyone else who is working on these same problems in a less flashy, and often equally or more effective, way.
Well his two main things, long-range electric vehicles and reusable rockets, do seem to be the best in-class, and he has the benefit from saying he was working on them before anybody else. It seems like whether you think people are drinking the kool-aid depends on how much you think people are basing their perceptions on his many side projects.
I understand why people, probably the very people who work at Waymo or some other brain-interface company, get mad about being overshadowed by Musk's flashiness, but I don't think it's a legitimate gripe and I observe many of them take their jealousy too far. Getting the public excited about science and technology is important, and if it isn't being valued appropriately, it's not enough. Most companies don't appear to want Musk-level publicity, and that's fine.
I don't know much about the brain-interface stuff. My biggest interest that he talks about is transportation technology, and with both Hyperloop and Boring, his main goal seems to have been attracting attention away from established alternatives in order to preserve the market for automobiles rather than high-capacity transit. It's not like he's the first person to propose pneumatic or vacuum tube transport (these ideas go back at least to the 1950s), and his main idea for making tunnels cheaper is to make them too small to carry many people.
It's good to get people excited about new things, but not by telling them that actually workable solutions are boring so that you can hold out the promise of exciting transit that will actually just require continuing to buy cars from his car company.
Ok but do you actually think he's meaningfully detracting support from projects like high speed rail? Was Vegas ever really going to build an efficient transit system under their convention center? It seems to me that, being Vegas, the project was always intended to be an attraction. And even still, the tunnel was completed on time and for a very reasonable price. If anyone wants a tunnel that size, there is now a proven, inexpensive option. That seems like a minor win for American civil engineering to me.
It seems to me like you have an unnecessary zero-sum attitude about this. The idea that Musk is "preserving the market for automobiles," as if that's something that he even feels a need to do, seems a little excessively paranoid. He's making a company that digs tunnels. The Boring Company is an independent for-profit entity from Tesla, they will surely dig a tunnel for whomever is willing to pay them to dig a tunnel.
I don't trust Elon Musk as far as I can throw him, at least on non-rocket topics.
I doubt there's a functioning humanoid robot in Tesla's near-term plans. If there is, I am fairly sure it's a bad thing. In that sense, I can only assume that Mr. Musk is deliberately cultivating a minor risk to head off a major one.
Well, if he can develop the functional humanoid robots, then he can get them on the assembly lines making Teslas, and then maybe the delivery backlog can be cleared:
The main problem that welfare has that UBI doesn't is means-testing. Making people fill out lots of paperwork and wait a while for the system to decide if they're a Deserving Poor or not adds a lot of friction to the process and increases costs compared to simply mailing out checks.
(There's "means testing" of a sort at the other end when taxes are due and some people get taxed more than they get in UBI, but the IRS already does that for everyone so there's no increase in bureaucracy. It also prevents any sort of "welfare cliff" since a progressive tax system doesn't work that way.)
Like, I don't know what articles you've been reading, but nearly every one I've seen on UBI has included a few reasons why it's better than simply putting more money into the existing welfare system.
>The case for UBI always seems very weak, as if people backing it haven't really sat down and spent time thinking about the precise details of how it'd work and how much it'd cost.
Plot the net of taxes & transfers which would be replaced by implementation of a UBI (i.e., means-tested welfare programs which would be shuttered) against pretax income. Perform an OLS linear regression against the data. The y-intercept is the UBI amount with approximately no net budget impact.
> The idea that administration overheads are so large that they could pay for UBI crops up frequently
Nobody has ever claimed that overheads would pay for UBI completely, merely that eliminating the overheads of multiple programs and the political wrangling that comes with it frees up more funding to actually help people.
> However you don't really need a paper to see this. Consider that UBI must still have very significant administration and means testing costs.
It doesn't, that administration cost is *already being paid and will not go away* because it happens with your yearly tax return. Pay everyone a UBI, at tax time they declare what they actually made, and you recoup the UBI above a certain threshold.
I feel like a lot of people really overcomplicate this topic.
You don't need heave administration and means testing to ensure that the recipient exists and is a living citizen of your country.
The problem with administration and means testing is in ensuring that someone who makes ~$10,000 a year actually has the paperwork to prove that they're not secretly making ~$200,000 a year, and that filling out this paperwork is one of the reasons so many social benefit programs fail to get to their recipients.
I'm not sure how much easier it is for a person living under a bridge in Austin to prove that they exist and are a citizen than to prove that they make less than $200,000 a year, but the claim is that it's enough easier that they're more likely to actually get the benefit.
Another problem with means testing is that those on welfare have little incentive to take a job that doesn't pay substantially more than welfare. To me, that seems like the main benefit of a UBI.
I spent a couple years "Not Working" 'cause if I took a job, I would suddenly have to pay 15k+ for shitty health insurance with a bigass deductible, and that is with Obama's shitlib credit bullshit.
>Thus a lot of administration work must go into establishing that a claimant is (a) real, (b) not dead, (c) probably of an eligible age (d) not in any debt especially to the state (as debt holders should be serviced first) and so on and so forth.
In the UBI proposals I have seen, the individual income taxes get raised to the extent the effect would be net zero on median* tax payer. In most countries similar get done anyway by tax authority, citizenship / electoral roll records, any existing welfare benefits, school system, military draft system in the few countries that still have them, and such. If you already have system for that, adding UBI instead of means-tested welfare isn't much of change.
* Or some other percentile point, dependent on how socialist dreams one has.
I have been looking into grad school for mathematics, in particular with the goal of eventually doing research. It looks like the job market for research positions is incredibly tight right now, but a large part of me wants to just study mathematics anyways. There are countless articles talking about how job prospects for pure math PhDs are actually okay, but most of the time they bring up examples of big data and marketing analytics, which I have something of an ethical opposition to. So I figured I would ask: What sorts of jobs can you get with pure math, other than data analytics?
FWIW, my team lead at Google had a PhD in pure math, and if I recall correctly he got hired right after completing it. I don't know if he learned to code before or after it though.
That was what I did (probably not on your team though). It was a bad choice - you should start out somewhere where the math gives you at least some advantage (not that you'll be doing abstract algebra anywhere non-encryption, but there's lots of places where good intuition is useful). Google is bad both because it has no room for that (99% of the work is writing protobuf pipelines), and because it's a bad learning environment (the typical response to "I don't understand X" is "read the code/git good")
I took a pure math PhD (mathematical physics) but ended up as a health policy analyst. Nothing compares with pure math with respect to engaging the mind, but I do feel like I often work on hard problems across a wide range of areas, and generally feel like I'm contributing to the greater good. I do work with big data, but also design complex randomized trials and have opportunities to learn and apply economics, psychometrics and medicine. I work with doctors, scientists, economists, and psychologists, almost all of whom like to learn new things that will help people. I also earn multiples more as a consultant than as an acadmic, and have been paid to travel to Europe, Asia and Africa just to talk to people about what I do. So while I miss mathematics quite a bit, I feel pretty good about where I landed.
I second most of what previous commenters said, and would like to add/reframe just a few ideas:
1. When I started my math phd, I was quite sure that I wanted a career in pure math research, but I underestimated how difficult it would be to keep a long-term interest into questions that are so theoretical (I studied algebraic geometry/mathematical physics). The math community can be a bit inward-looking, and it turns out that I'm much more interested in playing around with up-and-coming technological tools; I'm more tinkerer than thinker. Still, I think that pure math phds are still worth it, for those who are genuinely interested in the subject -- on the off-hand chance that your projects work out and you maintain your interest, math research is one of the most intellectually rewarding careers.
2. Regarding job prospects after the phd, I used to believe in a dichotomy between pure research and selling your soul to wall street or facebook. Luckily, the spectrum is much more continuous. Like many others these days, I ended up in bioinformatics research, which I really enjoy. To me, one particularly appealing feature of this field is the existence of long-term academic positions other than such-and-such professor: bioinformaticians and research scientists who get to do the fun tinkering without worrying so much about people management or grant applications. For those who like the culture and intellectual freedoms of academia, but want less involvement in the associated management and politics, this is an option worth exploring.
3. Related to 2, there are ways to hedge during your math phd, by working on pure areas which are close enough to applications. Others already mentioned cryptography and formal verification. Mathematicians more interested in geometry/topology could check out topological data analysis, or the recent applications of gauge theory to obtain convolutional neural networks which are equivariant w.r.t rotations or other symmetries.
4. Anecdotally, I agree with Elena that a math phd has a lot more signalling value than a math master's. In practical terms, some research scientist jobs in both academia and industry are gated behind a phd requirement. In industry these kind of jobs are a minority, but they're likely the ones where you get to do the most interesting work.
I may have a somewhat unique perspective relative to the commentariat here, in that I enjoyed the process of getting my PhD (in pure math). I left to industry halfway through my second postdoc, partly because I didn't have great postdocs (and didn't have enough of my own research program to thrive despite that), and partly because I wanted to settle down in a particular location and would rather do industry things than teach. In pure math (possibly unlike any experimental science ever), I found the graduate school experience to be "not a lot of money in exchange for not a lot of work," and would have considered stretching it out longer if a scholarship were available. (I'm from the US, but for Reasons did my PhD in England, so the standard US option of "you will teach some calculus classes in exchange for tuition + stipend" was not available.)
Back In My Day (PhD 2012), the exit route was finance first, then data science. This may have flipped. Also, data science isn't quite equivalent to marketing, e.g. I worked for a logistics company, and some -- though certainly not all -- of what the group did actually involved doing the logistics better. I've also seen manufacturing companies where the data science group is involved in process control.
I currently work in an engineering outfit (my title says Something Something Engineer). I think this is not terribly uncommon, although many of the opportunities will be tied to the Department of Defense. Of course, there is also the NSA, and people I know who worked there have said good things about the work environment.
A couple people recently mentioned quantum computing to me as their (actual or potential) exit strategy.
Google (I think in the form of straight-up software development) was an exit route for a few people I know, with varying success.
Bell Labs used to be an good exit opportunity if you could wheedle your way in, although I gather it's less of a "math department minus the teaching" now than it was in its heyday. There should be at least a few similar industrial research groups out there (e.g. Google, Amazon, IBM).
I will reinforce everyone who mentioned programming experience being very valuable outside of academia. I think you do get a salary premium for having a math PhD, but in most places it's essentially a monetary equivalent of the "wow you have a math phd you must be so smart".
This is good, and mostly matches my experience. I will advise against Google specifically - they're not good at accommodating people with academic but not direct work experience, and it can be a pretty awful environment unless you have an unusually good manager.
I did a math PhD and now do bioinformatics. It's not a super common route but there are a lot of people with pure-math backgrounds that have ended up doing well in this field and the job market is considerably better than in math. (That's a low bar to pass though!) The other advantages of bioinformatics are that it's still involves math and that it's very broad so you can do interesting, different things every day (eg: attend a biology talk, do software development, and read a stats paper) and it's still possible to do academia if that's your thing. The downsides are it's just nothing like doing math research and a lot of what we do is incredibly basic, like cookie-cutter stats 101 and making a few plots. Also you'll be frustrated at the number of downright incorrect papers that get published in this field, with just absurdly bad statistics that somehow get past reviewers unscathed. Maybe it's just my niche, but it seems like all the statistical methods papers out there mess up one way or another but no one cares.
Echoing Luke G, make sure you really know some software development, and not just at the "I took an intro to Java course eight years ago" level. It'll make your life easier in nearly any job you could end up in later that could use your PhD. If you don't like computers, don't do bioinformatics.
I'll add again the standard advice that a lot of people don't end up enjoying their PhD and if it's not really going to directly help your career, you should consider not doing it. I had a point where I did not enjoy my career, where I struggled to transition from classes to research work and I might have dropped out then. Luckily my advisor put me on a tractable problem and I made some early progress which was encouraging and got my back on track to liking what I was doing. Many other students are not so fortunate or pick projects that are simply too difficult. Many of those drop out. Many also don't even make it to that point. Especially if you're thinking of non-math jobs afterwards, pick a research topic that won't have you stuck for years, even if it's less sexy - no one will know/understand what you did anyway afterwards. You can work on that millennium problem in your spare time, but make sure you're making progress on something else too.
Math PhD programs, at least at fairly good programs, won't help you get non-math jobs, generally speaking. Expect them to be basically blind to the entire concept despite half their graduates going that route. Be proactive, since no one will be active for you.
I studied pure math, too--not a PhD, though I do know several PhDs as well. It can be great for career opportunities, *but* you really need to know computer programming, too. Most companies trying to fill quant-y roles are looking for general problem-solving ability rather than domain knowledge--if you have a solid base in math and CS, you can pick up most of the domain knowledge quickly. Also, everyone knows math majors are the smartest ;)
The most lucrative careers for math PhDs are usually in software and finance. The hot fields in software change every few years (AI, machine learning, big data, etc.), but a good math and CS background will make you well-equipped for any of them. In finance, there's a spectrum of different quant roles who love to recruit PhDs, and many traders and structurers also will recruit quanty people.
There's a pretty good diversity of roles available, and so you'll have some ability to make tradeoffs in work-life balance, amount of CS required, and the type of work--although it may take some amount of exploration before you really figure out what's the right balance for you. (I definitely had to revise a lot of beliefs about myself after a couple years on the job!)
A few assorted points to consider:
* Although a PhD is a unique opportunity to do research, it comes with a large opportunity cost and I know several people who seem to regret it--the research doesn't go as well as hoped, the social experience isn't as fun as undergrad, and you'll be a few years behind in your career. So make sure you're confident about loving research!
* Definitely take a few CS classes to maximize your opportunities for industry jobs. Even better, get involved in a software project.
* Consider taking some econ classes, too. Chances are it'll be embarrassingly easy for you, but the knowledge is very useful!
* I'd encourage you to keep an open mind when considering careers, including your assumptions of the ethics involved--a lot of media/social media portrayal is extremely misleading, and a lot of people in academia have misconceptions about industry.
* A summer internship in industry is a great way to pad your resume and help you figure out whether that industry is right for you.
> Chances are it'll be embarrassingly easy for you, but the knowledge is very useful!
Re-reading this, I should say I don't mean to belittle the field of economics--I have tons of respect for it and wish I studied it more. I just meant that typical Ec 101 curriculum will be pretty easy for someone with a strong math background.
As someone far too many years into a Physics PhD: if you love the field so much that you want to spend your life doing research, and a job is a way to avoid starving to death and dying of exposure in the meantime, then academia is right for you! If you are at all concerned with standard notions of "good job prospects", you don't want to go near academia, you're looking to convert to industry.
In that case, a Masters can be a decent investment, but PhDs are basically never worth it - at best you're trading a couple of years of salary for a lifelong sense of superiority, but actual payscales don't value it higher than working a job in the field, IIRC the studies. People who could do a PhD are very smart and get paid well, but the PhD itself isn't adding enough to justify the cost in time, and health.
In the case of mathematics specifically, all the money at the moment is in the overlap of maths knowledge and programming knowledge, so you will need to learn some coding. Firms generally recognise that it's much easier to teach a genius mathematician to be a functional coder than to teach a coder graduate level maths, though, so do still major in Mathematics (or Statistics) and treat coding as a secondary skill for now - unless, of course, you discover you just love doing it :)
Unless things have changed since Back In My Day (PhD 2012), in pure math having only a masters is a sign that you were going for a PhD and dropped out. There are a few exceptions where the masters is a well-known program (e.g. Cambridge Part III) which you're doing as Undegraduate+ rather than as PhD-, but in general, a masters in pure math signals that you dropped out of your graduate program. I don't believe this to be true of adjacent disciplines, e.g. data science or computer science or statistics.
That sign is well-known within academia (for any discipline that doesn't have an established non-academic career trajectory for masters degrees), but I don't know how well-known it is outside academia.
I dunno. I have a good friend who is a physics PhD working in the microchip industry. His division is very technical and he only hires physics PhDs. FWIW.
To echo this, I have my PhD in Physics and work in optical comms; your career will eventually cap out if you don't have a PhD (albeit at a relatively high level that may be perfectly acceptable to you), and a PhD will both open doors to you that may otherwise have been closed AND make it much easier to get your first job. If you don't want to eventually run shit, a Master's is fine, and you should be very, very careful to properly weigh the reduction in quality of life you'll experience during the extra years you're in school.
You can generally get a SWE job (your PhD gets your foot in the door, but you will have to learn programming stuff on your own time and it's a hard transition). Personally I'd recommend going the quant finance route - you'd have better comparative advantage and they're better about receiving mathematicians. Not sure how your ethics feel about that though.
FWIW I feel okay about having done a math PhD and then done a career change (my first job after grad school was pretty awful, but things improved after that). It can be an interesting thing to do that leaves you reasonably well-qualified for other jobs later, but OTOH if what you really want eventually is career advancement in some specific field better to just go straight for that.
I've worked in quant finance and I've worked in big tech (Physics PhD here) and I think the good times in quant finance are already over, you're likely to make more money and have a more pleasant job in big tech.
You should really, really, REALLY like math research to do this. And even if you do, a lot of math culture is an inward facing status game. Talented people somehow seem to get into the pure math track even when their skills provide a lot more leverage in practically every other research field.
What are some good research fields that I should go into instead? I have looked into economics, computer science, electrical engineering, and law, and while all of them seem enjoyable, first I have to get into the programs without the relevant degrees. Noah Smith has written about why an econ phd is a very good investment (also much of econ seems to be written in the same "language" as the mathematical logic that I study), is this something that can be easily pivoted to? Is doing something like that a wise decision?
I have an econ PhD. Being good at math is vastly more important than being good at undergraduate economics for econ PhD programs. I suggest you read intro and intermediate textbooks in micro and macro economics if you want to do this.
Sorry. posted too soon. In computational biology you'd be bringing math skills to bear on a field that doesn't really like computers (or last least views them as annoying necessities) and isn't in general that mathematically inclined. Also, given our strange biomedical times, there's good reason to think the biomedical research funding complex is going to be comparatively richer than funding in other fields going forward.
Having studied both, I think Smith is largely right to be long the economics Ph.D, especially over math. If you have good quantitative skills, the other one I would mention is computational biology.
If you're Yitang Zhang, you can use your math PhD to get a job at Subway.
(Less jokey response: if you can get someone to pay for your PhD, I say go for it. Just realize that you might end up a high school teacher thinking about logic in your spare time. Which strikes me as being much better than an adjunct lecturer thinking about logic in your spare time.)
Stories like Yitang Zhang are what keep me awake at night.
On the other hand, though, he seems to have had exceptionally bad circumstances to end up working at Subway. Growing up under Maoist China and all of the personal feuds with his advisors certainly didn't help.
I'm primarily interested in mathematical logic, especially from a proof theoretical angle, in addition to the rest of the set theory/model theory that people study in logic. Ideally the goal is to be a professor, and that is what I would go for, but I just want to think about what the fallback plans are assuming things work out.
For mathematical logic, you'll want to do some further investigation of placement records of PhD programs. In the early 20th century, mathematical logic was seen as central to the discipline, but in the past 50 years or so, math departments have treated it as a backwater. Most math departments, even at research universities, have 0 specialists in logic on their faculty, and aren't considering hiring one. This is quite different from philosophy and (I believe) computer science departments, where most research universities have at least one specialist in their department, and will try to replace them if they retire.
There are definitely areas of CS where mathematical logic has a lot of overlap. Program correctness, model verification, etc. are niche but growing fields--software is becoming more complex and more relied on, so it's increasingly valuable to formally verify it works to spec. Programming language theory is also related to logic, and I imagine can lead to industry jobs working on compilers and other programming tools.
People in proof theory can get jobs in crypto. There is a pretty big overlap between some of the stuff in zero-knowledge proofs and regular proof theory. In general, proof theorists can easily find work in computer science, and how far they are willing to go from theory pretty much limits their success. Make sure you get the very best advisor possible. Your advisor will get, or fail to get, your academic position. Everything depends on lineage, as a huge amount of material can only be transmitted through in-person contact.
Computer science seems like a reasonable alternative path, in particular because automatic theorem provers seem very interesting. Good to know about cryptography, as well. How does one make sure that things like a job in crypto are still in the cards after their PhD? Do you need to do side projects, or is it mostly sufficient to just do proof theory during grad school?
I considered a math PhD and chose not to do one ... Big Tech companies are so much more profitable.
Apart from the NSA, I'm not sure who hires math PhDs other than universities. I'm sure somebody does, but it probably isn't who you want to be hired by.
It's not the optimal way into big tech. On the other hand, the average PhD in big tech is probably working on more interesting problems than the average non-PhD so the hit to total lifetime earnings may be worth it.
Maybe it's naive, but I've been pretty surprised by how openly pro-war and pro-occupation much of the American elite class has revealed itself to be in the last week- especially our media elites. While I am normally not particularly enthused about the Greenwald/Taibbi left, I have to say that they do have some excellent points regarding how pro-national security state institutions like the NYT, WaPo, CNN etc. are. They are just openly clamoring for us to stay in Afghanistan, and against withdrawal. I guess I kinda vaguely knew this to be true, but their open pro-war cheerleading in the last week has been a bit astonishing. Makes me wonder how the inevitable war with China over Taiwan will go.
I would like to gently poke at people on the right who are convinced that the media establishment is uniformly leftist. When I was growing up, in a Nation-reading highly left-wing household, a huge part of the Left for us was being anti-war, any war, all wars. (I'm not saying that those are my views now- for example I was taught that the original Gulf War was Bad, whereas I now think it was justified- but I think being anti-war is like a core leftist value). The more complex/nuanced view is that the media is a series of elite institutions with its own worldview, which is mostly quite socially liberal, but not uniformly. I mean, they were in a constant state of hysteria about Trump for 5 years because it was great for ratings, which I know a lot of the Right confused with actually being anti-Trump. They loved the guy! You see all these stats about how much cable news viewership has declined in his absence, etc.
I see this almost uniform media elite consensus that leaving Afghanistan is Bad to be a pretty bad thing for Biden's approval rating/the midterms
I read the New York Times pretty regularly (usually about five or six articles before coffee, and various others throughout the day) and I don't have the impression that they are "clamoring for us to stay in Afghanistan". I see a lot of big headline articles talking about ongoing problems with the evacuation, but they don't seem like the ones I remember from 18 or 20 years ago that were actually pro-war. They just seem to be following the journalistic convention of complaining about whatever is going on that seems to be bad, without any clear sense of what alternative they would favor.
Yes, there is a lot of that in the media, isn't there?
But would you favor the media recommending fully vetted policies beyond the standard opinion pieces (think "The Economist")? I think this actually might turn people off when the realize the newspaper has a desired policy outcome.
In this case, I don't think the media is acting as an elite institution, I think they're just following a very easy incentive curve.
The footage coming out of Afghanistan looks bad. We've got a hurried and seemingly ill-planned evacuation going on and a bevy of "this person/organization will be hurt by the Taliban's rule" stories that are almost trivial to report. These stories are easy to write and will therefor get engagement. I don't think this represents some kind of stalwart leftist consensus that war is good. I think this is just the immediate response to the negative images/stories coming out of Afghanistan that will fad quickly with time.
I predict with high confidence ($100 bet to charity if anyone wants to take me up on it) that by the time the midterms roll around it will be seen as a point of favor on the left that Biden got us out of Afghanistan.
They’re following the curve because they also personally don’t want to pull out. They could instead show the horrible images and say “look how bad it was the entire time! Thank god this is the last of it! We should’ve been out years ago!”
I agree, this is not about anything more substantive than seeing images which evoke an (extremely temporary) visceral reaction. The public did not care and was not interested in what went on in Afghanistan the previous 20 years, and as soon as the pull-out is over, they will revert to not caring. Right now they just feel bad because they're seeing emotional footage.
By the same token, if the media regularly broadcast footage of the real, brutal, grotesque reality of all kinds of common-place, ordinary things that go on every day, people would be up in arms (whether that be graphic footage of what goes on with people dying of Covid in the ICU or what goes on to get your food to your table or any number of other things we really prefer not to see or think about).
Hmm, my predication was focused specifically on the how opinion among the American left. I'm not confident making any prediction about how public polling will shape out.
I would be fine with the any of the following terms:
A majority of registered Democratic Voters (50%+) will support to decision to leave Afghanistan by the time midterms come.
No action to censure Biden over his Afghanistan pullout or reverse said pullout takes place in congress that receives significant support from the Democrat Party. (Significant here described as support from Democrats sufficient to render said action successful.)
No Significant portion of the 2022 Democrat Candidates for election will support action to either censure Biden for his Afghanistan pullout or reverse said pullout. Significant here described again as constituting a majority when considered with Republicans who hold similiar beliefs.
I would associate nation building with a progressive world view, akin to domestic social engineering, so I don't think there's anything surprising about left-wing media being in favour of it, especially considering the regime that is replacing the occupation government. But there are – of course – many ways to reduce the political landscape to a single dimension, and we should just do PCA instead of being all subjective about it.
> I would like to gently poke at people on the right who are convinced that the media establishment is uniformly leftist.
A lot of these debates are affected by that there are several different axes of political views, and people variously use the labels 'left' and 'right' to refer to one or another of them. The sides on the various axes form loose coalitions, but these coalitions shift.
IMO much of the time rightists complain about these or those "establishment" institutions being dominated by the left, the more accurate claim is that they are dominated by the left on matters of race, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and—to a less complete extent—immigration, religion, and party politics. But not necessarily at all on other matters, such as economy or militarism/pacifism.
I think the US political establishment is globalist more than localist on both sides, and so it makes sense that the establishment media would lean towards the left-globalist corner (Wilsonian, in Mead's characterization). The anti-war left is solidly in the left-localist corner (Jeffersonian, in Mead's characterization). You can look at any war we've been involved in and see how people from different points on the diagram influence the resulting policy.
The first Gulf War primarily was a right-globalist effort (Hamiltonian), but there were things to support for the left-globalists (Wilsonian) in the legitimacy of the UN and to the right-localists (Jacksonian) in demonstrating US power to deter other wars; it's the left-localists (Jeffersonian) that most opposed the war. While there was agreement from three of the sides regarding the war, that agreement didn't stretch to what to do when the war ended, which is why the response afterwards sowed the seeds of future conflict.
But I'm more anti-war cosmopolitan, which is globalist I guess. (I kinda wanted them to leave some forces in Kabul, but focused on defense, not offense, to maintain a pro-Western zone where women can be educated and stuff).
Two axes isn't enough. The other popular "second axis" is statist-libertarian...which again poorly captures my way of thinking.
The axes are limited by being defined by historical people that have either been President or have been close enough to the presidency to define US foreign policy. They are useful primarily in their predictive capacity, which mostly lies in defining a second axis able to describe US foreign policy beyond right-left (for example, while Ron Paul and John McCain were both on the right, they both had very different foreign policy preferences).
That being said, it's a spectrum of general policies, not a straight-jacket. There's plenty of space between 'the US should always stay out of other countries business' and 'the US should always act as policeman at the behest of the global community'. People also holding both of those positions near the extremes (and anywhere else on the spectrum) can rightly view themselves as 'anti-war'; at the same time, neither extreme is necessarily strictly pacifistic.
I agree - there are at least three axes of politics in the Anglosphere (socialism/laissez-faire, authoritarian/libertarian, "woke"/traditional) and that doesn't even cover international relations very well.
technological progressive/regressive, pro/anti militarism/violence are two others. There’s a lot of them! There are many relations between them (and often not just tendencies towards one direction but more complex ones)
100% this. I do wonder in this specific case if the warhawk stuff became left-wing because Trump pushed the Republican position to isolationism, and hell will freeze over before the 'Left' and 'Right' are allowed to agree on anything, never mind if this means one side has to take a position completely at odds with everything they've been saying up till yesterday
Could you link one of the NYT articles (ideally not from their Op-Ed section)? I specify not Op-Ed, because my impression (from the WSJ op-eds) that those people are much less so part of the "media elite."
Also, outside of the media, which "elite class" are you referring to? My impression (once again from WSJ's reporting, so could be biased) is that most senators/representatives are condemning to dubious of the execution of the extraction, but largely not too harsh on the decision to pull out.
To a certain extent, it is Yarvin's "cathedral" that is advocating for a permanent War in Afghanistan. The deep state and the true believers in American power want to continue to project that power; if the US had abandoned Ashraf Ghani but held onto Bagram AFB the Taliban would have been unable to move against it.
This is somewhat ironic, since Yarvin wants to replace the cathedral with a new entity which could do a permanent War in Afghanistan, only effectively (with Battle Royale-style explosive collars or something).
Well the $50,000 question is whether the Afghanistan charley-foxtrot makes the Chicoms finally decide to settle things with Taiwan. Perhaps not right away, as even Joe Biden couldn't sit still for that, but after a Decent Interval. That would be an exceedingly dangerous event.
Increase. In the short term, obviously the US involvement in Afghanistan is over, so it's a temporary decrease. In the long term, Taliban is likely going to start new wars. At the same time, the utterly botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan will turn the public more hawkish; I doubt we'll withdraw from anywhere else anytime soon.
Whom do you believe the Taliban will invade? Turkmenistan seems the only vaguely-plausible candidate - the PRC, Iran and Pakistan are way, way out of their weight class, and Uzbekistan/Tajikistan are in a mutual defence treaty with Russia.
I agree with Melvin, below: it's not so much that Taliban will officially invade anyone, but rather that they'll conduct and/or aid and abet a continuous stream of terrorism on multiple targets.
Just some back-of-the-napkin numbers here, but the Taliban would have to do something like one and a half 9/11-size attacks a year to match the average yearly death toll of the war in Afghanistan.
OTOH, empirically it takes about one 9/11-size attack in 20 years to create the average yearly death toll of the war in Afghanistan. I don't see why we should expect future attacks to be far less deadly.
Is Pakistan way out of their weight class? A good deal of the population and government are sympathetic to radical Islam. Also, Pakistan has its own Taliban, which may join forces with the Afghan Taliban to try to capture the Pakistani government.
These don't seem like war scenarios so much as Pakistan's own democratic process (or lack thereof, in the case of either a pro-Taliban or anti-Taliban coup by the Pakistani military).
"Invasion", to me, means "one state militarily attacking another with the objective of territorial control". Pakistan's military is of the same scale as Iran's (slightly ahead in some ways, like nuclear weapons); its monopoly on force is not seriously threatened by any Afghani action, even taking into account possible domestic collaborators.
I don't believe the Taliban can or will actually invade anywhere.
But I do believe that a Taliban-run Afghanistan is likely to become a safe haven slash training ground for violent Islamist movements that will start carrying out violent acts in... well, just about every other country on Earth with any sort of nonzero Muslim population. That's what happened last time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan (remember why we invaded in the first place?) and also what happened in the few years that ISIS managed to control a chunk of territory.
OP literally gave the Gulf War as an example of a war that his left-wing family opposed. I don't think Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait could be considered a utopian attempt to remake society.
To me the bones (not the proposed culprits) seem obviously right - it's got that nice feature of correct theories that it explains a whole bunch of niggling weirdnesses in a satisfying way. That said, I've been burned in this idea-space before, so if there's good pushback somewhere I'd like to read it.
It seems like if this theory were true you should be able to find some really sharp discontinuities between adjacent areas that source their water very differently. In particular well (especially deep aquafer wells) vs. local rainfall vs. distant surface sourced water etc.
For example in the SF bay area there are several different water districts. There are areas where just going across the street gets you from water drawn basically directly via pipes from catchment basins in the Sierra Nevada's to areas served by the state water project where the water went through hundreds of miles of rivers and canals and resvoirs to areas served by local wells all with very little mixing or pooling of the water. We should in theory see pretty dramatic differences by water district boundaries in that sort of situation and I don't know that we do (if we do that would be great evidence). Southern California has some similar comparisons.
I thought it was fascinating, but he seemed to dismiss most of the diet and exercise aspects with arguments like "subjects only lost 5 pounds in 6 months." It seems like if you make a couple of those changes across a fraction of the population for the long term, that adds up to a meaningful share of the change.
Sure, but is that because they actually aren't effective or because people stop following them? I've only done some casual reading on the topic, so I really don't know.
This question is difficult because it feels like those should be different things, but in practice the distinction isn't so clear.
Imagine a drug came out that would reliably cure/prevent cancer if taken regularly, but studies show that 90% of people - even terminal patients - stop taking it in the short to medium term due to intolerable side effects, which get progressively worse over time. Is it accurate to say this drug cures cancer? In a technical sense, sure, but in practice that phrasing seems misleading - certainly we wouldn't be confused about why people keep dying of cancer when all they have to do is take a pill to prevent it.
The case with dieting is actually worse than that, because some appreciable percentage of people will gain back the weight they lose even if they do stick to the diet. If you're trying to maintain a weight well below your set point you'll have to get stricter over time as your body gets more aggressive about compensating for the perceived famine. And your "eat, fool" circuits are waaaaay down deep in your brain - they can smear your prefrontal cortex against the wall if they have to.
Put differently, a diet that 90+% of people don't stick to it has demonstrated itself to be incompatible with human physiology in a way no less serious than if it was ineffective due to not successfully interacting with the intended receptor. It looks different because will-power can temporarily override the physiology in the case of diets, but ultimately will-power will bow to its masters in the brain stem - you can't hold your breath until you die of hypoxia, and you can't diet yourself to well below your set point longterm.
There was a lot of justified pushback on r/SSC and DSL, correctly so. Lots of correlations and claimed associations and little real evidence. Maps that look similar, bunches of n=4 studies smashed together and taken at word, and above all lots of correlations where everything is correlated already, causal or not, etc. that said it’s still a lot of effort and interesting stuff put together
This article argues that the part about watersheds is wrong: https://nothinginthewater.substack.com/p/contra-smtm-on-obesity-part-2-watersheds. The argument: In the US, the watershed map is the same as the map of African Americans (mouth of river basin -> larger plantations -> lots of slaves), and race could correlate with obesity for any other reason. Similar argument that it's confounded by socioeconomic status. They further argue that the map of river basins in China does not support SMTM's conclsuion at all (Xinxiang is very obese for racial/social/economic reasons, and the rest of the obesity map doesn't actually line up with river basins well). The author promised to write a followup post against SMTM's altitude argument.
(Personally, as usual with this subject, I can't tell which way is up.)
I definitely found the China map unconvincing, but the US map had my jaw on the floor and is a major point in SMTM's favor, so this pushback is excellent!
That said, I think CT is overselling the degree to which race can explain that obesity map. The three states at the mouth of the Mississippi, sure, but YOU CAN TRACE THE F***** MISSOURI, MISSISSIPPI, OHIO, AND TENNESSEE RIVERS ON THE F***** COUNTY LEVEL MAP (I actually deduced the existence of the Tennessee river from that map without knowing it was there). It's one of the most stunning pieces of evidence for anything I've ever seen, and it doesn't match the race data nearly as well as it matches the river basins.
I noticed that their state-level plot is from 2018 and the CDC now has the 2019 up. They look somewhat different and frankly they don't match the watersheds all that well. WV, Alabama, SC, Indiana, Michigan - are these large watershed states? Some are part of a large watershed, but at the top not the bottom so inconsistent with their theory.
They said West Virginia is a distinct case, and it's quite reasonable to have a couple cases that are separate from their main thesis. I haven't looked at the others to see whether it lines up (northern Alabama would be in the Tennessee River watershed for instance, while southern Alabama would only have shorter and smaller rivers).
Population density would be a confounding issue there, wouldn't it? Those rivers have more towns along them than the surrounding countryside.
On the other hand, that county-level map (which I missed on my first reading) really is quite striking. I would like to see more than two other countries, though. Thinking about countries with significant population at both high and low altitude, what about France, Germany, Russia, Canada, Chile, Peru, Mexico?
Actually I just looked up obesity maps of Mexico and Peru and they do seem to support the trend too, with low-lying areas consistently fatter than mountainous areas. I do wonder whether it's as simple as the fact that walking up and down hills all day burns a lot of calories, though.
If I understand the argument correctly, it's well known that lower elevations are fatter than higher, but it's generally attributed to hypoxia, while SMTM is arguing that it's a side effect of lower elevations being at the foot of watersheds.
The Rio Grande and the Colorado river of the west are both heavily evaporating rivers and get lower flow as you go downstream, and thus would be expected to behave differently from rivers like the Brazos and the Colorado river of Texas, which are heavily agricultural and get more flow as you go downstream.
I've called it the "phlogiston" theory; a decent amount of circumstantial evidence but overall relying on a theory of a particle that may not exist (and none of the specific options suggested are particularly compelling).
At a high level, it seems to be understating how modern hyper-processed foods (Oreos, Diet Coke, etc.) contribute to obesity. Of course, any explanation for animal obesity wouldn't be based on that, but ... there are lots of possible explanations regarding domesticated animals, and I am not so sure that the "trend" holds for wild animals.
It understates how hyper-processed foods contribute to obesity? On the contrary, it may explain *why* hyper-processed foods contribute to obesity - because processing contaminates the food.
Somewhat related, the Peter Attia podcast had a recent episode that I found somewhat fascinating for the discussion on the differences between lab mice and wild mice: https://peterattiamd.com/steveaustad/. Basically, typical lab mice are so wimpy and fat they can barely be considered mice at all, and I imagine this is somewhat true for domesticated animals in general.
I mean, a bunch of theoretical particle theories have panned out...
The hyperpalatable foods theory has a couple sticking points for me: for one thing I'm fat and it's definitely not because of processed food. I eat too much in general, but I've cut out the gluttony in the past, and while I can straightforwardly lose 20-30 pounds I'm still substantially overweight - for some reason my set point is 245 lbs. And testimony from the anti-diet space gives examples of people winding up in the ER with organ failure despite still being kinda chunky (that particular claim was from Reagan Chastain, who should be trusted as far as you can throw her, but still). This calls to mind Guyenet's anecdote of the obese mice starving to death while defending body fat stores higher than the average mouse has during normal life - in both cases something has gone badly wrong with the set points, and I really don't see how hyperpalatable food explains this. Throw in the lab animals getting fatter on the same food as 50 years ago and the theory is on life support.
> And testimony from the anti-diet space gives examples of people winding up in the ER with organ failure
I mean if you ate 1500 kCal of HFCS or chocolate fat free smoothie per day, or something “healthy” like an olive oil / kale diet cleanse, I could totally see that causing organ failure. I can’t see organ failure being that common if you eat 2kCal/day of a healthy balanced natural diet or even burgers fries and some lettuce or soylent or something.
Also, if you watched the Rogan debate where Guyenet crushed Taubes, the only unanswered point I remember Taubes scoring was when he hammered Guyenet on a population that had obese mothers and starving children. How a population like that comes to be has haunted me ever since - SMTM's theory explains it.
I'm looking for recommendations of little-known but truly excellent songs from the classic rock era. These would be songs that – in some alternative universe – would have been smash hits, but for the flapping of a random butterfly's wings in some remote corner of the world. Thanks!
Blackburn & Snow were a popular boy/girl early 60s folk-rock duo whose only album was not released until decades after they broke up. “Yes, Today” is my favorite of their songs - might have been a hit if it had come out when it was supposed to.
> We can start with his writings on music, since that seems to be what he is known for. He has helpfully ranked the best 100 rock albums of all time in order…
> If that’s too broad for you, he also provides his top albums year by year … every single year from 1967 to 2012. He also gives genre-specific rankings for psychedelic music, Canterbury, glam-rock, punk-rock, dream-pop, triphop, jungle … 32 genres in all. Try punching “scaruffi [band]” into Google; I defy you to find a major musician he hasn’t written a review of. These are all just part of the massive online appendix to his self-published two-volume history of rock music.
I just looked into that page... it may be a good pointer to semi-obscure albums, but he seems to belong to a particular kind of avantgarde underground contrarians. When someone suggests "Trout Mask Replica" as the greatest rock album ever, there's something wrong with them. Also, I don't have the knowledge to judge all of his best-of lists, but on the ones where I do, I can say he makes some bizarre choices. Listing Cream and the Animals as milestones of progressive rock, while skipping the Beatles and Moody Blues - no. Just, no. Charlie Watts (RIP) at number 3 of the best drummers? Pleeeeease. Klaus Schulze with "Irrlicht" for the best rock album of 1972? That was not even a rock album at all, by any stretch of the imagination. So, while checking out his recommendations doesn't hurt... - no, scratch that. Trout Mask Replica does cause pain and discomfort. Check out his recommendations, but at your own peril, and don't be frustrated if you don't like any of them.
Heh, thanks for looking into it. I'm not really familiar with rock, so I can't really judge. But the ones I did check out I didn't like much either.
Luke writes that "In general, the greatest albums are not ones that should be listened to near the beginning of one’s explorations of music." I certainly haven't reached that stage for rock then it seems
Or some artists are just not your cup of tea. I have been listening to various flavors of rock and metal for thirty years now, and some of the supposed cult albums still don't do anything for me. Also, rock music should not require a doctorate in music theory to appreciate, at least on some level (and I'm saying that as a fan of progressive rock). Rock should have melodies that touch you emotionally and haunt you, and rhythms that make you want to rock out. Some melodies and grooves work on some people and not on others... but if you can't find anything where you can at least say, "I understand why some find that enjoyable", it may be that it's just not a great rock album. (It might still be a great something-else, though.)
It eventually became popular 30 years later but Pink Moon by Nick Drake was released in 1972.
Rocky Erickson's Gremlins Have Pictures has a 70s rock vibe though it was released in 1986. I think it's a masterpiece. His live version of Heroin really captures that era.
"The classic rock era" is a bit vague, but here are bands and songs that I've come across that may fit your criteria:
- the band Love put out the excellent album "Forever Changes" in 1967 - psychedelic rock based on acoustic guitars and the occasional trumpets and strings. Standout songs IMO are "A House is not a Motel" and "Maybe the People would be the Times".
