Why is consent the issue at hand? I don’t really see the relevance, directly. Babies aren’t asked for consent when born - similar copies of them are, with the benefit that those people are healthy, and want kids - but Neumann wanted kids.. also you can’t overcome a bias with more bias, but that’s rather minor.
I don’t think the consent part works for dead people and shifting it to clones seems very questionable. Cloning alive people being consent based is more like how copyright is consent based than how sex or medicine is consent based in terms of why it is.
As far as medical ethics is concerned, your consent wishes continue after death.
There is a story of a man who got a penis transplant after losing his original in an IED, but he could not get the testes, because the donor (before he had died) had not only consented to the use of his penis, not his testicles and gametes.
Maybe it shouldn't work that way, but right now it does.
There could be an argument against collecting DNA without permission (or digging up a grave without permission). For example the police are not supposed to enlist civilian help when collecting the DNA of a suspected rapist. But making clones once DNA is known isn't problematic IMHO.
Outside of privacy concerns, why should you presume any control over your DNA? This isn't like copyright where more versions of me decrease my value; if someone decides they want more me's in the world and have the means to do so without harming me... why should I get a say in this?
In some contexts... sure. Someone walking up to me and ostentatiously snapping my pic would be weird. But on the other hand, just by walking down the street to get coffee in a city, my image was probably captured dozens of times without my consent today alone. When I drove around a bit earlier, my car and license plate were almost certainly photographed dozens if not hundreds of times, again without my consent.
The current norms around privacy are really only about overt collection of information, and even those are degrading.
Sure, you might be in a bunch of photographs, but if someone decides to *publish* one of those photographs, they need your permission. If they go ahead and make a national billboard campaign without your consent, you can sue.
Likewise DNA. Say you get a nosebleed at a coffeeshop and the barista helps you clean up. Obviously, no one has done anything wrong. If the barista thinks you have an interesting look and decides to use your cells to make a baby, now they're way out of bounds. Your materials belong to *you*, and can't be used for research (or reproduction!) without your consent.
The glib answer is that this happens all the time with the Star Trek transporters. But really we are getting into the hard problem of consciousness territory here.
It's heady stuff of course. Lately I've been considering the proposed notion that consciousness could exist outside of our packages of meat and our living bodies could be thought of transmitter/receiver mechanisms.
But honestly this stuff throws me for a loop as I expect it does to a lot of people who consider these matters.
Suppose someone measured you down to the atom and created a perfect replica here and now, in the room right next to you. Would you suddenly experience a dual consciousness? Would you experience both sets of senses and control both bodies? The intuitive answer is no, since otherwise you could create an ansible by putting your split bodies light-years away (although that would be an interesting premise for a short story, it would require information to be transmitted faster than light with no observable mechanism). It seems like you should not be affected over here by someone creating a copy of you over there.
This suggests that your first-person experience requires some element with spatial & temporal continuity. The ancient concept of a soul matches pretty well to this: something immaterial and unobservable (except through introspection) that marks your body as the receptacle of "you."
But what if the matter of your two bodies and the matter of your two mind swere quantumly entangled? — it could very likely be the case if the duplication process duplicated down to the subatomic level. And as you proceeded down you life streams, at what point if any would your quantum entanglement cease? And what are the implications vis a vis consciousness of your quantum entanglement? I'm thinking of Roger Penrose's suggestion that consciousness has a quantum basis (which I thought was pretty absurd when I first heard it, but now I'm more sympathetic to his viewpoint).
Well, part of the problem is that continuity only exists in classical physics. In quantum mechanics there is no such thing. That is, there is no way to guarantee that this particle here and now was at some earlier time over there (unless it is the only particle in the system).
Very good point. And if Penrose's theory of quantum consciousness were correct, it would destroy the consciousness system when we measured. Oh, my brain hurts! ;-)
Ha ha well don't worry, it's totally possible for your consciousness to spontaneously arise again out of nothing as a result of a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum. In fact, if the universe lasts long enough, it's pretty much guaranteed to do so.
Ted Chiang's short story "Exhalation" is a beautiful and inventive meditation on this question. Highly recommended for any fan of philosophical science fiction:
Not sure what you mean by "lens". I believe it would look like you, think like you, be conscious and be very shocked to be suddenly "transported" to the future. However if you mean that the consciousnesses are linked in some way... Nope.
You're trying to reason on a high level and extrapolate to a low level. I think this kind of thought experiment is sometimes useful, but rarely. It's like asking "Is it reasonable that man be able to predict the future?" to draw conclusions about quantum mechanics. It's better to start from the double slit.
So in this case the real question is "is consciousness just chemical and electrical processes". It's obviously not fully answerable given the state of the art, but I feel like the evidence we do have says yes.
So I believe we'd get a you in the future. If we did it in the present, we'd have two yous. In fact, I think that if we just built a decent approximation of you, not atom by atom, but tissue by tissue and neuron by neuron, no one would know the difference. Not even you.
Sure. Doesn't violate any laws of nature. Indeed, the principle of indistinguishability tells us that if we *did* recreate your exact wavefunction in 10,000 years, there is no way even in principle to tell the difference between it and you right now. There's no such thing as a trajectory that we could trace, even in principle, to be sure that every particle in the future being was at one point in the current being.
Is it you? It would certainly *think* so, would have all your memories, would just remember taking a 10,000 year nap. To all the rest of us, it would pass any test of youness that we could devise. But is it you, for real? That may depend on what you think happens to "you" (the conscious you that is aware of itself) every night when you go to sleep.
Just peering at my own consciousness I think we need at least the illusion of temporal continuity plus a spatial continuity (as in my consciousness is in my body) to maintain our identity. You mileage may vary, though. Consider that we go off-line all the time for all sorts of reasons, the most frequent being sleep (but anesthesia, coma events, can also take us offline for a period of time). Waking, we may not be aware of the gap, but out stream of consciousness picks up where it left off. But if you were to clone me, my clone would be like a twin raised with a totally different stream of consciousness and identity.
On the other hand, if you had a Star Trek type transporter machine and were to measure my electrochemical state perfectly, and you were able to disassemble me (i.e. kill me) and reconstruct me somewhere else, I could easily believe that I would still have the same stream of consciousness and identity I had before I was transported.
Non-sequitur: but are persons partially repeatable? Consider that people are patterns -- particular organizations of matter, experience, etc. Consider also that people are layers of patterns: I am an animal, and a human, and a male, and I have such-and-such personality type, etc. How far down my pattern-onion would some other being have to match in order for it to be considered a "repeat" of me? What about a "rhyme" or (formal repeat) of me?
I fear if we are too strict then I will not even be a repetition of myself, and if we are too loose then I will become a repetition of all things.
If the Universe is infinite and people are repeatable, we all already have an infinite number of clones whose experiences are identical to ours.
But the question of whether we are repeatable isn't just about dualism or continuity of experience. Even if we assume that the mind is purely mechanical, as most of us do, we also have to assume that the precise states of our atoms or subatomic particles can only vary discretely. This is admittedly the key finding of quantum theory, so it's probably true, but it is possible to imagine some underlying continuous variation. If this were involved in consciousness, people wouldn't be repeatable.
Only if consciousness has cardinality greater than the universe, e.g. the former is aleph 1 and the latter aleph 0. Hard to see how that's possible, given consciousness is embedded in the universe.
I guess it depends on what we mean by the universe. If it's just infinite space and time, we have "only" aleph 0 chances to be repeated so any continuous variable would have greater cardinality. If there's a multiverse from (eg.) many worlds, eternal inflation or modal realism, our number of chances could be a bigger infinity.
I'm intrigued by your belief that infinite spacetime is countably infinite. That's certainly what happens if its quantized, but no one has a theory of quantum spacetime yet. So far we are obliged to treat it as a continuum (because GR is a classical field theory), which leads, willy nilly, to ultraviolet catastrophes and the very unsatisfactory kludge of renormalization.
Are you asserting spacetime *is* quantized? If so, what makes you suspect that?
I am not really assuming that spacetime is quantized, just that the number of people we can fit into the the Universe is countable. I think this is reasonable given that a person occupies a macroscopic volume of space, is made of matter, requires energy, etc.
If consciousness involves interaction with spacetime at quantum scales, the quantization (or not) of spacetime could affect whether people are repeatable.
I think the answer is yes, it's still you, but only in the disappointing sense that "you" are an illusion anyway. The idea of copying yourself without killing the original copy has already been brought up. As soon as that happens, you'll have two distinct brains starting as the same person with the same shared experiences, but they immediately diverge and no longer share anything. If this actually happens in the Star Trek transporter sense where both bodies are new and the original no longer exists, then which one gets some canonical claim to be the same as the original? They're both equally the same. This has of course been explored in science fiction, too. It's the plot of The Prestige. It's also part of the plot of the television version of Westworld.
But go deeper into a single brain and I don't think it's any different. While I don't think Daniel Dennett managed to actually explain away the hard problem as he intended to in Consciousness Explained, he did pretty convincingly argue that there is no such thing as a self. The brain on its own is already a distributed set of competing and conflicting processes that come to consensus to control sensory input and communication output streams, but patients with very specific types of brain damage have shown those streams can become entirely disconnected and no longer behave like a single person, even inside of one brain. The only difference between within-brain distributed processing and between-brain distributed processing is processes in one brain have no direct way to access the processes in other brains. If they did, it's entirely possible we'd have a true hive mind, and it raises the question of say, what the experience of being an ant is like. Are the chemical signals they send each other actually capable of sharing experiences directly rather than via mental modeling as when humans describe the past to each other, and if so, do they experience life as if they're one entity rather than many?
Of course, it's entirely possible they don't experience life at all, but to know that, we have to be able to answer the hard problem.
In any case, take heart I guess in the reality that you will die, as every temporary consensus of distinct processes that ever expressed itself to the world as you has already died countless times. You never existed to begin with. But still, it would be nice if there was a way to copy my memory stream and revive it in a future body. I think it has value even if it is only contingently experienced as a single person.
> Do we truly need this spacial and temporal continuity for it to be you?
Don't think so. The intuitive sense of continuity me-in-the-present has with my past selves is entirely a product of me-in-the-present's brain state. No *actual* continuity required.
There's no reason to assume this simple evolutionarily useful intuition magically hints at laws of the universe we've never had the chance to explore.
It seems reasonable to assume that we are a software executed on meat hardware. If a different copy of my software will be executed in the identical circumstances, getting similar inputs I expect both of us behave identically. I won't expect us having shared consciousness and subjective experience, just come to the same decisions for the same reasons.
Identity stuff seems mysterious, and I can't get rid of the feeling that I'm approaching the problem from the wrong angle. Suppose my consciousness is ceased. And then started from the same point some time after. I expect to be the same me as before. If the restart happenned on a different hardware, or even in a different level of virtualisation then I'll experience the transition from one body to another. But what will happen if my previous hardware will be restarted as well after a couple of minutes? My identity won't return back. It will be a new instance of me in my previous body, a couple of minutes dissynchronised with this me.
So far so good. The first restart from a checkpoint will carry on my identity. But time is relative. In different reference frames it would be different bodies that continue to carry on my identity! If someone can create an instance of my mind from its current point will my identity transition to this new hardware with some "objective probability"? According to MW interpretation of quantum mechanics that's what happening all the time.
At this moment I'm tempted to think illiminatively about identity. Consciousness is real, but identity is not. And there is no reason why I should care about this version of my consciousness more than about any other version of my consciousness. But I still feel confused about the subject so the question isn't dissolved yet.
Okay, I’ve let the us idea cook for almost a week.
“Down to the atoms” Quite an idea. If we do go with an entirely materialistic perspective, then you would be “reconstituted” - what a term - with all your memories and past conditioning intact.
So 10,000 years from now you would be a Rip Van Winkle who blinked and found himself in a new world.
That is a very interesting idea. We don’t know exactly how memories are stored yet. But if we say you and I are nothing more than a package of well organized atoms, we would have to believe that an exact copy of you would be another “you”.
That second person singular pronoun is doing a lot of work in your thought experiment.
There were several debates FOR and AGAINST the "LIKE" button on SSC/ACX. And when it existed on ACX, it was heavily used by at least a portion of the readership. However, since it's been disabled, I've noticed that it's quite rare that somebody simply states (in text) that they like or appreciate a comment. I'd guess that the ratio of "LIKE" button presses, to a written notes of gratitude is 100:1 (maybe 1000:1). If this is close to the truth, then why is it the case?
It's obvious that pressing a button is more convenient than typing a few words. But does this entirely explain the effect?
Is it the anonymity of the Like button?
Is it simply used by many for voting versus liking?
Is it "Like-light"? Kind of like saying "love youuuuu" versus "I love you."
Do many people lack the confidence in using their words, especially in "talking" with strangers?
I'm guessing it's a combination of the above that creates the massive multiplier. Regardless of the answer, I highly recommend spending the few seconds typing appreciative comments. I'd say that those are at least 100x more appreciated by the writer than a clicked "like".
"Listen very closely. There is a time and a place for meta-humor, the sort of humor where you try to be funny by applying something to itself. The time is when you are Douglas Hoftstadter. And the place is in a Douglas Hofstadter book."
Given as it's 2021 and yet here we are, the project is clearly hopeless and we might as well abandon it and give in to temptations with abandon. Also, Doge is now $129 billion coin. How's that for meta-humor.
Look, all this namby-pamby modern mushy niceness and "Oh, I like this! Heart!" is dispiriting to the cynical and atrabilious like myself.
Where are the Detestation buttons? The Abhorrence spleen? Hmm? Where or when will we get catered to for our needs and desires with custom buttons and icons?
You may give the credit to Stephen Donaldson and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which I read when I was seventeen.
*Insanely* over-written, "purple prose" is only the faintest, most washed-out pastel hue to describe it, and I had enormous fun matching my vocabulary with his ("yes, I know what 'viridian' is; hmm, this is a slightly different usage of 'aumbry' than the one I'm familiar with") but it did expand it 😀
I am surprised no editor sat down with him and went "Stephen, mate, you may or may not be competing with Tolkien, but there's no need to vomit up a thesaurus on every page."
On Discord you can react to anything with any emoji you want, including emojis custom-created for the server. So you can abhor things as much as you want.
Emoji are far and away the best part of Discord. I can give any reply I want, often amusingly, without disrupting the flow of anything. It's a thing of beauty.
I get that. But I think that the Like Button is a proxy for a long list of reactions. "Ha, that's funny!" "Good point!" "That was definitely worth reading." "Smart. I disagree, but smart." "Good effort!" "Awwwww." This list can go on and on. If all the responses were some version of these very short sentences, then I guess it would be annoying. But if they were interspersed, maybe not too annoying.
The other day, I sent a text to a friend and she "liked" my message. I saw a heart attached to my address. I was offended by this. If she responded "I like this", at least I could ask her "what about my address did she find so likable?"
Yep, and also indicates the end of the message protocol - since there was no actual reply, the last message is acknowledged and no further action is required.
Microsoft teams has a small number of emoticons that you can attach directly to someone else's messages. The thumbs up icon in particular is very useful as a shorthand for "I read your message and agree/approve, but I don't really have anything useful to add."
I think more platforms should have something like this, it's a very useful substitute for some of the nonverbal communication that you miss when communicating using a text only system.
The former finance minister of Austria is currently under investigation partly because he answered with a thumbs up emoji to a text message. In the text he was thanked for his help in the (nepotistic and probably illegal) appointment of a crony of the junior partner in the governing coalition to a job in the state-owned lottery company. Now the minister denies that he ever helped and tried to explain that what he wanted to express with the thumbs up was not a tacit approval, but simply something alone the lines of 'stop messaging me'.
When love is all around, a heart icon does no harm, does it? Reminds me of weird past thoughts (Why that heart? Is she interested in me? She sure is sweet...). Nobody move, nobody gets hurt.
This works, but be careful on a touch screen. On my iPad, I accidentally touch one of these lines on the regular. If you are in the middle of a deep thread, it just dumps you into a seemingly random location further down the comment stream.
I would guess it is because a "I liked this" comment is viewed as filler and not contributing much to the conversation. I sometimes appreciate reading this kind of comment when the original is very long or a link to another site, as it increases my interest. But mostly I agree with John that this kind of comment is annoying when it becomes too common.
The "like" button was annoying because you'd check your email and there would be fifty emails and you'd (I'd) think "oh, fifty new comments, must be an interesting thread" and instead it would be fifty likes.
Which is fine, but time-wasting. So I'm happier the like button is gone, but if people do want something similar and Substack can work out how to have "likes" but not send them out wholesale, that's be great. I know some people online do want to keep track of what likes/dislikes/reblogs/retweets they get, maybe because they want a sense of what is and is not popular when they write it or they really need the boost to their mood from "you like me, you really like me", so whatever floats your boat.
I'm happier not to get them. If somebody likes a comment of mine, I appreciate that, but I don't need to keep track of "nine people liked it, sixteen disliked it, oh woe is me".