- Beggar's Opera had a minor hit with "Time Machine" - early prog, lots of mellotron, dramatic vocals... I love it.
- Starcastle sounded a lot like Yes, but maybe a bit more organized. At more than ten minutes, "Lady of the Lake" is an unlikely candidate for a smash hit, but still a great song, and quite catchy for progressive rock.
- the prog version of "Elanor Rigby" by Esperanto may be the best Beatles cover ever.
- in the blues-based corner of classic rock, Ashbury had an excellent album in "Endless Skies", but never achieved breakthrough success. "Warning!" is a good place to start.
- Bob Seger recorded an awesome cover of "Bo Diddley/ Who Do You Love", which AFAIK never got anywhere... but it rocks hard.
It's very creative musically, but they lost the story by stretching it out over 8 minutes.
The singer even tacked the end of verse 3 onto the beginning of verse 2, cutting out 1/3 of the lyrics. It's become an art object instead of a human story.
Kansas also did a prog cover of it (less "prog" and more classical) with the London Symphony Orchestra, on "Always Never the Same", but I would never call it the best Beatles cover ever.
Ray Charles did a good Rigby cover. So did Joan Baez. Paul McCartney also did a cover of Eleanor Rigby, on his album /Give My Regards To Broad Street/ (1984). Not my favorite, but it's followed by a new composition, "Eleanor's Dream", which is worth listening to for the Eleanor Rigby connoisseur. If I had to pick a favorite, it might be Rare Earth's R&B cover of it.
Again, these wouldn't have been hits, and are only marginally rock, but I think they're great:
- Bruce Cockburn, generally
- T-Bone Burnett's album /Trap Door/ (1982)
- Robyn Hitchcock's "My wife and my dead wife" (1980)--the lyrics fascinate me, because the story it tells is IMHO unlike anything else in literature in its intent / function / purpose
Robyn Hitchcock has quite a few great tunes - “I Watch the Cars”, “The Lizard” and “I Often Dream of Trains” are three of my favorites. “My Wife & My Dead Wife” is also excellent, and is somewhat thematically similar to Noel Coward’s play/movie “Blithe Spirit”
It's easier for me to think of songs that I think were "truly excellent" but could never be "smash hits". Most of the repertoire of the midwestern art-rock band Kansas fall into that category. They did later become highly influential on Scandinavian metal, but nobody else seems to have noticed this. Some of my favorite songs by them are "Lamplight Symphony", "Cheyenne Anthem", "Ghosts", "T.O. Witcher", "Peaceful and Warm", "Rainmaker", and the entire album "Point of Know Return". One of their songs, "Miracles out of nowhere", has a 4-part fugue starting at 2:25. It ain't Bach, but it was a sincere attempt to cross rock with Bach.
Similar story for Jethro Tull's album /Songs From the Wood/, which is super-famous with critics, but I don't recall hearing any of it on the radio.
There's a very obscure song by Jonathan & Charles, "Mrs. Chisholm's Weekend" (1968), which is in the same vein as "Eleanor Rigby" (1966), but had the misfortune of being released on a Christian album. There are also a few songs from that period by the Christian rock musician Larry Norman which could have done better in the mainstream, like "I'm the Six O'Clock News", and maybe "So Long Ago the Garden" (1973), which sounds like a missing link between beat poetry and rap music, though I doubt any future rappers ever heard it.
(Take that "highly influential on Scandinavian metal" with many grains of salt. That's just my guess, based on some guitar-solo similarities with melodic death metal. They obviously influenced Dethklok, musically and visually, which is however a fake Swedish melodic death-metal band, which however probably sold more albums than most actual Swedish melodic death-metal bands.)
Frank Zappa is generally more vulgar than I care for, but "Muffin Man" was the song that made me want to get better acquainted. Give it a couple of minutes to actually get going... :)
Re. the recent announcement that NYC will provide free education for 3-year-olds in 2023, and the $3.5 "stimulus" bill that passed in the US Senate on Aug. 12, including some large amount for free preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds in America. (I can't seem to find out how much, other than that it's part of a $726 billion allocation, and that an "expert" predicted preschool for 3+4 year olds would cost $60 billion (yearly?)).
Scott, or maybe someone else, has written posts showing that the consensus now is that pre-school for 3-year-olds has no lasting educational benefits.
Now Vox has an article (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/16/17928164/early-childhood-education-doesnt-teach-kids-fund-it) saying that it has no lasting educational benefits, but has lasting health benefits. It says that the studies showing no lasting educational benefits used control groups, while the studies showing lasting health benefits were longitudinal studies mostly without control groups. It suggests that the health benefits were due to the actual health-benefit portion the pre-K education, and maybe the educational part, which is much more expensive, isn't useful.
So it sounds to me like scientific consensus at the moment would say that Congress is throwing a lot of money away on preschool for 3 and 4 year-olds, or at best betting a lot of money on a hypothesis, blowing right past the US budget cap before we've even started on the $10-to-$100 trillion New Green Deal.
The US has thrown away a shit-ton of money on useless pre-school education for decades, it's not going to stop now. It's a lot like "infrastructure" bills to address "our crumbling roads and bridges," which pop-up pretty reliably about once a decade or so. (You'd think at some point the voters might say: WTF? we voted for $x billion less than 10 years ago for those God-damned crumbling bridges, where did it go? Either the bridges should be brand-spanking-new now, and we don't need more $billions, or else whoever disbursed the money 10 years ago should be dragged into the public square and hanged. But they never do.)
Can you link some evidence that they repeatedly claim to repair the same bridges again and again, more often than in other countries? And that repeats on largeer scale - not just with some specific bridge?
Nope. The only evidence is my memory. I've heard this spiel for 40 years, and it's always the same. I've never heard any politician tell me "welp, we fixed all the Interstate bridges in the Northeast last time, it's the Midwest's turn now" or "OK, we fixed up Amtrak last time, they're good to go, so no money for that in this bill."
It is 100% normal that Northeast has bridges with maintenance/rebuilding required in various times.
Bridges are build at different times, requiring differing service intervals.
My city in Poland right now has two bridges in maintenance, last year another serious rebuilding was completed, new railway bridge is under construction. While many other bridges are slowly aging and will require costly repairs in coming decades.
We are definitely not rebuilding all bridges in one year on each century. That would be bad idea for many reasons.
AFAIK this is 100% normal, though some grift/stealing/misspending hidden in this is possible.
There was an article recently (can't remember where it was) suggesting that big federal infrastructure transfers to states just make states spend less of their own money on infrastructure. So the infrastructure spending stays the same but with different state-to-federal funding ratios.
Even more than most "education," preschool is pretty transparently just childcare with some baseline attempt at quality control (background checks, actually interacting with children rather than setting them in front of a device, etc).
The nation probably has some interest in more parents being able to go back to work after having children within 3 - 5 years, as opposed to in 5 - 8 years, and also to have more than one child. Grandparents are increasingly continuing to work until they're too old to do a decent job raising grandkids either, grandkids are coming later, and they often live too far away anyway. Is it a strong enough interest to justify the cost? I'm not sure. Our district is already short elementary educational assistants, and it's not clear we could find the "teachers," even at a decent wage. I'm not sure what the situation in New York is.
I'm somewhat doubtful that government sponsored, standardized, acceptable childcare at that age would be significantly less expensive if they didn't bother with the educational component. The workers would still have to do something to prove conscientiousness, safety, and generally that they were responsible adults strangers should trust their children with, which isn't cheap.
I would theoretically prefer an extended family culture where there's always someone in the house minding the young children, but my revealed preferences contradict that.
Echoing in on the point about how hard it is to find qualified workers for these positions: Currently, to do pre-K childcare you need to both be happy to work with kids, be willing to do so for less money than you could make as a teacher/teacher's aid/someone inside the official education system AND have a clean enough record that you can pass a background check. This trifecta just doesn't exist in most cases.
The expensive component is the number of staff required, though inner city rents can also contribute. Reducing the credentialing required for the staff can reduce costs, though, and I'm doubtful the credentialing has much if any correlation with the ability to teach pre-schoolers (though this part obviously depends substantially on which jurisdiction we're discussing)
Re: credentials for childcare staff, I don't know what the situation is like in the USA, but over here there are more and more standards being set for what children should be achieving.
Here's a link to the standards manual for Early Childhood Education, which covers from Birth - Six Years of Age for the settings
This is the kind of stuff that is being more and more considered a necessary part of children's education. It's no longer a case of "the parents are working, the kids need to be taken care of, for a group of three year olds just let them play with toys, learn how to get on with other kids, and since this is age Biting happens train them out of doing that", the kids and the childcare provider/preschool has to be hitting all these sorts of goals (e.g. as below):
5.2.8 How do you enable the child who consistently plays alone to interact with other children?
5.2.9 In what ways are children facilitated to work together in small groups?
If I remember what I was like at the ages of 4-6, I would have *hated* being chivvied into "interacting with other children" when I was quietly and happily playing alone with blocks or whatever, but we can't let kids be solitary! we must make sure they are sociable! and learn to interact! so they can be productive and efficient workers!
On the other hand, credentialling is here being used as a proxy for social class and overall trustworthiness. Call me a snob, but I don't want my kids taken care of by the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel employees you'd find at McDonald's or the TSA.
In addition to helping out working class parents, I also think there are benefits to the children, not in educational terms but in terms of socialization and normal development. It is really not natural to be cloistered with a hovering adult looking over a kid 24-7 who puts that kid's interests above all others. Kids are supposed to be running in a pack with other kids, learning to socialize and bump elbows and get in conflicts and work them out. Back in the olden days, that could happen just within families or extended families because people had so many more kids -- you couldn't give them all attention. Now it happens with daycare or preschool.
I well remember the first day of kindergarten, how the kids who hadn't been in daycare or pre-school previously were the ones crying in the corner, needing to be comforted by the teacher because they were terrified. The daycare kids were all having a great time. A parent looks out for their kid's own interests above the other kids, and that's not great to be marinated in that situation for 5 years straight when it isn't how society works. Kids that aren't socialized young are much like all the COVID puppies that didn't get socialized -- anxious and neurotic and not as resilient, when they aren't in perfectly controlled and safe contexts.
I am someone who is prone to rather extreme introversion and wanting to be by myself indulging my cerebral interests. If I had been alone in my mother's care my first few years, I would've spent all my time reading and playing alone (rather than just doing that on weekends and evenings) and I'm sure I would have become a serious weirdo with social problems and anxiety. I completely credit being only a marginal weirdo and being able to get along in society with being in daycare in my foremost years, and getting used to having to socialize, and having a minder who did not prioritize my interests either above or below those of the other children.
Yes, I fully agree with this. And even in schools, it didn't used to always be so age-segregated...in one-room schoolhouses, etc., you had kids of all ages learning together and helping with the younger kids. I don't know why we have such strict age-restriction nowadays, with large groups of kids all exactly the same age, which just breeds a lot of competition and status games rather than more natural age-based leadership and social hierarchies that better reflect the adult world.
I had a pretty ideal daycare situation as a kid, where a home-based daycare provider was watching a group of about a dozen kids ranging in age from babies to about 10 or 11, and we all played together and had a lot of unstructured time just running around outside or whatever. It was wonderful and I completely credit it with my social development, which I would not have received at home. I think some years later the state came down on her and required that she implement strict minder ratios and more age segregation, which is too bad.
This is pretty much my take on it too. Those pushing for universal Pre-K don't seem to care if the educational benefits are real or not, but they do care a lot about freeing up individuals (mostly women) to get back into the workforce. They seem to have a strong understanding that babysitting services being offered for all is not as popular or justified as better education for small children. That they can help save some kids from 24 hours a day in really crummy homes may also be a factor.
You might see this as a socialist program, I see it evidence that the values of capitalism, consumerism and materialism are fully baked in to progressivism. This is Peak Capitalism. The state will now take care of your children even earlier so you can get back to the important part of life: being a dedicated worker bee.
The classic statement is that it takes a village to raise a child - but modern people mostly just don't live in villages any more (or in the kind of extended-family communal households that many Bay Area rationalists do have) and so raising a child these days either requires expensive childcare, or the parents being with the child full time, as opposed to the more traditional options.
The question is whether the childcare support is provided by family and friends (the traditional way), by the market (the capitalist way), or by the government (the socialist way). It would be good to enable more people to live in such a way that the traditional means are readily available, but for better or worse, our society has developed in a way that puts that out of reach for most people, even more than the capitalist cost of childcare.
Sure, but I think what LesHapablap and myself both lament is that there isn't the choice; some people would love to stay home and take care of their kid(s) at least until they were four years old and ready for primary school, but there's not the opportunity - both parents need to be working nowadays in order to pay mortgages etc.
Which is how you end up with the absurdity of the mother (usually) working a job where the majority of her pay goes on childcare so she can work a job.
This. Also, another cynical angle - a word where a mother works to pay or the costs of childcare is one with a higher GDP than one where the mother stays at home to look after her own children, since the work of looking after children is now visible to the state.
I see this a lot, but this is just gains from trade. You can make the same argument about getting a job vs. growing your own food or building your own home just pushes money around and makes GDP look higher.
But if I'm a better programmer than I am a farmer/butcher or construction worker, then I'm actually materially better off making the trade and society is better off if people do this in general, and I've never seen the argument why this doesn't apply to child care.
It isn't the same argument unless professional child-rearing, e.g. in the preschool setting, is superior to what the child can get at home -- which nobody at all believes. So the situation is more similar to a peasant who has to plow a field with a stick, inefficiently, because he can't save up enough money to buy a good plow (and horse). In this case, the family can't supply enough saved money (e.g. through one parent earning enough for all) to buy the most efficient and effective possible child-rearing -- which is done by one parent.
You are "actually materially better off" if you drink a government-provided slurry with all your necessary nutrients instead of cooking yourself or buying food from restaurants. And society would be better off too. And you can use your extra pocket money to bid on a house someday. Actually you may have to take the government slurry in order to afford the house, since everyone else bidding on the house has already done so.
Whether it's a real benefit verses a shadow benefit will depend on several factors. One, is how many children can be "properly" cared for by an individual. If a daycare worker cares for approximately the same number of children as a parent, then that's not adding much on the daycare side (the parent may be doing more economically valuable work than the daycare worker, so that's potentially important still). I am scare quoting "properly" because I have significant doubts that the kind of upbringing a child can get in daycare is equivalent to what they can get from a parent who is regularly with them. Obviously huge caveats here, and some children are better off just being taken away from their parents, so there's certainly some room there to justify childcare no matter how reasonably poor the daycare is.
I'm more concerned about the quality of industrialized daycare than I am the current implementation, to be sure. Right now, the parents can make an economic choice about whether their productivity in society is greater than the cost in terms of day care. Put simply, if they make less money than daycare costs, they stay home. Generally, they would (and should!) stay home even if the costs are anywhere close, like making $20,000/year and paying $12,000/year for day care. Once you factor in costs related to work, like additional clothing, driving costs, etc., that ratio really isn't worth it. That's not even considering the value of spending time with your own kids.
Smart Codex Readers: Convince me that COVID Vaccine Passports are a good Idea.
Currently against them as I find them
1) counterproductive and dissuade trust,
2) discriminatory and segregationist
3)Onerous for implementation
4) Seem to discount natural immunity
5) Inevitable Privacy Concerns
6) No Methodological Target for Removal . Fear that passport requirement will shift from unvax to 'undervaxed"
7) Herding Effect where unvax further congregate among themselves
8) Divisive and leads to distrust of public health institutions.
9) Seem to ignore majority of exposure occurs inter familiar and scape goats public spaces
10) COVID vaccines are not sterilizing making vaccine passports essentially worthless.
11) my libertarian bias where this feels wrong.
Looking for arguments in favor:
Should Hawaii where I live implement this policy?
Does a temporary health vaccine passport potentially raise vaccine rates, improve "public perception of safety" , lower hospitalizations/deaths divisive policies that could be ineffective, counterproductive and possibly lead to worse health outcomes and trust.
Would your "libertarian bias" feel better if instead of yes/no admission and vaccine passports, that businesses simply implemented separate sections and differential pricing?
For example, I am absolutely positive that if airlines offered "vaccinated only" flights, that (1) LOTS of people would be willing to pay more to be on those flights, and (2) if the airline determined to charge more for fare on the unvaxxed fights to offset their risks in serving those passengers, it would motivate more people to be vaccinated. Is that somehow better in your mind then if airlines just simply started requiring vaccination passports for all passengers and stopped serving the unvaccinated?
I don't find any of your other points compelling. I see no privacy concern or slippery slope with showing people and businesses that you desire to interact with a simple verification of your vaccine status. Nor do I care if unvaxxed people feel that it is divisive...given that they are the ones acting like petulant anti-social babies, I could care less. The rest of us don't want to be around them. Just like in the 80s and 90s, society decided they didn't want to be around smokers, so that no one can smoke anywhere nowadays but their own home or cordoned-off smoking sections.
My general reaction is that EVERY time there is any sort of change at all in public policy...whether that is making DUI a felony or requiring seatbelts or issuing social security cards or making bars and restaurants non-smoking or updating a user interface or literally *anything*, ever, people yell and scream and complain and gnash their teeth and then the change happens and everyone gets over it and forgets about it two weeks later. The unvaccinated are acting that way and making a huge ado about nothing, at best, and at worst making a terrible health decision for themselves merely out of spite and wanting to stick it to libs/elites/whoever they think they're sticking it to.
I would imagine that a place like Hawaii, which is hugely dependent upon tourism from the affluent and older crowds (who are the most vaccinated people), would benefit from implementing the policy. The cosmopolitan frequent-travelers with lots of disposable income are not the people making up the anti-vax crowd.
I know its a meme that the unvaccinated are dissenting to spite you, but we really aren't. There are 2.5 as many reported deaths in the VAERS database for COVID vaccines as every other vaccine in the database combined (4,831 vs 1,919). Maybe that doesn't worry you, but can you at least admit it is reasonable for a person to worry about it?
Block is correct that there are a bunch of reasonable-sounding fellows headed by Brett Weinstein going around telling people that "the vaccine" is dangerous (and not making an effort, when I watched them in June, to distinguish between the 4 available vaccines in the two countries discussed).
I am now convinced that their apparent reasonableness is only skin deep, as it seemed like they never considered any alternative hypotheses before concluding "vaccines dangerous", and even at that time they were misrepresenting some data they had access to in obvious ways.
Is what you consider "reasonable" really rational, though? I guess this gets back to the whole rationality thing and underlying basis for ACT. You present two sets of numbers and say, "Hey, look at the difference here between COVID vaccines and the other vaccines!" Sounds like a reasonable to at least note the difference in rates. But you posted these two numbers without putting them in the context of any other data. If I put that 4,831 number into context of 190,000,000 people in the United States who've received at least one dose fo the vaccine that 4,800 number seems a lot less concerning.
Just looking at the US numbers though shows that we have an overall 1.7% chance of dying from COVID-19 infection and a 0.0019% chance of dying from one of the vaccines. So that makes it 895% more likely to die from the disease than from the vaccine. Now, you can burrow into those basic numbers and argue that IFR is lower because of all the undiagnosed cases, but still that difference is pretty damn big. It's hard to not to argue that your chances are better with the vaccine than a COVID-19 infection.
So, to answer your question, I don't think it's a reasonable thing to worry about, because I think your cognitive bias against the COVID-19 vaccines is making you latch on to data that puts them in a negative light.
I take your point, but your analysis leaves out a few things too. You assume a binary choice: "Either I get the vaccine or I will catch COVID" but you might not actually ever catch it. The choice is between a small danger today vs the possibility of a larger danger in the future.
Even that, however, assumes near 100% effectiveness of the vaccines, which at this point is clearly untrue. In my home state (Vermont), around 25% cases in the last couple of months were among vaccinated people. Also, its a small sample size, but the death rates have actually been higher in breakthrough cases than the overall rate. All of which muddies the water enough that I still contend it is reasonable to at least wait for more data.
You can believe whatever damn fool thing you want, but numbers argue against what you believe.
1. Current estimates are that Delta has an R value around 7. This number is based on in vitro studies (rather than epidemiological surveys), but that puts R value of SARS-CoV-2 3x higher than the 1918 H1N1 flu. And that's 2x-3x the R value of the common cold. You've gotten the common cold, haven't you? You've gotten the flu, haven't you? Why do you think you can avoid catching COVID-19 unless you have special powers that exempt yourself from the laws of probability?
2. Or maybe you're sitting by yourself in your survival bunker waiting for the Zombie/COVID apocalypse to pass. But SARS-CoV-2 is a Coronavirus, and in the past Coronaviruses haven't shown themselves to be amenable to herd immunity. COVID-19 will likely become COVID-22, -23, and -24. It might mutate into a relatively harmless cold-like virus. Or it might get worse. We'll see. But when you run out of dried beans and beef jerky you're going to have to come out your bunker and deal with people who might be contagious.
3. The fact that vaccines are less effective against the Delta variant is actually more reason to get vaccinated — because the vaxxed now have a higher probability of being contagious. So, you won't be able to depend on the vaccinated to protect you.
4. Also, from a mathematical perspective, if Vaccine X is only 80 percent effective against Variant Y, and 80 percent of population has been vaccinated with Vaccine X, and 20 percent of the population remains unvaccinated, then the pool of potential breakthrough cases and pool of unvaccinated are of equal size. So, you'd expect 50 percent of the cases to be in the vaccinated population and 50 percent in the unvaccinated population. The fact that Vermont has a 25% breakthrough rate against Delta still shows that COVID-19 is preferentially attacking the unvaccinated. If you look at the relative percentages hospitalized, if Vermont is like other states, probably only 3% of the hospitalized for COVID-19 will be from the vaccinated population.
>You've gotten the common cold, haven't you? You've gotten the flu, haven't you?
I don't know about Block, but I've never gotten the flu, and I'm no youngling.
More importantly, "the common cold" is about two hundred immunologically distinct diseases with nearly identical symptoms, that cycle in and out of circulation as herds become mostly immune to the last one. Most people will at some point catch *a* cold, very few people catch *all 200* colds.
"The flu" is a couple dozen immunologically distinct diseases, and ditto.
COVID-19, unless something weird happens going forward, is basically one disease. Several strains but they're immunologically related and one is clearly dominant. So your intuition is off. Most people contract a minority of circulating colds and a minority of circulating influenzas, which suggests that the probability of contracting any one specific disease is <<50%.
For the average vaccinated person, the odds are pretty good that they will someday catch *a coronavirus*, but also pretty good that they will never contract Covid-19. Most likely, the coronavirus they catch will be one of the ones already included in "the common cold".
I'm sure some people are legitimately afraid of the vaccine, but plenty of others are in fact doing it out of spite and because "they don't like being told what to do." I personally know some people in that camp.
I think even if it could be validated that those 5,000 people actually died from the vaccine and not something else, that is out of 200 Million people and certainly much lower than serious illness, long covid, or deaths from Covid itself. And likely caused almost entirely by anaphylaxis, which could be avoided by waiting an hour after getting the vaccine with a location where there's an Epipen available. I get allergy shots once a month and have to bring an epipen and wait half an hour before I can leave the Dr's office each time...not a big deal, and reasonable any time a severe allergic reaction could occur.
Look, I had pretty severe side effects from my first dose, which I was NOT expecting...3 days feeling like a bad flu, full body aches, severe headache. I was scared to get the second one. But the second one was actually easier than the first (perhaps just because I was mentally prepared) and now that I'm through it I am VERY happy to be vaxxed. Furthermore, it isn't about fear of dying, as I think the chances that I would die of Covid are about the chance I'll die from a lightening strike...I am healthy, skinny, and under 50. But it's still worthwhile to know I'm reducing my chance of keeping it spreading, putting elderly people at risk, and reducing my chance of feeling like crap for two weeks straight or getting long Covid. If everyone had just gotten the shots this spring when they were available, we would be very unlikely to be dealing with this current surge, new mask mandates, and people in the ICU, which would be a good thing.
" everyone had just gotten the shots this spring when they were available, we would be very unlikely to be dealing with this current surge, new mask mandates, and people in the ICU, which would be a good thing."
I recommend you look at the data out of Israel to see how this is likely false. They are 80% _+vaccinated have have the most hospitalizations ever recorded during pandemic.
Similarly in Hawaii we never ended restrictions, no freedom day for us for mask s etc with nearly 83% of adults vaccinated we're having the most cases ever.
In regards to mandate - i have no issue with private businesses (Your airplane comparison to smokers) doing their own thing. I 'm still against the mandate from the government as in my personal experience it degrades trust with communities especially taking into the colonial account of the island..
i work in public health vaccination drives and have heard every fear, question, concern possible - its a very complex issue.
the best way to convince an unvaxed individual I have found is the following;
'The known current risks associated with covid are greater than the risks associated with the vaccine. the disease is endemic and you will meet it in the future. Your choice is to meet it vaccinated or not. Being vaccinated will make it easier and milder.'
shaming does not work. Love, empathy, understanding, harm reduction models are more productive.
Given that there is a 5% rate of side effects that "prevented daily activities/work/required a medical visit" for each dose, some people are suggesting that the vaccine doses that were chosen were much too high; I even saw some report on Twitter showing good vaccine efficacy given 3 tiny doses (like 1% of a normal dose). Given that small doses would probably reduce these side effects and allow the entire world to be vaccinated, I hope small doses get more attention, quickly.
1. Not sure what you're talking about here. If you only want to allow people with vaccines to travel, a vaccine passport seems tautologically like it couldn't be counterproductive. As for dissuading trust, I mean, maybe, but Trust but Verify has been an iron law for a while now. Wouldn't you feel more comfortable knowing that people coming to your home were way less likely to be infected under this new regime?
2. Sure... but discriminatory against a body we want to reduce. That's like saying welfare programs are discriminatory against the poor, since hopefully it would make less of them. Something being discriminatory against a population isn't inherently bad, murder laws are discriminatory against the population of would-be murderers. (not saying people who don't get vacced are like murders, just making an analogy.)
3. Onerous... maybe? Setting up a national DB or giving out some kind of ID doesn't seem that onerous, but at scale it probably could be.
4. I guess, but I don't think anyone cares about stressing the capacity of natural immunity. As a society, we don't gain value by giving a shit about natural immunity.
5. In what sense? If you've been vaccinated or not? I don't see a major privacy issue here.
6. Vaccination status is currently a binary, I'm not sure what you're point here means.
7. Ok, but the opposite of that is unvaccinated people moving more freely throughout all of society which is also bad. The existence of people without immunity anywhere is the problem, not where they happen to be located.
8. Maybe... but this can be used to argue for or against any point. If the existence of controversy is enough to defeat any idea then nothing happens.
9. Citation? I haven't heard this. It also seems self-negating (assuming families are closed circles, how does the infection first happen?)
10. fair dinkum, mate. I think the vaccine reduces the duration of potential infection, though, correct? So it presumably decreases risk, but I'll give this point to you.
11. ok. My communitarian biases don't, but we can't fight our initial impulses.
Overall I think that the cost here is pretty little, the potential gain is sufficient (both in terms of reducing the potential number of infected people traveling and increasing trust from people in the areas being travelled to that their visitors aren't infected) that it's worth doing.
On July 21st, after a surge in cases (~10k% increase) caused by unvaccinated tourists, Malta started requiring proof of vaccination for all travellers (previously a negative PCR test was sufficient). At that point, the 7-day average case count was 203. One month later, it was down to 62. So vaccine passports do seem to work better than PCR tests, and the alternative of shutting down international travel altogether again would seem less liberal.
I don't understand what mechanism you are proposing where the purported decrease in tourism would lead to R < 1. I believe that the mechanism I am proposing, where keeping a low proportion of unvaccinated in the population leads to R < 1, is generally accepted.
Tourists by definition travel to many places and have contact with many people in the places they visit, so they are a vector for spread within a region. R = (# of contacts per unit time) * (probability of transmission per contact) * (duration of infection).
Vaccines affect the second and third factors, but tourism influences the first factor. So if tourism tanked you'd still see a drop in cases, even without any additional restrictions on who can visit.
For example, if Malta typically has 10,000 people visiting per day, but 9,000 of those cancelled their plans because of the surge you described, don't you think that would have a noticeable influence on R? I don't know what the actual numbers are, but it's a hypothesis that also fits the information you've provided.
I haven't heard of any cancellations based on fear of COVID, only of cancellations because of the restrictions (i.e. by those without vaccine passports). This lowers the probability that such cancellations are widespread. I suppose that in a couple of weeks, when the airport releases its August numbers, we will be able to rule out definitively the hypothesis that tourism declined by 90% between July and August. We already know that unvaccinated tourism declined by 100%.
Do you mean an actual passport, meaning a document that lets you travel interstate, or internationally? I'm a little bemused that that idea is even controversial, at least for international travel. When I was a kid I had occasion to travel (with my family) internationally, and it was routine that you needed documentation of certain vaccines to go to certain countries. I vaguely recall having a little yellow book, some kind of "International Vaccine Certificate" that my mother carried around with my passport. Different countries required different vaccines, and I remember one country in particular cost me about 3 separate visits to the doc's office to get stuck with needles. Boo.
Anyway, I think the concept is only really new and surprising to young First World people who have grown up for the past 30 years or so in a world in which infectious disease seemed to have been thoroughly vanquished. (Surprise! Turns out it wasn't...Mother Nature is a sneaky bitch.)
What you may want to ask yourself is: would your philosophical reasons stand, if COVID had a mortality rate like the Black Death (say 60-80%)? That is, if one person sneaking in from some other ravaged country could cause 80% of Honolulu to snuff it within a 4 weeks, say, would you still be firmly opposed to burdening that poor soul with the necessity to get a vaccine if he wanted to visit, and prove it? If your answer is "hell no!" then your opposition isn't really philosophical at all, it's practical -- you're just saying *in this particular case, for this particular disease* the civil liberties infringement is not worth the benefit to public health.
Unfortunately, if the core argument is practical, then reasonable men can disagree about the exact cost/benefit ratio required to support or oppose the idea, and it comes down to a lot of gritty detail, much of which is actually unknown because we lack the needed data.
3) Not at all. Everyone has smartphones, it's not hard. Plenty of places have implemented QR code passes.
4) "Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated." https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm7032e1_w
5) There's not really a way to quantify the value of privacy. But consider: how protective were you of your vaccination status (MMR, etc) in 2019?
6) This is a slippery slope fallacy.
7) The unvaxed would also be incentivized to get vaccinated.
8) Why would a private entity, say a bar or restaurant, implementing a vaccine mandate have any bearing on the public's trust in a public health institution?
9) So then you'd be in favor of them in high-risk areas, like indoor dining?
10) I'm not sure what you think sterilizing means.
11) It's good that you're upfront that this is your bias, but maybe try thinking about it this way: wouldn't it be governmental overreach to ban a private business owner from being able to run their business how they see fit, including their choice on requiring proof of vaccination? Why don't you value the freedom of business owners?
Re: Hawaii, only about half of the population of Hawaii has been vaccinated. All else equal, would the world be better if no other Hawaiian got vaccinated, or if every remaining Hawaiian got vaccinated? Again, all else equal. Forget the yeah-buts, forget that but-what-abouts, just all else equal. Is it better with no more vaccinations, or everyone getting more vaccinations?
1. Note on Counter Productive Nature of Vaccine Passport:
By creating division between both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations vaccine mandates public trust in institutions is damaged. Personally as a member of vaccination clinics I have met several individuals who are unvaccinated and are doubling down against vaccination because of loss of trust in government and feelings of coercion. Future health issues could be affected by this loss of trust. In Hawaii history of colonialism etc further complicates communicating and establishing trust with the most unvaccinated. Further loss of "privileges" and the carrot of a mask free society + the fear of booster infinity make it hard to connect.
Counter research to your note Research from across Europe shows that compelling people to take vaccines does not necessarily result in higher uptake of vaccines. Further, statistics show that the UK has some of the most positive attitudes towards vaccines across Europe, and that the top 5 European nations for positive attitudes towards vaccinations all have voluntary vaccination policies. The European nations with the most negative attitudes towards vaccinations include those with mandatory vaccination policies: Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia.
Here are two links by exploring the counter productive nature of passports:
Vax Passports Are a Bad Idea
— Prasad explores the balance of possible (but uncertain) health benefits and social harms
Covid-19 vaccine passports will harm sustainable development
British Medical Journal
”Vaccine passports interfere with that future as they create a structural barrier to sustainable development, benefiting only the few at the expense of so many.
2. Yes tautological but currently the most under n Hawaii the most under vaccinated populations are Filipino, Hawaiian American,and Black communities compared to Asian / White populations. In similar In New York CIty close to 60% Black Americans have not been vaccinated (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.page). One cannot support a policy that discriminates and segregates differences in vaccination by gender, race, or socioeconomics.The vaccine passport may serve to perpetuate inequality, segregation and structural racism.
3). Not everyone has smartphones. Age issues make it further complex. I work in public health and technology is a major issue with under vaccinated populations. Luckily the over 65 we've hit probably close to 87% vaccinated so this seems mute.
4) There are several studies comparing natural vs vaccine infection and is complex. I agree though looks like getting someone who had natural immunity is benefited from vaccination.
5) My Vaccination Status in 2019 was on a old piece of paper. My daughter's is digital. The COVID vaccine passport is presented everytime you enter a restaurant/etc and linked to a digital system.
6). The entire COVID panedmic has been a slippery slope. To me I could accept a vaccine passport if it had a clear end date / end target (say 80% Vaccination etc) and review.
7) Herding leads t o echo chambers. Having unvaxxed see vaxxed living healthy post vaccination is best way to convince them against their fears at least in my opinion. I'd like to see data from NYC on how their vaccine passport program is affecting vaccination rates.
8) Talking to unvax individuals, there are flash points of aggression. IE: ustomers angry, new labor costs with staff/ownership of not wanting the role of health bouncer/enforcer with potential for aggression & flash points at premises doors. Few want to operate in a checkpoint society where you need to show ID/Vax cards daily. Similarly individuals who the very same people who just months ago claimed voter ID is racist because minorities don't have IDs are suddenly acknowledging everyone needs ID creating further distrust.
9). I think employer mandates and targeted vaccines drives are more productive. Most contagion occurs within the household unit and less cases are from restaurants/public spaces in contract tracing data from Hawaii.
10) Sterilizing in vaccination means that it cuts transmission. Vaccinated individuals are spreading COVID making vaccine passports essentially worthless. If both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals can spread disease then there is limited logic in such an intervention...
11) Yes. I have no problem with individual business decisions to mandate vaccine requirements. I find the top down approach in effective.
>>
Re Hawaii: Hawaii has 69% of general population vaccinated with 1 shot , 62% with Full. This is for all ages. Eliminate the kids and we already have the majority of at risk individuals vaccinated so to be targeting a vaccine mandate program that would benefit the wealthiest individuals on the island who are already vaccinated probably is a distraction from other interventions that could be more effective.
Its funny the strongest argument FOR a vaccine passport appeals to the left authoritarian in me: A successful vaccine passport system could provide the government an opportunity to nudge other health outcomes. For example, individuals with a high body mass index could be limited in the types of restaurants they visit or purchase. Alcoholics could be restricted in entering bars. Similarly individuals with other communicable diseases could be tracked to ensure they do not cause spread within public settings expanding Vaccine Passport access points shifting.
Ultimately the disease is moving to endemic stage and the vaccines are serving more as a prophylaxis against serious outcome.
So as Tyler Cowen says : Just get vaccinated and live your life.
> 8) Talking to unvax individuals, there are flash points of aggression. IE: ustomers angry, new labor costs with staff/ownership of not wanting the role of health bouncer/enforcer with potential for aggression & flash points at premises doors. Few want to operate in a checkpoint society where you need to show ID/Vax cards daily. Similarly individuals who the very same people who just months ago claimed voter ID is racist because minorities don't have IDs are suddenly acknowledging everyone needs ID creating further distrust.
I think this runs together several discussions that are often run together, but need to be separated.
Right now you need to show a drivers license if stopped by a police officer while driving. You need to show a proof of age (in practice, usually drivers license, but occasionally passport) if you want to buy alcohol or tobacco or cannabis. You need to show proof of employment eligibility (usually Social Security card, sometimes passport) if you want to start a new job. In many states you are required to show ID (usually drivers license, but some other forms are allowed) in order to vote. You need to show proof of vaccination (usually MMR and/or meningitis) if you want to enroll in elementary school or university. You need to show proof of identity to board an airplane (usually drivers license domestically, and passport internationally, with special visas and vaccination certificate sometimes required depending on origin and destination countries).
All of this suggests that we already live in a "checkpoint society" where you need to show ID/vax cards daily - just that most of the purposes are served by the drivers license and only a few require vaccination or passport.
Some people have pointed to this fact and said that extending the ID requirement to voting is a small enough imposition, because voting is a rare enough activity, and enough people have ID already because of the other things. The response that is usually given is that voting is an important enough activity, and the forms of ID that are required are usually enough of a hassle and cost to get, that it's not worth the benefit.
Putting vaccination requirements on stores, restaurants, and concerts would be making the requirement stricter. But the vaccination card is much easier to get than a drivers license (for instance, in most states, you can get a vaccinator to come to your address for free to give the vaccine, if you and four other people are willing to get vaccinated - and if not, you can still go to any CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, or many other common chains and get it for free, rather than having one location per county as with other IDs).
I think most current opponents of voter ID would drop their opposition if it were as easy for everyone to get a free voter ID as it is for everyone to get vaccinated. (Though I haven't actually checked whether getting vaccinated requires the same sort of ID that voter ID laws do, in which case this really is a problematic imposition.)
I have been doing a lot of reading about trying to create an AI that has the somatic responses of human beings which I guess is the issue I’m hung up on. So I’ve been trying to educate myself to the state of the art. In light of this. I realize some of my comments are a little like a middle schooler sitting in on a PhD class and asking rather dopey questions. I’m a little embarrassed.
However I am struck by two threads in these comments; discussion of AGI And the questions about parenting and what might be the most effective way to raise one’s child.
That’s kind of fascinating in itself to me.
I have raised a couple of kids and some of the issues seem to really crossover
THE WILL TO LIVE is a subject that I raised earlier in this thread, in the context of AGI.
I received some very instructive replies which I appreciated. As I mentioned in that post, I have no scientific or mathematical training.
Certain people were kind enough to indulge me and explain things to me.
The best lesson was someone pointing out to me that a self driving car behaved very much like something that had a will to live. That was very sharp.
So I’ve been pondering.
I would like to amend my inquiry:
The Will to Power.
How does that unfold in the pursuit of general artificial intelligence?
What if there is a trait such that
(1) net worth and STEM citations are strongly correlated with the trait
(2) the trait is strongly inheritable
(3) there are visible external characteristics correlated with the trait?
I suspect this might be true for IQ and to a lesser degree height. What should a moral society do at that point?
Intresting question. Well like today, we have fat and slim people. Fat people are still made fun of all time, even though they shouldn't be. In a moral society, people would still be treated the same even though they would be able to tell who is richer or poorer depending on how they look. But what is likely to happen is that people will prefer to date/hang out with someone with the "rich"-looking trait than the one of the poor looking trait.
In choosing a spouse, surely being overweight or impoverished would (should?) make a difference. There may be benefits to holding less superficial values, but likewise for observing these common biases.
To what extent is choosing friends/acquaintances/business partners a matter of degree vs a fundamental difference?
At a certain point in my life the defining characteristic of choosing a spouse was the attribute of kindness
What if some politically influential parts of society complain about racial inequity?
Usually they make the assumption that the distributions of intellectual ability or aggressiveness are the same for all the visibly identifiable subpopulations. And a logically consistent person who shares that assumption would have arrive at the same conclusion.
Scott you are one of the few American Jewish public figures who has talked about the Jewish intellect without being apologetic.
It's understandable that many Jews shy away from this topic; after all gentile geniuses tend to be excessively humble too.
Do you think there are differences on average between the various gentile ethnic groups?
If you think there are such differences do you think the general public should be educated about it to counter the racial inequity narrative?
Also in a country that provides a lot of assistance to the poor citizens do you think everyone should have the right to make as many little citizens as they want? Or maybe depending on their genetics that should be controlled?
https://scitechdaily.com/inescapable-covid-19-antibody-discovery-neutralizes-all-known-sars-cov-2-strains/amp/
Is this nonsense or worth pating attention to?
paying….
I wonder if anyone's done further research into nBack intelligence.
Gwen has done a terrifying amount:
https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ
The high level takeaway I got was that it doesn't seem to generalize to tasks other than nBack.
As in, nBack as a method to increase IQ.
When do you think people will develop the ability to artificially create zygotes with given nDNA and mtDNA?
So for example babies with Yoruba skin, Dutch height, Ashkenazi intelligence and Japanese eyes?
Also when do you think artificial wombs will be available?
has anyone else stopped getting emails of new posts?
I'm frustrated and sad that good things I liked might end or might at least be different because people I liked did dumb shit.
Current Affairs was my favourite magazine, but then NJR handled the recent staff thing really badly (he flip flopped on how much authority he wanted, it blew up during a hiring decision between two great candidates—the biggest waste is that the candidate he liked would have been the staff's fave too he just didn't want the decision to be democratic anymore!). Now Lyta, Nate, and Adrian have all written open letters about it and the mainstream and conservative media are talking about it and not all publicity is good publicity, and who knows if the magazine'll even last.
Aubrey de Grey's the bearded longevity-research guy who founded the SENS foundation. Now there are sexual harassment allegations against him; who knows how it'll turn out, but also he idiotically interfered with the investigation (emailing a mutual of one of the allegers to persuade her to implicate someone else, instead of just talking to the investigator), so SENS obviously had to let him go. His idiotic decision is bad for himself of course but also bad for longevity research, which really needs to behave professionally to get respect and shake its image as just, idk, Peter Thiel's rich-people-out-of-touch-with-normal-people's-struggles-pipe-dream, and show that it's a safe and thriving place for young scientists including women to work.
David Sabatini, another big name longevity-research guy (an expert on rapamycin and mTOR) also just got let go from the Whitehead Institute for sexual harassment allegations, and in this case the reaction on twitter makes it sound like it was a really open secret so I'm guessing that they're true whatever they are (no details are public).
The pandemic has done disproportionate damage to worse-off people. What would pandemic response look like in a more egalitarian society? How would risky in-person work be handled?
What David Piepgrass said. As for risky in-person work, what couldn't be eliminated might be done by volunteers from the less vulnerable part of the population (young, healthy), being paid a significant risk premium - and supplied with decent PPE.
Of course this implies that old Joe with emphysema, the expert/foreman in the meat packing plant, would be able to get his income replaced while not working, and/or training for a new role. That would be a very hard sell in the US. And probably a hard sell to him too; few people want to become newbs again.
It's arguable that the reason stockpiles of PPE were inadequate at the start of this was the never ending drive for higher profits and lower costs. I see recent stock market darlings causing major damage locally (hello, PG&E) by cutting corners in the past to enhance their bottom line. There's no reason a government should do the same, not being driven by profit - except that habits of thinking may not follow logic. Hence the expired and non-existent items in US and other government stockpiles.
So there might actually have been adequate PPE at the start of this, at least for those with the highest risk work (treating the sick).
If the concept of "egalitarian" could include the culture of the people themselves, we'd have a lot less Covid going around since people would take vaccines to help their community reach herd immunity. I watched a guy named Yuri yesterday, friend of Weinstein, debunking lots of claims by Weinstein. I thought he did a good job, but he made classic mistakes like decrying the anti-vax campaign as immortal because it's, you know, killing people. Well, judging by YouTube comments, most red tribe members couldn't hear anything he said after that.
An egalitarian society would say "Covid tests are free, and if you catch Covid we'll pay for you to quarantine in a hotel and immediately pay replacement wages for the work you missed. Also, we need you to think hard about who you came into contact with so they can be tested immediately."
Responding to Carl Pham:
How long was it that the English tried to ride Herd on the Irish?
It’s not over yet but, let’s face it, you can’t say the BRITs walked away winning.
At the very least the Irish stole the English language and transcended it.
Totally tribal moment…
😆
> The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon.
I don’t think that’s how it worked out in the end
> Oh come on. Where's the National Socialist German Worker's Party these days? What happened to Tojo? The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon, home guerilla advantage notwithstanding. There are no Nationalists left in mainland China, and no followers of the late President Thieu bombing the occasional railroad bridge in Vietnam. It is certainly possible to win against a weaker opponent even if he's got the home-ground advantage, can melt into the countryside, is willing to live in caves and eat rats and don suicide bomb vests. It's entirely possible to wipe those people out, root and branch. But it requires focus and commitment, and quite often some pretty ugly decisions. You have to be damn sure that's what you want to do. Being half-assed about it, and not entirely certain what you're trying to achieve definitely doesn't work, and never has.
I don’t think that all of your cited examples are at all applicable.
Nazi Germany certainly not, China, certainly not.
The one exception is Vietnam, and we all know how that turned out.
That kind of war is a waiting game.
And a test of commitment.
Am I the only one that gets this issue, where I get an email that someone has replied to me and I hit reply and for a brief moment my comment is highlighted on my screen and then it defaults to some random place in the order of comments?
But meet us halfway and at least tell us what email software you are using!
Mail on IOS
Sorry, not an IOS user...but maybe David is!
This is a pretty good indication that there is something about mail in iOS and the comment section here that doesn’t play nice together. I will try it on my computer and see if it persists there.
You're not alone.
Sometimes people's blood pressure drops after eating. For some of those people, it drops into dangerous territory, but I wonder whether eating frequently would help some people lower high blood pressure.
I work as a contractor for the US Federal Government, and their rollout of the vaccine mandate has been troubled to say the least. A brief timeline:
2 weeks ago: They are developing a plan to implement Biden's executive order requiring vaccines or recent COVID testing to enter Federal facilities. More information will be released soon.
Yesterday: Starting two days from now, everyone must either sign a sworn affidavit saying they are fully vaccinated or provide a negative COVID test taken within the last 3 days. They aren't sharing vital details like who will pay for the tests, how security officers will evaluate COVID testing results, how they will verify who has signed the affidavit, and how this won't cause massive delays as hundreds of employees enter the building at the start of the shift. You still need a test even if you have received a vaccine if it has been less than two weeks since your last dose, providing an incentive to get J&J rather than Pfizer/Moderna. Most of this doesn't matter though, as most of the unvaccinated will just lie on the form knowing there probably won't be any negative consequences for doing so.
Today: Implementation of the mandate has been delayed. More information will be released soon.
Scott's recent "cost-benefit analysis are not done often enough" (paraphrased) made me think of this 1999 paper.
Parachuting for charity: is it worth the money? A 5-year audit of parachute injuries in Tayside and the cost to the NHS https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10476298/
Conclusion: Parachuting for charity costs more money than it raises, carries a high risk of serious personal injury and places a significant burden on health resources.
On the other hand, it seems like it's effectively an inefficient way to transfer money from NHS to your preferred cause.
"The Deeper Crisis Behind the Afghan Rout: Observers abroad see the culmination of decades of American incompetence." By Walter Russel Mead | August 23, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghan-rout-crisis-foreign-policy-forever-war-jihadist-taliban-biden-allies-moscow-beijing-11629750508
* * *
This isn’t a conventional credibility crisis of the kind President Obama faced when he backed down from his Syrian red line. America has demonstrated its commitment to Afghanistan for 20 years and had no treaty obligation to defend the former Afghan government. A competently executed withdrawal could have enhanced American credibility among some Pacific allies, especially if it was accompanied by clear steps to build up U.S. forces in East Asia.
The Afghan debacle doesn’t create a crisis of belief in American military credibility. Informed global observers don’t doubt our willingness to strike back if attacked. The debacle feeds something much more serious and harder to fix: the belief that the U.S. cannot develop—and stick to—policies that work.
Neither allies nor adversaries expected perfection in Afghanistan. Mr. Biden was right to say that the end of a war is inevitably going to involve a certain amount of chaos, and world leaders likely didn’t anticipate a seamless transition. They did, however, expect that after two decades of intimate cooperation with Afghan political and military forces, the U.S. wouldn’t be blindsided by a national collapse. They didn’t think Washington would stumble into a massive and messy evacuation crisis without a shadow of a plan. They didn’t expect the Biden team to have to beg the Taliban to help get Americans out.
It all fuels fears that the U.S. is incapable of persistent, competent policy making in ways that will be hard to reverse. It seems increasingly evident that despite, or perhaps because of, all the credentialed bureaucrats and elaborate planning processes in the Washington policy machine, the U.S. government isn’t good at producing foreign policy. “Dumkirk,” as the New York Post called the withdrawal, follows 20 years of incoherent Afghanistan policy making. Neither the past two decades nor the past two weeks demonstrate American wisdom or the efficacy of the byzantine bureaucratic ballet out of which U.S. policy emerges.
* * *
I think everyone realises it was always going to be a mess, but the question is, was it more of a mess than it needed to be? Right now, while it's not great, the Taliban seem to be relatively keeping their heads down (yes, they're executing police chiefs and hunting down journalists, but they're not on a rampage as yet) so it's bad but not rivers of blood bad yet.
And I think that "yet" is what we're all waiting to see: once the Western forces and Western civilians are gone, and it's just the Taliban, what are they going to do?
I can't really blame the army for collapsing as it did; it seems (and again, I'm only going by what the news is telling me, and who knows how true that is?) that any of the officers who had personal power-bases before the US came along to prop up a puppet regime, or who are convinced anti-Taliban, have headed north or back to their own tribal bases to start a resistance, rather than staying and fighting with the army in the expected, conventional sense - and that's probably part of the problem right there, that they trust their own tribal alliances or their own picked men, rather than having any confidence in the troops under them and the army as a coherent national force.
For the rest of the soldiers, it's "stand and fight, but when the government is handed over to the Taliban - and they're already in discussions about handing it over - then anybody who fought the Taliban is for the chop" so of course they got out as fast as they could. Wearing the uniform is painting a target on your back. Why stay and fight for a regime that is already working on surrendering?
https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-the-latest-d832920fb7b00d6d9bd5e54fd7fc3ef5
It's interesting that Hamid Karzai is still a power broker - so, did the Americans back the wrong horse with Ashraf Ghani, or was it a case of "at the time he suited our purposes"?
I've also read that the Afghan army wasn't getting food and ammunition.
See Carl Pham's comment below. You can decide to leave the party, and take your glass and your plate into the kitchen, and find the hostess and thank her for the lovely evening. Or you can sneak out without cleaning up or saying anything to anyone.
I'm trying to find background on Ghani and why he fled but Karzai is apparently secure enough to not alone stay, but be involved in talks, and reading the Wikipedia article on him is just one 🤦♀️ after another:
"He is also the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an American organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens.
In 2005 ...Ghani gave a TED talk in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan
Ghani ran in the 2014 presidential election securing less votes than rival Abdullah Abdullah in the first round, but winning a majority in the second round. Following political chaos, the United States intervened to form a unity government."
I swear, the main difference I see between Ghani - who was conciliatory in speech at least towards the Taliban - and Kharzi - who actively fought against them, yet one has to flee and the other can remain in the country, is their relations with Pakistan: Ghani was cool to frigid with them, Kharzi was on good terms.
Which does sound more like Pakistan pulling the strings of the Taliban. Which is its own entire problem, because this is more smoke and mirrors - what you or don't do when you're negotiating with the Taliban may be an entire waste if Pakistan is in the background putting its thumb on the scales.
Sorry, misspelling the man's name, he's Karzai not Kharzi (no idea where that one came from).
I don't usually support Biden, but in pulling out of Afghanistan, he showed political courage and far sightedness. The fall of Kabul is often compared to the fall of Saigon, but the lesson of Saigon isn't that the US should have stayed bogged down in Vietnam for another 20 years. It's that the US should have pulled out much sooner. As Biden said:
"We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong — incredibly well equipped — a force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force — something the Taliban doesn’t have. Taliban does not have an air force. We provided close air support. We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future."
Despite the overwhelming financial and military advantages the US gave the Afghan government, the Taliban overran the entire country in just weeks, taking half the country in just a few days. Why? Because 99% of the population supports Sharia. 92% of Afghan *women* support wife beating (https://www.prb.org/resources/most-women-in-afghanistan-justify-domestic-violence/). 79% of Afghans think you should be killed for leaving Islam. Why would Afghans support an immoral, corrupt, incompetent, foreign-backed infidel puppet regime with values diametrically opposite to their own? One that can't even deliver internal peace, the most basic requirement of any state? One propped up by warlords with child sex slaves (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/world/asia/us-soldiers-told-to-ignore-afghan-allies-abuse-of-boys.html)? The Afghan puppet regime had no legitimacy. The Taliban does, because the people support its brutal theocratic values.
The Afghan people got the government they wanted. If the Taliban ends the 50 year long civil war, puts an end to the child sex slavery, and provides even the most basic government services, they will have done more for Afghanistan than any government since at least the Soviet invasion of 1979.
Kind of a straw man there. The criticism by Sobchak, which mirrors the general criticism, is not the "what" (concluding the mission in Afghanistan) but the "how." President Biden asserts, laughably, that there was *no* better way to leave then the way we did, or else he moves the goalposts to suggest that those who suggest he royally screwed the pooch on the "how" are arguing about the "what." They're not, and it's dishonest to say they are.
So what better way was there to leave? The WSJ article puts forth no alternative proposal in the non-paywalled portion, even though it's 5 paragraphs long. The moment the US started withdrawing, the Taliban was going to go on the offensive. Judging by recent events, they would have quickly captured the country. It wouldn't have mattered if the US left in 2021, 2030, or 2085. There are people who say Biden pulled out too quickly, but they rarely say how long he should have stayed, if 20 years wasn't slow enough.
Biden did the right thing. A lesser president would have balked at the prospect of the Taliban capturing Kabul on his watch and kicked the can down the road, as the previous 4 presidents did, causing more death and destruction on all sides. Biden ripped the band-aid off quickly and took the political hit for the benefit of the United States--and ultimately, for the benefit of Afghanistan.
> So what better way was there to leave?
Well, at the very minimum, Biden could've ordered all of our equipment and materiel to be destroyed, rather than just allow the Taliban to take it. But that's a pretty low bar; in general, a more gradual withdrawal, covered by continuous airstrikes, would've been more effective (though admittedly more expensive).
Previous *four* presidents? I only count three - Bush/Obama/Trump. September 11 happened in the first year of Bush's term.
You're right, I was thinking that Biden is the 4th president to fight the war.
For start, do not leave helicopters and other equipment for talibs to cpature. Evacuate people they want to evacuate earlier.
Admit that Afghanistan failed and country would collapse, at least internally.
Though likely it would be rated worse by public than current mess.
The US forces attacking the Afgan army to seize the equipment they had previously given them certainly would be a controversial move.
I am pretty sure that just taking it would work fine. Though that would require admitting that Afghan army is a 100% failure.
Yeah no. I'm pretty sure CENTCOM could have come up with a plan that was loads better than what actually happened. Give me command of 30,000 Marines and associated equipment and even I could do it better.
What plan would that be? What experience do you have commanding large armies? Which wars have you fought and won? Just asserting that you can do better than the professionals of the world's most powerful army isn't very convincing.
”Which wars have you fought and won?" —
Man, that's a bold question
I have no experience at all. Which is why I said "even I could do it better." I'm 100% sure the "professionals of the world's most powerful army" could've done it a million times better -- had the President allowed them to do so. But as many stories in the media will tell you, he did not, so all their planning chops were in the event moot.
I think every person working for Central Command, from General McKenzie, could have individually come up with a better plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan; but the organization itself might not.
It's structural: The service chiefs by airplanes, ships, train personnel, do all the work of building a military.
(Another time, we can talk about how this is an incentive for the service chiefs to waste money on useless crap like LCS.)
Then the combatant commanders compete with each other to see who can get the biggest slice of that pie. Aren't they supposed to be competing with China and Al-Qaeda and drug dealers, instead of each other?
I know the seriousness of the charge I'm making (and I really want to emphasize this is a *Meditations on Moloch* style bad system, not a matter of any individual being dishonorable).
But the logic is inescapable. If Central Command's priorities had been twisted by bad incentives to maintain or increase justification for manpower and material Indo Pacific Command also wants, that is it incentive to spend less effort building an Afghan army that can stand on its own and more effort giving them support only we can provide like close air support or air-dropped logistical delivery.
Most importantly, it's an institutional motivation for CENTCOM, the United States military command responsible for Afghanistan, to always be putting off asking the Afghan army to defeat the Taliban; to always find a reason to stay; to never quite be willing to prepare to leave.
And I know that's a shitty motivation and doesn't make Central Command look great. But Central Command has been overseeing all US military activity in the Middle East for the entire time we've been in Afghanistan. If Im mistaken about the combatant commander having an incentive to prolong the conflict, that's means they we're trying to defeat the Taliban the whole time...and failed
What cities in the US would approximately meet these criteria?
Deal makers/breaks:
- Must have good weather (= sunshine) almost round the year (e.g., Miami).
- No snow.
- Must not be in H(awaii)ST (Also, e.g., Miami)
- Must be located in an urban or urban-adjacent location (e.g., San Antonio, TX)
- Must not be poised to get a lot worse climate-wise over the next 10-20 years (excessive heat, more storms, more rains, or floods).
- Must not sit on a geographical fault-line that could going to go boom someday "soon" ;-) (e.g., SFO)
- The local politics must not be the "bubble" kind. That is, it can be right-leaning or left-leaning - but (a) it should not be extreme in either direction and (b) it shouldn't be filled with insular people who have no idea how to get along with 'the others'.
- Must have fiber optic internet generally and easily available.
Strong preferences:
- Should not be in EST (e.g., Miami, NYC are all too far away from the tech-coast, time-zone wise. Might work though).
- Should be near a major or a minor tech center (there used to be only 2.5 tech-centers in the US namely SFO, SEA, NYC, but there are more now). If any of FAANG has a local development office, that's a very good sign.
- Should be cheaper than SFO, SEA, NYC :-)
- Should have direct flights to SFO and SEA (this is just a corollary to 'should be near a minor tech center')
- Should have highbrow culture (theatre, music etc.).
- Should have Amazon Prime easily available in most places ;-)
- Should be low crime, culturally diverse, and expected to sustain these characteristics over the long term (20 year outlook).
I bet Albuquerque NM fits most if not all of these criteria!
It snows in Albuquerque, it's not really a tech center (though Sandia is there), and it has high crime rates.
Have you thought about dangerous flora and fauna? I grew up outside of the range of most poisonous snakes, insects carrying dangerous diseases, and insects dangerous in themselves. The prevalence of hazards of this kind seems to be increasing over most of the continental US, partly due to non-native pests spreading, and partly due to warmer winters. And unlike larger dangerous fauna (bears etc.) the smaller dangerous pests often do quite well in (sub)urban areas - which is where you'll be if you want highbrow culture and a good internet connection.
Miami's weather in the summer (which lasts 6+ months) is pretty bad. The heat is oppressive and there are daily (brief) thunderstorms. A matter of taste, plenty of people do prefer it to colder climates.
lol no, Miami is not a serious option. Thunderstorms are ok, but the humidity turns out to be too hard for us.
sounds like you just described Raleigh NC! (though there is a tiny amount of snow)
Raleigh is interesting. It's a great idea and seems like an emerging tech corridor. I have to research its potential a bit though in terms of how it will fare over time. I think Atlanta has been getting a lot of recent tech investments/hiring in the south and I wonder if Raleigh is going to keep on being a university-city sized tech-town...
Raleigh will definitely continue to grow. Look up the AI/ML campus that Apple is building. UNC comp sci is great, as is Duke's department, and its a great place to live (driveable to NE and south, good airport, cheap COL, good housing, minimal culture war, close to the outer banks and the NC mountains, amazing in-state schools and tuition deals, good weather), so high human capital people will stay if there are jobs (and they already are). Google also has teams in Raleigh/CH because of all the comp sci profs. I would take the pair trade of Raleigh v Atlanta over the next two decades in a heartbeat. If I were going to start a co in a non-target city I would prob do it in Raleigh.
San Diego.
"Must not be poised to get a lot worse climate-wise over the next 10-20 years (excessive heat, more storms, more rains, or floods)."
Alarmist rhetoric greatly exaggerates the speed of climate change. Global warming so far, since 1913, has been less than one and a half degrees C. It may have speeded up more recently, but in 10-20 years it is unlikely to change the temperature of any city by enough to be visible through the noise of random variation. That fact is obscured by the tendency of the media to blame any unpleasant weather on climate change. Similarly, the high end of the IPCC sea level rise projection for the end of the century, as of the 5th report, was about half the difference between high tide and low tide — there are not many places where that makes much of a difference, and your concern is with a much shorter time period.
As annoyed as I am by climate science deniers, I do think the media has often exaggerated the threat. For instance, the common ECS estimate of doubling CO2 causing 3°C warming is something that is supposed to happen over hundreds of years, and the media often leaves out the "hundreds of years" part while failing to report the shorter-term warming expectation (TCR) which is more in the neighborhood of 1.75°C. I am more concerned with the effect of warming in more southern locations that didn't cause the warming - the Philippines, Central America, etc.
I am willing to put some money on a bet that the California climate will get worse over the next 10 years. Specifically:
* The summer temperature records will be beaten, then beaten again, several times.
* Seasonal wildfires will continue at their current level of severity, or increase in severity (until, of course, there's nothing left to burn)
* The current drought conditions will at least persist, and likely worsen.
* Air quality will continue to drop, as a consequence of the above.
I would also add that I perceive the climate where I live - very close to David Friedman - to have gotten somewhat worse in the 24 years I've lived here. I use air conditioning more. I experience more smoke days. (None noticeable in my first decade here.) I'm not sure whether drought being more common is climate change or coincidence - I moved here during an unusually wet year, which somewhat affected my expectations. But watering restrictions are now a constant presence.
It's also changed (for good or ill), such that plants that used to be grown commercially here no longer set fruit longer reliably enough to be worth growing locally. (Of course growers would probably have moved anyway, since (sub)urban growth means the land is currently more valuable with buildings than with orchards.)
What we haven't seen locally is catastrophic levels of change, though some of those burnt out of semi-local areas may disagree. People are not dying of heatstroke in extended periods of bad weather, except for the usual desert hiking mishaps (not all that local to me). People aren't being flooded out of their homes. We aren't having once in a century major storms. We're still only seeing those things as news coverage.
What isn't being grown locally?
The only thing I know of that A) was grown locally and B) has some trouble growing now is lady apples, but they were (and presumably still are - you see them in the grocery stores) grown in orchards in the hills, and the only place I've seen them have trouble growing is our yard (great harvest this year though - and most years, I'd guess our tree only fails to set fruit one year in three or so) which is... not in the hills. It's a significant climate difference!
There's definitely less good fresh fruit around than when I was a kid, but as far as I can tell it's mostly a "we need the land for houses" problem (so the farms get pushed farther out), not a "the tree won't grow/bear fruit here" problem, with an added-in "the Cosintino brothers retired, and none of their kids wanted the business, so the best produce shop closed despite being profitable" problem. (Why none of the local chains expanded to fill the niche I can't answer - my best guess is that sourcing good produce is hard.)
Are you thinking of a Central Valley problem, maybe? Because Silicon Valley was Prune Valley, and all kinds of plums and apricots still grow here really well - cherries too. It's just that's not the land's main value now. But I don't know the Central Valley as well.
I was thinking of cherries, and my understanding there was that they'd gone unreliable, though of course there was the double whammy of people wanting the land for houses, offices, etc.
I haven't studied the history, but...
We get a reliable crop from every cherry tree except one of the two Dad planted without knowing if they would bear in our zone (answer: one yes, one no) every year. We'll have a reliable crop from that one too when Dad finishes mastering grafting. I don't know that we're using the commercial varieties, mind, we have less variety in cherries than apricots or peaches, but my understanding is our sweet cherry was dead standard when we put it in, which was probably between twenty and twenty-five years ago - it was one of Dad's first. It's had various health problems - it's getting to be an older tree and we're a lot better at planting than at troubleshooting problems, especially fifteen feet above our heads - but fruit set has never been one of them.
It's possible someone was planting marginal varieties (but why? A variety that's seriously marginal now was mildly marginal twenty years ago, nobody but crazy amateurs* plants trees that won't bear even one year in ten), or that it's a problem in Gilroy, or somewhere else hotter than here - my Gilroy friends who have fruit trees do fine *but* the only cherry I know was bought recently so is presumably a modern variety - I don't know any 20-year-old cherry trees anywhere but here. But um, at least one point of evidence against.
(... and if you ever want to plant your own cherry tree, I promise you should be able to get a good one that will still bear perfectly. No such promises on apples, though; our successes are all weird so no good data on exactly how warm they go.)
*like us.
Water restrictions are more common for a simple and obvious reason: California's water infrastructure was designed in the 50s, mostly built between 1960 and 1975, and hasn't had any major addition at all since 1997. Meanwhile, the state's population grew from 16 million in 1960 to 30 million in 1990 to 40 million today. Simple math tells you the rest.
So population +25% in rather longer than the time period that concerns me (1997-2021), with these numbers applying to the whole state.
That could potentially explain a lot.
The *worldwide average* warming has been 1.5 °C, but there's much more warming over land than over water, and at medium and high latitudes than near the equator, so the amount of warming on temperate-zone land has been more like 5 °C, which is nothing to scoff at (it means that 35 °C days are as common as 30 °C days used to be, 30 °C as common as 25 °C used to be -- actually even more than that, as the variance has also increased as well as the average)
Er, the worldwide average warming has been more like 1.1°C with 1.6°C over land.
Generally those figures look much too high to me, but I would say scientists are bad at marketing, otherwise we'd be talking about the Paris target of 5°F land warming instead of the equivalent 2°C global warming.
I will continue to work on learning more about this, although I'd been under the (perhaps mistaken) impression that I was both well read and clearheaded about the topic of climate change.
Perhaps my time horizon should be longer than 20 years, and I should think about a 40–60-year time-span.
Sea level is not my only concern, although it's an important consideration. Things like drought/water table (and relative population vs water consumption, think problems in CA), abundance of electricity availability (think TX and local problems specific to its grids) etc are also of concern to me. Some of these can be overcome (TX for e.g, one can just install a generator) but others are harder to overcome (like drought).
If you're looking at shorter time horizons, drought is still something to worry about. The Colorado river has been overdrawn from for the past century, and the latest droughts (which may or may not be exacerbated by climate change) have not helped that situation.
On the other hand, I'm uncertain if that affects your average city-person (it seems like a much bigger problem for farmers). Water regulators might start metering and charging for excessive use, but I don't see Americans in major cities dying of thirst.
Buying a generator may keep your AC on, but a power outage means you're not getting internet. I'm assuming your career is computer-related (since you specified fiber optic internet as a deal breaker), so maybe put weight on avoiding counties/states that can't keep the lights on.
I'm pretty sure you ruled out everything. You'll need to relax your constraints.
Thanks - I'm open to it. For e.g., sporadic snow may be something I'm willing to handle. I live in the Pacific NW now and have live in British Columbia near the US/WA border in the past, I can easily work with some snow each year.
For e.g., I've been toying with Austin, TX and nearby places as a potential option. It meets most of the expectations, expect it gets some snow, power is a bit wonky but can be worked around if willing to own a home generator. Climate is the big question-mark in Austin and makes me hesitate.
As DLR has suggested, Tucson is a nice idea, and Melvin's suggestion of San Diego also seems like a good choice modulo wildfire smoke problems (which can be worked around a bit with full A/C in a house).
I used to think that Portland, OR could be a nice option, until Portlandia stopped being a parody :-( I used to really enjoy driving down to Portland, NewPort etc. to see friends and it was such a nice place 10-12 years ago. Sigh.
In terms of heat, drought, fire and cost of living, Oregon is well on its way to becoming Northern Northern California. To me that's much worse than it being a political/cultural bubble.
Tucson might work for you. Or Santa Fe.
Santa Fe probably gets too much snow -- a half dozen or so snow events, sometimes of a foot or so. I'm from Tucson and like it well enough, though it's pretty hot, bigger than I'd like, and water is an issue. The mountains are close enough for relatively easy summer day trips, which is nice.
Thanks DLR & Molly - Tucson sounds like a nice idea to research further.
Sunshine all year round plus no East Coast narrows things down to the south-west quadrant of the country pretty quickly.
I don't believe the climate will get significantly worse anywhere over the next 10-20 years since it hasn't over the last 10-20.
All the inland cities in the Southwest are too hot and culturally not great.
Los Angeles is too expensive (except in the really sucky bits) and too earthquake prone.
I think your shortlist might be San Diego or San Diego.
Anything north of LA in CA is likely to be negatively affected by wildfires in the coming years: dense smoke, power blackouts, freeway closures, and, of course, the actual fire (depending on location). These negative effects will be sporadic, however.
Thanks Melvin & Bugmaster. I visited San Diego years ago and enjoyed it, and my wife was on a conf trip and also liked it well enough. It has great Italian food which is a huge plus ;-) for us - we'll have to think about it some. We're in PNW so already familiar with fire+smoke problems - that's definitely a downside. Also worried about drought + water availability problems long term. I grew up in Chennai/Madras and never want to deal with water availability problems in my life again if I can avoid it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Chennai_water_crisis was the culmination).
Life is a bit more complicated (and correspondingly a lot more fun) when factoring in a significant other ;-) If I were single, this would be easier. If my spouse had no roots in the US and were an immigrant like me, perhaps this would be easier as well. If she didn't have strong opinions or a career to think about, this would be easier yet. If we didn't have to optimize for future needs like older in-laws potentially moving nearby, things might be simpler. And so on...
I've spent plenty of time in the cold, from childhood trips to Badrinath the Himalayas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badrinath - I don't recall the oxygen levels being a problem, I was running around and didn't skip a beat, no idea why everybody thinks 10k ft is a big deal) to walking around in downtown Montreal on New Years Eve in -30C ;-) I've also spent plenty of time in Equitorial places in 105F heat. I've become soft and comfortable now, so that's what I'm looking for next :D
ACX has covered progeria and aging before, so perhaps some will be interested in a new paper that helped co-author that investigated the underlying cause of disease. Hope you enjoy!
"Nuclear membrane ruptures underlie the vascular pathology in a mouse model of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome" Link: https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/151515
How effective are vaccines against long COIVD?
I'm in the UK and, like most, received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. It seems pretty clear that the UK government has given up any pretense of trying to control the disease, despite the country being solidly in the middle of a third wave of infections. I'm fortunate to have a job that can be done from home, and to have had family and friends to live with (so I've not died of loneliness), but until the pandemic my life completely revolved around the swing dance scene: I danced and taught classes several nights a week, and spent most of my annual leave travelling to dance events around the world.
Obviously everything was cancelled, and for a long time, but now dance events are beginning to appear in my calendar again and I'm trying to do the risk/benefit analysis of doing what I love vs. staying safe.
On the one hand, when I put some (pretty conservative) numbers into microcovid.org, it's clear that partner dancing—even on an outdoor, fairly sparsely-populated dance floor—is a REALLY bad idea right now, even at a 10%-per-year "risk mitigation" budget. On top of this, I know quite a number of friends (including one of my teaching partners) who were unlucky enough to catch COVID back in ~March 2020 (despite precautions) and have still not fully recovered from it.
On the other hand, catching colds is an occupational hazard for partner dancers and a risk I have alway been happy to accept—and so far everyone I know who's caught COVID post-vaccination has been either symptomless or has had a minor illness for a few days and then been fine.
It seems plausible that if a vaccine provides a good level of protection against serious illness then it might also greatly reduce the chance of suffering long-term effects. What does the science say?
Hmm, the risk didn't seem too high to me when I estimated with microcovid.org (assuming outdoors, both people fully vaccinated).
Is making sure people take LFTs before coming an option?
Many event organisers have requested that participants take lateral flow tests before coming, but few have enforced it—especially for outdoor events that are open to the general public.
You must have some pretty different assumptions about what an outdoor dance looks like. My guesses lead to it reporting an eye-watering 4% chance of catching COVID in a single 2h event. This seems obviously wrong, since if the risk were that high I would certainly have heard reports of new dance-acquired infections from recent events here—but it is not immediately obvious where the computation has gone wrong.
https://www.microcovid.org/?distance=close&duration=120&interaction=oneTime&personCount=20&riskBudget=100000&riskProfile=average&scenarioName=custom&setting=outdoor&subLocation=United_Kingdom_England&theirMask=none&topLocation=United_Kingdom&voice=loud&yourMask=none&yourVaccineDoses=2&yourVaccineType=astraZeneca
I assumed fewer people close to you, MRNA vaccines which have a higher multiplier, and silent/normal level of talking (do you talk to people loudly while dancing with them?) LFT requests probably give a decent multiplier too, depending on how many people you think comply and to what extent noncompliance is concentrated in risky people.
> Do you talk to people loudly while dancing with them?
It's not unusual—especially if you haven't seen them in 18 months!
> LFT requests probably give a decent multiplier too, depending on how many people you think comply and to what extent noncompliance is concentrated in risky people.
One thing that makes me and some of my friends quite nervous is that, at the moment, the most cautious people are still staying home, while the people who are going out dancing are (by definition) less cautious—and therefore potentially at above-average risk of having caught COVID. A remarkable demonstration of this phenomenon was provided by one local dancer who had given a sample for a PCR test on a Saturday morning in preparation for international travel, danced outdoors on Saturday afternoon and indoors on Sunday evening, and then learned on Monday morning that they had tested positive. Fortunately they 'did the right thing' by posting about it conspicuously on one of our local FB groups, so that people they'd danced with could get themselves tested, for which they were quite rightly praised—but when it subsequently coming to light that this person had elected not to be vaccinated reactions were decidedly more mixed: most were astonished and appalled, a stalwart few applauded, and the bayesian reasonsers figured, "well, that figures!"
This scenario has all 20 people listed as less than a foot away from you, which is very implausible. More realistically you should enter this as two scenarios and add the risks: one person a foot away, and 19 people 6+ or 10+ feet away.
Fair point!
The base scenario (2h on the dance floor with average person 3m away) then works out to 1000µCov, and it's another 700µCov for 8 minutes (~2 songs) dancing with one person. If I dance with 10 people (about 2/3rds of the 2h event) that gives a grand total of ~8mCov, which seems plausible but still a bit risky.
I know at least two partner dancers who'd had 2x mRNA vaccines (likely sometime in Apr/May '21 timeframe) who got breakthrough infections. The best I can tell from social media, neither suffered from long COVID. One of them was in early 40's and very healthy/active, other not sure what age group - likely late 30's to mid 40's range.
That said, there is some evidence that (a) the rate was around 20% for Alpha and we can infer that the rate might be higher for Delta (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext), (b) we see that Delta's attack-rate is around 20-45% (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/990339/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_13_England.pdf) and (c) Delta's attack-rate may very well be similar for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/pdfs/mm7028e2-H.pdf, if you do the math, you'll see that the attack rates are about 23% and 24% respectively for vaccinated and unvaccinated people; I don't have systematic/large studies for this unfortunately).
(c) is a bit of a weak-link, but I've read a bunch of other anecdotal studies that the attack-rates might be similar for both vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts, so I'd love to see evidence to the contrary - that would make me feel better (assuming the evidence shows lower attack-rates for vaccinated cohorts).
And finally I've seen some anecdotal evidence suggesting that long COVID happens irrespective of vaccination status. I've also read arguments suggesting that when someone is vaccinated, their high neutralizing antibodies will keep infection levels low and thus COVID symptoms would be minimal, and also means long COVID unlikely. The premise here is that COVID symptoms and long COVID severity are correlated. I haven't found good studies that substantiate this intuitively appealing and logical claim.
I meant by "the rate was around 20% for Alpha" that "the rate of *breakthrough infections* was around 20% for Alpha"...
What mechanism exists within the medical billing establishment to prevent hospitals, providers, or drug/device companies from generating arbitrary billing? E.g. anesthesiologists seem to always be sending us bills long after the fact, either from our children's c-sections or my umbilical hernia surgery, demanding payment. In the case of the c-sections I am certain the one claiming payment wasn't there. Likewise Apria just seems to periodically sprout new bills for a cpap machine long paid off every time I change insurance companies.
About as often as not we argue with the billing entity and they say "Whoops, I guess we screwed up", but the other times they threaten to send the bill to corrections. That of course has rather negative consequences down the road, even if you win in a small claims case. Anyway, getting off track, sorry.
So it seems that there is very little stopping a medical provider from just making up bills to send to people, either by mistake or malice, and very little one can do to fight those bills, despite there being no evidence that the bills are justified. Am I missing something here?
People do go to jail for Medicare fraud.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/medical-biller-sentenced-45-months-prison-role-4-million-health-care-fraud-scheme just 1 example
I don't know how many resources can be brought against someone fake-billing individuals or private insurance companies.
I've downloaded the entire Covid dataset from [ourworldindata](https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data), cut out all countries with <10000 overall cases, bucketed the remaining ones into three groups based on median age, and then made XY scatterplots, one data point per country, with X-value = total % fully vaccinated and Y-value = [avg new cases in the surrounding 5 day area]. (Both at a specific date only; I've tried 2021/06/01 and 2021/07/01.) The correlation is positive in all cases, i.e., countries with a higher % of people fully vaccinated have more cases. It remains positive if you add a 3 week delay to cases.
What's going on here? Anyone got a simple explanation? (Also, would you have expected this outcome?)
While I'd like to see clearer evidence for that claim, the explanation that comes to mind (if true) is that, time after time, whenever there are signs that the situation is getting better, there is a tendency for governments to immediately make things worse by loosening restrictions. In my home base of Alberta, for instance, they apparently saw that 50% of the population was vaccinated and decided that it was time to end the mask mandate (Delta? What's Delta?). As vaccination rates rose, they doubled down with new rules
> close contacts will no longer be notified of exposure by contact tracers nor will they be legally required to isolate — although it still recommended.
> The province will also end asymptomatic testing.
The conservative government backpedaled somewhat when Covid cases predictably shot up in response.
In addition to "the same countries can test and can vaccinate" point that other people are making, there's also the fact that some countries choose to double-down on the non-pharmaceutical interventions route (e.g. Australia notoriously has a slow vaccine rollout but a strong lockdown, I think Japan and South Korea might be in the same bucket?).
Since the vaccines reduce symptoms, maybe they are producing more unknowing carriers who then spread the infection to more people.
I think you would also need to plot in how much testing each of those countries do in order to get any kind of useful data. The countries with the most vaccines are also the countries doing the most testing. Lots people are tested in the US not because they have symptoms but because their job or school requires it on a weekly or even daily basis.
Also, countries that got the vaccine widely distributed also felt safe removing all the social distancing and mask-wearing restrictions (such as in the US), which essentially just let the virus rip among the many remaining unvaccinated.
Sure. Ask yourself what fraction of COVID cases are actually reported and available on the Internet in the United States versus, say, Iran, Mexico, or Burma. That will tell you why the countries with the highest vaccination rates are also reporting some of the largest number of cases.
[Doesn't check out.](https://i.ibb.co/4Rr2P4X/rc.png)
What is that supposed to be a chart of? Canada is X=6 Y=23 which means what? Whatever it is, outliers like UK might be having an outsized effect. I've been wondering why the UK has had so much Covid, any ideas?
It's X=percent fully vaccinated, Y=new daily cases per million, averaged over a 5 day period and with a 3 week lag. The lag was probably unnecessary as I said in the other comment (and UK is no longer a big outlier if you remove it).
I don't see how that graph says any such thing.
Actually it kind of does when you remove the delay, which is does probably not make sense given that the x-axis tracks fully vaccinated people. Nonetheless, the effect is not nearly as clear-cut as I was expecting before I made these.
Developed countries are able to track cases and vaccinate their population?
One more: maybe vaccinations have heavy effect in reducing deaths/long covid/etc but poor in blocking infections? Delta waves hello.
I've also created graphs for new deaths rather than cases, they all have a bit weaker correlations but not as much as you would predict. (Rich countries only and deaths gives a negative correlation, but not a particularly strong one)
Primarily this but maybe countries with heavier infections were more motivated to vaccinate?
A delightful example of Simpson’s paradox, with x = vaccination status, y = measured cases, and the problem being that measured cases goes up as measurement capacity and vaccination status go up with development. (If that’s why)
I've heard a lot of stories (including a recently popular twitter thread) about children claiming to remember past lives, down to factories they worked at, the names of their parents, or details about the past (a certain building that used to be a different building).
In Tibetan tradition, the Dalai Lama is chosen in part by having the candidate choose their toys from a previous incarnation. Of course, it's entirely possible that this process be manipulated. The number of adults who claim to remember anything about their previous lives is very small. A credulous defender may argue that society conditions people not to make claims like that.
My priors tell me that this should not be believed, but I'm curious: what's your take, not necessarily on reincarnation, but on memories from prior lives? What proof would convince you?
> [detailed] memories from prior lives
Possible if we're talking about ancestral memories, but unlikely per se.
More likely that the brain is doing something weird, like it does *all the damn time*. Like, simulating an alternative life isn't even that unusual, given stuff like dreams and reading fantasy novels, or how we rehearse imagined conversations all the time.
People remembering things that can be verified and not available right now. For example someone claiming to be a reincarnation of an ancient king and locating several previously unknown archeological locations.
Or digging out their stash of gold coins.
And this repeating multiple times. One can be an excellent archeologist and have weird spiritual beliefs so it is not foolproof. Or they could plant this coins earlier. But at least it is not fakable by looking at all photos.
But I would not bother with verifying it on my own, it is about as likely that Harry Potter was documentary.
I can't think of any way to differentiate between "Kid knows fact from 100 years ago that I can verify" and "Kid's parents own a history textbook"
I would require things not known currently (and not in the textbook) and verifiable.
Describing location of already found treasure? Zero evidence.
Ability to locate treasure (or some archeological artefact, or give specification of not yet known document)? That is some evidence.
This simple experiment would convince me: I whisper a secret into subject A's ear. I then kill subject A. Subject B then repeats to me the secret. This experiment could be ethically performed using those about to be euthanized or executed.
Problem is they probably don't remember all the specifics, and you don't know if their soul or whatever you want to call it, ends up in a predictable location.
Yeah, the purpose of this experimental design is for positives to be convincing. To correct for the low power, you could just repeat it a million times or whatever.
It would take a while though. You would have to create somewhat memorable but weird enough phrases and visuals so that they are uncommon enough. And you would have to keep it secret, which would be hard to do So every time a person is dying, you bring a posse of clowns and let them dance and say weird phrases. And then have those clowns sign non disclosure agreements and threaten to sue them if they tell anyone.
And then you would have to ask a lot of parents of children claiming past lives to try and get specific information, and match that against your secret database of those artificial experiences given to dying people. And if you get a high enough % of children describing these weird experiences, then it would increase the probability of past lives? As long as the sample of children asked is not large enough so that randomness could explain why some got it right by accident.
And I have put way too much thought into this already.
We don't really have any idea what things would be memorable post mortem, do we? So I'd just go with randomly generated "correct horse battery staple" type phrases (just making them long enough to make false positives extremely unlikely) and then have a web site where the first person to enter a correct phrase would win a billion dollars or whatever.
Interestingly the ones who have these memories never seem to remember having them later on.