It's annoying that Substack doesn't have a setting to just turn them off, but the fact that likes come from a different e-mail address than replies makes it possible to do this on your own with a filter.
like. a private workaround seems easier than the ongoing public like button pro/con argument...which honestly has its own nostalgia atmosphere going for it at this point....
The level of effort to write a thoughtful comment is much higher than a level of effort to click a button. If the only thing you want to express is "right on, good job writing this" then you'd not bother to write anything. In fact, a good intermediate solution was to allow different emojis (facebook allows five I think? too lazy to check... and some platforms allow hundreds) to express reactions that aren't worthy of carefully verbalizing.
I agree with the sentiment of this comment that people enjoy getting positive feedback and that people should be encouraged to give each other positive feedback. I would add that the most effective feedback is specific and constructive, so such feedback could follow the format "say something you liked about the comment or agreed with, then say something you might change about the comment or add to the comment" which is kind of a standard formula for giving good and constructive feedback. It's something I've taught my students in giving peer feedback, and it works well. Also I'm doing the teacher thing and modeling the technique in this comment.
Here is another reason FOR a Like button: I am often overwhelmed with the number of comments on any one post and simply don't have the time to go through all of them (especially subscribing to several Substacks...) A high "Like" count let's me notice a particularly illuminating offering and decide if I want to dive deeper into that thread or move on to the next. Sometimes, it's the high "Like" comments that are the real takeaways from any thread anyway, and though grateful for the comments that led to them, I may not have the bandwidth to sort through to find them.
I really agree with this. Likes are a simple, spam-free way to highlight posts that many people have found particularly insightful or interesting. In healthy communities, a like function is a way to harness the hive-mind of that community for everyone's benefit.
I also just think likes feel good. I enjoy being able to express my appreciation of someone's post with a like, and I enjoy getting my comments liked and therefore feeling like people have heard and appreciated what I've said. It's the equivalent of seeing people nodding or showing other non-verbal signs of interest while you're talking in person.
One issue with likes is that people start competing for them, posting not what is necessarily good for the community but what the community "like"s. Ice cream for dinner would get the most "like"s even if it's not a good idea.
And we fear that even smart people who know what's going on can fall into that cognitive trap.
I still give out a few "like"s a day, but I try to be careful with them.
This is an entirely theoretical concern, in my experience. There's probably a hundred times as many posts complaining about it as there are instances of it actually happening.
But...what people in this community like is interesting and useful points that contribute to a conversation. So...then...I'll make those? I guess I agree with Alsadius that the worry here seems purely theoretical--I'm having a hard time concretely imagining how this would cause a problem.
In *some* communities, people will "like" counterproductive things for lols, or will "like" anything praising the thing they like, no longer how vapidly, while downvoting even useful constructive criticism. But I don't see that happening here in particular (and we could have likes without downvotes).
There's a reason I strongly support an upvote button but not a downvote: there are enough people eager to explain how they disagree via comment, and unexplained downvotes are painful to receive (at least for me), far in excess of the pleasure of an upvote.
There's something to be said for people making up their minds without too much influence from others, so I would accept temporarily hiding the upvote counter on new comments/posts.
There are extensions like Pycea's that get around the UI lockout, but I was always hesitant, until Dan L reminded me that "getting a like and an email for it" is strictly no more annoying that "getting a 'This!' and an email for it" and I am less stingy with them now.
One-line nods of agreement are low-effort, low value-add filler that vandalizes comment sections with spam you're forcing others to scroll past to see the real discussions. I don't think Scott explicitly forbids them a la Hacker News, but they certainly go against community norms, all the people doing it now as a joke notwithstanding.
I experience this. I found it helpful lately to have a model of what might be called a “show and tell” Circle in kindergarten; Where everybody gets a turn. If I honestly feel I’m listening to other people then I can give myself permission to add something to it.
There’s always a chance of making a fool of oneself but what the heck
Personally, I find the lack of a Like button destroys the comment section so thoroughly that I almost never read the comments. There's just too many people here - without a filter, I don't have time to wade in. (I only noticed this one because it happened to be the top comment when I got to the end of Scott's post.)
I have often been tempted to post "+1" as a comment, but it's just that little bit too obnoxious. So good posts get neither recognition nor shown to more people. Because apparently the community thinks that rewarding people for posting good things is somehow a bad incentive.
Did I correctly remember that you said you're open to accepting book reviews outside of the Book Review Contest window? If so, I can't find the post where you mentioned this.
I recall Scott saying self-promotion is allowed on these ones so I'm gonna self-promote. I run a music recommendation website, https://theshfl.com, that I've been building on and off for the last couple of years - it's basically a random sampler built from crawling album reviews and best-of lists. What's cool about it though is that it is steerable - as you're flipping through you can change the population sampled from - when the music was made, who recommended it, genre, label, pretty much anything. I built it because I wanted something like it. Anyway try it out if you have trouble finding something new to listen to, or if you want to get some suggestions for good music from a genre you're unfamiliar with.
Thanks. Yeah, I should promise to make Classified Threads on some specific timeline so people don't have to worry about this. I've just been putting off figuring out what that timeline is because I don't know how long it takes to "build up" enough comments to make the thread a success. Maybe I'll try another next month?
That's how FdB's entire comment section is. Not sure if it can be selected for a particular post though. Also seems like it would be a craven cash grab.
1.) You can post your stuff in open threads but it should be a discussion starter. "I wrote this article on How To Bake Pies Efficiently. What do you guys think about pies? I hear a lot of people say that efficiency subtracts from the artistry of pies. What's your thoughts on that?"
2.) You can add a footer link equivalent to how Substack does for other Substack newsletters. Ie, putting at the end, "I don't know, AI risk seems overblown to me." with a footer of: "I write Pies Weekly. Link."
3.) Plus a monthly classified/promotion thread. Maybe a subscriber only one too. "I write about pies here. Also, looking for a head pie chef."
Because I am confuzzled right now; I always thought a tart was basically the same thing as a pie (at least over here, it tends to be 'tart is fruit and sweet, pie is savoury e.g. apple tart but steak and kidney pie').
Then I watched an American cooking video on Youtube where they made an American pie (open top) versus a British tart (closed top) and called them both "pies".
And then another American site tells me a pie is covered but a tart only has the bottom crust!
This is the kind of apple tart recipe with which I am familiar: https://www.odlums.ie/recipes/apple-tart/ (they leave out the spices, and we can get into the shortcrust pastry - with or without egg? argument later).
Here's a recipe for steak and ale pie (pastry on top and bottom):
Pie derives from English. Tart derives from Latin through French. So the real question is whether you're a sniveling Norman bootlicker or a good, true Anglo-Saxon.
Considering that Normans, Angles and Saxons were all Germans, it doesn't make much of a difference, does it? There were quite some Celtic Brits and maybe leftover Romans on these Isles in 11th century.
I'd say that a full or partial top crust is what makes it a pie, rather than a tart. I've never seen a savoury tart but I see no reason why one shouldn't exist in principle. And I'll allow Shepard's pie in on a technicality.
Also I'm annoyed that the linda mccartney not beef pies don't seem to be in supermarkets any more.
Where I live in the US it's all pie. No matter what is in it or where the crust is. Tart describes the taste of good apples for pie. Or perhaps a saucy English lass.
More seriously, Americans don't do savory meat pies, except calzones and kolaches, which are regional. (ish) (Okay, and some chicken pot pies). The standard size of an American fruit/sweet pie is 9 inches in diameter - if it is a smaller muffin sized piece then it is a tart. Many pies are traditionally open-faced/one crust (pumpkin, pecan, lemon meringue, etc) while apple pies are nearly always two crust. Cherry and (sometimes) peach pies are traditionally lattice for the top crust. Tarts are often single crust.
But basically there is only one right way to make a pie and that is how your favorite grandmother made it.
1.) Incentives people to come up with clickbaity "discussion starters" to advertise their blog. It also comes across as super disingenuous to start a discussion only as a means to promote your own content.
2.) Sounds like it would waste a lot of screen real estate, but I would be begrudgingly ok with it if substack (or some third party plugin) let's you hide signatures/footers.
My preferred solution is just to have the monthly/biweekly/whatever classified thread and not allow blatant self promotion in the open threads.
1) Clearly the thing to do is to write shorter blog posts (less effort! Yay!) and copypaste them from your blog which no one follows because it doesn't have a following. No one has to ever find out it was a blog post!
1.) Other than the adjective "clickbaity" I'd agree. That's the point. It encourages people to write things that start discussions here to advertise their blog. That means it encourages them to produce content that stimulates interesting discussions.
2.) It already exists. You don't seem to have noticed so I don't think it'll be a problem.
1.) The threads here are sorted newest first or chronological so you don't need to stimulate interesting discussion to get visibility. All you need to do is to write something that looks like a credible attempt at starting a discussion and generates curiosity for your own content.
2.) That is indeed news to me, I don't think I've ever seen that on any comment here. Are they hidden by default or something? In any case, if I don't have to see them I'm fine with them existing, objection withdrawn.
Since the meetups have started now, can anyone give me some of their experience as to what generally happens at these and what they get out of it? It sounds like an interesting way to meet peoole but if anyone can give me some more info I would be grateful
We ran a south bay meetup every month or two before Covid, have done one a month or two ago but not since then because of rising infection rates.
Ours were usually on a Saturday, starting about 1 PM, ending about 10 PM, with people arriving and leaving over that period. Our most recent had over a hundred people but the usual was twenty to forty. We provide nibbles and (non-alcoholic) drinks, some people bring nibbles and (alcoholic or non) drinks. We provide bread fresh from the oven. About six, we serve dinner to whoever is still there, generally two main courses, one of them vegetarian.
That's it for organization. In practice, it's several rooms of our house, sometimes the porch and the yard, with groups of people having conversations on a variety of topics.
I’ve been running the Philadelphia meetup with a co-organizer since 2018. Our first meetup after the big “Meetups Everywhere” post got us around 20 people the first time. When Scott attended we got 75 people. But usually we were 5-8 people meeting in a restaurant, at least until COVID. We’d have dinner and discuss a recent post or something generally rationalist that had been on someone’s mind. Since COVID we’ve been meeting at my home- we have a big covered porch.
Our group is eclectic and has a mix of ages and professions. I really value the intellectual outlet it provides me since I’m primarily a homemaker. Before moving to Philly I attended the Amsterdam meetup and it was similar- a small group but good for the kind of deep conversation we had trouble making with colleagues at the bar after work.
I've been running DC meetups since they started with the help of some co-organizers. We have a meetup at 7pm on a Saturday every month at my place. The atmosphere is nerdy house party. There's no set topic or organized discussion, and once about a dozen people show up, everything breaks up into separate conversations. I provide bourbon and logistics, other people bring snacks and other drinks. It's a really great time with an interesting group of people. In the before time we'd 25-30 people minimum. Numbers were lower than that earlier this year, but they've been consistently climbing. We were doing them outside on my patio or roof deck, but DC is inhospitable 6 months of the year, so the last few months have been indoors.
We also use the mailing list for other events that members of the community want to organize or promote. We've done board gaming, hikes, museum trips, and meetups at alternate locations. Anything people want to organize, really. In the before time we were doing about one of those a month, now maybe half that.
I talked to some people about a sort of Pascal's Wager theory of medications. Since most medications have stronger main effects than side effects, if you have a serious illness (like COVID) is it worth taking ten untested drugs that each have only a 10% chance of working? After all, probably at least one of them will work, and treating COVID effectively might be worth inflicting ten drugs worth of mild side effects on yourself.
I looked into this more this morning, and the most relevant paper I found was https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22446-z on HCQ, an untested drug that seemed to have at least a 10% chance of treating COVID earlier in the pandemic. The study finds HCQ increased mortality, by quite a lot. I was originally pretty surprised by this - HCQ gets used as malaria prophylaxis all the time and nobody acts like it's especially deadly. But I think it makes sense in the context where people who are on the verge of dying from COVID and need to be saved from it are actually really weak, and side effects that healthy people would shrug off can become fatal. I think this pretty clearly sinks the Pascal's Wager theory of medications in favor of the usual thing where you don't try anything until you have strong evidence that it's at least safe and probably also effective.
Also, Bram C brought up the idea that pandemics are deadlier than endemic diseases partly because you usually get endemic diseases as a child, and children get less severe versions of many conditions including COVID. Later I found https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00668-y , which was able to confirm that this pattern holds for many different conditions. Interested in hearing what knowledgeable commenters think about this.
Related to Bram C's point, the summer RSV surge was interesting because it suggested that just 14 months of nobody getting RSVs was sufficient to make the population extra-vulnerable to them, such that you could get an epidemic off-season and when schools are out. It really makes you wonder how contagious/deadly RSVs, flus, seasonal coronaviruses etc. would be in a truly immunological naive population.
I think the unknown is how much of their vulnerability was because these were diseases they would have been better off getting at the age of <10, and how much was genetic vulnerability (particularly in terms of MHC loci). Old World humans had been evolving to survive smallpox for thousands of years, New World humans hadn't, and there were suddenly a whole bunch of diseases like that. I suspect the genetic factor was if anything more important, because you have descriptions of whole villages dying, kids and all.
My understanding is that Bram C’s comment is one of the explanations for the Spanish Flu death distribution, where young and old people died, but not so much middle aged (since a relative of the flu had come through a couple decades before)
Lots of diseases have a mortality pattern where school-aged children are least vulnerable to mortality (see the paper Scott linked). Those of us old enough to have lived before the chickenpox vaccine can remember that you wanted to get get your chickenpox when you were roughly 5-10 years old and that it could be dangerous to make it all the way to adulthood without exposure. Apparently lots of diseases are like that.
The rough argument in the paper is that your ability to respond to completely new pathogens drops even by young adulthood. This seems at least plausible. As you grow older, your thymus involutes and while your pool of "naive" T-cells (trained against no particular antigen, ready for the unknown) doesn't go away, it becomes somewhat smaller and less genetically diverse over time.(https://www.jimmunol.org/content/194/9/4073.long)
The only problem I see with this theory is that the data in the paper shows that mortality is usually quite high for infants before lessening for children. Perhaps infants are less likely to catch an endemic disease than children though because of increased socialising/school etc?
As a disclaimer, I don’t work with mammals, but the data in the paper is does not surprise me from an ecoimmunology standpoint. It is a pattern I’d expect for a long-lived animal with slow development and delayed reproductive maturity. The very young (< 5 yrs), have more severe disease outcomes and higher mortality because they have naïve and undeveloped immune systems. Immune function can also trade-off with growth and development, and very young children are doing a lot of both.
Less severe disease in late childhood and early adolescence could be a sweet spot of immune system maturity and relaxed trade-offs with other traits. Growth rate slows, for example. The transition to reproductive maturity, especially reproduction itself, decreases the strength of immune responses across multiple taxa. Finally, immune senesce in old age.
Of course, caloric intake would substantially affect all of this. Modern humans in developed nations have ad libitum food access. In populations with caloric deficit, the trade-offs could go either way depending on whether immune function or the competing trait had more adaptive value.
Is the major trade-off on a stronger immune system limited calories or autoimmunity? I'm struggling to find the references or remember the genes involved, but I can recall mouse models that induced T or B-cell hyperplasia and a consequence was autoimmunity. Granted, lab mice in germ-free environments are especially prone to autoimmunity and are well-fed.
For an individual animal with limited resources, energy acquisition affects the relationship between all negatively associated traits. For example, under food limitation, reproductive effort and immune function have a strong negative association. Animals will allocate more to one or the other based on their life history strategy.
On a larger level, energy availability can determine the type of immune responses animals use. Although all vertebrates have adaptive immunity, ectotherms do not rely much on it; they have no lymph nodes or germinal centers. Ectotherm antibody titers and affinities do not increase much with a secondary exposure to a pathogen. When exposed to the same challenge, the binding affinity of mammalian antibodies increases orders of magnitude higher than amphibians. Ectothermic vertebrates have low metabolisms that cannot support the energetic expense of somatic hypermutation.
As for autoimmunity, I don’t know much about it. I work with wild populations and in animals without an adaptive immune system, but I don’t remember ever hearing about autoimmunity in discussions, seminars or classes about wildlife disease and ecoimmunology. All wild animals are diseased all the time. Their immune systems are always fighting something. I like the hygiene hypothesis as an explanation of human autoimmunity. I can’t speak about selection on specific mammalian genes, I just don’t know enough.
The strength of an immune response I know more about. An overly strong immune response to a pathogen can be maladaptive and cause self damage. For example, the mites that cause sarcoptic mange cause little direct damage. The mites don’t really cause the disease, it’s the overreaction of the inflammatory response.
That said, this means that there should be a quick (ideally publishing results in under 2 months) and moderate-sized study to see if it's safe enough for people to go wild while you find out for sure. HCQ almost certainly is not safe enough, while IVM is (at least if you don't eat the horse paste version).