I probably could not be convinced, as any information such a person could share that could be corroborated could also be gamed. If someone could teach them the information, then that's going to be the more likely reality. I suppose the strongest proof would be for them to describe something that no one living could have seen, for instance a sealed room or perhaps something extremely remote. The key would be that no one living could have known what was in the room/place, and then after the prediction it could be verified directly. Even that kind of scenario leaves a lot of room for someone to game it. In fact, that's something most of us would scoff at if a famous magician offered to do it. We wouldn't find it fantastical enough to even be interesting, as it would be so easy to fake.
In Western societies, neither materialist nor religious beliefs allow room for such a belief to be very likely. Materialist approaches would point out the lack of mechanism by which memories could be transferred. Christianity has very specific beliefs about what happens to your soul, to the exclusion of other possibilities.
I’ve been trying to frame Afghanistan in terms of the trolley problem. Here is my result, and I’d like to hear comments/feedback. Obviously, it has two semi-intentional features-not-bugs, namely (a) it only captures a subset of the scenario and (b) it’s a bit reductive.
The Afghani Time Travel Trolley Problem
=====
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks.
Ahead, on the tracks, there are a few thousand civilians tied to the tracks, as well as a couple of hundred soldiers, and 45 bn US dollars worth of arms + supplies. When the train reaches them, most of the civilians will die, the goods will perish, the arms will be stolen by enemies, but the vast majority of the soldiers will probably escape only with injuries.
You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks.
However, you notice that there are 20 million women tied to the other set of the tracks and unable to move. If you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to those other tracks and will head straight for them.
Instead of killing them, it will transport the women to 9th century. In the 9th century, these women will have to wear burqas, give up most of the common freedoms women have had in the 21st century, and become chattel slaves to the men in society. Many of them will die due to maladaptation and shock. But overall, most of them will live.
You have two options:
1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill a few thousand civilians, destroy 45 bn dollars of stuff and injure (or let die) many soldiers.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will make near-slaves out of 20 million women and their female progeny.
Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
Isn't this just an elaborate way of asking, "would you sacrifice millions of women to save some soldiers (but not equipment)" ?
The whole point of the trolley analogy is to render an ethical problem down to its most basic terms; it stops working unless the setup is cartoonishly simple.
In real life, the decision-making process is never that simple, since you are forced to reason under uncertainty. All of your decisions are probabilisitc, and the tradeoffs are never crystal-clear. In addition, in this specific case, the decision is not between "save some soldiers" vs. "save all women", but rather, between "continue losing lives and money every day" vs. "hopefully save a few women some of the time over a generation if not a longer period of time". And this doesn't take into account the global geopolitical situation, long-term effects on terrorism, the ethics of cultural hegemony, etc. etc. You'd need to spawn a whole trainyard of uncertain trolleys if you wanted to illustrate this problem.
>The whole point of the trolley analogy is to render an ethical problem
> down to its most basic terms; it stops working unless the setup is cartoonishly simple.
@Bugmaster, thanks. This is the most convincing argument I've heard against the trolley-style framing.
For option 2, the Taliban also committed several massacres in peacetime, and it's reasonable to assume that would have continued.
For the $45bn figure, you'd be talking about the per-year cost I'd gather? It would still be understated, if so. Afghanistan was a >$1bn/week adventure, lasting decades.
For the returning-women-to-the-9th century, you mean returning them to the 20th century, right? 20th century *Afghanistan*, of course. Apples to apples.
And which fraction of the women are we discussing here, even? Yes I know that there has been a surreal two decades where some Afghanesses could enroll into Critical Gender Theory studies at university, the whole show essentially bankrolled by foreign taxpayers at an absolutely ludicrous overall cost. But even during those two decades those were mere oases in Afghanistan -- modern liberal versions of Potemkin villages, if you will. The western invasion did not change the mentality across the overwhelming majority of the country by *one inch*. If the astonishing speed with which the whole house of cards collapsed after the US military withdrew has not awoken you to this fact, I'm not sure what else could. You see, the Taliban are not genius military strategists, achieving this record-breaking reconquista with some new and unstoppable military innovations such as the phalanx or the blitzkrieg. They are simply an organized faction that's *way* more aligned with the mentality of the overwhelming majority of the population, than the western invaders ever were. They encountered virtually no resistance. The US leaving decent modern weaponry to a small minority before pulling out, has not made much of a difference.
For most women there, things will not change that much in 2021, simply because things had not changed that much since 2001. But at least now Western Academia can hold a string of parties to celebrate the fall of that bastion of vile western neocolonialism, the defeat of those horrible supremacists who openly held their culture to be superior to an equally-valid indigenous one, and who used mechanisms of oppression to impose their values on a subjugated people -- some of whom have even ended up internalizing the opressor's worldviews. (OK admittedly I might be wrong on that one, as I'm generally too dumb to understand modern Western Academia)
If we only consider women in Kabul (~2 million) and $60bn / year, then in purely monetary terms this gives $30,000 per woman-life-year of being able to study critical gender theory vs. living in the traditional Afghani society. This is within the range of things considered cost-effective in the Western world, although not necessarily cost-effective globally.
Are you quite sure about your denominator in the calculation which gave you the "cost-effective estimate by Western standards"?
How many of Kabul's female population (cca 2.3 million, ages 0 till death) would be able to go to university, regardless of the curriculum taken?
No, bar that; how many women *had* been going to university while the US-propped government was in place?
(sidenote: a UNICEF report that predates the Taliban take-over accounted 3.7 million children country-wide out of school, 40% boys 60% girls - in a country of 39 million people overall)
OK, bar that. Let's not even insist on university. How many women's lives were actually changed, in terms of them having an independent source of income from their work - even including women without university degrees?
The denominator will shrink to *quite* less than 2 million, I'm afraid, even with all those extra inclusions. And the quotient will increase to *quite* above the yearly salary of the average American who got taxed to make this happen.
I checked the figures on tradingeconomics.com. In 2000, during Taliban rule, 0.8 million women were employed across a population of 20 million.
By 2021, that figure has increased to 2.4 million women out of a population of 39 million.
Adjusting for population increase, the 2000 employment rates would correspond to approx. 1.6 million women employed out of 39 million.
That translates to about 0.8 million more women employed. At a foreign taxpayer cost of $75.000 per year per woman.
This *is* very high, even by western standards. Most Ivy League institutions charge less than that.
I am confused about the factual claims you're making. Are we looking at the same plot, https://tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/labor-force-female-percent-of-total-labor-force-wb-data.html? It shows a jump from ~15% to ~22% of the workforce being female; I can't find a way to change it to absolute numbers (maybe I need a subscription to do that). To be consistent with your numbers, this would require the entire workforce to be about 12 million out of a 40 million population now (and 5 million out of 20 million population in 2000). That doesn't match my intuition for the Afghani unemployment rate? Tradingeconomics (https://tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/unemployment-rate) asserts that unemployment rate has been somewhere around 10%, and the 2020 Afghanistan population pyramid (https://www.populationpyramid.net/afghanistan/2020/) takes ~25% of the population out of the workforce, but that still gives me (22% - 15%) * (75%) * (90%) * (40M) = 1.9M women who are employed now and otherwise wouldn't be. (At, therefore, foreign taxpayer cost of $32,000 per year per woman.)
As Scott pointed out during lockdown analysis, in the West medical interventions are considered cost-effective up to ~$100,000-$150,000 per quality-adjusted life year. That, too, is a very large number; part of my point is that very expensive interventions are sometimes considered cost-effective.
We're looking at different numbers. You're giving percentages of female-workforce / total-workforce. I gave the total-female-workforce numbers -- as said, 0.8M in 2000, 2.4M in 2021.
Ignoring the doubling of the population, you'd be looking at a delta of 2.4M [@2021] - 0.8M [@2000] = 1.6M more women employed.
NOT ignoring the doubling of the population, the apples-to-apples delta would be 2.4M - 1.6M = 0.8M, the figure I used.
You're making unfounded presumptions about which portions of the population pyramid do or do not engage in work in Afghan society. You might be copying criteria that makes sense in the west, and that criteria can wildly miss the mark in Afghanistan. Published unemployment figures are practically useless to determine labor force participation, even in the west.
My factual claims simply boil down to taking the figures representing the number of women in the labor force, as a representation of the number of women in the labor force. https://tradingeconomics.com/afghanistan/labor-force-female-wb-data.html
Scott's figures of $100k - $150k per QALY are taken *intra-society* -- i.e. if Society S has a product P per person per year, then we're discussing exchanging 2*P to 3*P for a QALY. In plain english, US has a GDP per capita around $50k, and two or three years of such product could be spent to give a US citizen one more QALY.
Fair enough. But perhaps more typically relating to the final few years of one's life "reclaimed from nature", than to an open-ended decades-long arrangement.
Afghanistan's GDP per capita was $330 before US started pumping in the billions, and went up to $570 after it did. No "k"s involved.
I'm not asking you to multiply those GDP figures by 3, I'm asking wherefore do you assert a duty of a US taxpayer to fund Afghan QALYs while applying a calculation that is based on the US economy?
The cost to maintain it wasn't really $75k though. See this graph:
https://c.files.bbci.co.uk/15D54/production/_97482498_ustroopsafghanovertime.png
A reasonable amount of stability was ensured with a much smaller fraction of troops as you can see on that graph. So I think the real cost is possibly at least 5x lower. And arguably even lower if you consider that those soldiers and military equipment might be stationed somewhere else now. It isn't like all those soldiers were just fired over night.
So if you consider the above, than the marginal cost of keeping the Taliban out of Afghanistan might be in the thousands of dollars not tens of thousands. Spread out over multiple countries.
brown.edu puts it somewhere north of two trillion, in an estimate that is slightly more substantiated than the graph you pasted above.
I agree that some of those expenses would exist even without the Afghan engagement, and there could have been some overestimations -- so I'm operating with about half that figure in my other comments.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/figures/2021/Human%20and%20Budgetary%20Costs%20of%20Afghan%20War%2C%202001-2021.pdf
The CRT comment sounds facetious at best. In my experience at least, people don't go from "I have nothing" to "I want self actualization", they usually go through a few intermediate steps that often looks like "I want to better my people" (I want to become a doctor/lawyer), "I want to gain *lasting* status/money" and so on. CRT in specific, and literature/history/sociology style humanities in general, rarely pave the path to enduring freedom for first generation oppressed individuals in 3rd world countries. This is not to say that art, history, humanities can't contribute to these struggles - they can - but investing in formal education pathways along art/history/humanities specialization is not how people (with very little, who've experienced duress most of their lives) tend to spend their one shot at betterment.
Even in an improved Afghanistan, I'm generally skeptical that society would allow girls to study beyond high school/10th grade very often. If you want to keep fine-tuning the cost-model, then you'd have to account for the fact that mere high-school education costs upwards of 75k USD/year for many girls out there under the "NATO/US militaristic help" model, assuming all of the military expenditure's goal is/was women's education (and nothing else).
I wouldn't model success in terms of degree acquisition alone BTW - that doesn't sound like a good measurement. To me, things like basic literacy are excellent indicators to look at. Next, female lifespan is another indicator (which ought to correlate well with increased literacy levels), and infant mortality rates (also gets better with high maternal literacy and well being), the role women play in informal employment sector (i don't know how we'd measure it but it seems important that we account for this), rates of child marriage (this ought to drop to count as good), education attainment levels in the next generation (increase in maternal education will have a positive impact across the board on the next generation) and so on. I don't have good references to show that these sorts of interdependencies ought to work, but these were all taken as a given in India in the 80's/90's when I was growing up there and formed the background tapestry of public discourse, and my sense over the years is that most of it worked the way it was posited.
But I also admit after all's said and done and some more clever math is undertaken, it could all still amount to a net RoI that's not very attractive to most.
It's fine if you wish to call my remarks facetious. I think I mentioned CGT not CRT, but I also mentioned I'm too dumb to understand modern Western Academia anyway. I don't want to linger on those remarks because they are hardly the bulk of my point.
The point is that forcing western liberalism as a value system has practically not left a *dent* on the mentality of the Afghan population at wide -- in spite of two decades of military engagement, plethoras of NGOs and insane amounts of money burned. In 2000, 8% of the female population was employed. Two decades and *over a million of millions of dollars later*, 12% are employed. I'm not that hard to impress, but I'm not impressed.
The point is how blind a large portion of the west is to just how *spectacularly* the project of imposing western liberalism has failed there. The cognitive dissonance is sometimes so bad that people have started manufacturing trolley problems which posit that no less than a full 100% of the ~20 million women in Afghanistan had been basking in the light of western liberalism, until the wild money hemorrhage has been stopped, causing them to return to 9th century Afghanistan. More like 20th century Afghanistan, and even that only for a fraction of the women; the vast majority of women weren't much affected by the western-liberalism bit anyway, but could occasionally be affected by the persistent-low-grade-warfare bit.
You say that Afghanis are oppressed individuals fighting for freedom. I'm not following, *who* do you mean they are they oppressed by? By western invaders? By some undemocratic forces? By themselves?
> Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
Haven't we just gone through a few centuries of colonialism and imperialism, and in retrospect, now see that this kind of thinking was wrong?
What is your confidence that how you've defined the two tracks is both precise and accurate? Frankly, I think it's near zero. Furthermore, does your argument not clearly extend to policing the whole world, and thus basically justify starting a new world war?
Finally, there are more than two tracks so your scenario is a false choice. For instance, it seems like it would cost significantly money and lives to simply help anyone who wants to leave Afghanistan. Then you can just leave it to the Taliban.
> or instance, it seems like it would cost significantly money and lives
Err, significantly *less* money and lives that is...
Ahead, fading into the distance, you see an infinite number of identical track switches along the current track, each one of them leading to either thousands of dead civilians, 45 bn dollars lost, and a couple of hundred soldiers maimed or dead.
The number of potentially time travelled women on the opposite track increases at every switch, but the tracks with the women always end at a trolly stop instead of another switch.
You can either let infinite civilians and soldiers die and let infinite money be wasted or you can at some point send some finite number of women to the 9th century where they will mostly survive.
Do you *ever* pull a lever?
>You can either let infinite civilians and soldiers die and let infinite money be wasted or you can at some point send some finite number of women to the 9th century where they will mostly survive.
I don't think we can discount their descendants from this, about half of whom would also be women in any given generation.
It seems pretty implausible to me that we can at all accurately predict what afghanistan will look like in even ~3 generations, and even more implausible that it would specifically be exactly what the taliban want.
How confident are we about how the switches in the trolley work? The classic trolley problem is good because a physical switch that moves tracks is a familiar device we can be confident in. The variation where we are told that a large person on a footbridge can be pushed off by me and will certainly stop the trolley involves overriding our physical intuitions about how these situations work (which may still be playing a role in our moral intuitions). With the Afghanistan trolley problem it seems likely that the switching circuits involve lots and lots of feedback loops, so that it's unclear whether option 1 will *also* lead to many women being forced to live in 9th century conditions, and also whether option 2 will *also* lead to the deaths of many civilians and the destruction of skyscrapers or other physical goods.
Many women live in 9th century like conditions today in parts of rural South East Asia and the middle east, yet we don't describe those parts of the middle east and SE Asia as a whole as regressive 9th century like societies. I concede that there is truth in your observation that #1 would also lead to many women being forced to live in a highly regressive society, but it would still be a flawed 21st century society with regressive features. Implicit in my trolly-problem framing is my fear and prediction that under Taliban, the society of Afghanistan would stop resembling a "21st century society with flaws" (at least for women) and become much more like a 9th century society. For me at least, there is a stark difference in values between those two kinds of societies.
You're also right about #2 potentially leading to civilian deaths. I was looking at this infographic by the UN https://twitter.com/UNAMAnews/status/1419531459220619265?s=20 for annualized historical casualty rate there. OTOH, the historical casualty rate there has actually dropped YoY since 1996 according to the world bank - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?end=2019&locations=AF&start=1996. Maybe going forward Taliban would have an adverse effect only on quality of life but not on death rate, or at least that's my guess.
How many of these trolleys do you have? One a year? One a century? One ever? (The last one seems optimistic in Afghanistan.) What quality of life do the women have while the trolley is running through the civilians, goods, and arms? (Civil wars, even 20th century ones, are generally not great to live through.)
I think this one got me thinking, and I'm going to settle on "one (over a long duration, equivalent to 'ever')".
In practice, what we've learned in Afghanistan over the past 20 years is that the quality of life isn't anywhere close to someone in a western society would come to recognize, but it was (is!) still much better than life under the Taliban before. At the minimum, for women, coerced marriages haven't been endemic (although I'm skeptical of reports that they're gone now - they still happen in places like India, so I doubt they're erased from Afghanistan in mere 20 years), women can go to school and work, and aren't forced to cover their faces and so on. I doubt these are universal personal freedoms (again, because these legal freedoms aren't yet universal personal freedoms in all of SE Asia, so Afghanistan couldn't have leapfrogged SE Asia in mere 20 years) but I think this was a significant+good start.
The way I see it, the trolleys themselves are metaphors for choices we make, and in this instance, they are about trying vs. not trying to improve conditions. The framing in Option #1 feels (perhaps is) overly specific to trying via one methodology (foreign, mostly US, coercion/"help"/troops). I don't know if direct militaristic intervention needs to be the 'try' approach, but that's the one I was most familiar with, and I felt like that's what would resonate with readers.
I'm trying to point out through the trolley problem that giving up on trying is much worse than not trying, or at least it shouldn't be so easy to pick option 2 over option 1, and anyone in favor of option 2 should really be in favor of a better "option 1" and saying "it's their problem" is really an awful thing to say - and because of those reasons we should work very hard to find different/improved ways of preventing Afghanistan society from falling all the way back to pre-modern times for women.
Now, maybe this point cannot be made as long as Option 1 stays in its current form (perhaps it's a socially/politically toxic option and presenting it in any form makes the discussion untenable), or maybe the lesson here is that the trolley framing isn't the right vehicle (;-)) for making this argument.
Is it a bad idea to get J&J after getting BioNTech?
I read an article in the Atlantic suggesting that overstimulating the immune system was bad.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/08/covid-booster-shots-biden-8-months/619789/
It wasn't helpful to answer your question head-on, or a make other risk/reward decisions carefully, but it added enough uncertainty to make me wonder whether getting an early booster was really worth the effort.
I also read this in Science Mag about Hybrid Immunity which (I think) says that adding one mRNA dose on top of a viral vector dose like AZ is awesome - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6549/1392.full.
Since J&J is similar to AstraZeneca, I'd imagine that the study translates well to J&J, but I haven't seen studies that start with mRNA and then add viral-vector later on - these studies all seem to start with a viral-vector dose, then add an mRNA dose on top of that. Maybe it's reasonable to assume commutativity, maybe it isn't - hard to say.
No. Why would it be?
No data on that combination, and I don't have a model of the involved biology
OK, well, it's not complicated. In both cases you've got a bit of nucleic acid as the key cargo, and in both cases the nucleic acid specifies the structure of the S ("spike") protein* on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is what docks with the human ACE2 receptor and allows the virus to gain entry to the cell. It's the "lockpick" that opens the door, so to speak. The idea is that you'll fool the vaccinated cells into building a crapton of S proteins, which they will express (show) on their surfaces, and which will by complicated mechanisms lead to your immune system realizing some of its cells are infected and need to be killed, and by the way we should be on the lookout for this S protein thingy, which is the marker of evil invaders.
The first importance difference between the two vaccines is that the J&J vaccine uses the DNA that codes for the S protein, while the mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech), as the name implies, use messenger RNA**. The DNA has to get incorporated into the chromosomes of the cell, where it is then transcribed in the usual way to your own mRNA, and then translated to S protein by ribosomes. The mRNA vaccines skip this step by directly flooding the cell with mRNA transcripts. (That does mean the vaccinated cell has its chromosomes messed up, but it's about to be killed by the immune system anyway, so it doesn't matter.)
The second important difference is the delivery vehicle. In the mRNA vaccines they enclosed the RNA in a lipid nanoparticle, a bunch of ordinary fatty acids plus cholesterol plus some stabilizing derivatives of polyethylene glycol, a common polymer used in stuff that goes inside the body. This gunk surrounds the mRNA, shielding it from immediate degradation, until the lipid shell makes the particle fuse with cell membranes, releasing the mRNA into the cell. On the other hand, the J&J vaccine uses a hollowed-out wild adenovirus (a common form of cold virus), #26 in the list of families, called Ad26. The DNA is inside the adenovirus, which gains entry to cells in the usual way such viruses do. The important distinction here is that if you have ever been exposed before to Ad26, then you may have some pre-existing immunity to that virus, in which case, it may well be destroyed before the vaccine has a chance to do much -- this has happened before, and is why J&J chose a more unusual adenovirus, to which fewer people have already been exposed. It's also why there is just one shot -- once you've used Ad26 as a vector, you can't really use it again, because by then by definition your patient has been exposed to Ad26 and any future vaccine based on it won't work very well.
It's also the case that the remnants of the vaccine are disposed of slightly differently. The remnants of the Ad26 are just random proteins, and get chopped up and digested in the normal way. The normal lipids in the mRNA nanoparticle do the same thing, but some of the less common molecules make their way to the liver, great detoxer, where they get oxidized into more ordinary (disposable) molecules over a few weeks (this was explicitly studied in rats before they tried it on people).
Key takeaways:
1) So far as anyone knows, all the foreign material is gone after 2-3 weeks, so there's nothing left of it by the time your second shot comes around.
2) The mechanism of immune provocation is essentially identical in both cases, after all the hokey pokey all you're doing is tricking cells into expressing S protein, which the immune system takes as a heads-up that it should be on the lookout for this weirdo.
3) There will certainly be slight to modest differences in how strong the immune response is, because I don't think the modified S protein they use is exactly the same, and the variations in how you are tricking the cell into making S protein. There's a bunch of subtlety about how the body does this whole process that is still unknown, and could fling some interesting wrinkles in, e.g. how well does one method defends you against variants, et cetera. But none of these things should cause evil synergy between the two vaccines, so far as anyone knows -- just a question of how much good synergy there might be.
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* It's actually the code for a slightly-modified form of the S protein, which is stable by itself, as the normal S protein needs to be embedded in the virus outer coat to be stable.
** Actually they use a modified mRNA, which contains slightly weird nucleotides so it resists degradation, as there is machinery in the cell that would otherwise chew it to pieces in no time flat.
Thanks.
Sorry, I realize something I said above was ambiguous: it's the J&J vaccinated cell that has its DNA messed up, but that doesn't matter because it's a dead cell walking. It's also why we don't care whether the cell is deranged in some way by having its ribosomes hacked to manufacture a billion copies of viral S protein. The cell is going to get killed anyway.
Everything immunologists have been saying publicly about immune theory suggests that being exposed to any form of the virus (different vaccines, or different strains of the virus) should boost your immune protection, if anything, a bit more than being exposed to that form when you've already been exposed to that form. The only study I am aware of to get empirical results about mixing vaccines used AstraZeneca and BioNTech/Pfizer (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01359-3), and they seemed to suggest that the mix-and-match in either order was about as good as two doses of the mRNA vaccine in terms of antibody response, and better than two doses of the adenovirus vaccine, with slightly higher fever-type side effects. I don't think the study was big enough to determine whether the rare blood clot side effect of the adenovirus vaccine was made more or less likely.
If vaccine passports remain important in many cities for a long time, and if Texas continues to make it difficult to access electronic records of our vaccination, then I have been considering getting a dose of Johnson&Johnson on a visit to a coastal city in order to have a good electronic record of a vaccine, even though I already have two doses of Moderna and a paper card recording them. So I would also be interested to know if anyone who actually works on this stuff has further thoughts beyond what I've gathered from media discussion.
Who all remembers the SSC posts, "Legal systems different from ours, because I just made them up" and "Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism"? Inspired by those, and by the various ACX posts on ZEDEs, I set up a subreddit (r/archipelago)! Right now it only has a handful of seed posts by me intended to give a sense of the purpose of the subreddit, but I hope others contribute and it becomes a repository of many such ideas, ranging from the practical like ZEDEs to mere fictional amusements like the legal systems post.
Why? Some of us write such things for fun. Some of us write such things to explore the range of the politically possible, in hopes of developing ideas that will influence the future. I think it's potentially valuable for both purposes to have a publicly accessible collection of designs for alternative political systems. So if you agree, come on by https://www.reddit.com/r/archipelago/ and share your ideas!
Perhaps also consider including Scott's old series of posts on Raikoth: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spending-five-thousand-years-in-an-alternate-universe/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/15/index-posts-on-raikoth/
OpenAI Codex live demo. GPT-3 writes code!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&t=683s
n=1 for me it sure seems to!
Can't wait to see the post about the new health care transparency law and the wild data it's revealing about prices.
What law? I must have missed this.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/22/upshot/hospital-prices.html
Oh wow - I had been seeing this headline when I glanced at the news the past few days, but hadn't actually clicked, so I didn't realize the information it contained was the result of a new transparency law! I had assumed it was just the NYTimes compiling numbers that insurance agencies had already been able to see for years. Since it appears this is newly public information, that could well shake a lot of things up!
(I noticed in an article about inflation the other day that health insurance was apparently one of the few expenses whose cost had been going up dramatically before the pandemic, but started actually going down during the pandemic - I wonder if this transparency law is somehow related.)
My guess was going to be all the elective surgeries that got postponed because people didn't want to go anywhere near a hospital if they didn't have to.
I would be surprised if a reduction in spending for one year would have propagated through to prices that quickly, but I know little enough about insurance pricing that I can't rule it out. It seems more plausible to me that changes in negotiated prices they pay hospitals would change their plans, and thus prices they charge for coverage, but saying it out loud like this does make me skeptical of this too.
New Parents / Expecting Parents discussion anyone? It seems like we've had a few in this group based on some past points.
Do you guys think there are certain innate differences in how babies respond to fathers vs. mothers? We have a 3 month old, and often she gets so tired that she starts getting more agitated and wound up, and as much as I try troubleshooting (diaper, food, burp, these are easy), I can't calm her down and get her past that high agitation state when she needs to sleep. My wife is very successful at it, even if it takes a while. She's had a lot more practice though, since she was off 12 weeks, and now she's left work.
Also daycare is such an incredible challenge, frustration and expense that we are now a one income household. With our baby struggling to gain weight and around the 6th percentile in weight at 3 months old, we couldn't stick it out with our daycare. They would barely try to feed her or deal with her little mannerisms that seem like she doesn't want to eat.
We live in a small city, but the wait time to sign up and expense of daycare is still quite bad, I can't imagine how it would be in a big city.
My experience (5 children) is that children respond differently to each parent, from the moment of birth, and it will vary all through their lives. There are times when you'll be the favorite parent, and other times when your wife will be, and I don't think you can predict it. It probably won't even have anything to do with what you or she do, so I wouldn't try to analyze it too far or try to change what you do -- it's probably just what's going on inside their tiny little heads, how all the neurons are jostling around, making and breaking connections.
It helps to cultivate a state of Zen acceptance about this stuff. Do your best, but don't let the occasional weirdness stress you out or make you doubt yourself*. And don't expect things to be picturebook perfect either. Children are little people, and they have all the quirks and individual strengths and weaknesses of people in general. Furthermore, probably only half the outcome, now or later, is dependent on what you do. A lot of it depends on their nature, and on what they do -- and even at a very young age, children start to make decisions on their own, at least a little independently of what you do.**
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* Consider it training/prep for the high-school years.
** Which is ultimately a good thing, it's how children avoid acquiring some of the worst habits of their parents.
I was unfortunate(fortunate?) enough to have step kids who were past the small child stage and into high school before my tiny was born. I did not fare well with the very small stage (under 1 year) but am doing much better at the 3yo stage. The whole "I need IO that I can parse" is a very big part of what makes parenting possible for me.
Yes, I think most parents have the experience of being "better" at certain ages. I certainly feel that way. There are certain ages I feel I can handle very well, and others where I feel more than ordinarily stupid. I should probably ask my oldest, who are old enough to have a sense of humor about it, whether they see the same thing (about me). It would be interesting if they did, and it would be also interesting if they didn't.
When our (now two year old) daughter was little, my husband stayed at home with her while I went to work. It was still much easier for me to calm her than him, but I suspect that was breast feeding related. He would have to carry her around for a long period of time before she would settle, whereas I could just nurse her, and it was a much different experience than bottles. It was also much easier for me to put her in a soft wrap and walk around with her than him -- I think something about having already adapted to having a baby in that location? Which she liked a lot.
I've got another coming, and will see if it's different or not.
New father of 6 months...
My daughter reacts differently to my wife and I. My wife is better at calming her down for bed or to take a bottle if she's really worked up. That said, I'm not sure the difference is significant. We both do it reasonably okay.
My learning from the last six months has been: patience. Often she's crying her loudest and seems most inconsolable moments before she's asleep. I just grit my teeth and keep rocking her while continuously reminding myself of that fact.
We also (early, 1-3 months) did this thing that we just started calling "yo-yoing". She'd be inconsolable and then seemingly dose and then start screaming a few moments later and then dose again. Initially I would get super frustrated when she'd wake up each time, having just thought I was finally in the clear. But after a few attempts I noticed the pattern: each scream was shorter and each dose was longer until she was finally asleep. So I just mentally prepared myself for a half-hour to an hour of yo-yoing and suddenly it didn't seem so bad: each period felt like progress.
All of this was psychological and mostly just learning to be patient (I'm not). Shortly after she was born, I heard this great Sam Harris episode on "framing any given moment as your potential last time doing X". Using this mental framing helped me to wait out those long bouts of crying. Sure enough, I've already put her down in her bassinet for the last time because she just upgraded to her crib. I already wish I had appreciated it more the last time I did it.
All the best! Holy hell is it a lot of work, but I love being a Dad.
That Yoyoing thought makes a lot of sense. That's a good thing to consider. We go through the exact same thing.
Do kids react differently to different parents? I haven't seen a child who doesn't. My daughter didn't want anything to do with me for the first two years of her life. When my life left the house, she would scream from the time the door shut to the time my wife came back. My son was totally different. All he wanted as an infant was to take naps on my stomach while I took a nap in the recliner. They both grew out of it after a while.
In twenty years, you'll likely be glad your traded income for more kid-parent time. It sucks now, but take solice in your future self's preferences!
This was also something I noticed with our kids while they were little. For the most part I attributed this to the fact that, like your wife, I stayed at home with the kids which I think has two effects.
First, on the baby's side, I think there's just an innate recognition of Parent Who Is Always There, the effects of which are more pronounced when the baby is upset and/or sleepy, like the situation you described. With our first, it was basically impossible for my husband to calm her down or put her to sleep for the first year.
On the parent's side, I found that because I was with the kid all the time, I just really became attuned to every little thing that worked/didn't work. There were just little quirky things that I figured out worked for the baby that, when I tried to give suggestions to my husband, just made me sound like an insane person. ("She likes being held upright at first, but then you've got to shift to a cross-body cradle position once she gets drowsy enough. When is she drowsy enough? Oh, I have no idea how to tell you that. It's just something I can tell when it happens.... Also, once she starts closing her eyes, you've got to bounce every few steps.")
I also realized once my kids had gotten older that their difference in response to my husband also largely tracked with how their personalities developed. My oldest, who gave my husband fits, is now a very independent kid who is loving and affectionate, but a bit standoff-ish. She doesn't like being hugged too tight and isn't really "cuddly" by nature. Our second, who tolerated my husband much more than the first is now a very demonstratively affectionate kid who gives hugs and kisses left and right and still loves to be held and cuddled.
Kid #3 is still a baby, but he absolutely loves dad and it's very rare that my husband can't handle him when he's fussy and/or needs to go to sleep. Beyond what I mentioned above, I also attribute this partly to the fact that after a couple kids you're not nearly as neurotic about things and babies can tell when you're stressed out or relaxed.
Just hang in there! All of this is inherently stressful, and when you slap on weight gain issues as well, everything gets dialed up to 11. Our oldest was very low birth weight because of medical issues on my end (less than 1 percentile!) and had nursing/feeding issues because she was so small. It was a very rough first couple months. If it makes you feel better, she didn't get out of the 5th percentile till she was 9 months old! Once we introduced solid food she jumped from the 8th to the 17th to the 30th within 3 months. Before that, we went from 4th (2mo) to 3rd (4mo) to 0.9th! (6mo).
Very encouraging on the stories of different kids being different. Yes, we are still in that neurotic stage. Also, encouraging to here how your oldest recovered.
My wife and I are both very short. I'm near the 1st percentile in height for men, so I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that our baby would struggle with that, but we joke that she's going to be tall and skinny because she's jumped up in her length much more quickly than weight.
Same age kid here. I think there are innate differences with response to mom/dad, but they probably aren't as big as you think they are.
I plan to hire a nanny come December (right now, baby is looked after by my husband and Mother in law during the day). My main concerns with daycare are illness + lack of individualized care: not enough people to comfort him right away when he's upset or needs help going to sleep. I would be much more open to daycare once my kid is physically stronger and able to socialize with other kids.
With illness, are you specifically looking to trade "illness now" for "illness later"? My understanding was that they will be exposed to about the same amount of different diseases over the course of a lifetime anyway, so with most childhood illnesses you only get to pick when, not whether, they happen. (Although there's definitely a few that are particularly common in small children, e.g. ear infections and croup are a lot more of a young child problem due to young child anatomy, so you do get to just skip them.)
The other thing yo be prepared for is that with a kid in child care, you will get sick a lot more often too. I went from getting a cold every few years to getting a few colds every year.
Of course now you've got to worry about covid as well.
Yep. I think it's better to postpone sicknesses for when he's older, because he's less likely to have severe complications and can emotionally cope better with being sick.
Makes sense -- my son's first cold (~3 months old) sucked, and when he was ~5 months and a visiting ~9-month-old passed off his cold to us, I remember thinking "I wish we were at the point where you can be that cavalier about a runny nose..."
Don't underestimate those 12 weeks your wife spent with the baby. It may be a matter of time and patience, and you may need to spend an equal amount of time soothing the baby so that she is just as comfortable with you as with her mom. Calming an agitated baby can be extremely stressful, and knowing that your partner can just take care of it will be a strong temptation. How you move forward will depend on you and your wife's tolerance for taking the time and arranging your schedules. My wife took on that responsibility in our household, and the kids were more easily soothed by her most of the time. I was still involved enough to be able to do it fairly well, so that I could step in when really needed (aka my wife on edge and needing a break). Our middle child got really bad gas around 11pm almost every night for months, and would be up crying non-stop until it passed. My wife and I would take turns trying to sleep and carrying around the baby. Oddly enough that's a good memory now, despite being a really hard experience at the time.
Yeah I agree she's had more time and that's a big deal. I tend to walk around with and burp our baby more often, but sooth her less. She likes being over my shoulder and she's got really good at keeping her head straight. I have to remind myself still sometimes that she needs head support because usually she doesn't pretty good.
I know this memories will be fond ones, and more I can share the less overwhelming it will be for my wife. Our baby's at the stage where she's doing a lot with her hands now, she whipped the glasses off my head yesterday.
Children vary a lot in how they respond to parents. My oldest was fine with either my wife or myself, and middling decent with other caregivers, but our youngest only wanted mom. With the younger I could, after a lot of time and struggle, get her to take a bottle or go to sleep for a nap but most people (grandparents, sitters) couldn't. We were super lucky to find a day care with a very experienced infant caregiver who could get her to take a bottle or nap but I'm not sure what we would have done if we hadn't (my wife probably would have had to stay home like yours).
I would mostly just advise you to cultivate extreme patience on the issue: after trying the usual suspects you mentioned just keep holding and rocking. Keep the head elevated as you do so to help with reflux. It may take you longer than your wife, and you may never be as good at it, and just remember that it may have more to do with the child's preferences than anything you're doing or not doing.
Some good tips. Good to hear some positive experiences of daycare. We got on the list at several places as soon as we knew for sure and only got a response a few months before my wife was supposed to go back to work.
I'm sorry your daycare didn't work out, for us it improved the parenting experience so much! (Mostly just because we both prefer the company of adults and computers to that of babies, but also, they somehow taught our kid to enjoy tummy time.) We didn't have to wait to sign up, but we were able to shop around (bigger city advantage?) and find a place we liked that was able to take us. We were doing this about 3 months before the kid, so about 6 moths before starting the daycare. In a big city on a coast, I hear you may need to start even earlier.
No idea on mothers vs. fathers, I don't recall a major difference with ours; some of the time the favorite parent is clearly the dog.
Good luck getting out of 6th percentile! We went through that when the kid was 1 month and discovered he just really preferred bottles to breast, which of course then made daycare much easier. (He went from 6th to 96th to just being a large kid.) We did have to experiment a little with bottle types, there was one he liked even less than the breast.
Yeah my wife didn't think she could do a good job with breast, so we did formula right from the start, but we've changed formula and now we are on the Nutramigen (expensive) stuff, and we've found an anti-colic bottle that seems to help her too.
Does anyone know from where the (Christian) position that after death you will get to know everything (from the meaning of life to who ate your sandwich one day) comes from, or starts at? Is it there in the Old Testament or is it some human universal or what? Sorry, I know nothing about religions, I grew up in a mainly atheist society built on a previously Christian one, but all through my life I've vaguely noticed claims that if you reach Paradise you'll Know It All.
There's a strong argument that the old Jewish and early Christian understanding of the afterlife is not the same as the modern Christian one. Prof. Bart Ehrman has written a book on this. Here's an interview about it: https://text.npr.org/824479587
Hell, there are dozens of mutually contradictory modern understandings
A version of this idea is already there in Plato. In the Meno, Socrates argues that since an uneducated boy is able to learn that the diagonal of a square is the side of the square with double area, merely by answering questions Socrates asks and without being told anything, therefore the knowledge must already have been present and just needed to be recalled. He generalizes this to suggest that when souls are disembodied (before birth and after death) they are in contact with the forms and therefore have all knowledge, and in life, what we think of as learning is mainly recollection.
This idea sounds similar enough to what you're describing as a Christian view, and I know many early Christian views were heavily influenced by neo-Platonism, that perhaps this is a relevant influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)
In the Meno, Plato's Socrates does indeed advance the theory of learning as recollection - but he doesn't present it as his own theory. Before introducing it, he says that he learned of it from "priests and priestesses" (ἱερεῶν and ἱερειῶν). This suggests that while Plato might be the first *extant* Western source, he is likely not the origin point for the idea, and that it has a deeper and earlier foundation in Western religious tradition.
Also, it's anybody's guess whether Plato actually meant to suggest that Socrates actually believed the theory. By the end of the dialogue, consideration of the theory hasn't helped them answer the core question of the dialogue - whether virtue can be taught. I think Socrates is stepping Meno through a number of hypotheses about knowledge, all of which he thinks are wrong, intending to make Meno dissatisfied with all of them; the theory of recollection is introduced primarily to lever Meno towards conceiving of knowledge as something that must be supernatural. The answer Socrates actually believes himself would (of course) be the Forms, as detailed in the Republic or the Phaedo. But that's just my own personally favored interpretation, and I think most people disagree with me and think Socrates actually endorsed the theory of recollection, so YMMV.
Weird. A friend of mine, AFAIK well versed in theology, once told me that (at least according to some) once a sin is confessed and absolved it is effectively "erased", so that in the afterlife nobody knows who ate your sandwich at all.
But of course I can't find anything to back that up right now.
If God has numbered every hair of your head, I'm sure He also knows who ate your sandwich.
In Dante's Inferno the spirits of the damned can only foresee what will happen in the distant future; their clairvoyance vanishes the more the events are near in time. They know nothing about what happens in the present.
Inf. X, 100-105
We see, like those who have imperfect sight,
The things," he said, "that distant are from us;
So much still shines on us the Sovereign Ruler.
When they draw near, or are, is wholly vain
Our intellect, and if none brings it to us,
Not anything know we of your human state.
IIRC that's only the heretics, not all of the damned.
There's a long-runnig debate about this issue.
From Hollander's commentary:
"Most believe that what he says applies to all the damned, e.g., Singleton in his commentary to this passage (Inf. X.100-105). On the other hand, for the view that this condition pertains only to the heretics see Cassell (Dante's Fearful Art of Justice [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984]), pp. 29-31. But see Alberigo, his soul already in hell yet not knowing how or what its body is now doing in the world above (Inf. XXXIII.122-123)."
Interesting, thanks.
Wow, I just gave a very similar answer to a different question elsewhere on this thread! Check out 1 Corinthians 13, a very important Bible chapter. Particularly around verses 8-12. [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=NIV]
The thing that we call "knowledge" on earth is completely different from how things are in heaven. To the point that Paul (the writer of 1 Corinthians) isn't even willing to call what happens in heaven "knowledge" without a bunch of qualification. Earthly knowledge is full of complexity and distortion and misunderstanding, like looking at an object in a messed-up mirror. Heavenly knowledge is like looking straight at the object. Another example he gives is that earthly knowledge is like the incoherent babbling of a baby, and heavenly knowledge is like straightforward adult speech.
That makes it very hard for theologians and pastors to teach about what heaven is like, when one of Christianity's main sources basically says that earthly human thought is defective and is going to be replaced by something better. "The first thing I have to teach you about this is that anything I teach about it is definitely wrong."
The tradition I was raised in would probably say if you wanted to know it all you could, but when you get to heaven you aren’t concerned with earthly things so you probably wouldn’t try to find out.
Book of Revalations is probably the number one source for the eternal afterlife with God. My understanding though is that you do not instantly know everything; rather you have an infinite amount of time, and access to God, who does know everything.
Also, you apparently get to live in a Pluto-sized arcology constructed in space after Earth is destroyed, following a war in which trillions or quadrillions of people are killed by bombing (possibly orbital bombardment).
Or at least, that's the literalist way of reading Revelation.
Super interesting question. I'm an ex-orthodox jew but the same question could apply. My understanding is that the Old Testament doesn't mention the afterlife at all and its clearly a newer invention of monotheistic religions. I think the afterlife is sufficiently abstract and unsupported enough that every commentator could add their own flourishes all the time on what you get once you die. If I had to guess, I'd say that as religious commentators became more philosophical to match the philosophies of their time period's they got really into the idea that the afterlife meant "none of the limitations of the physical world". So not being held back by "time" means experiencing past, present and future simultaneously. Not having eyes means "you can see everything". etc. etc. This is obviously more of a guess answer and I'm sure their are actual experts here who can be a lot more specific.
I love this guy and I'm sure he'll have the best solution:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ReligionForBreakfast
Casually, I’ve heard that “when you die, you go to god and are with god, and god is all knowing, and you talk to god, so you can ask god stuff, and it’s heaven so you have all good stuff.” For a history of heaven a brief overview is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven#Hebrew_Bible. Different Christian cultures and denominations and times and peoples develop the idea of afterlife and heaven and such in complex and different ways. There’s a lot of thinking and folk ideas and variation and differences there. I don’t know much about it
I have some doubts about the plan to throw so much money at the "global climate problem". Please explain to me where I go wrong or with which points you disagree the most:
1. So far, the world is ca 1 degree C warmer compared to the preindustrial era (leaving aside doubts about the precision of estimating preindustrial era temperatures). So far, nothing terrible is happening, extreme weather events are not more devastating. The damages as portion of GDP have plummeted and the number of "extreme weather deaths" too, despite the much bigger world population. I sort of don't expect following strong non-linearity to be true: compared to the preindustrial past, one degree up, nothing happens (or things even improve), another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose. Is there some magic number saying "this is the exactly correct global temperature"?
2. Some countries seem to actually benefit from modest, say 2 C, temperature increase. Canada, Sweden, Russia etc. There are surely some losers, but the net balance may even still be positive.
3. Even the IPCC, which overall sounds quite alarmist to me, estimates the GDP global loss from "untackled" global warming only at couple percentage points by 2100 (when the global GDP is expected to be 4 or many more times higher than today).
4. CO2 seems to be fairly beneficial in some ways: agricultural yields are estimated to be 15 percent higher compared to a situation with pre-industrial concentrations. It is the main plant food: some deserts are already shrinking, the planet is greening. Surely it is a good thing?
5. Global warming seems to be saving lives even now: the drop in deaths from cold is several times higher than the increase in deaths from heat. No one seems to care for this, though.
6. The green deals seem to be extremely expensive, with lot of the funds going as subsidies to inefficient technologies (solar, wind). If you argue that these technologies are already efficient, please explain why they need subsidies. This and new taxes have the potential to choke economic growth. I believe that my grandchildren would be better off in a world that is 4 times richer and 2 - 3 C warmer than in a world that is only 1 C warmer but economically stagnating. After all, rich Gulf countries have no problem operating in 50 C outside temperatures. And we are still talking about a difference of only 2 C, not going from 20 to 50 C. The necessary adjustment seems very minor to me, with plenty of time to adjust.
7. If things really seem to go bad, there are several geoengineering projects that might work. And these would be still two or more orders of magnitude cheaper than those green deals.
8. Many alarmist messages go hand in hand with subliminal or open "we have to end capitalism" or "our only chance is degrowth". Somehow I fear that for many people this might be the real agenda.
9. China, India etc still keep building coal power plants at a fast rate. What if they (as I expect) will not play along? Should the West economically suffer and let them outgrow us (when they emit the CO2 we save, undermining all the green deals of the world)? Will a much stronger China be kind to us?
Any thoughts?
Regarding the temperature, 1 and 2, the problem is feedback loops. For example, snow is shiny, reflects a lot of light back into space. If the ice caps melt, the albedo drops, and then earth absorbs more energy directly. Another dangerous feedback loop is the permafrost: a bunch of frozen plant matter in the soil in Northern Canada and Russia that's been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. If it thaws (which it allegedly will at +2C), all that dead plant matter will decompose into GHG, and the amount of mass we're talking about here is greater than the amount of GHG we've emitted so far. These nonlinear processes make specific predictions hard, but they point very strongly to "bad."
Re 7, I agree, but we still need to fund these projects, and that requires believing there's a problem in the first place.
Re 8, I suspect it's true, there are people who don't REALLY worry about climate change except as an auxiliary argument for their pet issue, be it socialism or some spiritual environmentalism. It's important, though, not to let wrong people cause you to reflexively adopt a different wrong position (like "we don't have evidence that climate change will be bad."). Some people are dumb and have bad arguments, but do you really want to shape your worldviews based on the bad arguments dumb people have?
I also have the impression that the bad effects are overplayed and the good effect underplayed.
But on the other hand, there are some effects that deserve to be called catastrophic, and that can not easily be solved by throwing money at them:
- The oceans become more acidic (carbonic acid). This will kill a lot of species, plain and simple. Even for species not affected directly, there might be secondary effects. The marine ecosystem might look really different from today if the earth is 4 or 6 degree warmer.
- The same might hold for land-based species, but here it's less clear what happens. Ecosystems might or might not collapse.
- Our civilization has thrown a lot of money and effort into optimizing infrastructure for the environmental conditions that we have now. Like, the population density is highest close to the coastlines, and the most valuable buildings are there. If the sea level really rises a lot, this means a lot of people will be displaced, and a lot of value lost. If some 100 million people from Bangladesh have to move, that is a problem that can threaten stability. If some parts of California just turn desert, this is a problem. The answer "California is just a place, we can move elsewhere" is not completely false, but has lots of ramification.
A problem is that the changes have a momentum of centuries. If we want to avoid changes, then it is not an option to wait and see whether they are good or not, and re-engineer climate if it becomes unpleasant. Once the Greenland ice shield becomes unstable, it's gone, and re-reducing the temperature will probably not change that. A lot of other things are like that. Once the jetstreams or the gulf stream are gone, it's very unclear whether they come back in cooler climate.
So it comes down to a gamble. I don't think that we know it's going to be desastrous. But the chances for desaster are non-vanishing enough that I would like to avoid them, even at high costs now.
Fair enough, surely one valid point of view. Just a note towards the acidification: oceans are alkaline, this "acidification" is actually only a tiny move towards neutral pH. People tend to imagine a sea of acid, a terrifying thought for sure.
I still agree that this change might be lethal to some organisms even so.
Yes, it's not going to be harmful to humans. But afaik, even the current changes are already problematic for animals which use calcium carbonate, which is quite common in the sea. (Sea shells, algae, sponges, ....)
On 6, governments subsidise a bunch of things for a bunch of reasons. In particular, fossil fuel subsidies are much greater than subsidies for renewables.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/06/07/qa-fossil-fuel-subsidies
Solar and wind are extremely cheap and effective. (I saw one discussion that it costs less to build and operate a wind farm than it does just to operate an existing coal power plant of the same energy output, but I can't find it right now.) But it's hard for them to compete against the level of lobbying, inertia, and financial support of coal.
But even if they weren't competing with a subsidised fossil fuel market, there's an argument for subsidising them to make the transition happen sooner. (Obviously this only applies if you accept that global heating is bad, which most experts do.)
I just took a look at the OCI Shift the Subsidies database which is allegedly the underlying data behind the linked article. I’m super unimpressed with this data source. Most oil companies globally are nationalized so, yea, they use their status as a state owned entity to get preferential credit. That doesn’t mean those projects wouldn’t get financed otherwise. (also, financing isn’t a subsidy). In fact, I suspect more projects might be financed given how inefficient state owned enterprises tend to be. These people have a huge agenda that taints the entirety of their data collection.
The Oil and gas industry is both immense and profitable. Probably because oil and gas gets used in almost everything we do and touch. You can critique the industry for all sorts of things but saying it wouldn’t be profitable without government subsidies is completely nuts. In the US, the government gets a share of the mineral right so it probably looks more like a net tax than a subsidy.
Coal plants are a hassle to operate. Nobody wants to buy them in the US right now. But they’re also way more effective at providing base power which matters a lot, like at night. They don’t need lobbyists to ensure their existence. Renewables need a base power value proposition and coal will be done.
As you can probably tell, I’m not very tolerant of the excessive excuse making by the renewable crowd. Just about everyone has bent over backwards to make wind and solar a thing and it’s time to either let them compete unfettered in the energy markets or move on to other technologies.
I never said fossil fuels need subsidies to be profitable (if the site I linked to said that then I apologise for not reading it thoroughly). But in general if you've got two competing products that would each be profitable on their own, then the amount of subsidies they get still has an impact on the relative market share.
I kind of take your point about the data gatherers having an agenda, but also, is there anybody without an agenda who's done this kind of analysis? If I'm right, and global heating is a big bad thing, and governments are doing too little too late, then anybody who looks at the data will come to believe that if they didn't already. When they present their data they will have a strong opinion and you'll be able to accuse them of having an agenda.
I agree that you need base power. I'm pro nuclear for that reason. Also putting batteries in houses.
I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I don't really think "the excessive excuse making by the renewable crowd" is at all fair, and the idea that anybody has bent over backwards... I'd characterise that as a few token drops in the ocean so that governments can look like they're doing something. But I'm not sure we'll get very far by trading perceived hyperboles.
If you have 100 hypothetical points to spend on wind, solar, nuclear. How would you allocate them?
100 on nuclear.
I'm sure there are a bunch of places where wind and solar are the best choice for the majority of electricity generation. But those technologies are already mature and competitive, so they have tons of investors and don't need extra help. The nuclear industry, on the other hand, was almost completely wiped out around 1980. It doesn't just need to be rebuilt, it needs new technology to survive in the modern regulatory environment. So on the margin, I'd put all my money on R&D for Generation IV nuclear, especially molten salt reactors.
I don't think I can answer that. First of all it depends on the country how important each is. Second, I think they need different things. Wind and nuclear suffer from NIMBYism. Regulations need to be eased to make it easier to build on-shore wind farms and nuclear power plants. One problem in the UK is that the government has a lot of MPs in rural areas with gentle rolling hills and conservative citizens who don't want their view to be changed. So you don't necessarily need to spend money on subsidising wind farms in those places, but you do need to have a government that's prepared to risk throwing some of its MPs under the bus for the sake of the country (and planet) as a whole. Of course their incentives make that basically impossible.
For solar, I want to see new build houses having more than a token 3m^2 of solar panels built into their roof. The government doesn't need to spend any money at all here: just impose regulations on house building. (I recognise this will increase the cost of that housing but I think it's worth it.)
I also think nuclear fusion is important in the long term. But I don't know enough about the state of the research to know if it needs any help at the moment.
I have many more thoughts on the precise ways to encourage those three areas, but I'll spare you the full version. But I hope I've explained why I don't want to talk about spending hypothetical points.
> I sort of don't expect following strong non-linearity to be true: compared to the preindustrial past, one degree up, nothing happens (or things even improve), another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose.
Wow. What if I told you that a glance at a phase diagram would demonstrate that thermodynamics is really *all* about nonlinear effects? If you're not convinced, maybe try an experiment: vary the temperature of an ice cube linearly and try to see if you notice any nonlinear effects.
Fair point, but still: I believe that there are some non-linear effect, and possibly even positive feedbacks (although nature is rather full of negative ones). Nevertheless, NOTHING bad happened so far (within some statistical noise). Why should we be suddenly at a tripping point? Such that ALL HELL IS GOING TO BEAK LOOSE AND WE ALL BURN TO DEATH (paraphrasing the geist of most media coverage that come to my attention).
Is there anything special about 15 C global average so that say 17 C is terribly dangerous?
Aside from the mass extinction (which isn't really a problem for humanity), the big issue is the amount of stuff near sea level and the amount of shift in crop-growing regions. It's not that the state of the world is better at 15C than at 18C, but that the optimal distribution of stuff in an 18C world is significantly different from that in a 15C world and "location of cities/farms" is difficult to change quickly without mass deaths (Siberia is going to become a lot more habitable and Bangladesh a lot less so, for instance, but "relocate all the Bangladeshis to Siberia" involves substantial retraining of farmers, construction of infrastructure and simple transportation difficulties).
WRT sea levels it should be noted that there are engineering margins of error basically everywhere; when those margins of error are exceeded, well, you're going to go from "not a big problem unless you get hit by a hurricane" to "a bunch of CBDs are underwater" fairly quickly. It should also be noted that sea levels are very slow to react - we've got +1C, but we haven't got the full +1C worth of sea level rise yet.
You're definitely right, though, that human extinction isn't going to happen from this. Even in the worst-case scenarios you're looking at ~1-2 gigadeaths; runaway greenhouse ("Earth turns into Venus 2.0, everything dies") has pretty much been ruled out (as in, "it's possible with sufficient amounts of GHG, but there aren't enough fossil fuels on the planet to make that much CO2, and the super-effective GHG like CFCs have been successfully phased out").
> "relocate all the Bangladeshis to Siberia" involves substantial retraining of farmers, construction of infrastructure and ...
... and Russia deciding it will issue millions of visas to Bangledeshis. But this is unlikely, as is Mexico/US/Brazil granting visas to Central Americans, etc. So anti-immigrant sentiment is one major reason I'm concerned about global warming.
magic9mushroom left a suicide note in OT203 on Dec. 26. So... bye again.
I'd say "Nothing bad has happened so far" is also an exaggeration.
Consider the level of drought and food insecurity we are seeing now, vs. 20 years ago, even with modern technology.
I'm involved peripherally with agrobuinsess personally, and shit is fucking precarious for lots of high value crops already. If rain becomes any more unreliable, we could see some staple crops in becoming likewise unreliable (in certain areas. EG, there is less snowpack on the sierra's year over year for 25 years, and if the trend continues it will be BAD for the worlds largest class 1 farming zone.)
Maybe these effects don’t show up in commodity markets but it seems like we’re doing much better than we were 20 or 40 years ago.
That's also not the case.
For example, coffee commodity prices spiked in July due to drought in SA, and will continue to spike in the future as Africa is also at risk.
These effects are small-medium now, but they are only going to get worse as we exhaust glaciers and water tables, even if we stop warming now.
Look at GSCI and BCOM. The market trades within a range and generally downward.
If you feel the future will be different, put on the trade. But you can’t cherry-pick a particular crop and use that to support some broader climate agricultural catastrophe that isn’t happening.
It feels to me like there's an intuitive disconnect between "1 degree is a small amount of temperature shift" (true in any of my day-to-day experiences) vs. "1 degree is a HUGE amount of temperature shift for a planet-wise average". In particular, when you say "another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose," you seem to be treating 1 degree and 2 degrees as similar amounts of temperature shift, whereas I think for a planetwise average they're really not.i
Another thing is that there's much less warming on water than on land, and much less warming near the equator than at medium and high latitudes, so each 1 °C increase in the global average is a rather larger increase on temperate land.
But why? Even the "planetary average" I believe is an ill defined concept. No single place on Earth cares too much about planetary average. It cares about the specific temperature it experiences. I have myself seen a change of - 44 degrees in 24 hours (Czechoslovakia 1979). We had some "coal holidays" because of that, the coal froze and was hard to unload from the freight trains. So heat and electricity was rationed. Lot of fun back then. Local plants and animals are still well adjusted to such wild swings, why would they suffer so much in say 2 C per century drift? Some things will change for sure, but some things will change in all other scenarios too.
I think e.g. rainfall is driven by much larger-scale patterns than what you would normally experience. If you held everything else constant but just raised the temperature 1 degree C I think many places would be ok (unless that 1 degree C went from -0.5 to +0.5 and now solid ice becomes liquid water), but I don't think everything else is constant, fundamentally I assume because somewhere on earth lots of solid ice is turning into liquid water.
After all, my understanding is that the last ice age was only 4-5 degrees lower than current average; 4-5 degrees lower than current also doesn't feel like that big a deal (I live in a place with >30C summers, subtracting 4-5 degrees doesn't exactly cause water to freeze), but manifestly was.
Point taken. On the other hand, rainfall patterns change all the time, adaptation might be much easier and cheaper. Because of more evaporation there would be probably more rain overall, which is probably mostly a good thing. Speaking of ice ages, well, there is a problem we should be eventually much more worried about imho. Maybe we actually should save the carbon, to use it for preventing the next ice age in the future.
1. Extreme weather events are increasing [IPCC AR6 WG1, SPM section A3, p11]
The optimal temperature is probably whatever temperature human civilization has developed at, since temperature change results in large changes needed. Also, on a personal note, I suspect the cost of a species going extinct might be enormous, since biotechnology has barely begun, and every time a species goes extinct, we lose a potential set of biotechnological tools.
A summary of positives vs negatives: https://skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives.htm
2. The best information I am aware of is that 77% of countries will become poorer because of climate change. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15725
3. The above study estimates global GDP might be reduced by around 23% by 2100. The IPCC probably wouldn't make a super specific estimate like that, since there is huge political pressure on them to be as conservative as possible. However, even though that may represent the total GDP loss - there will be many who are far worse off. People in hot, dry areas may be forced to seek asylum elsewhere.
140 million people might have to move by 2050 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/03/19/climate-change-could-force-over-140-million-to-migrate-within-countries-by-2050-world-bank-report
By 2100, 300-600 million people might be displaced by sea level rise alone https://phys.org/news/2021-06-areas-climate-uninhabitable.html
So, I don't know if you consider that to be worse than a percentage of GDP. But seems bad to me.
4. The extra heat cancels out the effect of CO2 fertilization. https://skepticalscience.com/more-co2-hurts-key-crops.html
5. That may be true right now, but not in the long-term (which is more important, since more people will be alive in the future than are alive now) https://www.monash.edu/medicine/news/latest/2021-articles/worlds-largest-study-of-global-climate-related-mortality-links-5-million-deaths-a-year-to-abnormal-temperatures
6. The Australian carbon tax reduced emissions by around 4% per year, even though they were previously growing fairly rapidly - during this time GDP was still rising by around 2.6% per year www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/OGorman-and-Jotzo-Impact-of-the-carbon-price-on-Australias-electricity-demand-supply-and-emissions.pdf
Also, the risk of triggering positive feedback loops would be a pretty major cost [IPCC AR6 WG1, SPM section C3, p37]
Solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels (https://doi.org/10.25919/16j7-fc07) however our electricity infrastructure hasn't been built for variable, distributed generation. We currently lack energy storage on our electricity grids to "firm" the supply. However, we can simply build large batteries - lithium batteries will probably get a lot cheaper very soon - this still will require public investment, but we can't afford more climate change. Or we could just use nuclear. Or we could just tax carbon like the vast majority of economists want to (https://www.econstatement.org/)
7. What projects are you thinking of, and what are their costs? Geoengineering technologies for climate change are all in their very early stages - have you considered the risk that they won't work?
8. It could turn out that those people are right, couldn't it? What do you think?
9. China's net zero commitment is super vague and the CCP has delayed climate action before (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas). However, it's nearly finished implementing an emissions trading scheme, putting it a few steps ahead of America, Australia et al. But, in any case, climate change is a global problem - no one country can stop it. That's why international agreements such as Paris are so important for us to stick to, and not feel emboldened by laggard countries to be laggard ourselves.
8: It is of course possible that anti-capitalism would be the best system in certain contexts, at least (e.g. I'm sure that some form of fairly extreme socialism is optimal for *some* level of technological sophistication, population size, biome of government types around the world, etc., whereas capitalism would be optimal for others, almost no matter how you define "optimal"). But if that's the case, that should be argued on its own merits, rather than trying to make the (fairly weak and almost universally poorly argued, IMO) case that it is the ONLY solution to climate change.
Well, the heuristics is fairly straightforward: capitalism (market economy) works, nothing else does. Ever. Something else might hypothetically work in the future, when there is a total abundance of everything thanks to robots etc. My guess is though that without capitalism we will lose democracy - because the political class will be hundreds of times more powerful than today, deciding ALSO about the allocation of all the resources. Or some kind of AI, or a blend of the two. What could possibly go wrong, eh?
On temperature extremes, from Guzey’s best of Twitter:
https://www.worldclimateservice.com/2021/03/01/trends-in-temperature-extremes/
https://judithcurry.com/2021/07/15/heat-waves-and-hot-air/?amp=1&__twitter_impression=true
No clue myself if any of that is true, and he didn’t know either. But this purports to show extreme variation isn’t increasing
Great post
Just to pick a small part of this to demonstrate my frustration with these discussions:
"By 2100, 300-600 million people might be displaced by sea level rise alone"
Is that number based on humans doing nothing in reaction to rising sea level? Why would we do nothing?
I'm aware of the fact that Cape Town was able to reclaim several blocks of land where there used to be sea and this was decades ago. Hundreds of years ago the Netherlands performed miracles with water and land reclamation. It's just so hard for me to believe we won't be able to save New York / London etc with some engineering and human ingenuity. We're masters of using technology to adapt to the elements.
My main concerns remain: A. People not wanting to leave their air-conditioned homes and B. Loss of bio-diversity.
I think most cities that have "reclaimed" land from the sea usually took places where the sea was very shallow, added additional rock/soil/etc to raise it above sea level, and then built on it. It almost goes without saying that those locations were unbuilt before they added rock/soil/etc, because those locations were underwater.
I think the process of taking a place that was already build and raising it is much harder. The only example I am aware of is the Raising of Chicago in the mid 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
I suspect that some cities might be able to do this with some of their relevant neighborhoods, but very few particular places are going to be worth investing this much effort in - the costs of this sort of raising would thus be even greater than the costs of displacement of the several hundred million people that live on land that will end up below sea level. (I suspect that New York, Miami, London, etc. will be worth investing in, but the hundreds of millions of people displaced are mostly in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and other low lying highly populated places.)
No, it's based on a few different projections of what emissions could end up being, from little action to high action. Obviously there are some big unknowns and uncertainties - this is always going to be the case for a topic like climate change, which encompasses basically everything on the planet. Read the study here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z
What proportion of the world has air-con (or would if they could afford it)? I live in Southern Europe and the first time I saw an air-con unit was when I visited America.
I hope to get back here when I have more time. Right now only this:
8. - as someone who spent half of his life in non-capitalist country (Czechoslovakia), I am absolutely sure, I mean absolutely, that you don't want to lose capitalism. It is the engine that makes all the money you need to eventually take care of the environment and everybody's needs in fact. When we got rid of the communist rule in my country, the environment improved incredibly, within few years. I even think that without capitalism you lose democracy (there was never any successful democratic country without capitalism - meaning market economy. Scandinavian countries have market economies, to be sure). As for degrowth - I believe that without growth you have a recipe for a social disaster. Everything becomes a zero sum game suddenly - good luck with that. From another angle, the more rich is a country, the easier it is for it to handle emergencies, disasters and problems in general. More growth means more wealth.
9. Chinese communists will do absolutely nothing to threaten their economic growth. It is a part of their social contract and power is all they seek. Also, they cannot be trusted, the communist assholes they are. I have seen this in and out, they can be forced to do something, at best. Do we have enough force?
I don't think your assumption regarding a link between capitalism and environmental improvement is correct. Between the 60s and the 90s, the US also vastly improved environmental conditions...got rid of acid rain, cleaned up water and air, etc., and that had nothing to do with becoming more capitalistic, it was because of better knowledge, technology, and regulations. China has improved too. I see no link whatsoever between using technology to implement environmental improvements and and whether that is funded by private or public ventures (indeed, there is often no profit motive there, so it usually has to be implemented by public investment or regulations).
He didn't say "capitalism is the only thing that can lead to environmental improvement." What he is referring to is the reputation Stalin and Mao's regimes had for astounding degrees of waste. When you remove the price mechanism for fuel, for waste disposal, for resources, none of the workers or middle-managers or project czars have any incentive for efficient use of resources. If they need more coal to build some bridge, they ask the party for more coal and it gets sent over. No one keeps track of how much resources they consume because no one has to pay for it.
We find, just empirically, that the price mechanism keeps everybody more on their toes about resource consumption.
From Poland. The problem with communism was that massive part of economy was completely dysfunctional, interest of anyone utterly detached from any sort of productivity.
So you got the worst parts of capitalism with no benefits.
> better technology
made available in Poland thanks to collapse of communism, the other two also but this was clearest one
> The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-senseless-environment-crime-of-the-20th-century-russia-whaling-67774 is just one of tiny example
> China has improved too
China economic systems is about as communist as I am chinese
> I see no link whatsoever between using technology to implement environmental improvements and and whether that is funded by private or public ventures
the problem is not "public" part, it is "dysfunctional as fuck" part (guaranteed in centrally planned economies that are detached from actually doing something useful)
8. In general, I agree that capitalist societies have done a lot better. I certainly don't forsee this trend continuing once AI becomes capable of replacing humans at nearly everything. But there is a major flaw in capitalism if the costs of climate change remain external to the market.
9. Although China certainly burns a lot of coal, decarbonization is also a major opportunity for them - they make a large proportion of solar panels and batteries. My feeling is that the best approach to tackling the CCP is to continue raising tariffs and slowing international trade with China, until their government agrees to democratize and respect human rights.
Just to expand on your point about richer countries handling disasters better, it often illuminating to ask the climate-alarmed which climatic extreme kills the most Americans and what is that death rate? You know, so we can compare it to the 30 odd thousand who are shot to death or the similar number who perish in road accidents.
Its floods which are the most deadly of all the climate disasters - about one hundred Americans lose their lives to flooding every year.
Such a relief that AR6 doesn't suggest that flooding is getting worse (despite what some headlines might misleadingly hint at)
"At 1.5°C global warming, heavy precipitation and associated flooding are projected to intensify and be more frequent in most regions in Africa and Asia (high confidence), North America (medium to high confidence) and Europe (medium confidence)"
AR6 WG1 SPM p33
So, if flooding does (eventually) increase by 10% might we expect an extra 10 Americans to die every year? No; because deaths from all climate phenomena have been plummeting, everywhere, for as long as there have been records. Extreme weather was a vastly greater problem in the past than it is now, and will be in the future.
To clarify, it will progressively become less of a problem.
That is what irritates me most: every weather event is "because of AGW", according to most media. As if these things did not happen before. It is ok to use statistics to prove the point, but they mostly don't do that.
If it was not for the media coverage, 99% of people would not be able to make any conclusion, whether it is getting warmer or cooler or whatever. Except for the subjective cognitive bias "this did not happen when I was young".
I've seen groups like World Weather Attribution quoted in news articles to justify linking extreme weather events to climate change. Some news sources might not, but I've definitely noticed it happening. This is a group that estimates what percentage of an extreme weather event can be attributed to climate change, check them out - https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/
This chimes in with Scott's thoughts on cost-benefit studies from the last links post. William Nordhaus estimated that the optimum level of global warming would be about 3.5 degrees C. Of course then you realize why nobody else has bothered to do a cost-benefit analysis - it doesn't fit anybody's narrative. Seeing as BAU is taking us in the vicinity of 3.5 degrees, we merely need to carry on doing what we're doing - 3 or 4 hundred billion a year in subsidies for renewables and all will be well. The 'Very Alarmed' simply cannot have that - as Gurdjieff nearly said, people will give up anything you care to mention, except their alarm. And the 'Very Sceptical' also simply cannot have that because it would necessitate accepting that 3 or 4 degrees of warming could be created by our carbon emissions.
You would think that with such a supposedly big problem with vast potential costs, the helpfulness of assessing costs and benefits would be great, but it seems not.
Even capping warming on 3.5 degrees requires substantial investment, though.
I am no expert, but what I´ve read about the topic strongly suggests that while countries formally commited to 2 degrees, there is no real expectation that this goal will be without some unexpected technological (or political) breaktrough. So we will get much higher rise in temperatures than planned, but lower than if we did nothing.
There have been a number of cost-benefit analyses. The most well-known are Stern (2006) and Garnaut (2008). Both found reducing GHG emissions had higher benefits than costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garnaut_Climate_Change_Review
I don't know Garnaut, but I know the Stern review uses some quite nonstandard assumptions to reach that conclusion - specifically it assumes that costs and benefits depreciate at 1.4% per year as you project them into the future.
The model Stern (and basically every economist) uses here is that money can either be spent on things we like now, or saved / invested and then we have MORE money to spend in the future. When we're talking about intergenerational transfers of wealth (which we are when we talk about climate change) then everything we spend now preventing climate change 'steals' money from the future that they could use for other things they want. So the question is, how much would money that could be 'gifted' to the future now via investment actually worth when the future rolls around? Alternatively, what do we 'steal' from the future when we spend money now on making the world better for them?
NB - Apologies that 'steals' is a bit of a pejorative term - I couldn't think of another phrase that meant that you're taking money from future generations without their consent, but in this case you're taking the money with their best interests in mind whereas most people who steal don't do so with good intentions.
Stern says that the answer is that we 'steal' 1.4% of the value of the money each year by spending it now rather than investing it. This means that Stern argues that the £100 we spend preventing climate change now would only be worth £400 in 100 years time (so if the value of the improved environment we gift the world is worth >£400 it is positive expected value to improve the environment). However, it is really not clear where this 1.4% comes from; the UK government uses 3.5% as a much more standard discount rate, which would imply that £100 spent now 'steals' £3000 from the future which is nearly ten times higher. Stephen Watson below suggests that the Nordhaus analysis (which I haven't read) uses 5% implying we 'steal' nearly £12500 from the future!
I ended up a big sceptic on Stern - discount rate is almost single-handedly the parameter which leads to his eye-catching conclusion, and yet it is different from the standard value given by the UK government for future planning, Stern doesn't really explain where 1.4% actually comes from and there is inadequate sensitivity analysis around this key number. It wouldn't surprise me if preventing climate change did have a positive cost-benefit ratio, but it felt to me like Stern decided that that was going to be his conclusion and made the data fit his theory rather than the other way around.
Note - discounting is not just about the rate of return on investment, but also about the relative importance we put on future suffering/pleasure compared to present suffering/pleasure. A 1.5% discount rate might be low on financial investments, but it is probably high to put on the suffering/pleasure itself - it seems quite plausible that 0% is the appropriate discount rate for the actual hedonic value.
I think the hedonic argument is plausible, but money really isn't hedonic value, because money can be invested. Even if we assume 0% hedonic discounting, in 100 years we could have 400x the money to spend on whatever hedonic thing we want. So suffering/pleasure doesn't become worth less, but it does become cheaper at a regular financial discount rate.
Sorry, I should add that it wasn't like Stern pulled the number 1.4% out of thin air - he argued (probably correctly) that the discount rate depended on the situation with the global economy, and that the global economy would react to different climate scenarios differently. So Stern didn't actually have any single discount rate, but rather a range of discount rates of which the average was about 1.4%. But then as per my original comment this is significantly less than the UK government projects while looking at the same data, so at least one of either Stern or the UK Government is materially wrong here, and Stern does a less convincing job of identifying where his numbers come from IMO
Nordhaus also found that reducing GHG emissions had higher benefits than costs....... But only down to 3.5 degrees C.
There's a pretty good chance Nordhaus has a flawed approach to discounting social costs and benefits - when weighing up intangible benefits into the future, he usually discounts them with a rate similar to the economic discount rate, 5% or so. Though there is considerable divergence on the issue, and many think it should be even higher, the most common opinion among experts nowadays is that this discount rate should be zero. The average is 2.6%. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/26529055.pdf
Here's an amazingly thorough exposition of the issue, if you have a few months - https://users.ox.ac.uk/~mert2255/papers/discounting.pdf
This seems like more of an argument for climate change being good, as opposed to a criticism specifically of either climate charities and policy or say Stripe’s carbon removal pilot program? I share concerns about overreach here but ... this seems like a disconnected and relatively unsupported list of questionable reasons that barely tie together, so idk how useful it is to respond to them all.
1. Not an expert here, but there are petabytes of arguments about why climate change is, in fact, bad for the environment.
2. Not an argument? What reason is there to believe “the balance maybe positive?” That’s just a disconnected statement
3. A couple percentage points isn’t great! Normal policy stuff barely had the ability to increase GDP that much. Free trade agreements individually raise GDP by ~0.01% and that’s also probably the ballpark of most other policies. It’s especially not great for the people and areas the loss is concentrated in. But a x% GDP loss could mean anything from Beijing getting nuked (bad you would think) to the entire fast food, cosmetics, most of fashion, video game cosmetics, most of marketing, MLMs, and those sorts of industries getting outlawed, which would be awesome, to the pandemic, in between. But 3% GDP estimated loss, which probably isn’t that exact, could correspond to something bad. Probably worth directly discussing that instead lol
4. Again, not an argument. Yeah co2 increases ag yields by a decent amount, that is known and taken into account, well or not. Why would that be better than the harms climate change might cause? What are those?
5. Source? What? How am I supposed to understand this? The IPcC predicts lots of Serbs and displacement from climate change, likely on net, how am I supposed to even begin to think about why? Where can I learn about this?
6. Current expert consensus is that solar and wind are already price competitive in some areas. And they will continue to follow a learning curve and decrease. Are they wrong? Why? The GND might be too expensive and might decrease growth, but how much and why? How could it crater GDP by a factor of 4 relative to future?
7. Estimates? Huh?
8. Yes they are kind of dumb. But say stripes program or Biden’s goals don’t seem to include that?
9. Some theories are that solars price competitiveness will lead to worldwide adoption. And that US energy consumption has stopped growing due to much more efficient products.
For all I know, climate change isn’t real. But this doesn’t convincingly argue that.
Look I'm definitely no expert, just a guy with opinions. But I think a lot of people are underestimating extreme discomfort as a reason for concern.
I'm pretty confident general infrastructure advances can mitigate a lot of the bad effects of GW, and the whole "wars fighting over resources threat" always struck me as silly and unhinged.
But it's going to really suck if large parts of the world have unbearably hot summers where you sweat your arse off whenever you leave air conditioning. That might be hard to put a price on, but I'd argue global comfort is on par with ideals like "space exploration" and worth throwing a ton of money into.
Of course we also don't want to make a ton of wild animals go extinct either.
I think cheapish go-engineering is becoming more inevitable every day.
> But it's going to really suck if large parts of the world have unbearably hot summers where you sweat your arse off whenever you leave air conditioning
Right now large parts of the world have unbearably cold winters where you freeze to death if you go outside without heavy clothing. It seems like swings and roundabouts to me.
Even a three-degree change doesn't seem like a big deal to me. An "unbearably hot" day for me is anything above 40C; that happens a few days a year where I live, and maybe would happen twice as often if the weather were three degrees hotter... but that still doesn't seem like that big a deal.
How many people live in places where you'll freeze to death if you go outside without heavy clothing, compared to places with unbearably hot summers? I can't be bothered to do the math, but my guess is that the difference is at least a factor of three. Is it worth it if one billion people are less at risk of freezing to death if it means that three billion people are more at risk of dying of heat stroke?
My guess is a factor of ten the other way round - lots of guesses going on!
I'd add that if you look at the destination of people who move from one place to another, it is generally towards warmer places. People retire to Florida, not Alaska.
Also the vast (mostly) uninhabitated parts of the planet (Siberia, Mongolia, Greenland, Antarctica) are just too damn cold for Human Beings. After all, we live in an ice age!
What do you mean, other way around? Surely you don't think that more people live in cold regions than in hot? This 2000 graph suggests it could be as much as a factor of 50: https://www.themarysue.com/world-population-latitude-longitude/
To clarify, by 'cold' here I mean 'sub-5 degrees C on average'.
Another way to look at the graph you linked to is to ask 'What is the temperature of the places people choose to live in?' And the answer is - warm places rather than cold. Near the equator rather than the poles.
Why is the whole of Northern Canada almost completely empty and the Southern United States nearly full??
the annual deaths from cold are several times higher than the annual deaths from heat
If we didn't have artificial skin (clothes) and vast amounts of heating, the majority of people on the planet would simply die of cold. Before the discovery of fire, we could never have left Africa.
What is the difference in the energy spent on heating as opposed to cooling?
The average temperature of Earth is about 15 degrees and the optimum for humans is significantly higher than that.
My temperature concerns are generally reserved for the speed of change, not particularly the amount (up to Nordhaus's 3 or 4 degrees)
So maybe I guess the thing to calculate is cost of moving significant numbers of people to cooler areas.
Like sure if we redistributed everyone to Siberia that could be nice. But remember that most of the world population are in China, India, and to a lesser extent Africa. All have very hot climates already. In Hong Kong they have these cool air conditioned bridges between buildings to escape the heat but still get around but that's not a viable solution for most of humanity.
Also I'll add, I live in a hot country and don't mind super hot days either because I work in air-conditioning. But I enjoy camping and it's super important how many days of the year I'm able to go enjoy the outdoors with my kids. Less outdoor time for most of the world seems super sad to me. Even if everyone watching tv indoors doesn't have any concrete gdp downsides
My in-laws moved to Georgia a few years ago, and they originally struggled with the vastly hotter summers. Then they realized that they could just do more outdoor activities in the spring and fall. That's a bit of an issue with kid's school schedules, but Georgia specifically has more time off during the school year (two weeks in October and March or April IIRC).
Hell has a high gdp
Dumb Afghanistan question:
I hear some people saying the US "should have waited longer" to leave Afghanistan, and other people saying "they waited 20 years, what good would another few months have done"?
Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan? Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
Also, are people who aren't evacuated quickly enough really in danger from the Taliban? Why would the Taliban want to kill Westerners and anger Western powers? Isn't it in their best interest to let all the Westerners leave in an orderly fashion?
On May 15 the embassy released a second advisory reiterating their April 23 advisory that Americans should leave Afghanistan as soon as possible.
So far I think the Taliban have learned that angering Western powers and dropping your wallet on the street means you can't buy a cup of coffee.
To your first question - was that not the intention? As late as 12th August leaked reports were suggesting Kabul could fall in 90 days (and that was seen as alarmist) e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58187410 giving a reasonable timeframe to evacuate. Unfortunately even the worst case scenarios planned for were optimistic.
There will be disputes over things like foreign currency reserves, debt, sanctions and aid over the next months, and the Taliban will need to decide if they want to co-operate with the West on evacuations to show good faith, or go the Iran/North Korea blackmail route and seek any opportunity for leverage (e.g. de facto hostages). Who knows their approach but I wouldnt hang round Kabul to find out
There are already a lot of people dead. Im only seeing stuff about Afghani collaborators and nothing about US citizens, but i have little doubt that the Taliban would gladly kill US citizens if they werent worried about getting caught. If it helps, think of them as the Afghanistan version of the KKK and Know-Nothings.
From twotter, describing an "American mom".
"She was whipped by Taliban fighters on one attempt to get through, she said. A man standing near her was shot in the head on another try, leaving his wife and baby in tears.
Since then, she's been in hiding."
> Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan? Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
The military learned that a commander in chief was serious when he said he wanted to get out. They'd been able to persuade every prior President to stay and commit more money and troops.
I only spent limited time around senior leadership but here's my intuition:
>Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan?
Evacuation was never enumerated as a operational priority. Getting interpreters out has been a huge hassle for ages. For evacuation to be a priority someone very senior in the administration has to make that a strategic priority. It's not the kind of thing that happens via inertia. Lastly, I can't overemphasize the level of denial in considering the possiblity & timeline of Kabul falling. And staff officers don't make plans around scenarios they're collectively in denial about.
>Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
Learned about what? How to evacuate people? I would guess we're learning a lot about evacuating people and running a Berlin airlift style operation. I would also guess we're going to learn a lot about cohabitating in Kabul with the Taliban where you can't just airstrike them whenever they're visible because they're everywhere now.
>Also, are people who aren't evacuated quickly enough really in danger from the Taliban?
Depends who they are and what they did. Pashtunwali is a real thing so I wouldn't expect some Khmer Rouge style executions. But yea if you were an interpreter with a US partner force then you might get shot. Navigating Pashtunwali is complex and there are a lot of relatively cosmopoltian Afghans in Kabul that would rather not live under a redneck regime.
>Why would the Taliban want to kill Westerners and anger Western powers? Isn't it in their best interest to let all the Westerners leave in an orderly fashion?
I'm mostly checked out of the news so I'm very surprised if this is happening. A running question has always been how monolithic and organized the Tablan is. I have experience at a much more local level and my strong prior is that the new regime will probably be fairly orderly interspersed with some mob violence and maybe some symbolic shows of force - like killing some jews or christians or something. In the category of "a thing you're not allowed to say but is true" would be that the Taliban is often better at governance than the Afghan government. I'm not talking complex policy but just the everyday expectations of local government.
Ignorant opinion here: the moment the US started evacuating people, this would indicate a pull-out, and the collapse of everything (the army literally dropping weapons and scattering, the president filling a car full of cash and heading for the UAE) would have happened sooner. See this story from a pro-Ghani source: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/20/asia/afghanistan-ashraf-ghani-taliban-intl/index.html
""In the days leading up to the Taliban coming in Kabul, we had been working on a deal with the US to hand over peacefully to an inclusive government and for President Ghani to resign," he said.
"These talks were underway when the Taliban came into the city. The Taliban entering Kabul city from multiple points was interpreted by our intelligence as hostile advances," the senior official said.
"We had received intelligence for over a year that the President would be killed in the event of a takeover," the official added."
The pull-out or handover or whatever you want to call it was predicated on "there's a government in place, there are armed forces, they can step up and take over while we evacuate" but in reality that didn't happen. So even if the US forces had said "We are leaving over the course of an entire year", the only thing the native Afghan forces would listen to is "We are leaving" and they'd be out the door to save their own necks in seconds flat (and given the entire history of the country, who can blame them? It's a record of everything from "invaded by the Islamists, invaded by the Mongols, invaded by the Mughal, overthrew them and set up our own kingdom, then an empire, oops internal dissent knocked that on the head, to a monarchy, sort of invaded by the Brits they were peddling influence during the Raj, to a monarchy that was sort of reformist and progressive, to a civil war over those reforms, to a monarchy again, to a democracy part one: I overthrew my cousin the king and declared myself president, to a Communist regime, to invaded by the Russians who set up a Soviet-backed regime, to more civil war, to the Taliban, to invaded by the Americans, to a democracy part two: this time for real - yeah right the Americans are going home and that brings us up to date, with the only constant being that as soon as the new regime takes over, the followers of the old regime are for the chop).