I was wondering if part of the increased mortality might be that, by the time the patients get the drug, they are so badly off it's a case of "try it and see if it helps" and the study does say this:
"The average mortality was 10.3% (standard deviation 13.5%) in inpatient trials and 0.08% (standard deviation 0.18%) in outpatient trials."
So I am wondering if in-patients (who after all are in hospital because they're so sick) are simply much worse off, and the benefits (if any) of HCQ aren't enough to overcome that stage of the illness. Mind, I am not convinced that it does any good at any stage of the illness, but if you're so sick with Covid you have to be kept in hospital, and they decide to try a drug on you because "hey, it might help and we've tried everything else", then maybe you should be preparing for the worst.
Also, I'd be wary of the interactions between your ten untested drugs. Maybe Drug 1 only gives you itchy feet and Drug 2 makes your nose run, but in combination suddenly you have a fit of apoplexy.
Side effects are not uniformly dangerous, because they can interact with the disease itself. In this case, HCQ is known to cause arrhythmias and COVID is known to stress the heart (which malaria does not), and this synergy may be one source for the increased danger for using HCQ in treating COVID versus treating malaria. Another is that people with pre-existing heart disease are more susceptible to severe COVID, and of course that would make them more vulnerable to the cardaic side effects of HCQ.
As far as I know, Budenosid (Pulmicort) is a drug where the odds should work out. I think it has at least a 10% chance, possibly higher, to make COVID less severe if taken early. It has about as little side effects as one can get. It's routinely taken for years on a daily basis by pretty healthy people, just as a precautionary measure against asthma attacks.
I have a spray at home, and plan to use it proactively if I have been exposed to someone with COVID, or if a get cold symptoms. (Hasn't happened yet, lucky me.)
Well I would say polio is the most famous example of that. I believe the current hypothesis is that it was the *improvement* in sanitation starting around 1900 that caused the disease to move from endemic to pandemic, and significantly increased the fraction of cases with unfortunate outcomes, since the cases were now occuring in significantly older children.
Sounds plausible. And sanitation improvement still paid off if for those who didn't die as infants or in childbed there were a much lower number killed or crippled by polio at another age. No gain is for free and no effort is in vain. Still, mankind is kinda out on a limb concerning infectious diseases.
Oh very much so. It tremendously reduced rates of cholera, for example, which slaughtered way more people in the 19th century. Just one of those weird unexpected effects that should keep us humble about how much we know about disease and health.
>most medications have stronger main effects than side effects
Is this true for experimental ones? For time-tested medications it would be an effect of survivorship bias, which isn't straightforwardly applicable to experimental drugs, especially those in the early trials.
I remember hearing sometime last year that some places where case fatality rates for covid were especially low may have already had endemic versions of coronaviruses that lent some protection from covid-19. Does anyone know how this hypothesis has fared since?
I mean, yes, but why on Earth would you ever have thought HCQ had a 10% chance of helping? My understanding is that the guy who promoted it - in the medical community, I mean - rubberstamps every paper that his grad students put in front of him. So, either you should place a great deal of faith in grad students, or this was close to the textbook case of a hypothesis rolled up via dice, lacking any evidence that would allow us to locate it in idea-space.
ACX has discussed Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome and aging before. I was involved in some research investigating the underlying cause of disease (other than progerin protein). Biased of course, but I think it goes a long way in explaining the disease's what-we-call 'aging.'
Nuclear membrane ruptures underlie the vascular pathology in a mouse model of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome
A fun brain teaser. You have an island, centered in a moat. The island is a 10x10 square, and the exterior of the moat forms a 30x30 square. You have two 9x1x1 boards to use to cross the moat. How do you get across? (all units are measured in feet).
Now, there is a “correct” answer, but there are also fun ones that I’ve heard like “accelerate the moat and island to .99 light speed so that relativity causes the distance across the moat to be shorter.” Feasibility of answers is not necessary, this is just a thought exercise I find fun.
That wouldn't work though, would it? The distance from corner to corner is 10*sqrt(2) ~= 14.15 ft. Laying the first board at a 45 degree angle would get you 9/2 = 4.5 ft there, which still leaves 9.64 ft to traverse. If you draw a picture it's pretty clear that trying to lay the boards at different angles won't help. Or is it about the 1 ft width/depth of the boards?
More likely it is that you’re right, and it’s been 5 years since I saw the actual writeup of the problem and I forgot the exact dimensions. I just didn’t care enough to check the math, since the “correct” answer wasn’t what I was curious about. But kudos to you for running the math and catching that error (this is sincere, but I’m not sure how to make it read that way)
Got it! I thought the problem might be cleverly constructed enough to make that solution *almost* work, but I'll take it.
Another idea I had was a pole vaulting maneuver, planting one of the boards right at the edge of the moat. Although they might be too heavy for that to be practical.
Width alone isn't enough - if these were arbitrarily-thin planks, then board 2's weight would flip board 1 into the moat because board 2 doesn't intersect any chord on board 1 that's supported by the edge of the moat.
However, this is prevented by the thickness of the logs.
V vavgvnyyl pbafvqrerq gung bcgvba ohg qvfpneqrq vg orpnhfr V jnf guvaxvat bs gur fpranevb nf orvat nobhg fbzrbar *ba* gur vfynaq gelvat gb trg bss bs vg, fb gurl jbhyqa'g or va n cbfvgvba gb cynpr gur cynax bire gur pbeare. Gubhtu ybbxvat onpx ng gur dhrfgvba nyy vg fnlf vf "pebff gur zbng". Cebonoyl n yrffba gurer nobhg abg nqqvat rkgen pbafgenvagf haarprffnevyl.
During some nasty weather yesterday I noticed our local PBS weather channel rotates between English, Spanish, Russian, Hmong and Somali. I think they should throw in a Rot13 translation occasionally just to keep things fresh.
I did some quick and dirty math; assuming the wood is 40 lbs/ft^3 (about average from a quick google) you should be able to support up to 450lbs with this method. I think technically you might lose a little bit since the boards have thickness, so you need to stick it out a little further, but this will probably be made up for by the angling of the board
Interesting to point out that if your measurements are all in feet, then these aren't boards, these are veritable logs.
Dig out the center of the island with my hands to form a narrow land bridge towards the shore until the bridge is about 8ft from the shore, then plop a board down.
If the moat is shallow enough and the bottom of it firm enough, use the boards as stilts to wade across the water.
Light the boards on fire (by rubbing them together fast enough?) to form a smoke signal for someone to come rescue me.
Create a fulcrum by making a dirt berm, set one of the boards on it to make a seesaw, sit on one end, and wait for a comet or satellite or cannonball (or something) to land right on the other end of the seesaw to launch me across.
Drink the moat water until it's shallow enough for me to safely move across; use the boards to get up and down the sides of the moat safely.
Climb the big tree on the island, move over the moat on one of its branches, then get to where one of the branches is about 8ft off the ground on the other side of the moat and lower the boards down to help me safely get down.
Use my nanobot constructors to reform the boards into a 12x4x1 ultrastrong metamaterial low density bridge, then lay that across.
Cut and reshape the boards into a glider, then glide across.
Expertly toss the boards such that they land standing exactly upright in the water, solidly planted in the bottom, at the 3.3-across and 6.6 feet-across marks, so that they create 1x1 platforms, then use my mad parkour skillz to hop 3.3 feet at a time across the moat to the other side.
Dig a hole in the center of the island, down, then laterally, so that I tunnel underneath the moat and come up and out the other side. The boards are used as mobile supports for the tunnel.
Conduct strength training by lifting these massive logs until you can, by sheer force of musclery, launch yourself all the way across the moat.
Meditate on the nature of 9x1x1 boards until I ascend, and then, having ascended, dematerialize and rematerialize onto the other side of the moat.
'
Stand one of the logs upright near the edge of the island, veeeerry carefully shimmy up it so it doesn't fall while holding the other log, stand the other log on top of the first one, veeeerry carefully shimmy up the second log, then tilt yourself so that both logs fall over in an arc where you land on the other side.
Stand one of the logs upright on the edge of the island, very carefully shimmy up it, cause the log to fall towards the shore, then jump off the log at the right time to make it to the other side.
Plant one of the logs right up against the island standing upright in the water, so that from overhead, the island looks like a 10x10 with a 1x1 square sticking out of it, then fit the other log horizontally in between the upright log and the shore. It should fit/float perfectly in the remaining 9 ft, and you can walk across.
The diagonal between the corner of the island and the corner of the moat? Two x 9 foot boards is 18 feet in total length, which should be enough to get you across?
Pythagorean theorem means going across the hypotenuse is longer, not shorter, than just cutting across one side. Corner to corner is just over 28 feet (sqrt(1800)-sqrt(200)) as opposed to 20 feet of cutting across side to side.
The answer I came up with when I first saw this problem was to break splinters off, use them to light a fire, use the fire to harden longer splinters into nails, and then nail the boards together
I've the read the current replies and I still don't even understand the problem. Do the boards float unconditionally? Am I allowed/expected to lay down one board, walk along it, and place the second board? Does the path have to end at exactly the end of the water, or can it extend onto land? Without some more unstated restrictions the problem is trivial (unless I misunderstand something). Also, you say the island is centered in the moat, and I picture that its edges are parallel to the moat edges, but you don't say this.
I think you're allowed to levitate or telekinese the boards into whatever position you want. But once you release it from your telekinesis, the board must be supported under normal physics, and it'll sink in the water if not supported.
Writing that out suggested to me an amusing alternative solution: cebc gur gjb obneqf ntnvafg rnpu bgure gb sbez n fbeg bs hc-neebj be zbhagnva funcr, bar erfgvat ntnvafg gur vaare rqtr bs gur zbng naq bar ntnvafg gur bhgre. Gura jnyx guvf rqvsvpr irel pnershyyl.
The "correct" solution doesn't involve the boards floating, which is actually reasonable; they're too narrow to realistically bear a person's weight while floating. They'd rotate under your weight and dump you.
The version of this I saw had no water in the moat (it was set in a zoo), so you could have no support except from the edges of the moat. And the challenge was specifically to get *on* to the island, not *off* of it, so placing a board in the corner of the moat for the "intended" solution was no trouble.
it’s not a serious question, so you’re allowed to make basically any assumptions you need to make your solution work.
In terms of reasonable solutions, both Greg D and Melvin proposed good, technically sound solutions, while drossophillia proposed many more exotic solutions. All of them are acceptable
So you’re right that the problem is in some sense trivial, but the point is that it’s just fun to think about how to come up with cool solutions
These boards will weigh much more than I do, and I can jump 5 feet pretty easily. So lay out the first board so 5 feet is overhanging the moat and the other 4 feet is on land. Use the weight of the 2nd board on top of the land portion of the first to "anchor" it to the ground. I can then walk 5 feet out over the moat and jump the remaining 5.
I could draw the force diagrams to figure out exactly how far the first board can overhang the moat, but I'm pretty sure the idea would work.
Carve mortises and tenons into the ends of the beams (1'x1' is a beam, and a really big one at that, not really a board) and join them together into one 17'x1'x1' beam.
Since it isn't specified that the island is in the center of the mote or that it's side is parallel to the side of the mote, I will assume that the mote is narrower than 10 feet in some places and place one board there.
they're probably thin enough that you could sort of pole vault across, sticking one end in the middle of the middle of the moat and clinging on to the other.
Wait a sec.. is this why a reservation for The Forks popped up on my phone yesterday? I'm in {southeastern state} but ate there in early July, so assumed that I had mistakenly put an entry on my calendar back then. Ah well, it was a good excuse to call my {sibling}.
I was wondering if my former grad student who has lived in Winnipeg for nearly ten years now somehow accidentally got his calendar event onto my calendar even though we never shared calendars and it didn't ever quite add up.
I was also baffled by it. It's still not clear to me why Google decided to put it on my calendar just because a place, date, and time was mentioned in post. I'm tempted to try this right now as experiment, but I guess I'll forego understanding to spare you all spam calendar invites...
Bitcoin is awesome but it’s be even more awesome if it had smart contracts and also didn’t cost 1 in 200 of every electrical kWh produced on the planet
Bitcoin can still be gatekept as long as there is such a thing as the state, and "no transaction costs" really strikes me as an "In a frictionless vacuum" type of statement.
Bitcoin possesses lots of elements that make it a bit goldilocks:
The fact that bitcoin was cleverly engineered (in a technical and a social sense) to be truly decentralised is the first characteristic that sets it apart from other crypto-currencies. Compare it with any other crypto-currency of reasonable size and you'll find Bitcoin is the only one that doesn't have a group of founders controlling inflation etc. This alone sets it apart.
It is now fashionable to note that because of bitcoin's deflationary monetary policy, it is unsuitable as a medium of exchange because holders are incentivised more to hold bitcoin than they are to spend it. While this is true to an extent, it fails to take other factors into account. Sure, bitcoin disincentivizes casual purchases. I'm going to think carefully before I buy anything with it and I'm only going to spend bitcoin on stuff that has real, long-term value for me but isn't that a good thing? Bitcoin was created, partly in order to demonstrate that inflationary money is a used by governments as a means to extract yet more value from their subjects, taxing them once when they're paid, then again as a penalty for attempting to accrue value by saving and then once again, at point of sale. Bitcoin of course, does exactly the opposite, it encourages one to hold the currency because its value will increase over time as long as the societal consensus that 'bitcoin is valuable' is maintained. This does not render it useless or of limited value as a currency but it does erode its usefulness as a means by which to propagate and accelerate consumerism and actually, this is what I think people mean when they talk about the bitcoin deflationary mechanism rendering it useless as a currency. It is useless as a currency within the context of a society fixated on consumerism. Here, I think we see bitcoin's true purpose. It's creator made it, partly in order to solve a technical problem (double-spend, digital scarcity) and partly as a teaching instrument. I'm guessing that Satoshi Nakamoto was infuriated by people talking about the inevitability of inflationary boom and bust cycles and the inevitability of central banks but I digress.
The other reason, or cluster of reasons, why bitcoin is singularly valuable, is the cost it takes to maintain the network. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. As we all know, it now takes an amount of computational energy, equivalent in cost to the GDP of several smaller countries , to maintain the network but this means that a transaction made a few minutes ago would require an expenditure of energy to roll-back, write over, or falsify, such as would render the operation pointless in terms of cost to benefit and of course, totally impractical. To do the same with a transaction recorded several months or years ago is as close as we can get to impossible. This is massively important and sets bitcoin apart from other chains, especially proof of stake networks, which are a step back in respect of 'Trustlessness'. The bitcoin ledger, the blockchain, is the first 'agile', unfalsifiable, record-keeping system in the history of the world. I use the term 'agile', so as to disambiguate the bitcoin blockchain from things like the pyramids, for example, which have also been used to record important events and are also protected by a 'proof of work' system. One can write a transaction into the bitcoin ledger and have no doubt that it will be there as long as the network itself is. Bitcoin is therefore, immutable, to all intents and purposes, on the human-scale. No other crypto currency comes close to this. Ethereum, famously failed to adhere to this principle since day 1, when the DAO was hacked, millions of tokens were stolen and the founders decided to roll-back time and create a new Ethereum blockchain where this event had not taken place. This will never be possible on the organically created, truly decentralised, bitcoin network.
Bitcoin's decentralisation, immutability, cost of maintaining the network and its deflationary policy all combine to create the 'perfect' currency.
There are two problems with bitcoin as a currency, though. The first is technical and will be overcome. This relates to the speed of transactions on the network and the general usability of bitcoin and I won't delve into it because it isn't pertinent. The second problem is the inevitable concentration of bitcoin into the hands of the wealthy.
Like all scarce assets, bitcoin becomes ever more valuable, partly because of the deflationary economic policy, partly through network effect. It will therefore inevitably move from the hands of people who 'need something' to those who 'need nothing', the wealthy. In perhaps five years, or ten, only the world's wealthy will possess bitcoin. There will be very little new bitcoin around and that will all be owned by miners. The world's bitcoin private keys will be locked away in safety deposit boxes belonging to the few. This fact alone means that bitcoin has a limited future as a currency.
We are moving towards a future where money will become a digital object, that much is certain. Bitcoin is the progenitor of all the monies that will come after but its own fate is to become something else, more like a museum exhibit; incredibly valuable, unattainable by most, exchanging hands infrequently.
Having read this back before posting, it isn't really complete enough to answer your challenge and also suffers from contradiction, around the deflationary bit. However, maybe it will provide food for thought, so I have decided to post it anyway.
It is eternally fashionable to say things that treat Moloch as a conscious agent who will make choices according to his supposed preferences, e.g. Bitcoin "is useless as a currency within the context of a society fixated on consumerism."
All such explanations aren't. If a person doesn't use Bitcoin their reasoning is not "well, nah, I'm in a society fixated on consumerism". There are much more plausible reasons like "Bitcoin transactions are slow and expensive", "someone could steal all my money just by hacking my PC or the third party holding my Bitcoin", etc.