I'm also seeing a lot of talk about this was deliberate on the part of some section or other of the American administration, that (take your pick of) the generals or the intelligence agencies or the hawks or the Deep State or the fairies at the bottom of the garden didn't want to leave and deliberately FUBARed the withdrawal in order to damage Biden and lead to calls for US forces to go back in. How true or not this is, I have no idea, there's a lot of gossip and rumour going around right now.
The obvious problem is that our evacuation would set off the collapse. The obvious solution is to have enough U.S. troops on site to hold the parts of Afghanistan that we need in order to evacuate our people for the month or so it takes.
Why wouldn't that work?
A) Some people will not start evacuating until after the evacuation window has closed. August 16th was not the end of that window, but it does appear to have been a significant wake up call that there were only a couple of weeks left. Less, now.
B) Is that not what we're doing? Everything I've seen indicates that US citizens in Afghanistan are nominally free to make their way to the airport in Kabul (plus or minus the general dangers of ground travel in the area), where they will find 5k US troops running the evacuation effort. That is planned to end with the month, but if Biden extends it I doubt the Taliban will seriously contest control in the short term.
(SIVs are a complicated debacle that ought to be addressed separately.)
I normally disagree with you, but I wholeheartedly agree here. On top of troops, we're pretty good at airstrikes, as well, so I don't see why our only two options must be "stay another 20 years" or "pull out haphazardly, leaving our local allies to die".
In Germany, that is exactly what the current debate focuses on, since a few weeks before the collapse, the government was divided in the question of whether to pull out civilian helpers.
They decided against it because the Afghan government begged them not to pull out, backed by the US and other allies. So for Germany, very concretely, this was *the* reason why they didn't evacuate civilian helpers beforehand.
Even then, pulling out 4 days before collapse is better than 4 days after IMO
I mean this is just like timing the stock market. Yes of course the ideal time to cut and run is right before everyone else does. But cutting and running is causally influential to everybody else doing the same.
No it isn’t, it’s like insider trading, which can work. Biden controlled both the time of troop withdrawals and to a lesser but significant extent the timing of US citizen and afghan staff and current refugee evacuation. The second was allowed to happen after the first because they expected Kabul and the rest of Afghanistan to fall slowly. That was a poor expectation, and should’ve been either better understood or just, for security reasons, ignored. And then the second should’ve happened before the first. And US troops are a stronger incentive to not invade than US citizens and kabulis running is a reason to invade
I just don't agree. To speak just about the Americans for the moment, everyone was advised in June that they should leave. Many people did. Think about the mindset of somebody already ignoring their government's advice to leave a warzone. These people weren't going anywhere until they felt personally threatened. Should we have forced them out at gunpoint? I think that would have been bad both for reasons of personal liberty and optics. Could we have sent them another memo, where we somehow convinced them that "no really, you should really leave, but the Afghan government is really totally fine, we think, don't tell any of the locals that you're leaving." I just don't think that's realistic.
As for our local friends, it's really a similar story, but even more obvious to see how we couldn't get them out without precipitating the collapse. This is their home. These people are probably friends and relatives of people in the Afghan government. They have families. There really is no "get these people out but otherwise don't accelerate the collapse of the government." This is magical thinking.
Of course, we could have had the military do that. We obviously could have said "forcibly evacuate all of these people," and gotten everyone out while troops guarded the whole city of Kabul and then evacuated themselves. I think, though, that we'd just be blamed for more directly causing the fall of the Afghan government that way.
This just all seems like Monday morning quarterbacking to me. If there's anything I want to criticize, it's that a 20-year nation-building operation couldn't stand on its own feet for a few days. Proportionally, criticizing the exit seems like a really strange use of attention.
They probably would have left sooner if the US had made clear that Kabul could fall within a week. And many Afghans would’ve left sooner if the us government had offered them transportation, sped up the visa process, and made that clear.
The collapse was gonna happen anyway. If we started with the evacuation, rather than ending with it, that’d be better.
But yeah this is somewhat low significance, but it does demonstrate that even to the end they didn’t know at all what they were doing
The null hypothosis is incompitance (systemic, not individual). I don't see any reason to move from that.
Answering questions in order:
1. Evacuating Civilians / People - The people we'd want to evacuate are the people who were responsible for maintaining the civil order we were trying to project in Afghanistan. I heard this from some buddies in country, so take it only as an anecdote, but as troop deployments decreased, compensation for private security over there guarding infrastructure and individuals got increasingly lucrative. As long as the nation wasn't actively enemy controlled, these people have no incentive to leave early and the US had no incentive to get them out early.
2. Are they in danger from the Taliban - probably not... The Taliban's incentive right now is to act as much like a normal government as possible for while, which means doing their best to present a unified front that can maintain domestic control and not indiscriminately slaughter people. That being said - the Taliban has actively begun hunting down people they believe to be "collaborators," non-western afghani's deemed to have helped the occupying forces (so, police investigators, military officials and the like) so they've got good reason to fear for their safety. Westerners are probably safe from mainline Taliban forces... but do you trust every component of the Taliban to have the discipline to hold to the party line of "don't trust westerners?" What about non-Taliban forces inside Afghanistan... how much would you trust the Taliban to protect you against random looters?
My take is that Afghanistan just got drastically less safe overall, and this is what's prompting the flee not some kind of specific threat the individuals are running from.
One consideration is that the bulk of the State Department people are doing a one-year tour, and they are often pretty isolated from the general population. Afghanistan is a pretty undesirable post, generally avoided by State department employees with clout. A bunch of short-term, mildly incompetent bureaucrats, and a mixed bag of incentives. It is not surprising that this ended poorly for so many Afgan civilians. The Americans don't seem to be dying in droves during this evacuation, and this is the main incentive.
I can confirm my experience with State employees has been unmitigated trash.
To be fair, they weren’t running the show. The military had/has lead. Doesn’t excuse how terrible they were/probably are though.
There was a zoo in Massachusetts that tried to stop a government budget cut by announcing that such a cut would cause them to kill animals. It didn't work, but the general principle is that to stop someone else from doing X you make the consequences of X as painful as possible for the decision maker. Intelligently preparing to leave would have made it politically easier to leave. The "deep state" didn't want the US to leave Afghanistan and so didn't take the proper preparations. Evidence of the deep state's desires is the surprising amount of media criticism Biden has gotten from his Afghan position, despite the fact that it could cost the Dems the California governorship and thus potentially control of the Senate given the advanced age of one of California's Senators.
The Taliban compete with other Islamic groups for global influence and funding. Killing fleeing Americans might be a "reasonable" PR strategy to use against their Islamic competitors.
How could it cost the Dems the California governorship? It doesn't seem like a California specific issue, and California is a solidly blue state.
It can't. Newsom is only in trouble because of COVID. My personal guess is that a lot of his Hispanic LA base is pissed off at the restrictions that caused their small businesses to implode last year. They might have been OK had it stopped COVID in its tracks, but it didn't seem to this winter, when there was a huge surge in LA.
That's really what it comes down to. He'll keep his white Bay Area FB engineer vote, but the question is whether he keep the brown LA house painter/construction worker vote. If not...he's toast. I think he'll squeak by, but it will be close.
Right now the recall election is polling within the margin of error as to whether Newsom stays or goes. If he goes, it's not totally clear who will win, but for many weeks a right-wing talk radio host was leading the polls (because Democrats were mostly planning to leave that part of the ballot blank) though now there's a left-wing YouTuber who has suddenly jumped in the polls because no one else in the race has a D by their name.
The recall election on Sept 14, 2021. My guess is that a lot of voters lump together all the politicians of a party and so hearing negative things about Biden lowers the opinion of many people of Newsom.
Definitely not an expert, but my sense is that it isn't US (or UK etc) citizens that are in danger, or who might not get evacuated. It's the Afghans who worked for America who are going to have problems.
It's probably a very unfair comparison, but the French who collaborated with the Nazis were treated rather badly when the Nazis 'left'.
Why is it unfair?
Because you might think there's a moral difference between collaborating with Nazis and collaborating with the US-backed government of Afghanistan, and it's quite possible that this moral difference will be reflected the treatment of these people by the new regime (though it's also possible it won't be).
My completely non-expert opinion is that it was an attractor effect. Once enough Afghani powers decided that the Taliban were likely to win, they switched to supporting the Taliban.
So instead of having a protracted attrition war, we ended up with a sudden switch that didn't even wait for the troops to leave. So, ironic enough, you can't even put a number on "how many days the Afghan government lasted by itself" - it's negative.
So there was no evacuation because the official plan was for a long term war instead of an overnight change of power.
But how could the US be so surprised by this? I don't think they were. I just think that the decision makers work at simulacra levels that are decoupled from reality. Once the official plan was to leave, you can't move information upstream that would sensibly change the plan. I just can't imagine how this would work, institutionally. From everything I've seen in the past years, including the pandemic, I just don't think US has the capability of changing committed plans based on object level, competent analysis. When did it last happen?
I recently read an article by the guy who planned the withdrawal for the Trump administration. He blamed the solid September 11 withdrawal date that Biden's team selected. The plan under Trump was to leave sooner, but with a transition-based criteria system. If the Taliban didn't meet their end of the agreement, the US was not going to leave. According to the article, that means the US could have stayed indefinitely under the old plan, but that the Taliban was cooperating in order to get the US out. When September 11 was initiated as the "have to be out" date, the Taliban lost any incentive to hold back, knowing that the chain of command would struggle to reverse, and may be incapable of changing the plan.
I've read other discussions that basically say that the Taliban has been quietly massing outside all the regional capitals in farms and surrounding villages for the better part of a year due to the Trump plan, ready to take everything the minute we had drawn down. Other articles point to the May~October period as the heavy fighting time due to weather constraints, so figuring that regional capitals have been falling for about a month, that build up could have been as recent as March or so of this year. Either way, it looks more to me like the Taliban were playing nice up through about the official Trump withdrawal date and the general govt collapse was predictable after that short of a 40000 troop deployment and about 700 billion dollars worth of new bombing campaign.
That's still in line with the article I was referring to, as everyone knew the Taliban would take over once the US left. What is in question is whether civilians, equipment, etc., would be evacuated prior to that takeover. We'll never knew for sure the alternative world where the Trump plan continued, but there's a plausible scenario where we held to a goal-based timeline instead of an end date timeline.
I just read a headline that says that the Taliban will not announce a new government as long as there is still one US soldier present. It gives credence to Mr. Doolittle's suggestion because even now the Taliban is holding back to some extent because there is still a chance, however minor, that US can reverse a course and attack them. I don't know what kind of deal was with Trump. Depends on details but I can imagine that if they promised something like only a partial participation in the government then that would be the deal that the Taliban would have to accept eventually.
If that's true, the Biden's plan was very stupid. I also think that the US should have stayed in Afghanistan until they were sure that some things they introduced, would stay. Throwing all that was achieved away is always easy, it doesn't require smart thinking or anything. But there are real people in Afghanistan and they deserved better.
> . I also think that the US should have stayed in Afghanistan until they were sure that some things they introduced, would stay.
I don’t think there is any way for the US to win a staring contest with the Taliban. Time is on their side.
Oh come on. Where's the National Socialist German Worker's Party these days? What happened to Tojo? The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon, home guerilla advantage notwithstanding. There are no Nationalists left in mainland China, and no followers of the late President Thieu bombing the occasional railroad bridge in Vietnam.
It is certainly possible to win against a weaker opponent even if he's got the home-ground advantage, can melt into the countryside, is willing to live in caves and eat rats and don suicide bomb vests. It's entirely possible to wipe those people out, root and branch.
But it requires focus and commitment, and quite often some pretty ugly decisions. You have to be damn sure that's what you want to do. Being half-assed about it, and not entirely certain what you're trying to achieve definitely doesn't work, and never has.
Nobody who's paid attention to American politics for more than 25 years is surprised that a plan of Biden's was stupid. They guy has been somewhat of a joke for the past umpty-five times he's run for President -- and that was when he was younger and faster on his feet. He's always been just a good ol' boy Irish bullshitter, with very little of a clue. It's kind of stunning that he eventually made it over the top, and a real testament to how many people ended up disliking Trump, and how chaotic the Democratic primaries were in the midst of COVID. Even the guy who picked him for Veep (Obama) thinks Biden's a lightweight and pointedly declined to endorse him as a successor in 2016.
> Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan
I assume that people who made such decision intended to abandon most of local Afghanistan people who helped US forces (interpreters, cooks, translators, etc etc).
>a) the State Department issued advisories months ago telling Americans to leave, but can't compel them to
This is the part I keep coming back to - nobody went to sleep in the US and were shocked to find out that they somehow woke up in Afghanistan. The official State Department Level 4 "leave on a commercial flight ASAP" advisory was April 27th. By June 15th, the boilerplate language had been updated to:
>If you have concerns about your health or safety in Afghanistan, now is the time to leave. Commercial transportation and infrastructure are intact and operating normally. Strongly consider this option. If you decide to remain in Afghanistan, carefully consider all travel and limit trips only to those that are absolutely necessary. Given security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited.
If someone chose to stay after that, they were signing up for the uncertainty of whatever came next. To the extent that those people now regret their actions, that is not a failure of US planning.
The problem with the "crisis of confidence" is that the US intelligence community knew the Taliban would retake the country. If we knew it, surely the locals did as well. You can't count on the Afghani soldiers holding out for a few months and then giving up, when they know that's the end game plan. They have every incentive to switch sides and avoid fighting at all, maybe getting a place in the government. It's one thing to think that the new government would hold, and then asking the Afghani military to do their part. It's another thing to know that it wouldn't hold, and still expecting the military to fight under those circumstances.
People do fight for the lost causes, when they believe in them. The US establishment bristles at comparisons to Vietnam, but in this aspect they are very apt. The Afghan government was an obvious sham, thoroughly corrupt, incompetent and alien to the native culture, only propped up by the US dollars and military presence.
However, publicly admitting this would be tantamount to declaring that decades-long American policy was a colossal mistake, so the kayfabe had to be maintained in defiance of common sense and humanitarian concerns.
It was a colossal mistake but theoretically they could have supported more grassroots government even if it meant to include the Taliban. It seemed that the US pushed too much their values. The US embassy in Afghanistan had a LGTB support announcement very recently. If you think about how controversial it was just a few years ago even in the US. I am sure even the most progressive Afghan society would be still very biased against those things and we pushed too much of those and too little of basic human things, for example, that better court system, better economy, better healthcare and even education is beneficial to everyone, including the Taliban itself. Their are many Islamic countries who uses all those benefits while being very conservative like Saudi Arabia etc. It is not what we think is optimal but it is much better than Afghanistan. But we had no such perspective, we didn't value what they could achieve in those aspects and therefore we threw away everything.
Can you find anyone in a serious position within the US government who thought the Ghani-led government would remain in power after the US left? I've seen lots of predictions about how long it would hold out, but nobody seriously thought they would be around a few years from now. Most that I've seen were hoping to make it to the end of the year. Even a year ago the Taliban had taken control of so much of the country that the Ghani government couldn't be said to actually be in control of the country anymore. The steady Taliban gains throughout 2021 should have made that obvious to people months ago, when there was still time to make changes to the plan.
I used a program where you type in something and an artificial Intelligence makes art based on what you typed. I typed in a bunch of movie titles and made a quiz. Can you guess the movie titles based on the art? This will test how well you understand how an AI thinks. Or how many movies you watch. There are no sequels or prequels.
https://thorsbyprojects.tumblr.com/post/660029925870518272/ai-generated-art-movie-quiz
Also here is the same thing for tv series: https://thorsbyprojects.tumblr.com/post/660032539928510464/ai-generated-art-tv-quiz
Did you just type the movie titles? It looks like the AI has seen lots of the publicity art for these movies online, and has only been diverted from that in cases like Gladiator, Cleopatra, and Elephant Man, where the words in the movie title are common enough outside the movie that generic images took over. (I'm a bit surprised that Labyrinth is so associated with David Bowie's hairstyle rather than a Minotaur though!)
Just the titles, though it produces a series of images, and I tended to choose the easiest image. Except sometimes most of the title would appear as text, too easy.
The hairspray bottles really seemed to me that they were trying to say HAIRSPRAY!
In general I'm very sympathetic to Scott's views on education. I don't believe we've got any system that teaches kids more than basic numeracy and literacy. But I'm curious which of the following people think more plausible
1. People are plastic and develop intellectually in any stimulating environment. If they focus their attention on one area they'll develop pretty much to their potential in a few years.
2. We're just awful at teaching anything and getting people anywhere near their potential.
With than in mind, what level would Magnus Carlsen reach if he picked up chess at 15? Johnny von Neumann math at the same age? Simone Biles gymnastics at a decrepit 10?
You can begin to sketch an answer for (2) with birth month data among Canadian players in the NHL. Since youth hockey might start at age 6, the arbitrary calendar cutoff pits 6.99 year olds against 6.00 year olds. Consider the following toy model:
OT = -c1 * (23 - a) + c2 * t + c3 * r
Where 'OT' is observed talent, 'a' is age, 't' inborn talent, and r is both the quality and quantity of training received. This assumes that you will come into your full hockey powers at age 23. If c1 is big enough compared to c2, and r is zero, the difference in observed talent between a 6.99 year old and a 6.00 year old is huge even if they have the same inborn talent.
The fly in the ointment here is that training is a scarce resource. There are only so many good coaches, good opponents, and ice time. As a consequence of this, we give out the best training resources at age n to those who were better at age n-1. And this tracks all the way to the NHL level where Canadians born from July to December make up just 42% of the players. So even if Carlsen had it in him to pick up chess at 15, if he needed any help at all to do so, it would have been very tough to get. But this would have come from "The System" not Carlsen himself.
One could make the argument that we should not structure society in such a way that if a talented person fails to board their train by age 6 it's impossible to catch up. But that's not the one we've built.
I see your argument, but it also seems completely consistent with (1). Like there are plenty of people out their with the talent, and they could be developed even at advanced ages, but our sieve system doesn't admit that.
It seems like more of a criticism of the system than a means to choose between 1 and 2.
Largely (1), in my opinion with some nod to the general interest level of the student in question. Honestly, this is sorta what Mike H and Marvin and the rest of the responses seem to be saying -- (2) is true if you're asking can we force knowledge into someone and for everyone generally interested in learning new things, (1) is a reasonable description. Speaking from personal experience, I rose to about 80% level of whatever group I was in, which is really really really good when you're around some incredibly brilliant people, but it took time in that environment and once away from it, it hasn't terribly improved. That said, looking back on how easy it is to comprehend new math after a master's in engineering, I think there's a certain amount of repetition and reinforcement that good pedagogy can really help with in people who aren't actively resistant.
I make this argument all the time, occasionally with people in the public education system. Weirdly enough, they admit most of this stuff, but their primary defense of education as a system is that for apparently a large percentage of these kids the 8-10 hours of stability they get at school is literally the least dangerous and potentially healthiest time in their day. That all the education is just a smokescreen to get kids out of largely bad situations and, hopefully, allow for intervention in the case of the absolute worst examples.
My guess is that the reason our system exists is some percentage this, some percent the benefits of free childcare for workers.
If this is the case, we should replace the teachers with much lower-paid babysitters.
You'd let someone without a college degree babysit the children? :O
There was a comment in a recent thread along the lines of "Modern public schools teach a wide variety of topics so that kids can figure out what they want to do later in life. The things they want to learn about they practice and get better at, everything else they forget." That rings pretty true for me, where I can remember some math, some grammar, etc., but mostly I remember the things that I took further in college or had a natural interest in.
It's an expensive sorting system, where we value the ability of every (at least a strong most) student to get a feel for the options available and select between them. Not everyone is very good at those things, but they have the opportunity to look at them for both occupational and hobby interests. By the time they're 18 or so, they have been mostly sorted and the sorting seems to be pretty good.
If you look at K-12 education in that lens, it seems to do a pretty good job. If this hypothesis is true, then both #1 and #2 from your list can be simultaneously true, but maybe irrelevant to the goals of our education system.
I think the sorting is actually quite bad. You still have lots of people who go to law school, for instance, because they're not sure what else to do. They then find they hate being a lawyer. Most of the things you do in school have little to do with real jobs. There are also tons of kids who do know what they're interested in but have to spend time taking lots of other subjects they don't care for. While I think math is cool, I think 3-4 years of it in high school for people who don't care for it is ridiculous as a sorting mechanism. The whole system rejects the idea that kids should be able to do what they're interested in.
I don't really disagree. The primary issue is that schools rarely coordinate with employers, so they don't align expectations. They prepare EVERY student to be able to do just about any introductory field, whether that makes sense for the person or not. I'm seeing a shift in emphasis towards technical fields, which I think is positive, but it's not really enough.
Current public schools tend to do a good job of helping students realize what they enjoy doing, but a poor job of aligning that desire with actual jobs and in demand fields.
What I know of current research, there is very little parents can do _on purpose_ to significantly influence their kids. I think at most is stuff like "basic interpersonal skills", which is non-inherited and teachable. Otherwise it's genetic, home environment and peers, which yes, all depend on parents, but aren't really easy to change at will. You are who you are, and you kids will learn from you.
So what about László Polgár? I think these are extreme cases where you have much higher than normal competence and expended effort, and which probably can deliver results. But the fact that they exist doesn't mean there aren't sharp decreasing marginal benefits on effort.
So I don't think it's ok to generalize from such cases, (and I think there's an inherent bias that will tend to make parents treat their kids as special anyways). Most likely correct answer is 1, for the current state of educational science. Might it change in 50 years? Hopefully, but I doubt it's around the corner.
I know there's good evidence for the limited influence of parents on IQ and personality. But is there similar evidence on say, the ability to play and instrument, ride a bike or speak a language? These may sound trivial, but are much more relevant to the discussion.
I chose extreme cases because if they didn't exist then it's almost impossible to reason about 2. If everyone got average results then it's impossible to draw any conclusions about the state of our teaching. If some get spectacular results it's worth asking why.
I'd go for 2. Also note that most of the people being taught are heavily resisting it. Simply selecting for lack of resistance should already have a major effect (cf. Mike H's example of Khan Academy). As a university level teaching assistant, my teaching approach always emphasizes that learning is an activity on part of the student. I believe the same would hold at other stages of education, except that the students are often not ready to actually take responsibility for their own learning. Therefore, effective learning requires a certain amount of intrinsic motivation on part of the student. Schools offer plenty of extrinsic motivation to compensate, but that risks getting Goodharted. (in fact, in plainly does, see "teaching to the test") So, I think it is questionable how much improvement would be gained by starting the learning path at an earlier age if this motivation has not yet developed. In general, it follows that it is more effective to let young children "play around" with advanced toys ("hey kid, check out this Commodore 64"), rather than putting them on a lesson plan ("Ok, let's start with lesson one of "learning to program with the Commodore 64" ").
My own example would be how I learned to read English (I'm not a native speaker). Basically, I learned it by playing Pokemon Gold. I sometimes daydream about "Pokemon Ruby: educational edition". This hypothetical game would not force learning, but simply increase learning opportunity by adding an inbuilt dictionary, gradually increasing the difficulty of the language as the game progresses, and perhaps add some direct rewards for mini-games based on language (something in the flavor of the trick house from Ruby would probably work). Another example would be the "Donald Duck" comics (or at least, the Dutch version). Since the comics are pretty easy to follow without reading the text balloons at all, the text inside does not shy away from more advanced language, and uses a large amount of figures of speech. (the frequent reader of the Open Threads may recall that the Dutch language is enriched with many beautiful figures of speech, such as "Zoals de waard is, vertrouwd hij zijn gasten" ("The host will trust his guests as much as (he is trustworthy) himself"))
In general, it seems there is a lot of untapped potential in this space of "non-forcing" educational games. Young children have a very good learning ability, but lack the discipline to focus it towards ends that are known to be productive. Let their learning river flow downhill, I say, rather than trying to direct it with channels.
This gets back to John Holt, who believed that conventional schooling destroys motivation.
I wouldn't go that far. Schooling as currently practiced often does, but I don't think any far reaching pedagogical reforms would be nessecary prevent destroying motivation. Rather, I believe the problem is that obtaining motivation for useful (in the sense that they will be useful after the schooling has finished) topics in the first place is a difficult problem to solve, and even more so en masse in the school setting. Solving this problem does require more radical action, I believe. I don't think letting the kids have some choice over more a traditional curriculum is enough, as both freedom of exploration as well as useful guidance are nessecary. This demands an amount of attention that I think is not scalable, unless we can digitize and "gamify" it effectively.
I think it's pretty obvious than the people mentioned are close to their potential in the given area. Do you think they are not?
Have any non-Europeans had experience traveling to the EU during COVID?
I know you can get into your first European country by showing proof of vaccination and a negative test at the airport, but what happens if you want to go to another country (eg from Portugal to Spain, or Spain to France)? Do you have to get another test? Or do they assume anyone coming in from friendly European countries is okay?
I'm a US citizen. I flew from New York to Amsterdam in July. I had to have a negative PCR test to board the plane. No one cared about my vaccination status (I am of course fully vaxxed). In Amsterdam I changed planes to go to Tanzania. There I had to take another covid test to exit Kilimanjaro Airport. It was pretty much just a rip-off. I certainly didn't get covid between New York and Tanzania on planes that had a negative covid test as an entry requirement. Anyway, it doesn't directly answer your question about one EU country to another EU country, but it is a case of an EU country to another foreign country.
I traveled to Austria a few weeks ago, and then to Spain a few days ago. I managed to get into Austria (connecting in Germany, if that matters) just with my vaccine card, but in order to get into Spain I had to get tested (which is really easy in Austria).
Remember that you also need to get tested to go back to the US, regardless of your vaccination status, and that Europeans in general are still barred from the US.
See https://reopen.europa.eu/en/
Each country has it's own requirements, which you can usually find very easily by searching for "{country} covid entry requirements" and you will find some official government website. You need to present vaccine or other proofs whenever crossing a border, and some countries require you to fill in an online declaration before arriving.
As someone going from one European country to Greece I need to show COVID test done with 48h from entering - or proof of vaccination.
Note that Greece has nasty trap - you need to fill some PLF form, but cannot do this in last 24h before entrance. Penalty fee is 500 euro.
Thanks! So I can stress a bit less about it.
As European, this depends on the country you are travelling to. I had to do a test for some countries, while for others showing proof of vaccination was sufficient. I don't know how this is for non-Europeans, but I imagine this is the same for you.
To get into Portugal, I didn't have to show a test, just vaccination, and not the EU covid passport, the CVS document was fine.
This was at the beginning of August.
For +-30 year-olds, what is the better choice for Covid vaccines (we have J&J and Pfiser available to us)?
The primary consideration would be protection against possible long Covid, but other considerations (including potential side effects, infecting older, vaccinated, family members, etc.) are also factors.
Personally, I favor the mRNA vaccines (Modern and Pfizer) but only because I'm older and it's possible I've already been exposed to the Ad26 vector of the J&J vaccine -- which could make it much less effective. I think if you're younger that would be less of a concern because you've met fewer adenoviruses.
I second Jeffrey's advice. There is new evidence that strongly backs J&J + 1 mRNA approach as better than homologous approaches.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6549/1392
I think you've mistaken what that paper is about. It's a discussion of the possible factors that underly a stronger antibody response in people who have been *infected* and then given a vaccine. It's true at the end they surmise in one sentence that a mixture of vaccines "may" have similar effects, but they offer no detailed argument for that, nor point to any actual real-world evidence of it.
I got the mRNA, but I've been hoping to get J&J. Not only because a mix would seem to be better, but also because mRNA fades more quickly.
Where have you seen this evidence of the mRNA effectiveness fading more quickly? I hadn't heard that and I'd be interested to know more.
https://twitter.com/andrewlilley_au/status/1428237524212674564
I would be cautious about reading too much into an Oxford study saying that the Oxford vaccine is fading less quickly, especially given that for all the charts, the highest confidence line of each vaccine is still outside the error bars of the other, and there are lines within the error bars of each one that have higher or lower slope than the highest confidence line for the other. It does seem suggestive, but I would want to see actual studies showing an actual period where mRNA protection is lower than adenovirus vector protection before being confident that this difference in fading is real.
Andrew noted that it was expected beforehand that would be the case, and it wasn't clear to me why that would be a priori (admittedly, I hadn't heard of either mechanism prior to COVID). It might be related to the fact that some vaccines are designed to optimize just antibodies and not T-cells:
https://www.businessinsider.com/johnson-and-johnson-covid-19-vaccine-arguably-the-best-2021-2?op=1
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/Adenoviral-vectors-new-COVID-19/98/i19
There is a general write-up about 3rd dose vs. vaccine efficacy (reduction) over time at https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/confused-about-the-3rd-dose-me-too which is a good read and has links to studies. (It doesn't substantiate "more quickly" BTW)
Are there any good resources on the prospect of genetically engineering higher IQs?
You might be interested in this summary by gwern:
https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection
If anyone is looking for interesting content across tech, finance, art, media feel free to check this out: https://gokhansahin.substack.com/p/curated-content-for-busy-folk-45
Also, how can I report this comment as spam?
Please stop spamming it in every thread. Also, "content across tech, finance, art, media" is hopelessly vague - no suprise that you need to resort to spamming.
I know nothing about the research an AI technically. I have no training in computer programming or mathematics so I will admit my ignorance. But I have a question. Is there an algorithm for what I will term
the will to live??
Bear with me.
Imagine your life under the most intolerable circumstances. You are in a concentration camp, you are in solitary confinement and subject to random torture and other abuse. The rational conclusion seems to me that you should just get out of it anyway you can. But human beings don’t seem to behave that way.
Would you call that they will have live?
You don't need a fancy AI to implement "the will to live". You could make a really simple robot car that would roll around on a tabletop, and avoid falling off the edge -- and you can build it out of purely analog components, no computers needed. This car arguably has as much "will to live" as a mouse (I mean, the furry kind, not the computer peripheral kind).
"Algorithm," isn't really the term you want here. The algorithm isn't the thing which is alive or dead, so an algorithm alone cannot compute, "the will to live."
As we move from narrow intelligences to more general intelligences, we tend to turn our systems into "agents." An agent has some physical substrate. In order to effectuate self-preservation, the agent needs to have a model of what physical form it exists as, and then it can make decisions which avoid its destruction. Many narrow intelligences already have agent-hood and self-preservation. Take a self-driving car: it knows its physical dimensions avoids crashing into things. You might say a self-driving car has a will to live, as we keep seeing them make decisions which avoid their destruction.
Even digitally, many of OpenAI's video-game playing AIs exhibit this. They move away from hazards and towards the end of the game. The engineers create some scoring function in order to evaluate the AI's performance. In order to get the AIs to do something rather than nothing (because in some games, not moving will never win the game but it will avoid death), time was made to negatively impact the score: not only should the AIs move towards the end of the game, but they should do so quickly. From this time pressure immediately emerged suicide: if the AI was unsure it could make a certain amount of progress without dying, it might immediately kill itself to avoid the time penalty of trying. Obviously they had to come up with more sophisticated ways to score progress from then on.
So in general, is some analog of "the will to live" present in our systems? I think we generally just call it "self-preservation" but yes, if we want our agents to survive for very long, we generally need to design in some self-preservation. It's not really an algorithm, more a quality of the agent.
Thanks for this.
There is a well understood scheme, explaining how properties similar to "will to live" are emerging in a smart enough goal directed agent.
Agents will do actions that increase the chances to fulfill their goals, score more points on their utility metrics and try to prevent the actions that decreses it. In most cases being active increases the chances of success therefore "will to live" is an instrumental goal for most agentsю Obviously there are exceptions. If whole goal of an agent is to have a cup of coffee delivered to you and someone is already bringing you some coffee, such agent wouldn't mind being shut down. Special environments can even motivate agents to commit suicide if it is somehow the best strategy to accomplish the goal.
Humans goals are complicated and multidimensional. So it's not that easy to say what will be the optimal behaviour in your example. Some people may value the tiny chance to escape and accomplish their goals in the future more than they dislike all the torture and abuse now. Some may not. Some will commit suicide, some will not.
It's also easy to understand how humans can sacrifice their lives for some greater cause, or knowing that this sacrifice will help accomplish their goals, or how people die in peace, knowing that their goals are accomplished. It seems to me that the difference between AI preservation as an instrumental goal (will to score) and human will to live is only the difference in the utility functions.
I take your point.
Is this some kind of GPT-3 generated comment? If so, it's disappointing.
If a human wrote this, then I would say that your use of the word "algorithm" doesn't make sense in this context, and you should consider rephrasing without that word because with it, it's incoherent.
The will to live.. Siri disappoints me constantly
Thank you.
I started taking 400mg of SAM-e, based on the discussion in the depression post. I am seeing pretty dramatic results-- depression gone; much less anxiety; much less rigidity, ie more flexibility, more 'openness to trying new things'; also greater motivation, or, perhaps, less of a hump to get over to get myself to go do something; and, last but not least, greater happiness, and more enjoyment in life. A real life changer. Thank you.
I had the same experience about 10 years ago. The first 3 days frankly felt like I was on a low dose of MDMA. Then it leveled off, but still lifted me out of a pervasive depression. I stopped taking it after a few years. Occasionally I've tried it again, but it never seems to have anywhere near the effect of that first round.
Every time I read something like this I worry about placebo.
Do Gwern's self-double-blinding trick?
Psychiatric Intervention, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Placebo
It’s less sucky side effects than SSRIs and much less expensive than a therapist
Glad you're doing better. It seems to work really well for some people.
I'm curious whether anyone caught Tesla's "AI Day". I did. They showed off their neural network, explain how they convert 8 camera video feeds into a 4D vector space, then have a planning engine on top of that they decides what to do. They also showed off their new from-Silicon up "Dojo" Neural Network training computer that is optimized for the task.
They also showed a new Tesla humanoid robot, and said they plan to build a prototype next year. The idea is that it can do basic and boring human tasks. Elon casually mentioned that long term, he supports UBI.
I'm curious if this causes any updates in people's thinking about AI risk timelines, and also people's thinking about UBI in general.
I'm impressed with the things Musk has gotten done, but I also consider the humanoid robot stuff 100% grade A lies.
Coincidentally, I read a very sad news story today about a fatal crash involving a Tesla on Autopilot mode (the self-driving but not really mode).
The fault clearly is down to human error (the guy was driving on a back road at night, he was talking on his phone, he dropped the phone and bent down to look for it, is it any wonder the car crashed into another?) but equally obviously the family of the dead person are suing Tesla because that is the entity here with deep pockets.
The story is surprisingly negative, it contrasts what other car manufacturers do to what Tesla is set up in such situations (i.e. making drivers keep their damn eyes on the damn road) and has one quote from Musk a few years back that reads badly in this context.
So I think whatever about AI risk, this demonstrates yet again that the big risk is not from the AI, it's from the way humans use it.
https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/motors/it-happened-so-fast-inside-a-fatal-tesla-autopilot-crash-1.4650265
"One of a growing number of fatal crashes involving Tesla cars operating on Autopilot, McGee’s case is unusual because he survived and told investigators what had happened: he got distracted and put his trust in a system that did not see and brake for a parked car in front of it. American Tesla drivers using Autopilot in other fatal crashes have often been killed, leaving investigators to piece together the details from data stored and videos recorded by the cars."
https://theconversation.com/why-the-feds-are-investigating-teslas-autopilot-and-what-that-means-for-the-future-of-self-driving-cars-166307
"It’s hard to miss the flashing lights of fire engines, ambulances and police cars ahead of you as you’re driving down the road. But in at least 11 cases in the past three and a half years, Tesla’s Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system did just that. This led to 11 accidents in which Teslas crashed into emergency vehicles or other vehicles at those scenes, resulting in 17 injuries and one death.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has launched an investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system in response to the crashes. The incidents took place between January 2018 and July 2021 in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas. The probe covers 765,000 Tesla cars – that’s virtually every car the company has made in the last seven years. It’s also not the first time the federal government has investigated Tesla’s Autopilot."
Hmmm. Now, I'm not saying there isn't something wrong with Tesla's autopilot, only that nothing in the above post should be thought of as being equivalent to "tesla's autopilot is unsafe compared to humans". It is very unlikely that any self driving system will be 100% safe. Thus deaths will occur. It is almost certain that the type of deaths will be different to those we are used to.
Personally, I'm interested in my absolute risk of dying in a car, not the particulars of how that occurs. So, the real question is: on a per 100,000 km basis, which is safer? Me driving a Telsa manually or letting the autopilot?
By all means figures out why flashing lights freak it out, but that is kinda not the real point, is it?
The Tesla website has some pretty big numbers that sound pretty compelling. https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport (I know autopilot engaged does not equal reading a book in the back seat)
So far using "self driving" in cars appears to be about the same risk level as driving slightly drunk: as long as everything is normal, you're OK. But if something weird and unpredictable happens, you've got a problem.
And of course, the usual argument for why we need self-driving cars is because humans occasionally drive drunk, sleepy, et cetera. If the self-driving cars can only handle themselves confidently under the conditions a drunk or sleepy human could...meh.
Boston Dynamics spent over 20 years figuring out how to make a bipedal robot move as gracefully as a human, and Tesla thinks they can do it in a year? Good luck with that.
And that's just for moving around, in a controlled industrial environment. Musk wants a robot you can tell "pick up that wrench over there and tighten that bolt," which is several steps beyond that.
I've long stopped believing (if I ever did) any of Musk's announcements. He's a modern-day P.T. Barnum who is a master of hype and what will get the public excited, delivery of same is a completely different matter.
I have to admit, SpaceX seems to be working, so that is in the plus column for him. But autonomous robots that will do the grocery shopping for you? Starting from this time next year? I'm more inclined to put my faith in "I need a new pair of shoes, I think I'll see if there are any leprechauns around to make a pair for me".
My partner recently got a new pair of shoes - we've been into minimalist shoes for years, but he tried this new company, and their shoemaking elves had great service: https://www.softstarshoes.com/about-us#meetus
To be fair, he did not promise robots that do grocery shopping, or really anything more than _maybe_ a prototype built next year.
I think Musk's successes go beyond SpaceX. Tesla is overall looking quite positive and has forced change in the auto market towards electrificiation soon than would have otherwise happened.
While I personally think Musk is a dumb idiot asshole who lucked into his fortune and mainly sponges off of actual talented people, Tesla took a bunch of technical risks that look like they payed off/will pay off big, and having him as a front man helped massively.
Yeah, after how many years? of promising totally self-driving cars, now it's fully general ai-driven human robots. This, like 90% of the announcements coming out to the company, is nonsense aimed at investors and branding.
The humanoid robot thing seems pretty dubious. But it is a good distraction to change the news away from Tesla getting slapped with some investigations from the Feds over the Full Self-Driving Program.
Musk likes to trot out Cool New Stuff whenever there's bad news afoot for Tesla or SpaceX. It gets reporters talking about how the Cool New Stuff is cool, or stupid - but either way they're talking about it.
This seems overly cynical. Musk likes to trot out Cool New Stuff because Musk is the kind of guy who really likes Cool New Stuff.
I don't know why people, even the sort of people who usually like this sort of thing, have to be so cynical about Musk. There's seven billion people on this stupid planet, and sometimes it seems like Elon is the only one who is actually doing anything worthwhile. In most other contexts, people seem to understand that big technological bets are hard, and that if even 10% of your big bets succeed then you're doing pretty well. But when conversation turns to Musk, who has a much better strike rate than just about anyone else while also pursuing more ambitious goals than anyone else, all you hear about is the fraction of his projects which failed or else weren't delivered on time.
> sometimes it seems like Elon is the only one who is actually doing anything worthwhile
This sounds like Musks' reality distortion field hiding everyone else who is working on these same problems in a less flashy, and often equally or more effective, way.
Well his two main things, long-range electric vehicles and reusable rockets, do seem to be the best in-class, and he has the benefit from saying he was working on them before anybody else. It seems like whether you think people are drinking the kool-aid depends on how much you think people are basing their perceptions on his many side projects.
I understand why people, probably the very people who work at Waymo or some other brain-interface company, get mad about being overshadowed by Musk's flashiness, but I don't think it's a legitimate gripe and I observe many of them take their jealousy too far. Getting the public excited about science and technology is important, and if it isn't being valued appropriately, it's not enough. Most companies don't appear to want Musk-level publicity, and that's fine.
I don't know much about the brain-interface stuff. My biggest interest that he talks about is transportation technology, and with both Hyperloop and Boring, his main goal seems to have been attracting attention away from established alternatives in order to preserve the market for automobiles rather than high-capacity transit. It's not like he's the first person to propose pneumatic or vacuum tube transport (these ideas go back at least to the 1950s), and his main idea for making tunnels cheaper is to make them too small to carry many people.
It's good to get people excited about new things, but not by telling them that actually workable solutions are boring so that you can hold out the promise of exciting transit that will actually just require continuing to buy cars from his car company.
Ok but do you actually think he's meaningfully detracting support from projects like high speed rail? Was Vegas ever really going to build an efficient transit system under their convention center? It seems to me that, being Vegas, the project was always intended to be an attraction. And even still, the tunnel was completed on time and for a very reasonable price. If anyone wants a tunnel that size, there is now a proven, inexpensive option. That seems like a minor win for American civil engineering to me.
It seems to me like you have an unnecessary zero-sum attitude about this. The idea that Musk is "preserving the market for automobiles," as if that's something that he even feels a need to do, seems a little excessively paranoid. He's making a company that digs tunnels. The Boring Company is an independent for-profit entity from Tesla, they will surely dig a tunnel for whomever is willing to pay them to dig a tunnel.
The company's next project (allegedly https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-18/elon-musk-s-boring-co-pitches-double-wide-tunnels) is to dig tunnels that are 21 ft in diameter, and to dig two of them side-by-side. Are you convinced that that, too, is some Trojan Horse against public transit?
I don't trust Elon Musk as far as I can throw him, at least on non-rocket topics.
I doubt there's a functioning humanoid robot in Tesla's near-term plans. If there is, I am fairly sure it's a bad thing. In that sense, I can only assume that Mr. Musk is deliberately cultivating a minor risk to head off a major one.
Well, if he can develop the functional humanoid robots, then he can get them on the assembly lines making Teslas, and then maybe the delivery backlog can be cleared:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/18/months-long-delivery-delays-confound-would-be-tesla-owners.html
I think it’s interesting that the penultimate display of AGI is a robot that can tap dance.
It was a human in a spandex suit FYI
Proof of concept I suppose
The main problem that welfare has that UBI doesn't is means-testing. Making people fill out lots of paperwork and wait a while for the system to decide if they're a Deserving Poor or not adds a lot of friction to the process and increases costs compared to simply mailing out checks.
(There's "means testing" of a sort at the other end when taxes are due and some people get taxed more than they get in UBI, but the IRS already does that for everyone so there's no increase in bureaucracy. It also prevents any sort of "welfare cliff" since a progressive tax system doesn't work that way.)
Like, I don't know what articles you've been reading, but nearly every one I've seen on UBI has included a few reasons why it's better than simply putting more money into the existing welfare system.
>The case for UBI always seems very weak, as if people backing it haven't really sat down and spent time thinking about the precise details of how it'd work and how much it'd cost.
Plot the net of taxes & transfers which would be replaced by implementation of a UBI (i.e., means-tested welfare programs which would be shuttered) against pretax income. Perform an OLS linear regression against the data. The y-intercept is the UBI amount with approximately no net budget impact.
> i.e., means-tested welfare programs which would be shuttered
If someone spends their UBI on video games, and has no money for food, do we let them starve in the street?
Otherwise, we just regrow all the old welfare programs.
> The idea that administration overheads are so large that they could pay for UBI crops up frequently
Nobody has ever claimed that overheads would pay for UBI completely, merely that eliminating the overheads of multiple programs and the political wrangling that comes with it frees up more funding to actually help people.
> However you don't really need a paper to see this. Consider that UBI must still have very significant administration and means testing costs.
It doesn't, that administration cost is *already being paid and will not go away* because it happens with your yearly tax return. Pay everyone a UBI, at tax time they declare what they actually made, and you recoup the UBI above a certain threshold.
I feel like a lot of people really overcomplicate this topic.
You don't need heave administration and means testing to ensure that the recipient exists and is a living citizen of your country.
The problem with administration and means testing is in ensuring that someone who makes ~$10,000 a year actually has the paperwork to prove that they're not secretly making ~$200,000 a year, and that filling out this paperwork is one of the reasons so many social benefit programs fail to get to their recipients.
I'm not sure how much easier it is for a person living under a bridge in Austin to prove that they exist and are a citizen than to prove that they make less than $200,000 a year, but the claim is that it's enough easier that they're more likely to actually get the benefit.
Another problem with means testing is that those on welfare have little incentive to take a job that doesn't pay substantially more than welfare. To me, that seems like the main benefit of a UBI.
That was me!
I spent a couple years "Not Working" 'cause if I took a job, I would suddenly have to pay 15k+ for shitty health insurance with a bigass deductible, and that is with Obama's shitlib credit bullshit.
>Thus a lot of administration work must go into establishing that a claimant is (a) real, (b) not dead, (c) probably of an eligible age (d) not in any debt especially to the state (as debt holders should be serviced first) and so on and so forth.
In the UBI proposals I have seen, the individual income taxes get raised to the extent the effect would be net zero on median* tax payer. In most countries similar get done anyway by tax authority, citizenship / electoral roll records, any existing welfare benefits, school system, military draft system in the few countries that still have them, and such. If you already have system for that, adding UBI instead of means-tested welfare isn't much of change.
* Or some other percentile point, dependent on how socialist dreams one has.
I have been looking into grad school for mathematics, in particular with the goal of eventually doing research. It looks like the job market for research positions is incredibly tight right now, but a large part of me wants to just study mathematics anyways. There are countless articles talking about how job prospects for pure math PhDs are actually okay, but most of the time they bring up examples of big data and marketing analytics, which I have something of an ethical opposition to. So I figured I would ask: What sorts of jobs can you get with pure math, other than data analytics?
FWIW, my team lead at Google had a PhD in pure math, and if I recall correctly he got hired right after completing it. I don't know if he learned to code before or after it though.
That was what I did (probably not on your team though). It was a bad choice - you should start out somewhere where the math gives you at least some advantage (not that you'll be doing abstract algebra anywhere non-encryption, but there's lots of places where good intuition is useful). Google is bad both because it has no room for that (99% of the work is writing protobuf pipelines), and because it's a bad learning environment (the typical response to "I don't understand X" is "read the code/git good")
I took a pure math PhD (mathematical physics) but ended up as a health policy analyst. Nothing compares with pure math with respect to engaging the mind, but I do feel like I often work on hard problems across a wide range of areas, and generally feel like I'm contributing to the greater good. I do work with big data, but also design complex randomized trials and have opportunities to learn and apply economics, psychometrics and medicine. I work with doctors, scientists, economists, and psychologists, almost all of whom like to learn new things that will help people. I also earn multiples more as a consultant than as an acadmic, and have been paid to travel to Europe, Asia and Africa just to talk to people about what I do. So while I miss mathematics quite a bit, I feel pretty good about where I landed.
I second most of what previous commenters said, and would like to add/reframe just a few ideas:
1. When I started my math phd, I was quite sure that I wanted a career in pure math research, but I underestimated how difficult it would be to keep a long-term interest into questions that are so theoretical (I studied algebraic geometry/mathematical physics). The math community can be a bit inward-looking, and it turns out that I'm much more interested in playing around with up-and-coming technological tools; I'm more tinkerer than thinker. Still, I think that pure math phds are still worth it, for those who are genuinely interested in the subject -- on the off-hand chance that your projects work out and you maintain your interest, math research is one of the most intellectually rewarding careers.
2. Regarding job prospects after the phd, I used to believe in a dichotomy between pure research and selling your soul to wall street or facebook. Luckily, the spectrum is much more continuous. Like many others these days, I ended up in bioinformatics research, which I really enjoy. To me, one particularly appealing feature of this field is the existence of long-term academic positions other than such-and-such professor: bioinformaticians and research scientists who get to do the fun tinkering without worrying so much about people management or grant applications. For those who like the culture and intellectual freedoms of academia, but want less involvement in the associated management and politics, this is an option worth exploring.
3. Related to 2, there are ways to hedge during your math phd, by working on pure areas which are close enough to applications. Others already mentioned cryptography and formal verification. Mathematicians more interested in geometry/topology could check out topological data analysis, or the recent applications of gauge theory to obtain convolutional neural networks which are equivariant w.r.t rotations or other symmetries.
4. Anecdotally, I agree with Elena that a math phd has a lot more signalling value than a math master's. In practical terms, some research scientist jobs in both academia and industry are gated behind a phd requirement. In industry these kind of jobs are a minority, but they're likely the ones where you get to do the most interesting work.
I may have a somewhat unique perspective relative to the commentariat here, in that I enjoyed the process of getting my PhD (in pure math). I left to industry halfway through my second postdoc, partly because I didn't have great postdocs (and didn't have enough of my own research program to thrive despite that), and partly because I wanted to settle down in a particular location and would rather do industry things than teach. In pure math (possibly unlike any experimental science ever), I found the graduate school experience to be "not a lot of money in exchange for not a lot of work," and would have considered stretching it out longer if a scholarship were available. (I'm from the US, but for Reasons did my PhD in England, so the standard US option of "you will teach some calculus classes in exchange for tuition + stipend" was not available.)
Back In My Day (PhD 2012), the exit route was finance first, then data science. This may have flipped. Also, data science isn't quite equivalent to marketing, e.g. I worked for a logistics company, and some -- though certainly not all -- of what the group did actually involved doing the logistics better. I've also seen manufacturing companies where the data science group is involved in process control.
I currently work in an engineering outfit (my title says Something Something Engineer). I think this is not terribly uncommon, although many of the opportunities will be tied to the Department of Defense. Of course, there is also the NSA, and people I know who worked there have said good things about the work environment.
A couple people recently mentioned quantum computing to me as their (actual or potential) exit strategy.
Google (I think in the form of straight-up software development) was an exit route for a few people I know, with varying success.
Bell Labs used to be an good exit opportunity if you could wheedle your way in, although I gather it's less of a "math department minus the teaching" now than it was in its heyday. There should be at least a few similar industrial research groups out there (e.g. Google, Amazon, IBM).
I will reinforce everyone who mentioned programming experience being very valuable outside of academia. I think you do get a salary premium for having a math PhD, but in most places it's essentially a monetary equivalent of the "wow you have a math phd you must be so smart".
This is good, and mostly matches my experience. I will advise against Google specifically - they're not good at accommodating people with academic but not direct work experience, and it can be a pretty awful environment unless you have an unusually good manager.
I did a math PhD and now do bioinformatics. It's not a super common route but there are a lot of people with pure-math backgrounds that have ended up doing well in this field and the job market is considerably better than in math. (That's a low bar to pass though!) The other advantages of bioinformatics are that it's still involves math and that it's very broad so you can do interesting, different things every day (eg: attend a biology talk, do software development, and read a stats paper) and it's still possible to do academia if that's your thing. The downsides are it's just nothing like doing math research and a lot of what we do is incredibly basic, like cookie-cutter stats 101 and making a few plots. Also you'll be frustrated at the number of downright incorrect papers that get published in this field, with just absurdly bad statistics that somehow get past reviewers unscathed. Maybe it's just my niche, but it seems like all the statistical methods papers out there mess up one way or another but no one cares.
Echoing Luke G, make sure you really know some software development, and not just at the "I took an intro to Java course eight years ago" level. It'll make your life easier in nearly any job you could end up in later that could use your PhD. If you don't like computers, don't do bioinformatics.
I'll add again the standard advice that a lot of people don't end up enjoying their PhD and if it's not really going to directly help your career, you should consider not doing it. I had a point where I did not enjoy my career, where I struggled to transition from classes to research work and I might have dropped out then. Luckily my advisor put me on a tractable problem and I made some early progress which was encouraging and got my back on track to liking what I was doing. Many other students are not so fortunate or pick projects that are simply too difficult. Many of those drop out. Many also don't even make it to that point. Especially if you're thinking of non-math jobs afterwards, pick a research topic that won't have you stuck for years, even if it's less sexy - no one will know/understand what you did anyway afterwards. You can work on that millennium problem in your spare time, but make sure you're making progress on something else too.
Math PhD programs, at least at fairly good programs, won't help you get non-math jobs, generally speaking. Expect them to be basically blind to the entire concept despite half their graduates going that route. Be proactive, since no one will be active for you.
I studied pure math, too--not a PhD, though I do know several PhDs as well. It can be great for career opportunities, *but* you really need to know computer programming, too. Most companies trying to fill quant-y roles are looking for general problem-solving ability rather than domain knowledge--if you have a solid base in math and CS, you can pick up most of the domain knowledge quickly. Also, everyone knows math majors are the smartest ;)
The most lucrative careers for math PhDs are usually in software and finance. The hot fields in software change every few years (AI, machine learning, big data, etc.), but a good math and CS background will make you well-equipped for any of them. In finance, there's a spectrum of different quant roles who love to recruit PhDs, and many traders and structurers also will recruit quanty people.
There's a pretty good diversity of roles available, and so you'll have some ability to make tradeoffs in work-life balance, amount of CS required, and the type of work--although it may take some amount of exploration before you really figure out what's the right balance for you. (I definitely had to revise a lot of beliefs about myself after a couple years on the job!)
A few assorted points to consider:
* Although a PhD is a unique opportunity to do research, it comes with a large opportunity cost and I know several people who seem to regret it--the research doesn't go as well as hoped, the social experience isn't as fun as undergrad, and you'll be a few years behind in your career. So make sure you're confident about loving research!
* Definitely take a few CS classes to maximize your opportunities for industry jobs. Even better, get involved in a software project.
* Consider taking some econ classes, too. Chances are it'll be embarrassingly easy for you, but the knowledge is very useful!
* I'd encourage you to keep an open mind when considering careers, including your assumptions of the ethics involved--a lot of media/social media portrayal is extremely misleading, and a lot of people in academia have misconceptions about industry.
* A summer internship in industry is a great way to pad your resume and help you figure out whether that industry is right for you.
> Chances are it'll be embarrassingly easy for you, but the knowledge is very useful!
Re-reading this, I should say I don't mean to belittle the field of economics--I have tons of respect for it and wish I studied it more. I just meant that typical Ec 101 curriculum will be pretty easy for someone with a strong math background.
As someone far too many years into a Physics PhD: if you love the field so much that you want to spend your life doing research, and a job is a way to avoid starving to death and dying of exposure in the meantime, then academia is right for you! If you are at all concerned with standard notions of "good job prospects", you don't want to go near academia, you're looking to convert to industry.
In that case, a Masters can be a decent investment, but PhDs are basically never worth it - at best you're trading a couple of years of salary for a lifelong sense of superiority, but actual payscales don't value it higher than working a job in the field, IIRC the studies. People who could do a PhD are very smart and get paid well, but the PhD itself isn't adding enough to justify the cost in time, and health.
In the case of mathematics specifically, all the money at the moment is in the overlap of maths knowledge and programming knowledge, so you will need to learn some coding. Firms generally recognise that it's much easier to teach a genius mathematician to be a functional coder than to teach a coder graduate level maths, though, so do still major in Mathematics (or Statistics) and treat coding as a secondary skill for now - unless, of course, you discover you just love doing it :)
Unless things have changed since Back In My Day (PhD 2012), in pure math having only a masters is a sign that you were going for a PhD and dropped out. There are a few exceptions where the masters is a well-known program (e.g. Cambridge Part III) which you're doing as Undegraduate+ rather than as PhD-, but in general, a masters in pure math signals that you dropped out of your graduate program. I don't believe this to be true of adjacent disciplines, e.g. data science or computer science or statistics.
That sign is well-known within academia (for any discipline that doesn't have an established non-academic career trajectory for masters degrees), but I don't know how well-known it is outside academia.
I dunno. I have a good friend who is a physics PhD working in the microchip industry. His division is very technical and he only hires physics PhDs. FWIW.
To echo this, I have my PhD in Physics and work in optical comms; your career will eventually cap out if you don't have a PhD (albeit at a relatively high level that may be perfectly acceptable to you), and a PhD will both open doors to you that may otherwise have been closed AND make it much easier to get your first job. If you don't want to eventually run shit, a Master's is fine, and you should be very, very careful to properly weigh the reduction in quality of life you'll experience during the extra years you're in school.
You can generally get a SWE job (your PhD gets your foot in the door, but you will have to learn programming stuff on your own time and it's a hard transition). Personally I'd recommend going the quant finance route - you'd have better comparative advantage and they're better about receiving mathematicians. Not sure how your ethics feel about that though.
FWIW I feel okay about having done a math PhD and then done a career change (my first job after grad school was pretty awful, but things improved after that). It can be an interesting thing to do that leaves you reasonably well-qualified for other jobs later, but OTOH if what you really want eventually is career advancement in some specific field better to just go straight for that.
I've worked in quant finance and I've worked in big tech (Physics PhD here) and I think the good times in quant finance are already over, you're likely to make more money and have a more pleasant job in big tech.
You should really, really, REALLY like math research to do this. And even if you do, a lot of math culture is an inward facing status game. Talented people somehow seem to get into the pure math track even when their skills provide a lot more leverage in practically every other research field.
What are some good research fields that I should go into instead? I have looked into economics, computer science, electrical engineering, and law, and while all of them seem enjoyable, first I have to get into the programs without the relevant degrees. Noah Smith has written about why an econ phd is a very good investment (also much of econ seems to be written in the same "language" as the mathematical logic that I study), is this something that can be easily pivoted to? Is doing something like that a wise decision?
I have an econ PhD. Being good at math is vastly more important than being good at undergraduate economics for econ PhD programs. I suggest you read intro and intermediate textbooks in micro and macro economics if you want to do this.
Sorry. posted too soon. In computational biology you'd be bringing math skills to bear on a field that doesn't really like computers (or last least views them as annoying necessities) and isn't in general that mathematically inclined. Also, given our strange biomedical times, there's good reason to think the biomedical research funding complex is going to be comparatively richer than funding in other fields going forward.
Having studied both, I think Smith is largely right to be long the economics Ph.D, especially over math. If you have good quantitative skills, the other one I would mention is computational biology.
If you're Yitang Zhang, you can use your math PhD to get a job at Subway.
(Less jokey response: if you can get someone to pay for your PhD, I say go for it. Just realize that you might end up a high school teacher thinking about logic in your spare time. Which strikes me as being much better than an adjunct lecturer thinking about logic in your spare time.)
Stories like Yitang Zhang are what keep me awake at night.
On the other hand, though, he seems to have had exceptionally bad circumstances to end up working at Subway. Growing up under Maoist China and all of the personal feuds with his advisors certainly didn't help.
Yitang Zhang did have a job as a university lecturer before his Great Discovery, ne?
But yes. Even having actual brilliance is no guarantee of success.
Try looking at the 80,000 hours site ( they're effective altruism folks). Here's a google search I did of their site for word 'mathematics.'
https://80000hours.org/search/?cx=007036038893981741514%3Ad-war0ad7jy&cof=FORID%3A11&q=mathematics
What kind of math? Are you going for a professor-track or something else?
I'm primarily interested in mathematical logic, especially from a proof theoretical angle, in addition to the rest of the set theory/model theory that people study in logic. Ideally the goal is to be a professor, and that is what I would go for, but I just want to think about what the fallback plans are assuming things work out.
For mathematical logic, you'll want to do some further investigation of placement records of PhD programs. In the early 20th century, mathematical logic was seen as central to the discipline, but in the past 50 years or so, math departments have treated it as a backwater. Most math departments, even at research universities, have 0 specialists in logic on their faculty, and aren't considering hiring one. This is quite different from philosophy and (I believe) computer science departments, where most research universities have at least one specialist in their department, and will try to replace them if they retire.
There are definitely areas of CS where mathematical logic has a lot of overlap. Program correctness, model verification, etc. are niche but growing fields--software is becoming more complex and more relied on, so it's increasingly valuable to formally verify it works to spec. Programming language theory is also related to logic, and I imagine can lead to industry jobs working on compilers and other programming tools.
People in proof theory can get jobs in crypto. There is a pretty big overlap between some of the stuff in zero-knowledge proofs and regular proof theory. In general, proof theorists can easily find work in computer science, and how far they are willing to go from theory pretty much limits their success. Make sure you get the very best advisor possible. Your advisor will get, or fail to get, your academic position. Everything depends on lineage, as a huge amount of material can only be transmitted through in-person contact.
Computer science seems like a reasonable alternative path, in particular because automatic theorem provers seem very interesting. Good to know about cryptography, as well. How does one make sure that things like a job in crypto are still in the cards after their PhD? Do you need to do side projects, or is it mostly sufficient to just do proof theory during grad school?
The capital:talent ratio in crypto is high right now, so the standards aren't so high at the moment, anyone with skills has security.
For a logic-adjacent field, look into Formal Verification research, especially wrt bytecode wasm compilers.
Alternatively, the zero knowledge cryptography field is growing rapidly.
I considered a math PhD and chose not to do one ... Big Tech companies are so much more profitable.
Apart from the NSA, I'm not sure who hires math PhDs other than universities. I'm sure somebody does, but it probably isn't who you want to be hired by.
Big tech hires all the other maths PhDs.
It's not the optimal way into big tech. On the other hand, the average PhD in big tech is probably working on more interesting problems than the average non-PhD so the hit to total lifetime earnings may be worth it.
Maybe it's naive, but I've been pretty surprised by how openly pro-war and pro-occupation much of the American elite class has revealed itself to be in the last week- especially our media elites. While I am normally not particularly enthused about the Greenwald/Taibbi left, I have to say that they do have some excellent points regarding how pro-national security state institutions like the NYT, WaPo, CNN etc. are. They are just openly clamoring for us to stay in Afghanistan, and against withdrawal. I guess I kinda vaguely knew this to be true, but their open pro-war cheerleading in the last week has been a bit astonishing. Makes me wonder how the inevitable war with China over Taiwan will go.
I would like to gently poke at people on the right who are convinced that the media establishment is uniformly leftist. When I was growing up, in a Nation-reading highly left-wing household, a huge part of the Left for us was being anti-war, any war, all wars. (I'm not saying that those are my views now- for example I was taught that the original Gulf War was Bad, whereas I now think it was justified- but I think being anti-war is like a core leftist value). The more complex/nuanced view is that the media is a series of elite institutions with its own worldview, which is mostly quite socially liberal, but not uniformly. I mean, they were in a constant state of hysteria about Trump for 5 years because it was great for ratings, which I know a lot of the Right confused with actually being anti-Trump. They loved the guy! You see all these stats about how much cable news viewership has declined in his absence, etc.
I see this almost uniform media elite consensus that leaving Afghanistan is Bad to be a pretty bad thing for Biden's approval rating/the midterms
I read the New York Times pretty regularly (usually about five or six articles before coffee, and various others throughout the day) and I don't have the impression that they are "clamoring for us to stay in Afghanistan". I see a lot of big headline articles talking about ongoing problems with the evacuation, but they don't seem like the ones I remember from 18 or 20 years ago that were actually pro-war. They just seem to be following the journalistic convention of complaining about whatever is going on that seems to be bad, without any clear sense of what alternative they would favor.
Yes, there is a lot of that in the media, isn't there?
But would you favor the media recommending fully vetted policies beyond the standard opinion pieces (think "The Economist")? I think this actually might turn people off when the realize the newspaper has a desired policy outcome.
It's an interesting question. Some of the options for journals I see:
• Only publish the facts, don't make any value judgment at all.
• Advocate for a specific desired policy.
• Don't have a single political line, but publish opinion pieces arguing for specific policies from various people with different opinions.
All of these are alternatives to "criticize the current policy but don't advocate for an alternative".
I'm definitely ambivalent about what I would prefer! But my main point was just to contest the claim that the NYTimes was advocating more war here.
In this case, I don't think the media is acting as an elite institution, I think they're just following a very easy incentive curve.
The footage coming out of Afghanistan looks bad. We've got a hurried and seemingly ill-planned evacuation going on and a bevy of "this person/organization will be hurt by the Taliban's rule" stories that are almost trivial to report. These stories are easy to write and will therefor get engagement. I don't think this represents some kind of stalwart leftist consensus that war is good. I think this is just the immediate response to the negative images/stories coming out of Afghanistan that will fad quickly with time.
I predict with high confidence ($100 bet to charity if anyone wants to take me up on it) that by the time the midterms roll around it will be seen as a point of favor on the left that Biden got us out of Afghanistan.
They’re following the curve because they also personally don’t want to pull out. They could instead show the horrible images and say “look how bad it was the entire time! Thank god this is the last of it! We should’ve been out years ago!”
I agree, this is not about anything more substantive than seeing images which evoke an (extremely temporary) visceral reaction. The public did not care and was not interested in what went on in Afghanistan the previous 20 years, and as soon as the pull-out is over, they will revert to not caring. Right now they just feel bad because they're seeing emotional footage.
By the same token, if the media regularly broadcast footage of the real, brutal, grotesque reality of all kinds of common-place, ordinary things that go on every day, people would be up in arms (whether that be graphic footage of what goes on with people dying of Covid in the ICU or what goes on to get your food to your table or any number of other things we really prefer not to see or think about).
Just to pin down terms (to make sure we actually disagree) my prediction would be:
A majority of Americans will be defined as "more than 50%, with the 50% mark not within the error bars, in a poll done by a reputable company"
I think it's plausible (45%) that a majority of Americans will support the decision to leave Afghanistan by the time midterms come.
I am extremely doubtful (80%) that a majority of Americans will feel positively about Biden's execution of our removal from Afghanistan.
Hmm, my predication was focused specifically on the how opinion among the American left. I'm not confident making any prediction about how public polling will shape out.
I would be fine with the any of the following terms:
A majority of registered Democratic Voters (50%+) will support to decision to leave Afghanistan by the time midterms come.
No action to censure Biden over his Afghanistan pullout or reverse said pullout takes place in congress that receives significant support from the Democrat Party. (Significant here described as support from Democrats sufficient to render said action successful.)
No Significant portion of the 2022 Democrat Candidates for election will support action to either censure Biden for his Afghanistan pullout or reverse said pullout. Significant here described again as constituting a majority when considered with Republicans who hold similiar beliefs.
I would associate nation building with a progressive world view, akin to domestic social engineering, so I don't think there's anything surprising about left-wing media being in favour of it, especially considering the regime that is replacing the occupation government. But there are – of course – many ways to reduce the political landscape to a single dimension, and we should just do PCA instead of being all subjective about it.
> I would like to gently poke at people on the right who are convinced that the media establishment is uniformly leftist.
A lot of these debates are affected by that there are several different axes of political views, and people variously use the labels 'left' and 'right' to refer to one or another of them. The sides on the various axes form loose coalitions, but these coalitions shift.
IMO much of the time rightists complain about these or those "establishment" institutions being dominated by the left, the more accurate claim is that they are dominated by the left on matters of race, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and—to a less complete extent—immigration, religion, and party politics. But not necessarily at all on other matters, such as economy or militarism/pacifism.
Mead's four schools of US foreign policy (https://ricochet.com/311633/archives/the-four-themes-of-us-foreign-policy/) tend to place US foreign policy on what could be a two-axis diagram, with one axis being more-or-less left-right and the other more-or-less globalist-localist.
I think the US political establishment is globalist more than localist on both sides, and so it makes sense that the establishment media would lean towards the left-globalist corner (Wilsonian, in Mead's characterization). The anti-war left is solidly in the left-localist corner (Jeffersonian, in Mead's characterization). You can look at any war we've been involved in and see how people from different points on the diagram influence the resulting policy.
The first Gulf War primarily was a right-globalist effort (Hamiltonian), but there were things to support for the left-globalists (Wilsonian) in the legitimacy of the UN and to the right-localists (Jacksonian) in demonstrating US power to deter other wars; it's the left-localists (Jeffersonian) that most opposed the war. While there was agreement from three of the sides regarding the war, that agreement didn't stretch to what to do when the war ended, which is why the response afterwards sowed the seeds of future conflict.
But I'm more anti-war cosmopolitan, which is globalist I guess. (I kinda wanted them to leave some forces in Kabul, but focused on defense, not offense, to maintain a pro-Western zone where women can be educated and stuff).
Two axes isn't enough. The other popular "second axis" is statist-libertarian...which again poorly captures my way of thinking.
The axes are limited by being defined by historical people that have either been President or have been close enough to the presidency to define US foreign policy. They are useful primarily in their predictive capacity, which mostly lies in defining a second axis able to describe US foreign policy beyond right-left (for example, while Ron Paul and John McCain were both on the right, they both had very different foreign policy preferences).
That being said, it's a spectrum of general policies, not a straight-jacket. There's plenty of space between 'the US should always stay out of other countries business' and 'the US should always act as policeman at the behest of the global community'. People also holding both of those positions near the extremes (and anywhere else on the spectrum) can rightly view themselves as 'anti-war'; at the same time, neither extreme is necessarily strictly pacifistic.
I agree - there are at least three axes of politics in the Anglosphere (socialism/laissez-faire, authoritarian/libertarian, "woke"/traditional) and that doesn't even cover international relations very well.
technological progressive/regressive, pro/anti militarism/violence are two others. There’s a lot of them! There are many relations between them (and often not just tendencies towards one direction but more complex ones)
100% this. I do wonder in this specific case if the warhawk stuff became left-wing because Trump pushed the Republican position to isolationism, and hell will freeze over before the 'Left' and 'Right' are allowed to agree on anything, never mind if this means one side has to take a position completely at odds with everything they've been saying up till yesterday
Could you link one of the NYT articles (ideally not from their Op-Ed section)? I specify not Op-Ed, because my impression (from the WSJ op-eds) that those people are much less so part of the "media elite."
Also, outside of the media, which "elite class" are you referring to? My impression (once again from WSJ's reporting, so could be biased) is that most senators/representatives are condemning to dubious of the execution of the extraction, but largely not too harsh on the decision to pull out.
To a certain extent, it is Yarvin's "cathedral" that is advocating for a permanent War in Afghanistan. The deep state and the true believers in American power want to continue to project that power; if the US had abandoned Ashraf Ghani but held onto Bagram AFB the Taliban would have been unable to move against it.
This is somewhat ironic, since Yarvin wants to replace the cathedral with a new entity which could do a permanent War in Afghanistan, only effectively (with Battle Royale-style explosive collars or something).
Do you think that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is likely to increase or decrease the total amount of war in the world?
Well the $50,000 question is whether the Afghanistan charley-foxtrot makes the Chicoms finally decide to settle things with Taiwan. Perhaps not right away, as even Joe Biden couldn't sit still for that, but after a Decent Interval. That would be an exceedingly dangerous event.
Increase. In the short term, obviously the US involvement in Afghanistan is over, so it's a temporary decrease. In the long term, Taliban is likely going to start new wars. At the same time, the utterly botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan will turn the public more hawkish; I doubt we'll withdraw from anywhere else anytime soon.
Whom do you believe the Taliban will invade? Turkmenistan seems the only vaguely-plausible candidate - the PRC, Iran and Pakistan are way, way out of their weight class, and Uzbekistan/Tajikistan are in a mutual defence treaty with Russia.
I agree with Melvin, below: it's not so much that Taliban will officially invade anyone, but rather that they'll conduct and/or aid and abet a continuous stream of terrorism on multiple targets.
Just some back-of-the-napkin numbers here, but the Taliban would have to do something like one and a half 9/11-size attacks a year to match the average yearly death toll of the war in Afghanistan.
OTOH, empirically it takes about one 9/11-size attack in 20 years to create the average yearly death toll of the war in Afghanistan. I don't see why we should expect future attacks to be far less deadly.
Is Pakistan way out of their weight class? A good deal of the population and government are sympathetic to radical Islam. Also, Pakistan has its own Taliban, which may join forces with the Afghan Taliban to try to capture the Pakistani government.
These don't seem like war scenarios so much as Pakistan's own democratic process (or lack thereof, in the case of either a pro-Taliban or anti-Taliban coup by the Pakistani military).
"Invasion", to me, means "one state militarily attacking another with the objective of territorial control". Pakistan's military is of the same scale as Iran's (slightly ahead in some ways, like nuclear weapons); its monopoly on force is not seriously threatened by any Afghani action, even taking into account possible domestic collaborators.
I don't believe the Taliban can or will actually invade anywhere.
But I do believe that a Taliban-run Afghanistan is likely to become a safe haven slash training ground for violent Islamist movements that will start carrying out violent acts in... well, just about every other country on Earth with any sort of nonzero Muslim population. That's what happened last time the Taliban controlled Afghanistan (remember why we invaded in the first place?) and also what happened in the few years that ISIS managed to control a chunk of territory.
OP literally gave the Gulf War as an example of a war that his left-wing family opposed. I don't think Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait could be considered a utopian attempt to remake society.
Has the been any serious pushback on SlimeMoldTimeMold's _A Chemical Hunger_ series? https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
To me the bones (not the proposed culprits) seem obviously right - it's got that nice feature of correct theories that it explains a whole bunch of niggling weirdnesses in a satisfying way. That said, I've been burned in this idea-space before, so if there's good pushback somewhere I'd like to read it.
It seems like if this theory were true you should be able to find some really sharp discontinuities between adjacent areas that source their water very differently. In particular well (especially deep aquafer wells) vs. local rainfall vs. distant surface sourced water etc.
For example in the SF bay area there are several different water districts. There are areas where just going across the street gets you from water drawn basically directly via pipes from catchment basins in the Sierra Nevada's to areas served by the state water project where the water went through hundreds of miles of rivers and canals and resvoirs to areas served by local wells all with very little mixing or pooling of the water. We should in theory see pretty dramatic differences by water district boundaries in that sort of situation and I don't know that we do (if we do that would be great evidence). Southern California has some similar comparisons.
Excellent argument.
I thought it was fascinating, but he seemed to dismiss most of the diet and exercise aspects with arguments like "subjects only lost 5 pounds in 6 months." It seems like if you make a couple of those changes across a fraction of the population for the long term, that adds up to a meaningful share of the change.
I think it's actually fairly well known that diets don't work the vast majority of the time (90+% of people gaining back the weight within 5 years).
Sure, but is that because they actually aren't effective or because people stop following them? I've only done some casual reading on the topic, so I really don't know.
This question is difficult because it feels like those should be different things, but in practice the distinction isn't so clear.
Imagine a drug came out that would reliably cure/prevent cancer if taken regularly, but studies show that 90% of people - even terminal patients - stop taking it in the short to medium term due to intolerable side effects, which get progressively worse over time. Is it accurate to say this drug cures cancer? In a technical sense, sure, but in practice that phrasing seems misleading - certainly we wouldn't be confused about why people keep dying of cancer when all they have to do is take a pill to prevent it.
The case with dieting is actually worse than that, because some appreciable percentage of people will gain back the weight they lose even if they do stick to the diet. If you're trying to maintain a weight well below your set point you'll have to get stricter over time as your body gets more aggressive about compensating for the perceived famine. And your "eat, fool" circuits are waaaaay down deep in your brain - they can smear your prefrontal cortex against the wall if they have to.
Put differently, a diet that 90+% of people don't stick to it has demonstrated itself to be incompatible with human physiology in a way no less serious than if it was ineffective due to not successfully interacting with the intended receptor. It looks different because will-power can temporarily override the physiology in the case of diets, but ultimately will-power will bow to its masters in the brain stem - you can't hold your breath until you die of hypoxia, and you can't diet yourself to well below your set point longterm.
There was a lot of justified pushback on r/SSC and DSL, correctly so. Lots of correlations and claimed associations and little real evidence. Maps that look similar, bunches of n=4 studies smashed together and taken at word, and above all lots of correlations where everything is correlated already, causal or not, etc. that said it’s still a lot of effort and interesting stuff put together
This article argues that the part about watersheds is wrong: https://nothinginthewater.substack.com/p/contra-smtm-on-obesity-part-2-watersheds. The argument: In the US, the watershed map is the same as the map of African Americans (mouth of river basin -> larger plantations -> lots of slaves), and race could correlate with obesity for any other reason. Similar argument that it's confounded by socioeconomic status. They further argue that the map of river basins in China does not support SMTM's conclsuion at all (Xinxiang is very obese for racial/social/economic reasons, and the rest of the obesity map doesn't actually line up with river basins well). The author promised to write a followup post against SMTM's altitude argument.
(Personally, as usual with this subject, I can't tell which way is up.)
I definitely found the China map unconvincing, but the US map had my jaw on the floor and is a major point in SMTM's favor, so this pushback is excellent!
That said, I think CT is overselling the degree to which race can explain that obesity map. The three states at the mouth of the Mississippi, sure, but YOU CAN TRACE THE F***** MISSOURI, MISSISSIPPI, OHIO, AND TENNESSEE RIVERS ON THE F***** COUNTY LEVEL MAP (I actually deduced the existence of the Tennessee river from that map without knowing it was there). It's one of the most stunning pieces of evidence for anything I've ever seen, and it doesn't match the race data nearly as well as it matches the river basins.
I noticed that their state-level plot is from 2018 and the CDC now has the 2019 up. They look somewhat different and frankly they don't match the watersheds all that well. WV, Alabama, SC, Indiana, Michigan - are these large watershed states? Some are part of a large watershed, but at the top not the bottom so inconsistent with their theory.
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html
How annoying.
They said West Virginia is a distinct case, and it's quite reasonable to have a couple cases that are separate from their main thesis. I haven't looked at the others to see whether it lines up (northern Alabama would be in the Tennessee River watershed for instance, while southern Alabama would only have shorter and smaller rivers).
You can also trace race on the country level map - the blacks settled where the farms were, as slaves, on the ... rivers.
Meh - you can watch the Missouri cross country Dakotas. I don't think that's attributable to enslaved blacks.
Wow. "Cross *the* Dakotas".
I only know this from the meme image about how nutrient settlements caused differential racial makeup of where the nutrient deposits were!
Population density would be a confounding issue there, wouldn't it? Those rivers have more towns along them than the surrounding countryside.
On the other hand, that county-level map (which I missed on my first reading) really is quite striking. I would like to see more than two other countries, though. Thinking about countries with significant population at both high and low altitude, what about France, Germany, Russia, Canada, Chile, Peru, Mexico?
Actually I just looked up obesity maps of Mexico and Peru and they do seem to support the trend too, with low-lying areas consistently fatter than mountainous areas. I do wonder whether it's as simple as the fact that walking up and down hills all day burns a lot of calories, though.
If I understand the argument correctly, it's well known that lower elevations are fatter than higher, but it's generally attributed to hypoxia, while SMTM is arguing that it's a side effect of lower elevations being at the foot of watersheds.
The Rio Grande and the Colorado river of the west are both heavily evaporating rivers and get lower flow as you go downstream, and thus would be expected to behave differently from rivers like the Brazos and the Colorado river of Texas, which are heavily agricultural and get more flow as you go downstream.
I've called it the "phlogiston" theory; a decent amount of circumstantial evidence but overall relying on a theory of a particle that may not exist (and none of the specific options suggested are particularly compelling).
At a high level, it seems to be understating how modern hyper-processed foods (Oreos, Diet Coke, etc.) contribute to obesity. Of course, any explanation for animal obesity wouldn't be based on that, but ... there are lots of possible explanations regarding domesticated animals, and I am not so sure that the "trend" holds for wild animals.
It understates how hyper-processed foods contribute to obesity? On the contrary, it may explain *why* hyper-processed foods contribute to obesity - because processing contaminates the food.
Somewhat related, the Peter Attia podcast had a recent episode that I found somewhat fascinating for the discussion on the differences between lab mice and wild mice: https://peterattiamd.com/steveaustad/. Basically, typical lab mice are so wimpy and fat they can barely be considered mice at all, and I imagine this is somewhat true for domesticated animals in general.
I mean, a bunch of theoretical particle theories have panned out...
The hyperpalatable foods theory has a couple sticking points for me: for one thing I'm fat and it's definitely not because of processed food. I eat too much in general, but I've cut out the gluttony in the past, and while I can straightforwardly lose 20-30 pounds I'm still substantially overweight - for some reason my set point is 245 lbs. And testimony from the anti-diet space gives examples of people winding up in the ER with organ failure despite still being kinda chunky (that particular claim was from Reagan Chastain, who should be trusted as far as you can throw her, but still). This calls to mind Guyenet's anecdote of the obese mice starving to death while defending body fat stores higher than the average mouse has during normal life - in both cases something has gone badly wrong with the set points, and I really don't see how hyperpalatable food explains this. Throw in the lab animals getting fatter on the same food as 50 years ago and the theory is on life support.
> And testimony from the anti-diet space gives examples of people winding up in the ER with organ failure
I mean if you ate 1500 kCal of HFCS or chocolate fat free smoothie per day, or something “healthy” like an olive oil / kale diet cleanse, I could totally see that causing organ failure. I can’t see organ failure being that common if you eat 2kCal/day of a healthy balanced natural diet or even burgers fries and some lettuce or soylent or something.
(Eating those to lose weight)
Also, if you watched the Rogan debate where Guyenet crushed Taubes, the only unanswered point I remember Taubes scoring was when he hammered Guyenet on a population that had obese mothers and starving children. How a population like that comes to be has haunted me ever since - SMTM's theory explains it.
human are omnivores, that is partly why we occupy so many ecological niches.
May I offer the words of the poet Leonard Cohen
https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-they-locked-up-a-man-poem-a-person-who-eats-meat-intro-live-at-the-isle-of-wight-lyrics
I'm looking for recommendations of little-known but truly excellent songs from the classic rock era. These would be songs that – in some alternative universe – would have been smash hits, but for the flapping of a random butterfly's wings in some remote corner of the world. Thanks!
Blackburn & Snow were a popular boy/girl early 60s folk-rock duo whose only album was not released until decades after they broke up. “Yes, Today” is my favorite of their songs - might have been a hit if it had come out when it was supposed to.
Scaruffi’s "Best Rock Albums of all Times" might be helpful:
https://www.scaruffi.com/music/best100.html
Which I originally found via https://lukemuehlhauser.com/scaruffis-rock-criticism/:
> We can start with his writings on music, since that seems to be what he is known for. He has helpfully ranked the best 100 rock albums of all time in order…
> If that’s too broad for you, he also provides his top albums year by year … every single year from 1967 to 2012. He also gives genre-specific rankings for psychedelic music, Canterbury, glam-rock, punk-rock, dream-pop, triphop, jungle … 32 genres in all. Try punching “scaruffi [band]” into Google; I defy you to find a major musician he hasn’t written a review of. These are all just part of the massive online appendix to his self-published two-volume history of rock music.
I just looked into that page... it may be a good pointer to semi-obscure albums, but he seems to belong to a particular kind of avantgarde underground contrarians. When someone suggests "Trout Mask Replica" as the greatest rock album ever, there's something wrong with them. Also, I don't have the knowledge to judge all of his best-of lists, but on the ones where I do, I can say he makes some bizarre choices. Listing Cream and the Animals as milestones of progressive rock, while skipping the Beatles and Moody Blues - no. Just, no. Charlie Watts (RIP) at number 3 of the best drummers? Pleeeeease. Klaus Schulze with "Irrlicht" for the best rock album of 1972? That was not even a rock album at all, by any stretch of the imagination. So, while checking out his recommendations doesn't hurt... - no, scratch that. Trout Mask Replica does cause pain and discomfort. Check out his recommendations, but at your own peril, and don't be frustrated if you don't like any of them.