Or, in the current circumstance, why should I buy a bagel and coffee with bitcoin when the odds are in a month I will be able to buy 100 bagels and 100 coffees with the same amount of bitcoin. In that sense it’s incredibly inflationary but maybe with the poles flopped
It's completely wrong to say that deflationary currency is fine because it only discourages "unnecessary" spending. I need to buy food, I don't think anyone would call that "consumerism," but Bitcoin is equally unsuitable for buying that as it is for buying anything else.
Many attempts have been made to explain why deflationary currencies suck. But if people really do not want to know why deflationary currencies suck, none of them will work, going back to "well, it would be cool if *I* had a deflationary currency."
> Bitcoin was created, partly in order to demonstrate that inflationary money is a used by governments as a means to extract yet more value from their subjects, taxing them once when they're paid,
Except maybe in weird second-order effect ways, the government doesn't extract value from inflation. Seignorage is not the government's way of funding itself.
None of society, the universe, nor the laws of physics say that you are promised a risk-free and stable store of value. If you buy 100 loafs of bread they will eventually rot. If you have a pound of gold you have to pay someone to guard it. If you have an options contract to give you 100 loafs of bread next year, you have the transaction costs and the risks that maybe 100 loafs of bread happened to decrease in value.
Getting free money sounds good, and so does a machine that keeps on going faster and faster with no input of energy.
Aren't you conflating entropy and inflation here? Certainly, in closed systems, there is the opportunity for organised growth, so why does money have to be inflationary? Gold has held its value, in real terms, perfectly adequately and there are many other examples.
Assuming constant Stuff, deflation means less Money. So the wealth was always there, it's just that now you can access it rather than someone else because the someone else who otherwise would have accessed it now finds himself without the money he used to have.
Alternately, you can get deflation by having more Stuff for the same Money. In that case, the wealth probably came from the place it usually does - artisans, craftsmen, farmers, miners, and factory workers making more Stuff.
Thank you for the exposition. I appreciate the effort, and I've learnt a thing or two.
That being said, the two main things I'm taking away from this are:
1) It really isn't suitable to be a universal currency;
2) Its basic philosophy is only very good if you think things like central banks (and centralisation in general) are inherently bad. Which I guess is fine, but it's not me.
> The other reason, or cluster of reasons, why bitcoin is singularly valuable, is the cost it takes to maintain the network. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but disagree with it entirely. This cost is not scalable, it's prohibitive, and it's disproportionate to the value it provides.
What do you mean by Bitcoin maximalism? The first I'd heard that term years back, it was the claim that Bitcoin would eventually come to the be the only currency in use anywhere, and thus the fundamental value of Bitcoin can be computed as (value of all goods in existence) / (number of Bitcoin in circulation). An estimate of that number is something totally absurd in the hundreds of millions of USD or something, so Bitcoin is tremendously underpriced and you should buy it.
As for why that's wrong, well, the world has never had a single global currency. Maybe that will happen at some point, but it's an awfully bold claim that I don't feel much need to refute and I have no clue how to steelman it.
I see Investopedia currently defining "Bitcoin maximalism" as the claim that Bitcoin is the only digital currency needed and will thus be the only digital currency in use at some point in the future. To steelman that, well, Bitcoin has some nice properties. It is truly decentralized, so to the extent that is or should be a goal of digital currency, I doubt you can improve upon it. The only possible attack against the entire network, trying to control 50% + 1 nodes, is expensive to the point of being self-defeating as you'd make the network you just took over worthless as soon as you did it. So it's pretty resilient.
As for arguments against that, users of currencies desire other qualities than those Bitcoin offers. A lot of these are downstream to the currency itself, like convenient and cheap transaction processing, safe storage, broad acceptance. Those don't generally speak to strengths and weaknesses of the currency itself, but rather to the surrounding ecosystem and the business communities you find yourself involved with. Bitcoin does have one major drawback in this area, though. Proof work is, by design, an expensive and slow way of verifying transactions. Transactions on the actual blockchain can be processed in bulk, however, allowing individual transactions to be processed off-chain by higher layers, but then you're avoiding some of the strengths of Bitcoin. Those higher layers are just as susceptible to whatever it is you're trying to avoid by using Bitcoin instead of normal currencies in the first place.
Arguing against this second weaker claim would seem to me to be largely another matter of basic probability. Permanent monopolies like this don't really exist. So why should we expect Bitcoin will be the first ever? Even if it really is the best digital currency that can possibly ever be conceived, that doesn't make it inevitable or even likely it will forever be the only one actually used.
On a broader level, the central purposes and features of Bitcoin are being decentralized and computationally expensive to use. The expense is somewhat hidden from end-users as it is pushed onto node owners, who are presently compensated mostly by the rapid appreciation of Bitcoin itself, meaning they don't need to explicitly charge. This can't remain the case forever, so at some point the cost of running a node drops below what you can be compensated for just by Bitcoin appreciation, so you're left where equilibrium can only be maintained by charging users to use the blockchain or reducing network size, either making it more expensive or weaker. The only way to sustain itself seems to be draining value from other stores into the Bitcoin network at a fast enough rate to compensate blockchain node owners without charging users. But a scheme that generates no additional intrinsic value on its own, instead relying on draining value from external sources paying in, is typically a Ponzi scheme. It can potentially keep going for a very long time and serve as a sink for tremendous amounts of wealth coming from elsewhere, but it can't do that forever.
That isn't an argument against owning it, of course. As an individual investor, there is no reason for you to care about forever. But it is an argument against some notion that Bitcoin will permanently become the only digital currency in use.
Of course, regular currencies also have no intrinsic value, but this is getting at a fundamental question of what the purpose of Bitcoin is supposed to be. Regular currencies are meant to be a medium of exchange, not a store of value. Some amount of inflation sufficient to make it undesirable to hoard large amounts of cash for long periods of time, but not quite enough that appreciation of consumer goods outpaces appreciation of labor compensation, is a feature, not a bug. Aside from the transactional specifications of how Bitcoin is exchanged on a blockchain, the other feature of Bitcoin is the permanent capped supply and exponentially decaying mint rate. Early on, proponents largely tried to argue that a deflationary currency was actually desirable for galaxy brain reasons, but it entails a massive shift in how civilizations presently function, relying on dynamism and economic activity in which goods and services are frequently exchanged rather than simply being held onto to by original owners. Value creation is largely a matter of specialization, division of labor, and trade. Some future where this is not the case is possible, I suppose, but we get back once again to basic probability estimation where claims that human society will be drastically different in some fundamental way are not really being backed up by anything other than the desire of Bitcoin owners to convince you to sink your money into the network so their Bitcoin becomes more valuable.
More recently, it seems proponents have largely abandoned the notion that Bitcoin is ever likely to be dominant as a medium of exchange, but that you should nonetheless sink your money into it because it's a great store of value. This may or may not be the case, but as we'd still need something else then to serve as a medium of exchange, it isn't maximalism.
Thank you! This looks like a good start. You have a great point about defining what bitcoin maximalism is, and i'll accept the way you started: positing there'll be only digital currency in the future. I'll cal myself a 'soft maximalist' and say that while i can see there being many, i think bitcoin will be the dominant one.
> Those higher layers are just as susceptible to whatever it is you're trying to avoid by using Bitcoin instead of normal currencies in the first place.
Can you say more about this? A big motivation for me in buying bitcoin is that fixed upper limit on supply. Does using lightning network to transmit bitcoin change that fixed upper limit on supply?
> Some amount of inflation sufficient to make it undesirable to hoard large amounts of cash for long periods of time, but not quite enough that appreciation of consumer goods outpaces appreciation of labor compensation, is a feature, not a bug
Can you say more about this? I think this is where our primary disagreement comes from: bitcoin maximalists absolutely see deflation in the currency as being a feature. A lot of people who don't like bitcoin see is deflationary nature as being a serious flaw.
> Early on, proponents largely tried to argue that a deflationary currency was actually desirable for galaxy brain reasons, but it entails a massive shift in how civilizations presently function, relying on dynamism and economic activity in which goods and services are frequently exchanged rather than simply being held onto to by original owners. Value creation is largely a matter of specialization, division of labor, and trade.
It seems like you believe here is that deflationary currencies are inherently bad for value creation, because deflationary encourage people to hold onto things, rather than to sell them. Is that far?
Do you think 'most people save too much money, and don't send enough, so that people don't do much economically" is likely to be a problem in a possible future bitcoin-based economy? Do you think this was a problem when the gold standard dominated?
When i look at the economy, i see a bipartite system, where large numbers of people are continuously spending money, and doing very little savings or investing. Their behavior is likely rational, because saving currency that loses its value over time makes little sense, and investing small amounts of money provides little meaningful chance for real return. Then there's a small amount of people which huge piles of money, which only ever seem to grow bigger. People who do have savings are 'investing' in things they don't really understand, because if they _don't_ engage in these 'investments', their money loses value over time. So, as a result of inflationary money, economic growth requires large numbers of people spending money they don't really have, while smaller numbers of people take the money they do have and invest it in systems they really don't understand, but depend on for their future.
Can you steelman just this portion of the argument - that deflationary currencies (which gain value over time) encourage and reward behavior that leads to value creation (i.e. saving as much as possible, not buying what you don't need or investing in what you don't understand), mores than inflationary currencies?
> it seems proponents have largely abandoned the notion that Bitcoin is ever likely to be dominant as a medium of exchange, but that you should nonetheless sink your money into it because it's a great store of value. This may or may not be the case, but as we'd still need something else then to serve as a medium of exchange,
The proponents i've seen have argued that bitcoin will _first_ be a globally accepted store of value, before it passes into the being a medium of exchange. Once people everywhere accept bitcoin as an appreciating store of value, they will then be more likely to accept it as a medium of exchange, via systems like lightning network for small transactions, and with on-chain transactions replacing things like large-scale wire transfers. Gresham's law then suggests that people will try to dump their fiat money first, until basically everyone agrees fiat is more or less worthless.
The very basic argument for crypto is that it's still in its infancy and most of the problems involving security, transaction costs and network latency will go away with technological improvement. Trying to use crypto for everyday transactions now is like online shopping, dating or video streaming over a dial-up modem in the mid-1990s: not impossible, but not competitive enough to be mainstream. This will change once the banking system understands the blockchain and we all have 7G phones running our own nodes.
The counterargument is that people already throw massive amounts of bandwidth and computing power at bitcoin, and it mostly goes towards zero-sum competition that doesn't really improve performance for anyone wanting using to buy and sell stuff.
It's kind of hard to Steelman something you don't agree with, or at least hold significant curiosity in. I'm also not convinced it's a good use of anyone's time.
Considering how massive education is as an institution, how deeply invested societies and individuals are in education, and the huge body of research and literature on education, it seems shocking to me that there is such a dearth of words/tools to discuss the QUALITY of education.
What tools do we currently have? We can talk about the outcomes -- discussion of which is often limited to graduation rates and standardized tests. We can talk about inputs -- small classes, higher-paid instructors, charter schools, homeschooling, project-based, etc.
But none of these things tell me very much about the objective quality of how Cathy spends 6-10 hours of every school day. And if we drill down to the quality of Cathy’s biology class versus Billy’s Physics class, things get even murkier. We’re stuck with “good teacher” versus “bad teacher”, and “easy” versus “hard”.
I think there may be a single, missing metric that would facilitate a lot of these conversations and analyses: ENGAGEMENT.
How engaged are the students?
And, if they are highly engaged, WHO CARES ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE?!?!
Let’s assume that a bunch of students in a classroom don’t have access to sugar, drugs, or screens. Nor are they fighting or having sex on top of the classroom desks. And let’s imagine that despite all this they are still highly engaged. Whatever magic is happening in that classroom should translate to better learning.
Finding out if a class is good or not should be as simple as seeing the student engagement score for that class. Finding out if a school is good or not should be based on the amount of high engagement hours that the average kid gets in that school. If I was to tell you that School A (an average Public school) provides 1 hour of high engagement per day, School B (a charter school) provides 1.5 hours, and School C (SSC Academy) provides 4 hours of high engagement, would you need any other metric to make a decision?
In honor of Bezos, this is the only metric that focuses on the customer. The customer is the one who is doing the learning. Schools should be obsessed with the quality of the customer experience (quality of engagement), because more engagement equals more learning. We should all be.
If this metric already exists in some form, and I’m missing something, please point it out.
Oh… and how do we measure ENGAGEMENT? Well, we can observe the students (automated tools are getting better at this sort of thing). Or we can ask them. Or we can do some combination of both.
I disagree that engagement is a sufficient condition. For example, imagine a classroom full of sports fans all watching an exciting and close game (on a screen or especially in person). They might be highly engaged (look at the student section at a college football game), but that doesn't mean it translates to better learning, especially about topics that you find valuable for them to be learning.
For a less extreme example, what about a teacher that has a really engaging and charismatic style but is actually sort of confusing and getting some of the facts wrong. They might be more engaging than the teacher next door but actually teaching their students less.
To be fair they did rule out "screens" so that eliminates the first example. Although, why did they do that? Because some kinds of engagement are "too easy."
I think reading is another interesting example - generally considered educational these days, but at one time novels were considered as bad as we now consider "screens." I carried books around as a kid and used them much as everyone use phones these days, to escape from boredom. I suppose reading every science fiction book in the high school library might have somehow helped.
It rules out watching a game on a screen, but doesn't rule out watching them in person. The student section at a football game tends to be very engaged without screens, but are they learning? Are they learning what society wants to value?
Metrics are great until they show the opposite of what the people in charge want. Which is what happens when you try getting really good metrics related to education.
I doubt this. We passed the point, some years ago, when the quality of teaching available online, surpassed that available in most physical environs. There are numerous examples, but how about Harvard's CS50 programme, which easily trounces equivalent cs courses available in local universities and colleges. Yet people cluster together in physical gathering places, perhaps out of habit and inertia, more than anything else.
If educating the mind were really the main point of 'education', it would look very different.
I think I mostly agree with you, but one other thing that "education" is trying to account for is measurable growth. Because there are so many students at all levels, it's very very hard to accurately track learning. This is especially true for the students in materially or socially poor environments, where there is little to no parental support.
A lot of what schools offer to in person learners is someone to track their progress and make adjustments when needed. If all students were self-actualized learners, this would not be necessary. This may not be necessary in college, if we are willing to allow students to fail when they do not meet the requirements, no matter how much money they have put into the system. For a general education offered to the full population to have meaning, then we do need monitors who can identify current or potential failures and take steps to remedy them. We cannot accept the option of "they didn't make an effort, so they failed." That would create huge stratification between students who come from healthy and/or wealthy families, and those who have various barriers to learning.
Something built primarily around engagement would probably look less like a school than like a community center with a bunch of clubs going on. Which isn't necessarily bad, but there will almost certainly be winners in engagement metrics where the kids don't learn to read or multiply or other pretty basic civilizational skills. There will be a cohort of students very engaged with basketball or makeup or cooking or something for hours a day, but won't learn any traditional academics at all.
Someone could say: well, they still have to write (and other fundamentals), and we'll measure engagement while writing. That doesn't necessarily seem like an improvement on just measuring their written work, and would probably mostly end up measuring selection effects of those who are highly engaged while doing academic tasks.
That brings in the problem of "are they engaged because the teacher is catching their interest and they are retaining this information, or are they engaged because it's all done in a flashy, entertaining style?"
I still have fond memories of my Fifth Class history lessons where Sister Joseph put aside the text book and simply told us the information as if it were a story (listen, if you want to grab the attention of ten year old convent school girls, telling them all about how the Viking who killed Brian Boru was caught up to by Brian's bodyguard who tied him to a tree - USING HIS OWN INTESTINES
But I read something online from somebody teaching (I don't know if it's high school or college) about how he writes his own curriculum and will change up selected texts if they're too old, because he can't expect kids to be interested from three months ago (yes, he did give that figure: a whopping entire THREE MONTHS BACK). And I can't help thinking "What the hell are those kids going to do when they have to engage with something that is not Relevant and Up-To-This-Second and specifically textured to be appealing to whatever the current fashion is? How are they going to learn about things that happened before they were born? How are they going to develop the ability and the cognitive tools to extract information from something that is not cut up into bite-size chunks and spoon-fed to them?" because you can fall into the trap of trying to make everything appealing and engaging.
You seem to be taking it for granted that reading boring texts now makes you better at reading boring texts later. What makes you think that engaging with something that is not relevant to your personal interests is a skill, and that teachers who force students to "engage" with outdated materials are in fact teaching that skill? It seems most people leave school thinking "academic texts are boring and I'm glad I'll never have to read one again!" and not "I'm glad I know how to read old boring things, it's really enriched my life!"
There are techniques for, as you say, extracting information from dense texts - but these techniques generally need to be taught explicitly, through modeling, guided practice, and feedback. (I say generally because the most gifted students - e.g. almost everyone in this comments section - will pick them up on our own; the majority of students will need to be taught explicitly). If the purpose of your class isn't teaching this particular literacy skill, then assigning dense, boring, or outdated texts will usually end up being detrimental to whatever the actual purpose is.
As a general thing, school is about training children to do things they don't want to do, and I think there's a deficiency in teaching children to be effective at things they do want to do. Even if some of the former is needed, there's also a need for the latter.
If someone is drawing up a new curriculum every three months because kids can't be expected to handle things that old or irrelevant, God help them when they need to read the information pamphlet in a box of medication, or fill out a form, or sign off on a contract, or any of the boring YOU NEED TO READ THE SMALL PRINT OR YOU WILL BE PAYING WITH ONE OF YOUR KIDNEYS DOWN NOW AND A PINT OF BLOOD EVERY WEEK FOR ETERNITY paperwork that businesses do use to trap people, because they know the big, singing and dancing, colourful banner grabs attention "Buy this now for no money at all!" and nobody reads "but three weeks later we sell you to the salt mines" small print.
There's a lot of boring, dull, no-fun, but it's necessary stuff in life. The earlier you start to learn how to deal with it, and find ways to make it bearable, the better. You can eat all the candyfloss and ice-cream you like, but eventually you will also have to eat your broccoli.
You talk about examples of engagement in your school classes, e.g. students have to do science experiments or anthropology field work or projects.
How would you deal with a kid complaining they can't read a source document for a history project because it was written all the way back in 1950? You can do all the "snatched from the headlines" work you like to make things relevant and attention-grabbing and so forth, but one day today's headlines *will* be tomorrow's boring stuff. If you're trapped within the tiny circle of what is familiar to you as the only thing you can understand, you are cut off from so much.
You don't really need a new curriculum for new texts. I used to do a music video production unit in a design/technology class where I'd change the case study video every few years because there's an uncanny valley of pop music between "fresh" and "classic" where music is considered cringe. But changing the case study doesn't mean you change the whole unit.
I don't know what subject would merit changing texts every three months, and I suspect that was exaggeration or virtue signaling of some type. But certainly in my global politics class I would try to choose case studies that were current, and I'd switch them up from year to year. One year I was covering revolutions and there was a coup in Zimbabwe that generated some good news stories for class.
As to the rest, sorry, but it sounds to me like "I suffered so children have to suffer too." Kids really, really, really don't need teachers to demonstrate that life can be boring and difficult. Do you read the entire instruction pamphlet for your box of medication or do you just read the part that says "take 2 pills every 4-6 hours"? Do you read every EULA and cookie policy for every app and website you use?
If you were saying "kids should be taught how to research medications, side effects, and interactions so they can be intelligent consumers of medications" I'd be totally on board. If you were saying "kids should be taught how to deal with paperwork and contracts intelligently and how to look for traps and gotcha clauses" then alright. Those are life skills I can get behind.
But "kids need to read primary source documents from the 1950s for history classes"? Hard disagree. I wasn't required to read anything but very short excerpts from primary sources until university, and at that point I had freely chosen and paid for all my courses and could drop boring ones if I chose to. AP and DP history kids have to engage with primary sources, but again, those are elective courses - I was a math nerd so I didn't take AP US History; I took AP calculus and AP compsci. And I wouldn't dream of demanding that every student learn integration or quicksort. To me, reading history documents from 70 years ago is equally esoteric and equally without practical application for most people's lives.
Making kids do boring, shitty stuff that they don't want to do isn't teaching them to "find ways to make it bearable". It's teaching them that school is boring and dense and adults are hypocritical sellouts who hate kids. Again, if you're explicitly teaching coping strategies, or scanning and skimming texts - and by "explicitly teaching" I mean explaining, modeling, guided drills, and feedback on practice - then it's fine to have some lessons on dealing with boredom or coping with dense texts. But you can't just give out work that kids hate - because you don't care enough to update your curriculum - and then turn around and say "well this will teach you the life lesson of putting up with things you hate".
Engagement isn't missing from educational theory and practice. I took an entire course on student engagement for my Master's of Education degree. I learned about using expectancy-value theory to assess reasons for lack of engagement. About student goal orientation (intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, performance vs mastery goal structure) and self-efficacy. About models for building and assessing engaging learning experiences. Engagement came up again and again even outside that course - for example, many modern classroom management techniques are build around engagement. There's self-determination theory - students are intrinsically motivated by autonomy, competence, and relevance. There's the related ARCS model of motivation: Attention, relevance, confidence, satisfaction. There's the TARGET model of analyzing lessons for engagement opportunities (task, authority, recognition, grouping, evaluation, time). A real wealth of literature on student engagement. I could go on about it all day.
The problem, as with most things in education, is that there aren't enough teachers with enough time to apply this knowledge to actually engaging students. To design a really engaging unit or topic, and then differentiate it so that it actually engages all of the students, adjusting as you go based on individual student needs, taking time to give students the feedback they need to stay engaged, you end up spending 2-3 hours of time outside work for each 1 hour of actual instruction.
What drove me absolutely mad as a teacher - and what I'm convinced drives a lot of teacher burnout - was knowing that if I had another 40-80 hours in a week I could make all my lessons as engaging as my best lessons. Knowing I constantly had to triage. Constantly had to pick and choose which students I devoted the bulk of my time to helping. Knowing I knew how to do more but it was not humanly possible to do so.
I totally agree with you that student engagement should be one of the most important metrics in our assessment of the quality of a school experience. It's not just that you learn more when you're engaged - it's also that being engaged is rewarding in and of itself. Being engaged instills a lifelong love of learning. Being engaged is a human right that too many teachers in too many schools are denying to kids on a regular basis. And done well, engagement can be used to teach kids to be better learners.
But it's incredibly difficult to teach a specific curriculum in a way that engages students. You need large-scale, institutional change in the way schools approach content and curriculum. And then inquiry-based and project-based curricula have their own problems - done poorly, they can lack rigor, and fail to provide students with needed facts and knowledge and skills practice.
In terms of measurement - you hit the major ones: observation (you can count time on task if you need to quantify something) and just asking students. It's also obvious to any teacher or adult in the school who takes the time to get to know the kids whether they're engaged in any particular task or subject.
Engagement is a pretty popular topic in progressive (not the same as politically progressive - see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education) educational theory and practice. Programs like the International Baccalaureate's Middle Years Programme lean pretty heavily into inquiry learning and project-based assessment for engagement purposes (this was the program I taught in for the last 8 years). For some reason it doesn't generate a ton of noise, but it's there.
Honestly I'm happy to address a specific concern or question about any of this stuff, if you have one. I think the study of how to engage students is generally quite valid and the problem is in its lack of application - by teachers who either don't care or don't have time - but I'm happy to debate whether or not, for instance, students are more likely to engage with a task if they are confident they can do it, and how teachers might foster that confidence if in fact it is needed.
But yeah, it's obvious that education, like every other field, is plagued by people who claim to know things that are absolute nonsense. Don't even get me started on learning styles.
So are there some schools that have adopted the right way of teaching and systematically get better results? I've heard some claims about Direct Instruction used in some charter schools, but that's about it.
I'll say a conditional yes, but with the caveat that proving causation in education is really hard.
So I mentioned the IB programs in my comment. These schools tend to build curriculum around student engagement. The Diploma Programme (DP) courses typically build some kind of active, performance task into course assessments. For example, in Global Politics, which I taught, one of the four assessment components (which determine final grades) was literally called the "Political Engagement Activity". In science classes the student has to do an experiment. In anthropology the student has to do actual ethnographic research. Etc. DP also has community service requirements that tie directly into coursework. The results are pretty great in the sense that DP grades are taken quite seriously by college admissions boards and scholarship committees.
However, of course there's a huge confounding factor, which is that these are almost always private schools selected by the kind of parents who can afford expensive private schools and care enough about "international-mindedness" and progressive education to pick IB over alternatives (like AP) that are more exam-based and less engagement-based. So one could argue that even if these kids were put in regular schools, they'd likely excel.
Also, having seen the implementation of IB programs from the inside... it's one thing to have a written curriculum built around engagement. It's another thing entirely to have teachers who deliver a taught curriculum around engagement. Many teachers are understandably results-driven, where results are measured by grades. Even in the DP, it's entirely possible for students and teachers to collaborate to produce something that looks like engagement on paper but is not real engagement, or is not sustained engagement.
Charter schools have the same kind of selection biases. Charters can adopt something like project-based learning, which promotes engagement, and get good results. Schools that don't get to pick their students and can't throw disruptive students out could adopt the same program and get worse results, because project-based learning is much harder for kids without academic self-management skills and every kid who needs special support takes time away from the teacher's ability to make the project go well in general overall.
Schools also aren't ever going to self-report "yeah, we don't even try to engage kids" and one of the recognized problems in educational research is that when you study an intervention (say, a program for increasing engagement) it works but then as soon as the research team stops paying attention, or you try to scale the intervention to other schools that aren't supervised by a study, the intervention suddenly stops working. There's a concept called "implementation fidelity" that is the bane of any pedagogical technique or curriculum program. Sure, Direct Instruction looks like it works - but does it work when teachers half-heartedly implement it? When they get tired of the structured drills and stop making kids repeat things back? When teachers don't really understand the technique and "adapt" it in a way that removes the part of it that works? This is not a critique of DI, by the way - the same applies to everything. "Differentiation" is an important concept in education but if you survey actual teachers most of them don't seem to know very much about how to actually do it. This is one of the reasons why ed reform is really hard.
Also "engagement" can be misused. My principal last year was all about making sure cameras were on in zoom classes. I rarely enforced this rule because my gut feeling was that the kids who were turning off cameras needed some refuge from the stress of the pandemic, and that was more important than demonstrating engagement at any given time. There are now numerous studies about zoom fatigue and how and why video calls cause increased stress and anxiety, all of which back up my gut feeling, and I'm not surprised because my teaching style is very much based on relating to students on a human level, and you can't relate to someone on a human level without seeing the effect being in video calls all day for five days a week during a once-in-a-century crisis is having on them. But anyway, some of the "cameras on" kids were totally disengaged - kids are smart about things like putting their mobile phone on their laptop screen so it looks like they're looking at the screen while they're watching TikTok - and some of the "cameras off" kids were totally engaged - participating in discussions, completing projects, learning - and so it's important to draw a distinction between engagement and the performance or appearance of engagement. A school that is hyper-focused on engagement will get a lot of hollow, performative engagement. Goodhart's law, and all that.
I'm all about engagement in my classroom and in my training to other teachers, but, weirdly, I also question how scalable it is.
It's not realistic to expect even a young mind to be able to think deep thoughts for six hours every day, and a student who leaves my class with their gears turning (always my goal) is going to have to put them aside in just a few minutes or be unable to engage with their next teacher's ideas. How would you like being forced to context shift every time you found a deep vein of thought? I have a lot of sympathy for cerebral kids.
So, it would be a nice problem to have, but I fear that the current design of a school day means that engagement starts to become a zero sum game once you have enough sufficiently engaging teachers.
Engagement for six hours a day is not impossible - television networks and YouTube have certainly figured out how to do it. And the "Khan Academy" videos seemed to have hit on at least one formula for engagement.
Maybe instead of making every teacher try to come up with their own Khan Academy-esque presentation, schools would do more "flipping" - where kids watch assigned engaging presentations on "You Tube" at home and then discuss said videos (and do homework) in the classroom the next day.
tanagra seems to be speaking of a mental engagement that keeps working after the class is over, which isn't the same kind of Engagement YouTube measures. Day to day, it may be impractical to measure it at all.
It sounds to me that you're basically saying that class sizes are too large (in a number of students: one teacher ratio way). If class sizes were 1 student to 1 teacher (basically tutoring), then you wouldn't need to triage and could instead devote all your time to that one student, delivering a carefully crafted and engaging lesson every time.
In other words, Bloom's Two Sigma Problem (https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/): nothing is as effective or as expensive as one-on-one tutoring, with tutored students scoring two standard deviations above mean (so in the top 2.5%). This is why Alexander the Great was personally tutored by Aristotle... and why this is a completely unworkable system to try scaling up, because we don't have an unlimited supply of Aristotles. (In fact, we only have an average of one person's time per person). As far as I can tell, much of education research is about figuring out how to replicate tutoring without the expense of actual tutoring.
This is why I hope that one day, eventually, the principles behind why games like Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft (Redstone = binary logic) teach so well will be understood well enough to mass produce them for every topic under the sun. In fact, that's already sort of happened with the DARPA digital tutor (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vbWBJGWyWyKyoxLBe/darpa-digital-tutor-four-months-to-total-technical-expertise). But given that it was discontinued for unknown reasons, despite its effectiveness (its students once outscored the instructors teaching other classes), it seems that point is still far off. A pity.
My son and I play Minecraft (he's 8) and the redstone=binary logic thing isn't quite a slam dunk - when he works with redstone he's mostly just following tutorials, which is fine. But I will say that by playing the game and watching Minecraft streamers/YouTubers, he's learned research and computer skills that are certainly more advanced than those of most of my middle school students. For example, he can install mods, which requires googling the mod name, navigating to the download page, downloading it, opening the downloads folder, copying the file, opening the mods folder, pasting the file, and relaunching the game. He can do limited troubleshooting and he's getting better with time. The number of students I've had in 8th or even 9th grade who can't download a file and then copy-paste it somewhere else is staggering. He can also use the minecraft command line and command blocks - even I didn't start typing commands until I was 10. At some point he may take up redstone programming (I've also started him on python). I just let him follow where his interests go.
You can also see the generational divide because when we are trying to figure out how to do something, he goes to youtube to watch a video on it and I go to the official Minecraft wiki to read the "man page" (man is short for manual in this context, for those unfamiliar with 90's computer slang).
Anyway, on class sizes: if the goal is to implant certain knowledge and skills into students' minds, 1:1 does seem to be the gold standard. However, I wouldn't underestimate the benefits of socialization and social learning - a tutor can't exactly assign a group project. Perhaps you could have tutors for mastering academic subjects and then group activities for practicing leadership, cooperation, delegation, etc. But peer groups can actually be quite valuable for improving engagement, if you know how to use them. I'd say the issue is part class size and part teaching hours. I think most teachers could engage a group of 15-20 students pretty consistently given 3:1 prep time to contact hours. The trouble is that no one wants to pay a teacher a full salary for 10 contact hours per week. Full time at my last school was 20-24 contact hours - meaning for full engagement I would have needed to work 80 hours per week at a bare minimum, and that's putting aside administrative and professional development tasks. I think most teachers would agree that if you put in 80-90 hours per week you can consistently deliver great lessons that engage the majority of students - and that this pace of work is draining, destroys work-life balance, and drives the ridiculous rate of teacher burnout.
There are other ways to optimize this - for example at larger schools, you can give one teacher several sections or groups of the same class (e.g. if your school has four seventh grade classes, they all take seventh grade math with the same teacher) and then that teacher only has to prep seventh grade math lessons, which they deliver four times each. This is also nice because if a lesson goes awry with your first section you can modify it for your next section. If the teacher has to prep 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade math lessons it's much less efficient. But not every school is large enough to make this work.
On tutoring: I have several friends who tutor English online to Chinese students, and they tell me China has just passed a law regulating tutoring hours outside of schools, apparently out of concern that students are spending too much time on education and not enough on having an actual life, and parents are spending too much money on private tutors. Where I live (Georgia the country) most public school teachers also tutor students in their subjects one on one after school hours, and most of my students have tutors in what their parents think of as the core subjects. We've had some problems with students whose tutors appear to be doing their homework for them. And of course in the US there's a whole "test prep" industry, which poses a problem in terms of equity, since competitive examinations can determine access to colleges and scholarships. So I think, broadly speaking, that many parents and teachers across the world intuitively recognize that if they want their kids to learn something, tutoring is the way to go. What are schools even for, then? Socialization and certification.
I’m still a bit mad at mojang about command blocks. Why would they expect people to make mods with that! It’s ridiculous the effort people have put into making official mods with them when they could’ve used an official forge or something like that, or even spigot... But I guess it’s in their wheelhouse - do something tremendously stupid and build arbitrarily and shakily upon it, this leaving a fun and endlessly complicated and deep system of random parts and challenges to uncover (this is why red stone is so fun! It’s horribly broken and ridiculous).
The other day I was building a redstone boat catapult to quickly launch my boat up to a higher road without the player having to get out of the boat... the system is so janky. Like, a pressure plate can power redstone two blocks below it, but powered redstone can't power a piston one block above it, but somehow cobblestone can transmit power from horizontally adjacent powered redstone to a vertically adjacent piston? It really is ridiculous, and fiddly, just like so many things in real life. Definitely rewards trial and error, and real-world problem solving skills applied to totally arbitrarily contrived situations.
That is the problem: if class sizes were something like six pupils to one teacher, then you could have individually-tailored learning plans and all the rest of it. But that is not going to happen when there are a hundred kids in one year to be taught. You can break them up into classes of thirty or so, and that's it.
Though maybe in a perverse way, if the waterfall of money poured into education was spent on "one teacher for every six pupils", it might be possible to fund it?
My belief is that almost all of the money poured into education that isn't directly funding hiring more and better teachers is wasted.