Heh, thanks for looking into it. I'm not really familiar with rock, so I can't really judge. But the ones I did check out I didn't like much either.
Luke writes that "In general, the greatest albums are not ones that should be listened to near the beginning of one’s explorations of music." I certainly haven't reached that stage for rock then it seems
Or some artists are just not your cup of tea. I have been listening to various flavors of rock and metal for thirty years now, and some of the supposed cult albums still don't do anything for me. Also, rock music should not require a doctorate in music theory to appreciate, at least on some level (and I'm saying that as a fan of progressive rock). Rock should have melodies that touch you emotionally and haunt you, and rhythms that make you want to rock out. Some melodies and grooves work on some people and not on others... but if you can't find anything where you can at least say, "I understand why some find that enjoyable", it may be that it's just not a great rock album. (It might still be a great something-else, though.)
It eventually became popular 30 years later but Pink Moon by Nick Drake was released in 1972.
Rocky Erickson's Gremlins Have Pictures has a 70s rock vibe though it was released in 1986. I think it's a masterpiece. His live version of Heroin really captures that era.
"The classic rock era" is a bit vague, but here are bands and songs that I've come across that may fit your criteria:
- the band Love put out the excellent album "Forever Changes" in 1967 - psychedelic rock based on acoustic guitars and the occasional trumpets and strings. Standout songs IMO are "A House is not a Motel" and "Maybe the People would be the Times".
- Beggar's Opera had a minor hit with "Time Machine" - early prog, lots of mellotron, dramatic vocals... I love it.
- Starcastle sounded a lot like Yes, but maybe a bit more organized. At more than ten minutes, "Lady of the Lake" is an unlikely candidate for a smash hit, but still a great song, and quite catchy for progressive rock.
- the prog version of "Elanor Rigby" by Esperanto may be the best Beatles cover ever.
- in the blues-based corner of classic rock, Ashbury had an excellent album in "Endless Skies", but never achieved breakthrough success. "Warning!" is a good place to start.
- Bob Seger recorded an awesome cover of "Bo Diddley/ Who Do You Love", which AFAIK never got anywhere... but it rocks hard.
Let me know if any of these resonate with you.
Eleanor Rigby is one of my favorite songs. That version by Esperanto is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2V1MTGWJgA&ab_channel=sada0210
It's very creative musically, but they lost the story by stretching it out over 8 minutes.
The singer even tacked the end of verse 3 onto the beginning of verse 2, cutting out 1/3 of the lyrics. It's become an art object instead of a human story.
Kansas also did a prog cover of it (less "prog" and more classical) with the London Symphony Orchestra, on "Always Never the Same", but I would never call it the best Beatles cover ever.
Ray Charles did a good Rigby cover. So did Joan Baez. Paul McCartney also did a cover of Eleanor Rigby, on his album /Give My Regards To Broad Street/ (1984). Not my favorite, but it's followed by a new composition, "Eleanor's Dream", which is worth listening to for the Eleanor Rigby connoisseur. If I had to pick a favorite, it might be Rare Earth's R&B cover of it.
Again, these wouldn't have been hits, and are only marginally rock, but I think they're great:
- Bruce Cockburn, generally
- T-Bone Burnett's album /Trap Door/ (1982)
- Robyn Hitchcock's "My wife and my dead wife" (1980)--the lyrics fascinate me, because the story it tells is IMHO unlike anything else in literature in its intent / function / purpose
Robyn Hitchcock has quite a few great tunes - “I Watch the Cars”, “The Lizard” and “I Often Dream of Trains” are three of my favorites. “My Wife & My Dead Wife” is also excellent, and is somewhat thematically similar to Noel Coward’s play/movie “Blithe Spirit”
It's easier for me to think of songs that I think were "truly excellent" but could never be "smash hits". Most of the repertoire of the midwestern art-rock band Kansas fall into that category. They did later become highly influential on Scandinavian metal, but nobody else seems to have noticed this. Some of my favorite songs by them are "Lamplight Symphony", "Cheyenne Anthem", "Ghosts", "T.O. Witcher", "Peaceful and Warm", "Rainmaker", and the entire album "Point of Know Return". One of their songs, "Miracles out of nowhere", has a 4-part fugue starting at 2:25. It ain't Bach, but it was a sincere attempt to cross rock with Bach.
Similar story for Jethro Tull's album /Songs From the Wood/, which is super-famous with critics, but I don't recall hearing any of it on the radio.
There's a very obscure song by Jonathan & Charles, "Mrs. Chisholm's Weekend" (1968), which is in the same vein as "Eleanor Rigby" (1966), but had the misfortune of being released on a Christian album. There are also a few songs from that period by the Christian rock musician Larry Norman which could have done better in the mainstream, like "I'm the Six O'Clock News", and maybe "So Long Ago the Garden" (1973), which sounds like a missing link between beat poetry and rap music, though I doubt any future rappers ever heard it.
(Take that "highly influential on Scandinavian metal" with many grains of salt. That's just my guess, based on some guitar-solo similarities with melodic death metal. They obviously influenced Dethklok, musically and visually, which is however a fake Swedish melodic death-metal band, which however probably sold more albums than most actual Swedish melodic death-metal bands.)
Frank Zappa is generally more vulgar than I care for, but "Muffin Man" was the song that made me want to get better acquainted. Give it a couple of minutes to actually get going... :)
Frank Zappa and Tom Waits both did interesting weird stuff back then. But, again, not top-40 hit material.
Thanks for recommending that Outlaws song! Nice!
I discovered Green Grass and High Tides through one of those music games, I think GH3. Amazing song.
Re. the recent announcement that NYC will provide free education for 3-year-olds in 2023, and the $3.5 "stimulus" bill that passed in the US Senate on Aug. 12, including some large amount for free preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds in America. (I can't seem to find out how much, other than that it's part of a $726 billion allocation, and that an "expert" predicted preschool for 3+4 year olds would cost $60 billion (yearly?)).
Scott, or maybe someone else, has written posts showing that the consensus now is that pre-school for 3-year-olds has no lasting educational benefits.
Now Vox has an article (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/16/17928164/early-childhood-education-doesnt-teach-kids-fund-it) saying that it has no lasting educational benefits, but has lasting health benefits. It says that the studies showing no lasting educational benefits used control groups, while the studies showing lasting health benefits were longitudinal studies mostly without control groups. It suggests that the health benefits were due to the actual health-benefit portion the pre-K education, and maybe the educational part, which is much more expensive, isn't useful.
So it sounds to me like scientific consensus at the moment would say that Congress is throwing a lot of money away on preschool for 3 and 4 year-olds, or at best betting a lot of money on a hypothesis, blowing right past the US budget cap before we've even started on the $10-to-$100 trillion New Green Deal.
Would anyone care to elaborate on this?
I imagine there would be some benefit to parents too.
Congress is bribing the teacher vote.
X to Doubt, dude.
They'd just fund their pensions if they wanted to do that.
I assume that preschool is to let parents work more than for the benefit of the children?
The US has thrown away a shit-ton of money on useless pre-school education for decades, it's not going to stop now. It's a lot like "infrastructure" bills to address "our crumbling roads and bridges," which pop-up pretty reliably about once a decade or so. (You'd think at some point the voters might say: WTF? we voted for $x billion less than 10 years ago for those God-damned crumbling bridges, where did it go? Either the bridges should be brand-spanking-new now, and we don't need more $billions, or else whoever disbursed the money 10 years ago should be dragged into the public square and hanged. But they never do.)
1) set of repaired things may be different, noone expects that it funded repair of evry single bridge
2) some maintenance/repair every 10 years is not unusual (sometimes it is required more often due to floods etc)
Interesting hypotheses. Doesn't match my experience in the slightest, but to each his own.
Can you link some evidence that they repeatedly claim to repair the same bridges again and again, more often than in other countries? And that repeats on largeer scale - not just with some specific bridge?
Nope. The only evidence is my memory. I've heard this spiel for 40 years, and it's always the same. I've never heard any politician tell me "welp, we fixed all the Interstate bridges in the Northeast last time, it's the Midwest's turn now" or "OK, we fixed up Amtrak last time, they're good to go, so no money for that in this bill."
It is 100% normal that Northeast has bridges with maintenance/rebuilding required in various times.
Bridges are build at different times, requiring differing service intervals.
My city in Poland right now has two bridges in maintenance, last year another serious rebuilding was completed, new railway bridge is under construction. While many other bridges are slowly aging and will require costly repairs in coming decades.
We are definitely not rebuilding all bridges in one year on each century. That would be bad idea for many reasons.
AFAIK this is 100% normal, though some grift/stealing/misspending hidden in this is possible.
There was an article recently (can't remember where it was) suggesting that big federal infrastructure transfers to states just make states spend less of their own money on infrastructure. So the infrastructure spending stays the same but with different state-to-federal funding ratios.
Even more than most "education," preschool is pretty transparently just childcare with some baseline attempt at quality control (background checks, actually interacting with children rather than setting them in front of a device, etc).
The nation probably has some interest in more parents being able to go back to work after having children within 3 - 5 years, as opposed to in 5 - 8 years, and also to have more than one child. Grandparents are increasingly continuing to work until they're too old to do a decent job raising grandkids either, grandkids are coming later, and they often live too far away anyway. Is it a strong enough interest to justify the cost? I'm not sure. Our district is already short elementary educational assistants, and it's not clear we could find the "teachers," even at a decent wage. I'm not sure what the situation in New York is.
I'm somewhat doubtful that government sponsored, standardized, acceptable childcare at that age would be significantly less expensive if they didn't bother with the educational component. The workers would still have to do something to prove conscientiousness, safety, and generally that they were responsible adults strangers should trust their children with, which isn't cheap.
I would theoretically prefer an extended family culture where there's always someone in the house minding the young children, but my revealed preferences contradict that.
Echoing in on the point about how hard it is to find qualified workers for these positions: Currently, to do pre-K childcare you need to both be happy to work with kids, be willing to do so for less money than you could make as a teacher/teacher's aid/someone inside the official education system AND have a clean enough record that you can pass a background check. This trifecta just doesn't exist in most cases.
The expensive component is the number of staff required, though inner city rents can also contribute. Reducing the credentialing required for the staff can reduce costs, though, and I'm doubtful the credentialing has much if any correlation with the ability to teach pre-schoolers (though this part obviously depends substantially on which jurisdiction we're discussing)
Re: credentials for childcare staff, I don't know what the situation is like in the USA, but over here there are more and more standards being set for what children should be achieving.
Here's a link to the standards manual for Early Childhood Education, which covers from Birth - Six Years of Age for the settings
Full and Part-time Daycare
Childminding
Sessional services
Infant classes in primary schools
https://siolta.ie/media/pdfs/siolta-manual-2017.pdf
This is the kind of stuff that is being more and more considered a necessary part of children's education. It's no longer a case of "the parents are working, the kids need to be taken care of, for a group of three year olds just let them play with toys, learn how to get on with other kids, and since this is age Biting happens train them out of doing that", the kids and the childcare provider/preschool has to be hitting all these sorts of goals (e.g. as below):
5.2.8 How do you enable the child who consistently plays alone to interact with other children?
5.2.9 In what ways are children facilitated to work together in small groups?
If I remember what I was like at the ages of 4-6, I would have *hated* being chivvied into "interacting with other children" when I was quietly and happily playing alone with blocks or whatever, but we can't let kids be solitary! we must make sure they are sociable! and learn to interact! so they can be productive and efficient workers!
On the other hand, credentialling is here being used as a proxy for social class and overall trustworthiness. Call me a snob, but I don't want my kids taken care of by the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel employees you'd find at McDonald's or the TSA.
In addition to helping out working class parents, I also think there are benefits to the children, not in educational terms but in terms of socialization and normal development. It is really not natural to be cloistered with a hovering adult looking over a kid 24-7 who puts that kid's interests above all others. Kids are supposed to be running in a pack with other kids, learning to socialize and bump elbows and get in conflicts and work them out. Back in the olden days, that could happen just within families or extended families because people had so many more kids -- you couldn't give them all attention. Now it happens with daycare or preschool.
I well remember the first day of kindergarten, how the kids who hadn't been in daycare or pre-school previously were the ones crying in the corner, needing to be comforted by the teacher because they were terrified. The daycare kids were all having a great time. A parent looks out for their kid's own interests above the other kids, and that's not great to be marinated in that situation for 5 years straight when it isn't how society works. Kids that aren't socialized young are much like all the COVID puppies that didn't get socialized -- anxious and neurotic and not as resilient, when they aren't in perfectly controlled and safe contexts.
I am someone who is prone to rather extreme introversion and wanting to be by myself indulging my cerebral interests. If I had been alone in my mother's care my first few years, I would've spent all my time reading and playing alone (rather than just doing that on weekends and evenings) and I'm sure I would have become a serious weirdo with social problems and anxiety. I completely credit being only a marginal weirdo and being able to get along in society with being in daycare in my foremost years, and getting used to having to socialize, and having a minder who did not prioritize my interests either above or below those of the other children.
Yes, I fully agree with this. And even in schools, it didn't used to always be so age-segregated...in one-room schoolhouses, etc., you had kids of all ages learning together and helping with the younger kids. I don't know why we have such strict age-restriction nowadays, with large groups of kids all exactly the same age, which just breeds a lot of competition and status games rather than more natural age-based leadership and social hierarchies that better reflect the adult world.
I had a pretty ideal daycare situation as a kid, where a home-based daycare provider was watching a group of about a dozen kids ranging in age from babies to about 10 or 11, and we all played together and had a lot of unstructured time just running around outside or whatever. It was wonderful and I completely credit it with my social development, which I would not have received at home. I think some years later the state came down on her and required that she implement strict minder ratios and more age segregation, which is too bad.
This is pretty much my take on it too. Those pushing for universal Pre-K don't seem to care if the educational benefits are real or not, but they do care a lot about freeing up individuals (mostly women) to get back into the workforce. They seem to have a strong understanding that babysitting services being offered for all is not as popular or justified as better education for small children. That they can help save some kids from 24 hours a day in really crummy homes may also be a factor.
You might see this as a socialist program, I see it evidence that the values of capitalism, consumerism and materialism are fully baked in to progressivism. This is Peak Capitalism. The state will now take care of your children even earlier so you can get back to the important part of life: being a dedicated worker bee.
The classic statement is that it takes a village to raise a child - but modern people mostly just don't live in villages any more (or in the kind of extended-family communal households that many Bay Area rationalists do have) and so raising a child these days either requires expensive childcare, or the parents being with the child full time, as opposed to the more traditional options.
The question is whether the childcare support is provided by family and friends (the traditional way), by the market (the capitalist way), or by the government (the socialist way). It would be good to enable more people to live in such a way that the traditional means are readily available, but for better or worse, our society has developed in a way that puts that out of reach for most people, even more than the capitalist cost of childcare.
Sure, but I think what LesHapablap and myself both lament is that there isn't the choice; some people would love to stay home and take care of their kid(s) at least until they were four years old and ready for primary school, but there's not the opportunity - both parents need to be working nowadays in order to pay mortgages etc.
Which is how you end up with the absurdity of the mother (usually) working a job where the majority of her pay goes on childcare so she can work a job.
This. Also, another cynical angle - a word where a mother works to pay or the costs of childcare is one with a higher GDP than one where the mother stays at home to look after her own children, since the work of looking after children is now visible to the state.
I see this a lot, but this is just gains from trade. You can make the same argument about getting a job vs. growing your own food or building your own home just pushes money around and makes GDP look higher.
But if I'm a better programmer than I am a farmer/butcher or construction worker, then I'm actually materially better off making the trade and society is better off if people do this in general, and I've never seen the argument why this doesn't apply to child care.
It isn't the same argument unless professional child-rearing, e.g. in the preschool setting, is superior to what the child can get at home -- which nobody at all believes. So the situation is more similar to a peasant who has to plow a field with a stick, inefficiently, because he can't save up enough money to buy a good plow (and horse). In this case, the family can't supply enough saved money (e.g. through one parent earning enough for all) to buy the most efficient and effective possible child-rearing -- which is done by one parent.
You are "actually materially better off" if you drink a government-provided slurry with all your necessary nutrients instead of cooking yourself or buying food from restaurants. And society would be better off too. And you can use your extra pocket money to bid on a house someday. Actually you may have to take the government slurry in order to afford the house, since everyone else bidding on the house has already done so.
Nutrient slurries are not actually that healthy, in practice
So the metaphor holds then!
Whether it's a real benefit verses a shadow benefit will depend on several factors. One, is how many children can be "properly" cared for by an individual. If a daycare worker cares for approximately the same number of children as a parent, then that's not adding much on the daycare side (the parent may be doing more economically valuable work than the daycare worker, so that's potentially important still). I am scare quoting "properly" because I have significant doubts that the kind of upbringing a child can get in daycare is equivalent to what they can get from a parent who is regularly with them. Obviously huge caveats here, and some children are better off just being taken away from their parents, so there's certainly some room there to justify childcare no matter how reasonably poor the daycare is.
I'm more concerned about the quality of industrialized daycare than I am the current implementation, to be sure. Right now, the parents can make an economic choice about whether their productivity in society is greater than the cost in terms of day care. Put simply, if they make less money than daycare costs, they stay home. Generally, they would (and should!) stay home even if the costs are anywhere close, like making $20,000/year and paying $12,000/year for day care. Once you factor in costs related to work, like additional clothing, driving costs, etc., that ratio really isn't worth it. That's not even considering the value of spending time with your own kids.
Smart Codex Readers: Convince me that COVID Vaccine Passports are a good Idea.
Currently against them as I find them
1) counterproductive and dissuade trust,
2) discriminatory and segregationist
3)Onerous for implementation
4) Seem to discount natural immunity
5) Inevitable Privacy Concerns
6) No Methodological Target for Removal . Fear that passport requirement will shift from unvax to 'undervaxed"
7) Herding Effect where unvax further congregate among themselves
8) Divisive and leads to distrust of public health institutions.
9) Seem to ignore majority of exposure occurs inter familiar and scape goats public spaces
10) COVID vaccines are not sterilizing making vaccine passports essentially worthless.
11) my libertarian bias where this feels wrong.
Looking for arguments in favor:
Should Hawaii where I live implement this policy?
Does a temporary health vaccine passport potentially raise vaccine rates, improve "public perception of safety" , lower hospitalizations/deaths divisive policies that could be ineffective, counterproductive and possibly lead to worse health outcomes and trust.
Thanks!
Would your "libertarian bias" feel better if instead of yes/no admission and vaccine passports, that businesses simply implemented separate sections and differential pricing?
For example, I am absolutely positive that if airlines offered "vaccinated only" flights, that (1) LOTS of people would be willing to pay more to be on those flights, and (2) if the airline determined to charge more for fare on the unvaxxed fights to offset their risks in serving those passengers, it would motivate more people to be vaccinated. Is that somehow better in your mind then if airlines just simply started requiring vaccination passports for all passengers and stopped serving the unvaccinated?
I don't find any of your other points compelling. I see no privacy concern or slippery slope with showing people and businesses that you desire to interact with a simple verification of your vaccine status. Nor do I care if unvaxxed people feel that it is divisive...given that they are the ones acting like petulant anti-social babies, I could care less. The rest of us don't want to be around them. Just like in the 80s and 90s, society decided they didn't want to be around smokers, so that no one can smoke anywhere nowadays but their own home or cordoned-off smoking sections.
My general reaction is that EVERY time there is any sort of change at all in public policy...whether that is making DUI a felony or requiring seatbelts or issuing social security cards or making bars and restaurants non-smoking or updating a user interface or literally *anything*, ever, people yell and scream and complain and gnash their teeth and then the change happens and everyone gets over it and forgets about it two weeks later. The unvaccinated are acting that way and making a huge ado about nothing, at best, and at worst making a terrible health decision for themselves merely out of spite and wanting to stick it to libs/elites/whoever they think they're sticking it to.
I would imagine that a place like Hawaii, which is hugely dependent upon tourism from the affluent and older crowds (who are the most vaccinated people), would benefit from implementing the policy. The cosmopolitan frequent-travelers with lots of disposable income are not the people making up the anti-vax crowd.
I know its a meme that the unvaccinated are dissenting to spite you, but we really aren't. There are 2.5 as many reported deaths in the VAERS database for COVID vaccines as every other vaccine in the database combined (4,831 vs 1,919). Maybe that doesn't worry you, but can you at least admit it is reasonable for a person to worry about it?
Block is correct that there are a bunch of reasonable-sounding fellows headed by Brett Weinstein going around telling people that "the vaccine" is dangerous (and not making an effort, when I watched them in June, to distinguish between the 4 available vaccines in the two countries discussed).
I am now convinced that their apparent reasonableness is only skin deep, as it seemed like they never considered any alternative hypotheses before concluding "vaccines dangerous", and even at that time they were misrepresenting some data they had access to in obvious ways.
Here's the review I started on 3 hours of claims: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7NoRcK6j2cfxjwFcr/covid-vaccine-safety-how-correct-are-these-allegations
Is what you consider "reasonable" really rational, though? I guess this gets back to the whole rationality thing and underlying basis for ACT. You present two sets of numbers and say, "Hey, look at the difference here between COVID vaccines and the other vaccines!" Sounds like a reasonable to at least note the difference in rates. But you posted these two numbers without putting them in the context of any other data. If I put that 4,831 number into context of 190,000,000 people in the United States who've received at least one dose fo the vaccine that 4,800 number seems a lot less concerning.
Just looking at the US numbers though shows that we have an overall 1.7% chance of dying from COVID-19 infection and a 0.0019% chance of dying from one of the vaccines. So that makes it 895% more likely to die from the disease than from the vaccine. Now, you can burrow into those basic numbers and argue that IFR is lower because of all the undiagnosed cases, but still that difference is pretty damn big. It's hard to not to argue that your chances are better with the vaccine than a COVID-19 infection.
So, to answer your question, I don't think it's a reasonable thing to worry about, because I think your cognitive bias against the COVID-19 vaccines is making you latch on to data that puts them in a negative light.
https://www.cdc.gov/.../vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
I take your point, but your analysis leaves out a few things too. You assume a binary choice: "Either I get the vaccine or I will catch COVID" but you might not actually ever catch it. The choice is between a small danger today vs the possibility of a larger danger in the future.
Even that, however, assumes near 100% effectiveness of the vaccines, which at this point is clearly untrue. In my home state (Vermont), around 25% cases in the last couple of months were among vaccinated people. Also, its a small sample size, but the death rates have actually been higher in breakthrough cases than the overall rate. All of which muddies the water enough that I still contend it is reasonable to at least wait for more data.
You can believe whatever damn fool thing you want, but numbers argue against what you believe.
1. Current estimates are that Delta has an R value around 7. This number is based on in vitro studies (rather than epidemiological surveys), but that puts R value of SARS-CoV-2 3x higher than the 1918 H1N1 flu. And that's 2x-3x the R value of the common cold. You've gotten the common cold, haven't you? You've gotten the flu, haven't you? Why do you think you can avoid catching COVID-19 unless you have special powers that exempt yourself from the laws of probability?
2. Or maybe you're sitting by yourself in your survival bunker waiting for the Zombie/COVID apocalypse to pass. But SARS-CoV-2 is a Coronavirus, and in the past Coronaviruses haven't shown themselves to be amenable to herd immunity. COVID-19 will likely become COVID-22, -23, and -24. It might mutate into a relatively harmless cold-like virus. Or it might get worse. We'll see. But when you run out of dried beans and beef jerky you're going to have to come out your bunker and deal with people who might be contagious.
3. The fact that vaccines are less effective against the Delta variant is actually more reason to get vaccinated — because the vaxxed now have a higher probability of being contagious. So, you won't be able to depend on the vaccinated to protect you.
4. Also, from a mathematical perspective, if Vaccine X is only 80 percent effective against Variant Y, and 80 percent of population has been vaccinated with Vaccine X, and 20 percent of the population remains unvaccinated, then the pool of potential breakthrough cases and pool of unvaccinated are of equal size. So, you'd expect 50 percent of the cases to be in the vaccinated population and 50 percent in the unvaccinated population. The fact that Vermont has a 25% breakthrough rate against Delta still shows that COVID-19 is preferentially attacking the unvaccinated. If you look at the relative percentages hospitalized, if Vermont is like other states, probably only 3% of the hospitalized for COVID-19 will be from the vaccinated population.
>You've gotten the common cold, haven't you? You've gotten the flu, haven't you?
I don't know about Block, but I've never gotten the flu, and I'm no youngling.
More importantly, "the common cold" is about two hundred immunologically distinct diseases with nearly identical symptoms, that cycle in and out of circulation as herds become mostly immune to the last one. Most people will at some point catch *a* cold, very few people catch *all 200* colds.
"The flu" is a couple dozen immunologically distinct diseases, and ditto.
COVID-19, unless something weird happens going forward, is basically one disease. Several strains but they're immunologically related and one is clearly dominant. So your intuition is off. Most people contract a minority of circulating colds and a minority of circulating influenzas, which suggests that the probability of contracting any one specific disease is <<50%.
For the average vaccinated person, the odds are pretty good that they will someday catch *a coronavirus*, but also pretty good that they will never contract Covid-19. Most likely, the coronavirus they catch will be one of the ones already included in "the common cold".
I'm sure some people are legitimately afraid of the vaccine, but plenty of others are in fact doing it out of spite and because "they don't like being told what to do." I personally know some people in that camp.
I think even if it could be validated that those 5,000 people actually died from the vaccine and not something else, that is out of 200 Million people and certainly much lower than serious illness, long covid, or deaths from Covid itself. And likely caused almost entirely by anaphylaxis, which could be avoided by waiting an hour after getting the vaccine with a location where there's an Epipen available. I get allergy shots once a month and have to bring an epipen and wait half an hour before I can leave the Dr's office each time...not a big deal, and reasonable any time a severe allergic reaction could occur.
Look, I had pretty severe side effects from my first dose, which I was NOT expecting...3 days feeling like a bad flu, full body aches, severe headache. I was scared to get the second one. But the second one was actually easier than the first (perhaps just because I was mentally prepared) and now that I'm through it I am VERY happy to be vaxxed. Furthermore, it isn't about fear of dying, as I think the chances that I would die of Covid are about the chance I'll die from a lightening strike...I am healthy, skinny, and under 50. But it's still worthwhile to know I'm reducing my chance of keeping it spreading, putting elderly people at risk, and reducing my chance of feeling like crap for two weeks straight or getting long Covid. If everyone had just gotten the shots this spring when they were available, we would be very unlikely to be dealing with this current surge, new mask mandates, and people in the ICU, which would be a good thing.
" everyone had just gotten the shots this spring when they were available, we would be very unlikely to be dealing with this current surge, new mask mandates, and people in the ICU, which would be a good thing."
I recommend you look at the data out of Israel to see how this is likely false. They are 80% _+vaccinated have have the most hospitalizations ever recorded during pandemic.
Similarly in Hawaii we never ended restrictions, no freedom day for us for mask s etc with nearly 83% of adults vaccinated we're having the most cases ever.
In regards to mandate - i have no issue with private businesses (Your airplane comparison to smokers) doing their own thing. I 'm still against the mandate from the government as in my personal experience it degrades trust with communities especially taking into the colonial account of the island..
i work in public health vaccination drives and have heard every fear, question, concern possible - its a very complex issue.
the best way to convince an unvaxed individual I have found is the following;
'The known current risks associated with covid are greater than the risks associated with the vaccine. the disease is endemic and you will meet it in the future. Your choice is to meet it vaccinated or not. Being vaccinated will make it easier and milder.'
shaming does not work. Love, empathy, understanding, harm reduction models are more productive.
Israel is apparently reporting only 39% Pfizer vaccine efficacy, which is pretty bad but certainly better than nothing. But it's still relevant that it has 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/23/delta-variant-pfizer-covid-vaccine-39percent-effective-in-israel-prevents-severe-illness.html
Given that there is a 5% rate of side effects that "prevented daily activities/work/required a medical visit" for each dose, some people are suggesting that the vaccine doses that were chosen were much too high; I even saw some report on Twitter showing good vaccine efficacy given 3 tiny doses (like 1% of a normal dose). Given that small doses would probably reduce these side effects and allow the entire world to be vaccinated, I hope small doses get more attention, quickly.
(source for the 5% figure is the vaccine survey offered to all Canadians [AFAIK] when getting a shot: https://canvas-covid.ca/results )
Going through your points in order:
1. Not sure what you're talking about here. If you only want to allow people with vaccines to travel, a vaccine passport seems tautologically like it couldn't be counterproductive. As for dissuading trust, I mean, maybe, but Trust but Verify has been an iron law for a while now. Wouldn't you feel more comfortable knowing that people coming to your home were way less likely to be infected under this new regime?
2. Sure... but discriminatory against a body we want to reduce. That's like saying welfare programs are discriminatory against the poor, since hopefully it would make less of them. Something being discriminatory against a population isn't inherently bad, murder laws are discriminatory against the population of would-be murderers. (not saying people who don't get vacced are like murders, just making an analogy.)
3. Onerous... maybe? Setting up a national DB or giving out some kind of ID doesn't seem that onerous, but at scale it probably could be.
4. I guess, but I don't think anyone cares about stressing the capacity of natural immunity. As a society, we don't gain value by giving a shit about natural immunity.
5. In what sense? If you've been vaccinated or not? I don't see a major privacy issue here.
6. Vaccination status is currently a binary, I'm not sure what you're point here means.
7. Ok, but the opposite of that is unvaccinated people moving more freely throughout all of society which is also bad. The existence of people without immunity anywhere is the problem, not where they happen to be located.
8. Maybe... but this can be used to argue for or against any point. If the existence of controversy is enough to defeat any idea then nothing happens.
9. Citation? I haven't heard this. It also seems self-negating (assuming families are closed circles, how does the infection first happen?)
10. fair dinkum, mate. I think the vaccine reduces the duration of potential infection, though, correct? So it presumably decreases risk, but I'll give this point to you.
11. ok. My communitarian biases don't, but we can't fight our initial impulses.
Overall I think that the cost here is pretty little, the potential gain is sufficient (both in terms of reducing the potential number of infected people traveling and increasing trust from people in the areas being travelled to that their visitors aren't infected) that it's worth doing.
On July 21st, after a surge in cases (~10k% increase) caused by unvaccinated tourists, Malta started requiring proof of vaccination for all travellers (previously a negative PCR test was sufficient). At that point, the 7-day average case count was 203. One month later, it was down to 62. So vaccine passports do seem to work better than PCR tests, and the alternative of shutting down international travel altogether again would seem less liberal.
> One month later, it was down to 62. So vaccine passports do seem to work better than PCR tests
Or maybe people cancelled their plans to travel to a place that had a ~10k% surge in COVID cases. That also fits the timeline you laid out.
I don't understand what mechanism you are proposing where the purported decrease in tourism would lead to R < 1. I believe that the mechanism I am proposing, where keeping a low proportion of unvaccinated in the population leads to R < 1, is generally accepted.
Tourists by definition travel to many places and have contact with many people in the places they visit, so they are a vector for spread within a region. R = (# of contacts per unit time) * (probability of transmission per contact) * (duration of infection).
Vaccines affect the second and third factors, but tourism influences the first factor. So if tourism tanked you'd still see a drop in cases, even without any additional restrictions on who can visit.
For example, if Malta typically has 10,000 people visiting per day, but 9,000 of those cancelled their plans because of the surge you described, don't you think that would have a noticeable influence on R? I don't know what the actual numbers are, but it's a hypothesis that also fits the information you've provided.
I haven't heard of any cancellations based on fear of COVID, only of cancellations because of the restrictions (i.e. by those without vaccine passports). This lowers the probability that such cancellations are widespread. I suppose that in a couple of weeks, when the airport releases its August numbers, we will be able to rule out definitively the hypothesis that tourism declined by 90% between July and August. We already know that unvaccinated tourism declined by 100%.
Do you mean an actual passport, meaning a document that lets you travel interstate, or internationally? I'm a little bemused that that idea is even controversial, at least for international travel. When I was a kid I had occasion to travel (with my family) internationally, and it was routine that you needed documentation of certain vaccines to go to certain countries. I vaguely recall having a little yellow book, some kind of "International Vaccine Certificate" that my mother carried around with my passport. Different countries required different vaccines, and I remember one country in particular cost me about 3 separate visits to the doc's office to get stuck with needles. Boo.
Anyway, I think the concept is only really new and surprising to young First World people who have grown up for the past 30 years or so in a world in which infectious disease seemed to have been thoroughly vanquished. (Surprise! Turns out it wasn't...Mother Nature is a sneaky bitch.)
What you may want to ask yourself is: would your philosophical reasons stand, if COVID had a mortality rate like the Black Death (say 60-80%)? That is, if one person sneaking in from some other ravaged country could cause 80% of Honolulu to snuff it within a 4 weeks, say, would you still be firmly opposed to burdening that poor soul with the necessity to get a vaccine if he wanted to visit, and prove it? If your answer is "hell no!" then your opposition isn't really philosophical at all, it's practical -- you're just saying *in this particular case, for this particular disease* the civil liberties infringement is not worth the benefit to public health.
Unfortunately, if the core argument is practical, then reasonable men can disagree about the exact cost/benefit ratio required to support or oppose the idea, and it comes down to a lot of gritty detail, much of which is actually unknown because we lack the needed data.
1) Counterproductive how? Do you think that they make people less likely to get vaccinated, instead of more? Real-world examples prove that vaccine mandates increase vaccination rates: https://apnews.com/article/europe-business-lifestyle-health-travel-1d10271c4f1617521892d49d83b773ad
2) Yes, but this is tautological.
3) Not at all. Everyone has smartphones, it's not hard. Plenty of places have implemented QR code passes.
4) "Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated." https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm?s_cid=mm7032e1_w
5) There's not really a way to quantify the value of privacy. But consider: how protective were you of your vaccination status (MMR, etc) in 2019?
6) This is a slippery slope fallacy.
7) The unvaxed would also be incentivized to get vaccinated.
8) Why would a private entity, say a bar or restaurant, implementing a vaccine mandate have any bearing on the public's trust in a public health institution?
9) So then you'd be in favor of them in high-risk areas, like indoor dining?
10) I'm not sure what you think sterilizing means.
11) It's good that you're upfront that this is your bias, but maybe try thinking about it this way: wouldn't it be governmental overreach to ban a private business owner from being able to run their business how they see fit, including their choice on requiring proof of vaccination? Why don't you value the freedom of business owners?
Re: Hawaii, only about half of the population of Hawaii has been vaccinated. All else equal, would the world be better if no other Hawaiian got vaccinated, or if every remaining Hawaiian got vaccinated? Again, all else equal. Forget the yeah-buts, forget that but-what-abouts, just all else equal. Is it better with no more vaccinations, or everyone getting more vaccinations?
Thanks for the points.
1. Note on Counter Productive Nature of Vaccine Passport:
By creating division between both vaccinated and unvaccinated populations vaccine mandates public trust in institutions is damaged. Personally as a member of vaccination clinics I have met several individuals who are unvaccinated and are doubling down against vaccination because of loss of trust in government and feelings of coercion. Future health issues could be affected by this loss of trust. In Hawaii history of colonialism etc further complicates communicating and establishing trust with the most unvaccinated. Further loss of "privileges" and the carrot of a mask free society + the fear of booster infinity make it hard to connect.
Counter research to your note Research from across Europe shows that compelling people to take vaccines does not necessarily result in higher uptake of vaccines. Further, statistics show that the UK has some of the most positive attitudes towards vaccines across Europe, and that the top 5 European nations for positive attitudes towards vaccinations all have voluntary vaccination policies. The European nations with the most negative attitudes towards vaccinations include those with mandatory vaccination policies: Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia.
Here are two links by exploring the counter productive nature of passports:
Vax Passports Are a Bad Idea
— Prasad explores the balance of possible (but uncertain) health benefits and social harms
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/92107
Covid-19 vaccine passports will harm sustainable development
British Medical Journal
”Vaccine passports interfere with that future as they create a structural barrier to sustainable development, benefiting only the few at the expense of so many.
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/03/30/covid-19-vaccine-passports-will-harm-sustainable-development/
2. Yes tautological but currently the most under n Hawaii the most under vaccinated populations are Filipino, Hawaiian American,and Black communities compared to Asian / White populations. In similar In New York CIty close to 60% Black Americans have not been vaccinated (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-vaccines.page). One cannot support a policy that discriminates and segregates differences in vaccination by gender, race, or socioeconomics.The vaccine passport may serve to perpetuate inequality, segregation and structural racism.
3). Not everyone has smartphones. Age issues make it further complex. I work in public health and technology is a major issue with under vaccinated populations. Luckily the over 65 we've hit probably close to 87% vaccinated so this seems mute.
4) There are several studies comparing natural vs vaccine infection and is complex. I agree though looks like getting someone who had natural immunity is benefited from vaccination.
5) My Vaccination Status in 2019 was on a old piece of paper. My daughter's is digital. The COVID vaccine passport is presented everytime you enter a restaurant/etc and linked to a digital system.
6). The entire COVID panedmic has been a slippery slope. To me I could accept a vaccine passport if it had a clear end date / end target (say 80% Vaccination etc) and review.
7) Herding leads t o echo chambers. Having unvaxxed see vaxxed living healthy post vaccination is best way to convince them against their fears at least in my opinion. I'd like to see data from NYC on how their vaccine passport program is affecting vaccination rates.
8) Talking to unvax individuals, there are flash points of aggression. IE: ustomers angry, new labor costs with staff/ownership of not wanting the role of health bouncer/enforcer with potential for aggression & flash points at premises doors. Few want to operate in a checkpoint society where you need to show ID/Vax cards daily. Similarly individuals who the very same people who just months ago claimed voter ID is racist because minorities don't have IDs are suddenly acknowledging everyone needs ID creating further distrust.
9). I think employer mandates and targeted vaccines drives are more productive. Most contagion occurs within the household unit and less cases are from restaurants/public spaces in contract tracing data from Hawaii.
10) Sterilizing in vaccination means that it cuts transmission. Vaccinated individuals are spreading COVID making vaccine passports essentially worthless. If both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals can spread disease then there is limited logic in such an intervention...
11) Yes. I have no problem with individual business decisions to mandate vaccine requirements. I find the top down approach in effective.
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Re Hawaii: Hawaii has 69% of general population vaccinated with 1 shot , 62% with Full. This is for all ages. Eliminate the kids and we already have the majority of at risk individuals vaccinated so to be targeting a vaccine mandate program that would benefit the wealthiest individuals on the island who are already vaccinated probably is a distraction from other interventions that could be more effective.
Its funny the strongest argument FOR a vaccine passport appeals to the left authoritarian in me: A successful vaccine passport system could provide the government an opportunity to nudge other health outcomes. For example, individuals with a high body mass index could be limited in the types of restaurants they visit or purchase. Alcoholics could be restricted in entering bars. Similarly individuals with other communicable diseases could be tracked to ensure they do not cause spread within public settings expanding Vaccine Passport access points shifting.
Ultimately the disease is moving to endemic stage and the vaccines are serving more as a prophylaxis against serious outcome.
So as Tyler Cowen says : Just get vaccinated and live your life.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-08-10/delta-straussians-know-how-to-live-with-covid?srnd=opinion&sref=htOHjx5Y
All Yeah-s Butts etc. Maybe since Hawaii likes to take its time we'll wait to see how the vaccine passports work out for NYC/SF.
> 8) Talking to unvax individuals, there are flash points of aggression. IE: ustomers angry, new labor costs with staff/ownership of not wanting the role of health bouncer/enforcer with potential for aggression & flash points at premises doors. Few want to operate in a checkpoint society where you need to show ID/Vax cards daily. Similarly individuals who the very same people who just months ago claimed voter ID is racist because minorities don't have IDs are suddenly acknowledging everyone needs ID creating further distrust.
I think this runs together several discussions that are often run together, but need to be separated.
Right now you need to show a drivers license if stopped by a police officer while driving. You need to show a proof of age (in practice, usually drivers license, but occasionally passport) if you want to buy alcohol or tobacco or cannabis. You need to show proof of employment eligibility (usually Social Security card, sometimes passport) if you want to start a new job. In many states you are required to show ID (usually drivers license, but some other forms are allowed) in order to vote. You need to show proof of vaccination (usually MMR and/or meningitis) if you want to enroll in elementary school or university. You need to show proof of identity to board an airplane (usually drivers license domestically, and passport internationally, with special visas and vaccination certificate sometimes required depending on origin and destination countries).
All of this suggests that we already live in a "checkpoint society" where you need to show ID/vax cards daily - just that most of the purposes are served by the drivers license and only a few require vaccination or passport.
Some people have pointed to this fact and said that extending the ID requirement to voting is a small enough imposition, because voting is a rare enough activity, and enough people have ID already because of the other things. The response that is usually given is that voting is an important enough activity, and the forms of ID that are required are usually enough of a hassle and cost to get, that it's not worth the benefit.
Putting vaccination requirements on stores, restaurants, and concerts would be making the requirement stricter. But the vaccination card is much easier to get than a drivers license (for instance, in most states, you can get a vaccinator to come to your address for free to give the vaccine, if you and four other people are willing to get vaccinated - and if not, you can still go to any CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, or many other common chains and get it for free, rather than having one location per county as with other IDs).
I think most current opponents of voter ID would drop their opposition if it were as easy for everyone to get a free voter ID as it is for everyone to get vaccinated. (Though I haven't actually checked whether getting vaccinated requires the same sort of ID that voter ID laws do, in which case this really is a problematic imposition.)