Most kids don't need individually-tailored learning plans from teachers - and one of the explicit goals in modern education is to teach students goal-setting and self-assessment, so they start making their own learning plans.
But really it depends on what you think you're getting out of education. The factory model was great when you needed to teach kids the three Rs and broadly sort kids into career paths, and the fact that kids who couldn't conform got drummed out was a feature, because they would have been disruptive or incompetent workers. It's not so great when your goals are producing a more equitable society full of self-actualized 20-somethings ready for the information age - when no child can be left behind, when ed reformers dogmatically believe that any kid can master any subject, and when education is supposed to fill the gaping void left by the lack of decent social services outside of schools.
So if you want schools to produce docile and compliant workers who have had every last shred of inspiration beaten out of them - i.e. if you want child prisons - the 1 teacher to 30 students model is perfect. If you want children to actually have a decent quality of life and grow up expecting something more from the world than drudgery and an early death from opioid addiction, then yeah, you're going to need more and better teachers.
At least per Freddie, reducing class size isn't a silver bullet*.
I'm sure that someone with individual access to a private tutor will probably have a great outcome. I would even buy that limiting class sizes at Deiseach's six would probably be a measurable improvement over 30 or so... but I'm remarkably unconvinced that these same gains are apparent when you're talking about a reduction from say... 30 to 20.
My not-in-anyway-well-informed opinion is that this is probably a span of control problem. Once you exceed the teacher's personal span of control, educational quality takes a direct and dramatic hit. Further burdening the teacher after that, however, doesn't cause a scaling decrease in quality.
I think you're right. Each teacher probably has a magic number or range where they can know enough about each student to create truly meaningful personalized plans and get a similar effect to tutors. That number probably varies quite a bit between teachers, which may be a good portion of the difference between "good" and "bad" teachers. The best teachers might be able to individualize learning for 10-15 students at a time, maybe more. Most teachers would top out under 10, maybe closer to 5. To scale this plan, you would need a program that allows even average teachers to do what they can, which means something like Deiseach's 6. Alternately, you create a system of education where you don't individualize plans per student, but constantly adjust the overall curriculum in a vain attempt to do so by proxy. This allows a fairly competent teacher to handle a class of 25+ students, but does not achieve the benefits of individualized tutors. Given the potentially 5X costs of the individualized plan, it's easy to see why very few schools attempt it. If we did attempt it for real, we would also run into a massive teacher shortage, which would inevitably result in people who should never have been teachers who get hired at struggling/poorer schools which puts us in a similar position to what we have now, but at 5X cost.
About that 'factory model of education' thing... apparently it had the exact same objectives and used the exact same rhetoric as the modern education reforms of today. See http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model & https://hapgood.us/2014/07/09/the-original-factory-education-was-a-personalized-learning-experiment/ - basically, the villain of today was once the hero of yesterday, and the heroes of today are saying the exact same things about themselves as the villain once did, and in fact doing some of the exact same things as well. How that doesn't send the current generation of reformers shaking and trembling with perspective ("You're walking the exact same path he did.")... I don't know.
In other words, yes, I think you're right. All the money pouring into education that isn't spent on getting more and better teachers is money probably wasted, since it seems the problem in education has in fact been pinpointed: student to teacher ratios, and every other attempt at addressing the problem does nothing but turn into tomorrow's villain that the next generation of reformers swear they have to overthrow. Though given that we still have the "only one person's time per person" limit on how many teachers we can have, I think that efforts to develop a DARPA stye digital tutor are also worth investigating, given that they're attacking the teacher to students ratio (every student gets a digital tutor, even if it's just the Kerbal Space Program of the subject they're studying) rather than doing whatever it is the other reforms do...
I suppose Direct Instruction and Mastery Learning might also be worth pursuing, given the relative high praise Nintil gives it (https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/). Though it's been frequently criticized as nothing but barbaric memorization instead of true learning, stuff that produces the docile and compliant workers you warned about. Still, it was the only thing that actually worked when studied by Project Follow Through; according to the Nintil article, almost everything else actually *decreased* performance relative to traditional teaching methods. That's got to be worth something, being the only one to work.
(Incidentally, if you want to read more about the heady hopes and crushing reality of that era of reforms, in Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society era, see this Gwern tweet: https://web.archive.org/web/20190315005543if_/https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1017976030177488897. This is where you get the much reviled Project 100 000 [https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara], because reformers at the time genuinely believed they were helping people who were just missing some protein or something [see the Gwern tweet thread] and that the military would be glad to provide that help, or at least willing if forced to.
It never seemed to cross their mind that the entire idea was flawed and their good intentions were blinding them to the obvious moral repugnancy of sending medically-certified retards [I believe that was the term the era used as non-pejorative, until it got co-opted?] to die. Sometimes by blowing up their friends with grenades in a poorly thought out practical joke and being beaten to death by an angry mob, or by blowing themselves and ~300 other people up in Port Chicago with poorly thought out explosives handling, or by getting themselves and everyone else in their squad killed by walking right into an ambush...
Yeah, the military was not glad to take these people, and was not willing once it was no longer forced to. Hence the ban it negotiated on never taking anyone who scores too low on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Without the good intentions, they could see what was actually happening rather than what the designers were praying for. Sometimes, good intentions lead to the greatest evil, by the magic of wishful thinking. Every generation's heroic reform becomes the next generation's villain, rhetoric masking and then justifying anything. Anything. That's why every book about Utopia is inevitably a book about Dystopia.)
Yeah, the "factory model" is, as the first link points out, more a rhetorical device than a historical claim. Also I'm not saying the "create docile compliant workers" model of education is any worse than the "create a society of perfect equality of outcome" model of education - the first is feasible but morally questionable, as it grinds down most people until their natural creativity and love of learning are withered beyond recovery; the second is completely unfeasible but the attempt seems likely to make education actively worse for many students. I think modern education is in a crisis state because no one can even agree explicitly on what it's for, and so 99% of the "ed reform" debates seem to be people screeching "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" past each other until they get dizzy from the effort. I don't know, that was my impression, anyway, but I tend to stay off that corner of the internet. I just mind my own business and try to shield my students from the worst excesses of adults' general disregard for children's day-to-day well-being.
The school that is the main competitor to my school here in Tbilisi uses mastery learning, but not anything like 1:1 teaching. My impression is that academically they're a bit less rigorous than we are (were - I resigned at the end of last year for pandemic-related issues...) but socially and emotionally their students were a little better off. I suppose there's a bit less pressure from Mastery learning than from an IB curriculum. I'm not criticizing it - I actually think kids that are happier but know a bit less are meaningfully better off, especially if the quality or duration of their knowledge is actually higher. I tried to implement principles of mastery learning in my own classes, but my administration didn't like it, because it resulted in too many students getting really high grades. I was explicitly told to make it impossible for every student in the class to get the highest score on assessments.
This is not an isolated quirk of my admin - it's sort of baked in to the whole IB assessment methodology, which grades on a curve in order to maintain "rigor" for college admissions. In other words, if every student masters everything in the curriculum, then there's nothing to differentiate one student from another in competitive college admissions, and we can't have that because no one would take us seriously if we just told colleges "yes, this child has mastered school". I just think that it's terribly unfair to students to say they're going to be graded according to a standard, but then build in obstacles to achieving that standard in the name of sorting the kids into a normal distribution. The MYP grading materials explicitly disavow this strategy and forbid MYP teachers to use it when assigning grades, and yet they themselves use it in their externally-moderated assessments... so there's more than a bit of hypocrisy there. But also, it's understandable. If they didn't sort students by college readiness, their whole business model would evaporate, since no parent is going to pay for a curriculum that isn't going to get their kid into college.
I think a lot of the "problems" in mass, general education are just completely intractable - which, again, means we just aren't setting realistic goals.
Rereading the LessWrong and Nintil articles again, it seems to be a matter of expense: "This process was long, arduous, and expensive. First they recruited subject area experts and had them do example tutoring sessions. They took the best tutors from among the subject area experts and had 24 of them tutor students one-on-one in their sub-domain of expertise. Those students essentially received a one-on-one 16 week course. Those sessions were all recorded and served as the template for the Digital Tutor...
So in terms of personnel we are talking 24 tutors, about 6 content authors, a team of AI engineers, several iterations through each module with test cohorts, and several proctors throughout the course, and maybe a few extra people to set up the virtual and physical problem configurations. Given this expense and effort, it will not be an easy task to try and replicate their results in a separate domain or even the same one. One note in the paper that I found obscure is that the paper claimed the Direct Tutor “is, at present, expensive to use for instruction.”" (from the LessWrong article)
&
"A common theme in the studies cited above is comparing advanced vs simplistic computer based tutoring. Making good software tutors is hard, and it would be a long review of its own to properly look at tutoring software...
Andy Matuschak (personal communication) suggested that the key difficulty is that one needs both to be a good creative problem solver, and have domain knowledge in order to translate knowledge and explanations into good software. Many are developed by PhD students and then abandoned. Even the DARPA tutor doesn't seem to have been put into production yet, for some reason." (from the Nintil article)
I guess the answer boils down to "Why can't we just make more Kerbal Space Programs for other subjects?" - there's something we're still missing about how to replicate good games/software tutors, as the track record of any AAA games studio can attest, and any Edutainment games developer can doubly attest. You catch lightning in a bottle once with Super Energy Apocalypse (see https://jayisgames.com/super-energy-apocalypse/ for a sense of its genius, or just play the game yourself with Flashpoint [https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/])... then you release CellCraft, then essentially disappear from the industry. There's something about making these things actually good that just takes a whole lot out of you, apparently.
> it will not be an easy task to try and replicate their results in a separate domain or even the same one
Wait, it's a *digital* tutor? It should not be costly to replicate just by using the same digital tutor again (and I see author JohnBuridan was likewise confused about this). The tutor being digital is what justifies the large expense of making it.
One teacher with a small number of students can do a lot of one-on-one tutoring with each student. That doesn't fix the 30:1 student:teacher ratio, but it might work for 8:1.
One metric is insufficient and one should be constantly careful against relying too heavily on even a well thought out suite of metrics. Compare GDP and economics.
That said, in a large enough organised system metrics are a useful tool to check against.
Student rating of teachers works just fine. I enjoy seeing feedback from my students, and generally the direct feedback and anonymous feedback I get line up well, and also match my own thoughts about how things are going in any particular year and class. There are studies that show that student ratings are at least somewhat correlated with teacher efficacy. On the other hand a teacher can hack student ratings if they know that's the primary metric - one study famously found if the teacher gives out snacks a bit before ratings, their ratings go up a lot. There are no perfect metrics for school but student ratings and surveys are a good piece of the puzzle.
Do your exam results line up with the feedback? You can have teachers rated as "Mr Brown is awful" but the kids in his class do well on tests, and teachers rated as "Ms Jones is so cool!" but the kids come out unable to read.
Engagement with the topic and subject is necessary, but I feel it could devolve into a popularity contest; the classes are fun, the teacher is cool, we all have a great time - but we learned nothing.
This is a good point. Broadly I would say that children are interested enough in their own learning that they're not going to rate a teacher highly across all metrics if they aren't learning anything. In my experience, students are usually dissatisfied if they feel they aren't learning anything, and they're not shy about expressing that dissatisfaction. On the other hand, sometimes students don't realize that they're learning things. In fact one thing that actually improves engagement is to have students reflect regularly on what they've learned - specifically, guided reflections on specific skills - because when they realize how much they're learning, it makes them happier.
When I was a kid I used to come home from school every day and my stepfather would ask "what did you learn in school today" and I'd say "nothing" and he wondered why I went to school in the first place. Part of this was that I was precocious and already knew most of the reading and math I was being assigned until about grade 7. But part of it was that kids don't necessarily recognize learning experiences that don't involve specific recitable facts - in other words, kids can tell you facts like "I learned there are nine million bicycles in Beijing" but can't necessarily articulate ideas like "I learned how to organize my notebook" or "I practiced putting my name and the date on my homework assignments" or "I got feedback on organizing my ideas in a paragraph". So actually I would have liked school better if my teachers had been better about telling me what my learning goals actually were - in other words, what the value was of the tasks I was being asked to perform. Which is to say, I would have rated my elementary school teachers much higher if I'd known that I was actually developing foundational academic skills.
I can only speak for myself, but generally the feedback I get from my students does line up with their assessment results (which are usually not exams, but reports of projects they've done, some of which are externally moderated by the IB) - in the sense that (at least in cases where feedback is not anonymous) there is a correlation between students/classes who are bored/dissatisfied with my teaching and students who perform poorly on assessments, and between students who are engaged and who perform well on assessments. But because I have taught in smaller private schools, there usually wasn't another teacher of my subject to compare results with, so I can't say with any certainty that some other teacher might not have been able to get better assessment results but with less engagement - or better engagement and assessment results. All I can say with any certainty is that when I am able to engage students they almost always perform better than when I am not able to engage them.
Wouldn't say we disagree by much. But I've seen evidence of decent correlations with attractiveness, easyness and gender. I'd be afraid that charming, good looking teachers that set easy work do great and their colleagues suffer by comparison.
Strong view is that it's absolutely insane to base teaching decisions on this single metric. Weaker view is that this metric is almost useless in light of test scores. Weaker still view (but still held) is that it will steadily push teachers towards easier curriculums and tests, and damage education over time.
I think learning should be easy. It was for me. I think people would be a lot more educated if school were easy and fun, and made learning something people actually wanted to do, rather than a chore full of artificial obstacles thrown up for the sake of teaching life lessons about grit and perseverance.
Wow, this is not the forum I expected a take like that to come from.
My point is not "I'm exceptional so screw everyone else". It's "if learning can be fun and easy for me, it can be fun and easy for everyone."
The human brain is designed to learn, and learning is intrinsically rewarding. Making it so it's *not* fun and easy usually takes deliberate effort. Kids learn through play, unless you stop them and force them to learn only by doing boring things that suck.
I somewhat disagree with this. I started highschool just as rate my teacher became ubiquitous and I basically never found it to be incorrect. Classes with highly rated teachers were almost always better and more instructive than classes with low rated teachers.
I haven't used it in many years, but it was mostly accurate for me as well. That's especially true for engagement measures, as "boring" was probably the measure seen most often when teachers were rated poorly.
I think engagement is a decent proxy measure for how much a teacher cares. If a teacher cares about the students they're responsive enough to know what the students find interesting and emphasize those aspects, and riff on them. If a teacher cares about the subject, their own interest shines through and becomes infectious. Teachers who are disengaged or lazy are usually the boring ones, and bore their students in turn.
This is probably true big picture, but the most "boring" professor I had in college seemed to genuinely love both the subject and the students. He just had a very boring presentation style and affectation. I enjoyed the subject and it was in my major, and I still found him very boring.
Students rate professors more highly if they're easier, though. The score is *partly* correlated with something of actual value, but it's also strongly correlated with easiness.
As a grad student, I once served as a TA for a professor who was *utter garbage*. He just told stories all day--not, like, stories that illustrated the course content in some way, just unrelated stories. He'd re-tell the same stories repeatedly over the course of the semester, because he couldn't remember that he'd told them before. Once he spent like 20 minutes genuinely teaching students something important about Kant, and it was great, and I got a glimpse into the competent teacher he might once have been, decades earlier. But...like...I *remember* that 20 minutes because it was *unique*.
But he was very lenient and gave the students all A's, in a program where very few professors gave many A's.
Oh, also, he cancelled the entire first week of class, because he got mixed up about when the semester was beginning, and was on vacation.
Anyhow, I assumed the students would criticize him pretty thoroughly in the student evaluations, particularly since this was an honors class, and I thought of these students as ones who really cared about their education. But instead, the student evaluations were the highest and most positive evaluations I ever saw of a professor at that institution. They raved about how much they learned from him. *eyeroll*
Admittedly, that was official university student evaluations, not RateMyProfessor, but they work similarly.
Even if this worked, it doesn't seem like it solves the actual problem, not of how do you get your kids a quality education, but how do we get all kids a quality education. Even if you could identify the best schools and the best teachers, unless you then go on to figure out how those were created and produce more of then, it won't do most students any good because they can't just all choose the same schools and same teachers.
We had summer! For the entirety of July! Then it rained for three-quarters of August as per usual, but now we are getting Summer Part II: Indian Summer here (it might even last half-way into September if we're very lucky!)
I just had a discussion with my wife yesterday regarding Indian Summer. Can we still say that? Maybe call it "bonus warmth and sunshine period" or something. I'm pretty old and out of touch so I try to keep my guard up against unintentional offensiveness.
You're correct, somebody probably will get offended about it. When/if I see "don't use this term, it is a SLUR" on social media, I'll know to correct my foul and colonialist language.
I spent years jogging around a local Lake Calhoun but it turns out that the lake was named after a dick. John Calhoun was a pro slavery US Vice President so the state DNR renamed it Lake Bde Maka Ska its original Ojibwe name. Okay, that make sense to me. We shouldn't be honoring pro-slavery VP's by naming urban lakes after them.
Can somebody point me at any previous intro or basic discussion of prediction markets? I'm struggling to see what the fascination with them is.
To me, they seem to be about as useful predictors of the future as Top Hits or blockbuster lists are as arbiters of taste. Sure, people have to think about some future event and assess its likelihood by putting their money where their mouth is. But since when does having money behind something make it true?
Or maybe they're sources of interesting ideas. Maybe you're curious what questions other folks find interesting but you don't want to be inundated with conspiracy theories and other noise; prediction markets function to add cost, which filters out batshit propositions. Okay, I guess, but how robust is this dynamic? For something to show up as a bet at all, someone has to sufficiently believe that the prevailing opinion is wrong. If the odds are extremely unbalanced, we're dealing with people who think the sun won't come up tomorrow, and it's not very interesting. If the odds are too balanced, then it's a horse race and also not very interesting. This seems a bit... distasteful to me. "Sorry, your idea is neither popular enough nor niche enough for me to care about it".
Thank you. So, assuming I'm not interested in playing the market: what can I actually learn from observing them? They are opaque, in the sense that although they might be saying what people truly believe, they do not say what makes them believe those things. And it's the latter that I usually find insightful.
Pragmatically, having (good) predictions you don't understand is still way better than having no predictions at all. "Food left at room temperature will spoil" is an incredibly-important thing to know, and understanding microbiology is not essential to most of the practical applications of that knowledge.
The idea is that the markets are "trained". If you're a better predictor than the market, you can make money (assuming the market is liquid enough - meaning, is there someone for you to actually trade with if you think the market prices are wrong). If you're a worse predictor, you lose money. The end result is that the bad predictors lose all their money and stop playing, and good predictors get rich and are able to move the market quite a lot when they trade.
The issue is figuring out where the liquidity comes from. In theory you have to subsidize the market if you want to get good results. Through that lens, prediction markets are a decentralized way for you to turn money into predictions, without having to trust any particular person (except to trust that they will act in their self interest, i.e. try to make correct predictions so they can make money).
Economists and other ratty types tend to like them because they're an example of "mechanism design", which is basically the study of how to make trustless mechanisms for doing things, trustless meaning that you only have to trust that people will try to make money.
Yeah, but in order to make money, don't you need to retain some percentage of 'bad' predictors, or at least "not as good at predicting this outcome as me" predictors, in order to get money from their failed predictions? If everyone is predicting "tomorrow the sun will come up" and everyone is right, where does the money come from?
My jaundiced view is that somebody looked at the stock market and went "*This* is how we should set public policy! What could possibly go wrong?"
I too don't see the fascination, but plainly there are enough smart people who are gigantic maths nerds who want to throw their money onto a bonfire out there to make it worth setting one up?
I mean, the stock market at least usually works in a way where the company that seems to be doing a good job selling a new product to people gets better access to investor capital if it wants to ramp up production quickly, while the one that requires customers to go indoors in a pandemic while home video gives a better experience loses access to investor capital, which is usually well and good. But now we've got meme stocks (and we've always had bubbles).
Not just that, but people continue saying it after the price goes up rather than down without ever admitting they were wrong. The Economist claimed vindication on a "housing bubble" even as housing prices continued increasing after they called it:
Few people who speak of bubbles even have the concept of an "anti-bubble", which is why Sumner had to invent the term "negative bubble" (which I misremembered as anti-bubble).
> The 1929 bubble is the easiest to explain with fundamentals. Studies have shown that stocks were not grossly overpriced in 1929, and the collapse has a very good “fundamental” explanation—the Great Depression.
“He doesn’t have an eating disorder! His starvation has a perfectly serviceable alternative explanation - vomiting and not eating!”
> How many remember frequent predictions of bubbles, that turned out not to be bubbles
And there were millions of crank claims of flight until planes flew, and most day traders losing money doesn’t mean none make money
I wouldn't deny the existence of anti-bubbles, but they seem to be rarer and/or shallower than bubbles.
And, logically, they should be. No matter how clearly and correctly you recognize a bubble, it is difficult to profit from it without taking on a large risk. An anti-bubble, you can just buy the grossly undervalued asset on the cheap and hold it until the bubble anti-breaks. There's still the risk of being *wrong* and holding on to a lot of stock in a buggy-whip manufacturer, but not the risk of being right but margin-called into bankruptcy before you can profit from it.
So the anti-bubbles should generally be popped earlier, and this tracks with my casual observation.
Prediction markets are for questions that can actually be resolved, not matters of taste. So if the thing being sold is a security that pays $1 if average global temperature exceeds value X in a certain year, the payoff is determined by such actual facts rather than fads.
"If the odds are too balanced, then it's a horse race and also not very interesting"
On the contrary, it's very interesting if that turns out to be the case! People might be insisting something is obvious, but a horse race suggests otherwise.
One draw for me is this: there are a lot of pundits. There are a lot of self-proclaimed experts on every side of every issue. You can't know how knowledgeable they actually are, only how convincing they are.
I can imagine there being a handful of people that have a very clear idea of, say, how the Middle East works - but they'll never be on TV, because every time you ask them a question, they say "Well, it depends...".
Instead, who gets a large platform is people that are really good at appearing smart. This may be correlated with actually being smart, but it's definitely not the same thing.
Prediction markets would work as a tool to identify the former and weed out the latter.
Unfortunately, prediction markets don't really work. They are not that fun to participate in, because there's no immediate feedback, and they're not that great at predicting stuff, possibly because they can't attract enough motivated people.
Work on what, though? "Joe bet $X that there would be a nuclear explosion in Upsidedowntania by March 39th against Bill betting $Y it would go well, Joe was correct" and how does that effect the wider world?
So far, prediction markets seem to be a combination of navel gazing and gambling for people who think they're too smart for what they are doing to be called gambling. Granted, it's hard to demonstrate they will have a good/bad effect on wider society until they get adopted widely, but what exactly are they good for?
Regrettably the invite to Winnipeg arrived with too little notice for me to make the 850-mile drive from Chicago. It did at least enhance my morning with a delightful touch of AI weirdness, no harm no foul.
I'm now very curious why, out of the dozens of events listed in that email, Google Calendar decided the Winnipeg event and *only* that event warranted an auto-created entry.
I can't think of any special connections I might have to Winnipeg, real or Google-imagined, and any of the events in Ontario would have been closer by hundreds of miles. Is there something special about the event description? I guess it's the only event that that it doesn't have a "Coordinates" item, and the only one before Europe that mentions a restaurant instead of a park.
This sponsored automated calendar brought to you by TourismWinnipeg in association with Google AI pilot project! Come to beautiful, historical Winnipeg!
No, you don't understand. You *will* come. You don't have a choice in this.
(For all of us who pooh-poohed AI risk, now we have an example of it in action! 🤣)
Now that you mention it... we can't eliminate that possibility.
I overlooked another piece of the puzzle - Google got the date wrong. My calendar event was scheduled for 6:00pm on August 28, when the real Winnipeg event is listed for the same time of day, but on Sep 9. There are (were) several other events scheduled for the 28th, but none of them at that exact time of day.
I suspect the calender events were generated from the e-mail substack sends out. So the question is if gmail does OCR on your e-mails, rather than if google search does OCR on websites.
There is a lot of covid-related school closure/learning loss literature out there, as well as on broader effects of school closures. I'm posting this one because Hanushek is a big deal in the area of economics of education and because it has a brief section on previous school closures or disruptions which comes to a different conclusion than the ACX piece. https://www.oecd.org/education/The-economic-impacts-of-coronavirus-covid-19-learning-losses.pdf
Oh, so that's why I got a message saying I had a restaurant reservation in Winnipeg. I did wonder about that, but seeing it was for, like, right then, I elected to ignore it rather than try to figure out how to cancel it.
If you reply to someone's comment, then the person gets an e-mail with your reply, and the e-mail includes "like", "view", and "reply" buttons. I believe this is the only way to "like" a comment on ACX, by clicking the "like" button in the e-mail.
How would you run basic tests for whether a nuclear power plant is leaking radiation, or causing health damage in some other way (assuming you don't trust the government to be honest about it)?
Walking around the area with a Geiger counter seems like the obvious one. Testing the tap water in the nearby town for radiation also seems required (looks like there's a bunch of home water radiation testing kits available online - does anyone know how reliable it scalable they are?) Anything else I'm missing?
On a completely unrelated note, there's rumors that the Israeli nuclear/textile plant in dimona leaks radiation, causing high rates of cancer in dimona. Does anyone know any trustworthy data on this? Is this even a plausible thing to be worried about?
Detect ambient radiation carried by the wind? Probably wouldn’t be enough for small leaks but it works for big ones. Should check both groundwater and river water. Could also put a Geiger counter (or whatever counters for the types of radiation you’re worried about) on a drone and transmit the data back to base as it suicides into the plant. I don’t speak squiggles so I can’t google stuff but I think most nuclear plants have very strict monitoring for leaks of all kinds and there should be something of that available online.
You could also check data from nearby measuring stations. Chernobyl was "discovered" in the west when the meters at a Swedish nuclear plant went way up (they thought they themselves had a minor leak at first). But the best way is probably to just use a Geiger counter, they're not that expensive.
On that note, even I minor leak would probably be impossible to hide (to many nerds with Geiger counters), even if you wanted to do so. I can't think of any historical leak that was hidden for more than a couple of days. I'd be much more worried of a leak of something non-radioactive but cancerogenic.
Detect cancerogenics? Maybe: there are lots and lots of chemicals that can cause cancer. Some are unknown. Testing can rule out some compounds. More advanced tests can rule out more, but are harder to do. And the chemical might not be in the water anyway.
Commonly radiation monitoring systems are used to detect leaks at nuclear plants. In particular gamma and neutron detectors can be used similar to the ones here. https://www.mirion.com/products/area-monitoring
The radiation generally doesn't get loose on its own. Direct radiation works on line-of-sight, and if there's a hole clean through the wall of the reactor core and containment structure, then people would probably notice that in short order.
The fuel rods, control rods, and the structure of the reactor core are all solids (unless something has gone terribly wrong) and are generally pretty reliable at staying where they're put.
As far as I know, the main bit that's nontrivially radioactive and at risk of leaking is the primary coolant, which is a fluid and becomes radioactive from absorbing neutrons from the reactor core. If the primary coolant is leaking, then you should be able to notice that by monitoring coolant levels in your primary coolant loop.
And in general, one of the benefits of the containment building is that anything that escape from the reactor core will still be inside the containment building. By putting up radiation detectors inside the containment building but outside the core, you should notice leaks early before the radiation leaks into the outside environment.
It's not really radiation per se that will be the major concern, as long as you aren't standing right next to the core the inverse square law will make it difficult for radiation to hurt you. The major concern would be the leakage of radioisotopes into the environment, because you could eat or breathe these and then they would irradiate your cells for a long time at an exceedingly close range (microns to inches). For example the most dangerous long-term result of the Chernobyl accident was the release of something like 3 million curies of cesium-137 and 250,000 curies of strontium-90, which both have moderately long half-lives (so they are both highly radioactive and stick around a while), and which are unusually dangerous biologically for slightly different reasons. (A lot of I-131 was also released, but it has a much shorter half life so while it was very dangerous initially it goes away in a few weeks.)
A reasonable and accurate check would be to examine nearby groundwater for the presence of unusual levels of Cs-137 (there's a natural amount from atmospheric nuclear tests), as it's a characteristic product of uranium fission, and its compounds dissolve readily in water, which contributes to its spread, and it would be a direct measure of health risk.
However, the only way I know to reliably detect Cs-137 is through gammy ray spectroscopy. There are professional tools that do this, but they're not cheap. Here's someone who built a homebrew spectrometer, though:
Hang on, strontium's a problem because it's taken up by bones (ditto radium and plutonium), and iodine's a problem because it's taken up by the thyroid, but where's the especial issue with cesium (compared to equivalently-radioactive stuff)?
Partly because Group 1A salts are generally highly water soluble, so cesium gets around. As for the biological uptake, recall that the two most common ions in the body (Na+ and K+) are also in Group 1A. So just as Sr+2 substitutes for Ca+2 in the bones, Cs+ substitutes for Na+ and K+ in all kinds of places.
Note that there is a difference between "leaking radiation" and "leaking radioactivity".
Radiation is emitted by radioactive isotopes of elements produced in nuclear reactors, as well as directly by fissions. Fissions won't generally occur outside a nuclear reactor.
"Leaking radiation" means that while the radioactive isotopes are confined, there is not enough radiation shielding around the reactor, and as such things in close proximity (and *only* things in close proximity) will be irradiated. This is sometimes done deliberately - radiation sources for medical and other uses need an openable hole in their shielding, else they won't irradiate anything. You don't generally need to worry about this one unless you plan on visiting (or working at) the reactor site, reprocessing site and/or waste disposal site - buildings, the horizon, and even long distances through air are pretty good at attenuating ionising radiation, and it can't turn corners.
"Leaking radioactivity" means that the radioactive isotopes are not confined, and are leaking (as dust, solution, gas, etc.) into the environment, where they can then irradiate things. As bored-anon says, groundwater and river water are obvious places to check. Dusts/gases (such as what was released from Windscale or Chernobyl) are trickier to check reliably from ground level, although airborne dusts coming from nuclear reactors are pretty rare outside of accidents (the usual case is if the core is open to the air and on fire; the former has occasionally been designed into the more cowboyish reactors - such as Windscale - but the latter is emphatically not an intended part of nuclear reactor operation).
If you're just concerned about yourself rather than Uncovering The Truth - having a Geiger counter on your person, plus testing your water and food ought to do it. Only radiation that hits you or gets produced inside you is dangerous to you. I note *food* because plants can take up radioactive isotopes from soil or groundwater (and animals that eat those plants can take them up in turn).
What's the hydrology in the Negev like? Presumably anything that leaks out in water is either reaching the dead sea or drying up and accumulating somewhere in the desert.
Does the Jordanian government send people with geiger counters along the border?
So here's my problem. My wife has turned anti-vaccine and is refusing to allow our kids to get vaccinated if children are recommended the vaccine (as looks like will happen where we live). What does one do in this situation if (like me) you think the vaccines are the best defence against whatever horrible variant of COVID is currently evolving somewhere?
For background, I always knew that my wife's family were anti-vaccine, but this is the first time it's been imported into our house. I've obviously tried rational argument, persuasion, appeals to authority and the rest––she's not budging on the "vaccines are untested and will make our kids infertile (or whatever)" line. This is unsupported by any evidence beyond anti-vaxx propaganda from wackadoodle world.
This specific problem is about vaccines, but I should also say that I'm finding it very hard not to read my wife's thoughts on the vaccine as a verdict on something bigger.
Sorry to hear this. I'm sure you have tried rational argument. If you've not tried this, one thing to try might be irrational argument, i.e. appeals to emotion. That might mean talk about individual cases, show the videos of people begging others to get vaccinated, show the nasty side of some anti-vaxx people. Maybe look up some online tutorials, I'm sure there are some, maybe even ones heavily research-backed.
Failing that: the safety of your kids, and others', are at risk. This is more important than any feelings your wife has. So, could you sort it out in secret? Even a very elaborate and difficult plan could well be worth it by any practical measure, and morally it's the right thing to do.
The first strategy seems likely to make her dig in further. The second should only be tried if he is legitimately willing to end his marriage over this.
Hard disagree. COVID is not significantly dangerous to children, nor are children appreciably contagious when they get it, so absent the signaling value of "my kids are vaxxed" the vaccine is of very little value to them. Both strategies described here are waaaaay beyond the pale.
And, of course, we know have this confirmed incident where an unvaccinated Marin County (California) teacher infected the whole front row of her class (by reading to them out loud). For some reason, she came to work while symptomatic. I wonder if anyone has done IQ and personality studies of the anti-vaccine crowd. Is there some sort of reasoning deficit affecting these people? Or are they just bullheadedly self-centered?
And, to MasteringTheClassics point, some of these kids infected their parents. Luckily Marin County, even at back in May when this happened, had a very high vaccine uptake rate. So I don't think this outbreak spread beyond the parents.
Not sure where you're getting your data from, but some links would help us to evaluate the probable validity of your statement. Whether or not Delta is increased hospitalizations among school-age children, I think you can assume that a child with a symptomatic COVID-19 infection is probably shedding the virus at the same rate as an infected adult. Unless you can identify a possible mechanism that they wouldn't, I think your assertion that children are not "appreciably contagious" is likely wrong.
Per the July 9 update from CDC (link below), they note that there are dearth of studies about the impact of new variants on school-age children. Referencing older studies, the CDC points out...
"In the United States through March 2021, the estimated cumulative rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 symptomatic illness in children ages 5-17 years were comparable to infection and symptomatic illness rates in adults ages 18-49 and higher than rates in adults ages 50 and older. Estimated cumulative rates of infection and symptomatic illness in children ages 0-4 years are roughly half of those in children ages 5-17 years, but are comparable to those in adults ages 65 years or older. These cumulative rates were estimated from CDC models that account for under-detection among reported cases."
Thanks. I've tried the showing the stories of anti-vaxx DJ/politician/personality gets COVID and changes his mind, but the reply is always that there's no need for children to get the vaccine. The COVID causes cognitive decline gave a slight hesitation, but not by much.
We snuck my 11 year old daughter in to get vaccinated early so we are very pro vaccine. But to me the risk to children do not warrant deception or risking the loss of trust in your marriage. For under 12 kids I think the benefit/cost are pretty marginal and not worth screwing up your marriage over.
Well.... The evidence about whether the very small risk from the vaccines is currently smaller than the very small risk from Covid for children is still in the balance, so I wouldn't feel too bad about it.
It sounds like the main problem is less whether it's a good idea to give this specific vaccine to children (something about which reasonable people can disagree), than that you and your wife do not trust one another's reasoning or sources of information.
That may be more likely to adversely affect your children's lives than either Covid or vaccine side effects, both being very small risks if they don't have other major health issues.
"Anti-vaxx propaganda from wackadoodle world" is very inflammatory, and I could see, if you're using that language openly, why your wife would want to dig her heels in even if her preference was fairly weak to begin with. I generally like vaccines, and think this one sounds basically useful and safe, and the current levels of shrill preachiness are still making me kind of regret getting it.
A good place to start is to demonstrate that you can tell where she's coming from, and why she listens to the sources she does. Do you understand where she's coming from? Going by this post, it sounds like not. A lot of people currently feel like they're living in Stalinist Russia, with an antagonistic government, media, and scientific community, that has very different interests from theirs, with no desire or ability to pursue their best interests.
I guess the main issue is that her main source of information is her family, who are then informed by the usual suspects on social media. So it's more a question of "my sister has done research on this and I trust her", when her sister is touting ivermectin on the back of the Weinstein brothers or whoever.
Try to get her to fully and step by step explain her reasoning, people usually break down from this, especially if their belief is illogical. She'll probably then just become sullen and stubborn, but maybe it will work.
This eventually gets to "well, there's stuff in vaccines we just aren't told about and that's what I'm resisting". I mean, there no doubt is, just like there is in milkshakes or mustard or the family car ...
But don't forget about the Arbutus Biopharma nanoparticles that are carrying the mRNA! Either they (a) are small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier, or (b) they are not dissolving until they reach the bloodstream and are releasing the mRNA into our system to pass through the BBB! Because studies have shown small quantities of mRNA reaching rat brains! And since the spike protein mRNA is now in our brain tissue, once we get the third dose Pfizer, our immune system will start attacking our neurons, and we'll all come down with Alzheimer's.
If so, we should start seeing a lot of people who received their booster dose displaying cognitive problems in the next few weeks. Waiting with bated breath! <#snarkasm>
The risk to children is very low, might even be less than the risk of adverse results to the vaccine. The other issue is the risk of the kids getting infected and passing it on to you. If both of you are vaccinated that's pretty low. If your wife isn't — it's her life, and if she is under 50 the risk to her is pretty low as well.
I got vaccinated and think most people should. On the other hand, I think it's clear that authoritative sources of information such as Fauci and the NYT are routinely dishonest, say what they want people to believe not what they believe is true, which gives me some sympathy with those who don't trust such sources on this issue. Happy to expand on that if you disagree.
Please expand? We're in the UK, so Fauci at al are less relevant here. But I am hearing a lot of "the authorities were wrong about masks and viral spread and herd immunity; therefore they're wrong on this."
I'd argue that Fauci, CDC, and WHO were not being dishonest, rather it's been their SOP to be very cautious with their messaging. They've always been much more concerned with not making positive claims that might later be proven false than providing useful advice in a timely fashion. They weren't lying about masks and viral spread, rather they they just extremely conservative in the way they evaluated the new data that was coming in, and they were organizationally clinging to the null hypothesis until the counter-evidence was overwhelming.
For instance, the Chinese response to their epidemic early on showed that mask-wearing and social distancing greatly reduced the spread of the virus. In fact, China recommended these steps to WHO and CDC in late Feb '20. Both organizations ignored the evidence, and instead relied on a transmission model that was 60 years out of date.
The evidence on Fauci is from his own words. He was interviewed in, I believe, the New York Times, and said he had decided to raise his estimate of what was required for herd immunity in response to polling evidence showing an increased number of people willing to be vaccinated. That evidence couldn't change what was needed for herd immunity, only what he wanted people to believe. So either his previous estimate or his new estimate was a lie. What I found surprising about that was that it didn't occur to him to conceal the fact that his purported scientific opinion wasn't.
On masks, Fauci early on was arguing they did no good, and his later explanation was that he was trying to discourage people from buying up masks because they were needed for medical personnel. That might be wise, but it was pretty clearly dishonest. The CDC has never, so far as I know, produced serious scientific evidence that masks work, only anecdotes, and they have never made a serious push to distinguish between masks that they have some reason to expect to work and tying a bandanna over your face, and limit mask mandates to the former. That looks to me like the "something must be done. This is something" sort of policy. There's a pretty good discussion of the evidence on masks here:
As Fauci wearing a Pinocchio nose, I don't remember hearing about his herd immunity "triangulation", but he *is* a politician as much as he is an MD. You don't get to the top of the NIH without having abundant political skills as well academic chops — which means you have to kiss ass, bully, lie, arm twist, sooth, weep crocodile tears, and shake hands with people you hate. On the whole he's been less wrong than say Anders Tegnell, all the "experts" who signed The Great Barrington Declaration, anyone at the Hoover or Cato institutes.
But, yes, I do remember Fauci claiming that he only recommended against masks because there was a shortage. The thing is, we don't really know his original reasoning for being dismissive of masks. However, I don't go as far as to say he was lying, only that he was spinning messages for reasons unknown to us. I would love to have the late Mike Wallace interview him, to see if and how he could hold his own against the master interrogator. Lol!
Yes, I agree with you the CDC has certainly uselessly muddle the mask data into recommendations that actually may not work at all well — such as double masking always being a good idea (for a KF94 mask it's a bad idea because it defeats the purpose of the mask's design). There's certainly lots of studies now about masks, and comparisons of how well different mask types and materials work. And the CDC seems to have not bothered to update their information. But is that lying? Or is it just bureaucratic inertia and consensus by committee? Who knows...
I suggest you not listen to bullshit articles about mask effectiveness on the MSM (or any SARS-CoV-2 related subject for that matter). Most journalists aren't capable of evaluating the scientific arguments and studies on their own, and they tend to rely on "experts" who will match their confirmational biases.
But if you look at the research papers there's a huge load of evidence that masks work. If you consider yourself to be rationalist, and moreover a if you consider yourself to be Bayesian rationalist, here's some bedtime reading for you. If you're not a rationalist, well, I'm wasting my time...
This is your standard reminder, from someone who has looked at far too many research papers on this particular matter, that anyone who makes claims regarding the efficiency of "masks" without specifying what *kind* of mask, is probably wasting your time.
I'm afraid I don't know about information sources in the U.K.
One result of Trump getting elected was that quite a lot of people in the U.S. media concluded that telling the truth was less important than not saying anything that might help Trump. One place that intersected Covid issues was the question of its origin. It was obvious from the beginning that a lab leak was a likely source, given that it first appeared within a few miles of a Chinese lab doing research on bat viruses. But Trump mentioned that possibility so it was widely treated as obviously wrong until he was safely out of office, at which point people started discussing the question again.
I think elite sources of opinion have always been willing to shade the truth in service of either a good story or their political preferences, but it seems to have gotten worse in the US in recent years. I don't know if the same thing happened in the U.K. The easiest test is to take some subject you actually know a good deal about and look at how it gets discussed in the media, ideally something that many people have reasons to push beliefs about independent of their truth or falsity.
It sounds like you are talking specifically about kids 12 or under, and specifically COVID vaccine. In which case, you might treat this the way your wife's hypothetical fear of guns was preventing you from buying an AR-15 to protect your children against rampaging herds of 30-50 feral hogs. While it is theoretically *possible* for your child to be killed or seriously injured by rampaging feral hogs, or by COVID, both outcomes are sufficiently rare that you'll probably do OK if you ignore the threat.
The much bigger threat is the great many childhood diseases that, unlike COVID, have actually killed young children in significant numbers and for which vaccines are well established as a safe and effective defense. So if your wife is currently OK with vaccinating your children against those diseases (and if they are young enough that there are still regular childhood-disease vaccines on the schedule), be wary of upsetting that apple cart. People can maintain a level of cognitive dissonance where COVID vaccines are an Evil Conspiracy but e.g. MMR vaccines are fine. They are also capable, if you force them to come up with a "logical" defense for their fear of COVID vaccines, of deciding that all the other vaccines have to go as well.
>So if your wife is currently OK with vaccinating your children against those diseases (and if they are young enough that there are still regular childhood-disease vaccines on the schedule), be wary of upsetting that apple cart.
This is a very insightful point. She *is* OK with the other vaccines and always was; partly, I expect, because she got them herself. But you are absolutely correct that it will only take a nudge to send those vaccines into "all vaccines are potential poison that will make our kids infertile." (I have independent experiences of cognitive contagion like this with her.)
Hey man, I'm really sorry to hear this. I'm sure you know this but this issue is almost certainly not limited to the vaccine. Your wife didn't wake up one day and say "hey, I really find the arguments for vaccinating children to be uncompelling". I'm not sure why she feels the vaccine sucks but the answer is almost certainly not the object level science or whatever. This is the most important question for you to figure out.
My guesses would probably be that the people who say the vaccine are "the best thing ever" are distasteful to her. Maybe those people make her feel condescended to and she wants to retain her agency in not capitulating to them. Maybe you make her feel condescended to (too far? sorry) and this compounded with her media diet illicits a strong protective maternal instinct to save her kids at all costs. The stakes are clearly very high on her end and it sounds like on your end too.
My advice would be to lower the stakes of the conversation. COVID isn't the measles and the vaccines aren't thalidomide. This is not worth getting divorced over. That's obviously stupid. She's the mother of your kids for a reason. Literally every person I know well holds at least one completely insane belief. Welcome to being in relationship with other humans.
All of this is true, but it doesn't make it any the less dismaying to see a rational human being fall into a cognitive trap like this. She's religious and I'm not; I can accept this because religion been shaped by centuries of use to co-exist with and probably confer benefits on the societies that exhibit it (i.e. all of them).
But this anti-vaxx stuff ... it's hard to stomach.
I am not sure what motivates her, but if she is worried about new unproven things created by scientist maybe play up the idea that COVID was genetically engineered by Chinese scientist in Wuhan.
How exactly does "she's religious and I'm not" follow for you here? The vaccine (as a vaccine) does not seem like a religious question. The vaccine (as a cultural signifier) is. Perhaps the vaccine question is a proxy for a bigger values-disagreement between you and your wife here...
I think the meaning is that the wife is literally religious (believes in god, goes to church), not that her anti-vax beliefs are held with religious fervor.
The anti-vaxx stuff is very distasteful on a lot of levels. But I don't think that matters.
Rationality is largely overrated in relationships. I'm not sure the idea of relationships themselves perform well through a rationality framework.
Would you rather be with a rational human being or someone who will lie to the police for you? Relationships are tribal and tapping into those primal needs will be what ultimately reconciles this conflict (in my opinion).
I feel like you've given the best advice in this thread, so a genuine question: How do you think addressing the underlying primal needs differs from rationality?
Imo, if you address a situation "rationally," you must necessarily speak to the underlying needs in a way that will resolve the dispute; if you do not so speak to the underlying needs, your "rational solutions" are (rationally speaking) non-sequiturs.
Re: lying to the police. I'd like to be with somebody who would lie to the police if and only if it is right to do so. I think this capacity requires steady rationality as well as emotional awareness. Likewise, I think any resolution of conflict will require the rational and emotion working in harmonious tandem.
I generally use definitions by their de facto effects more than de jure assertions. In other words, a flooded parking lot is better described as a pool than by the parking lot sign. In that vein, Rationality (TM) is the set of beliefs and actions held by people describing themselves as rationalists. The consenus view in this thread was something other than addressing human needs. And that's fine. It's just not effective. Addressing the "object level" concerns tends to be a rationalist pattern of engagement. The movement is called Rationality, not Effectiveness.
Re:lying to the police, yea I guess that's just a set of preferences on my part. I value the hardcore loyalty of tribalism. And to be clear, I'm thankful and appreciative of our local police force and support them over suspects everyday of the year. My close relationships just trump all those concerns in my own value hierarchy.
So addressing needs may be rationality but it is not Rationality. If this is your position I think you have it absolutely right.
Re: lying to the police: Do you think people can be too loyal? Strictly I mean so loyal that it defeats the ends of the loyalty in the first place, but loosely I just mean that loyalty ends up not being good for them or for you.
--
OOC, why do you prefer de facto definitions? To me: R is only r sometimes, but r is r all the time. R then confusingly becomes both r and not r.
Moreover, R by itself seems to be an empty label, signifying nothing. Likewise for all de facto definitions.
"Literally every person I know well holds at least one completely insane belief. Welcome to being in relationship with other humans."
I'd say there's a lot of insane beliefs out there, and it's often a matter of picking your poison. Look at the whole transgender kid stuff. But there's some distance between making that compromise and convincing yourself there isn't a problem.
I would just wait. You've made it this far, it would seem fairly reasonable that events over the next year will solve the problem for you. Maybe a variant *will* emerge that kills kids, and it will be in the news, and I would guess she will change her mind rapidly then. Or maybe the schools will require them. Or maybe in a year the irrational heat around the issue will fade away, it won't be so much of a tribal identification ritual -- and in any event there will be an extra year of "testing" (in all the rest of us guinea pigs) to reduce the cogency of the "untested" argument.
Yes, this could be a wise choice. I am disproportionately exercised by the topic now, and maybe I'll care less too. I'm also of the view that if COVID had the symptoms of say, Ebola, everyone on Earth would be screaming for the vaccine, so maybe a change of COVID virulence will make the difference.
If COVID has the symptoms of Ebola, then the risk would be several orders of magnitude higher - of course everyone would be screaming for the vaccine. You say that you're disproportionately exercised (incensed?) by the topic now - why is that? As several other people have pointed out in this thread, the risk of covid to children is essentially nil. Vaccinating them is certainly the pro-social choice, but as to the your own kids, their covid vaccination status is far down the list of decisions you make about them that will affect their health outcomes. You say that you're "dismay[ed] to see a rational human being fall into a cognitive trap like this", but I'd really encourage you to turn that mirror on yourself and try to sus out how much of your pro-vax position is tribal signaling vs an honest cost-benefit assessment. IMO that cost-benefit comes out positive, but its a marginal benefit and not something to stress over. Especially for a relationship as important as one with a spouse I would personally only press the issue if my kids had other health conditions that significantly raised their risk profile, or if the issue was over much nastier diseases that we vaccinate against.
I'm not so foolish as to think that I'm above tribal signalling, and especially in favour of the "I'm-too-smart-to-belong-to-a-tribe" tribe. However, there's a big difference between two people weighing up a the probabilities and coming to a reasonable disagreement as to the risk-reward trade-off, and what's happening in my house.
If the health authorities recommend vaccination and the statistics look reasonable, I'll get my kids vaccinated; if they don't, I won't––I'm not shilling for the vaccines. The problem I'm having is that my wife gets false information from poor sources (her family) and insinuates vaccine roll-out is being driven by big pharma who want to make profit at the cost of making our daughters infertile. This is not a rational way to think.
You say that "the risk of covid to children is essentially nil". Maybe it is and maybe it isn't; I'm not a medic and I couldn't say for sure. That's why I make the point about vaccinating if the public health authorities recommend it, and only then.
What is the need behind your wife's resistance? Are you appealing to that when you argue? A lot of the times when folks find rational argument unpersuasive, it's because the rational argument does not address the underlying needs from which the irrationality springs.
I had a friend who ate so much sugar that he developed rashes and could not sleep. He insisted the sugar was good for him. Trying to convince him that this was irrational and unhealthy and bad for him did not work.
What worked much better was first uncovering that he ate sugar primarily for pleasure. From here, we reasoned that eating that much sugar contrary to his reasons for eating sugar in the first place. That is, eating that much sugar for pleasure was actually unpleasurable. If he wanted more pleasure he would eat less sugar.
My point here is that often someone else's "irrational" position can be dissolved only by showing it to be inconsistent with the person's own reason for holding that position.
Strange that everyone is giving you advice on how to convince a rationalist that they should vaccinate thier kids, when you obviously need marital advice. You won't get that here, but you should seek it out.
I mean what else would one expect? I typed about several paragraphs of decisive pieces of data (like, it’s been >9 months since the first vaccines, and no fertility drops have been observed by the extensive monitoring programs) and that’s a lot more interesting than marital advice, which also probably depends on his situation (try a bunch of different approaches and see what works and expect it to take a while)
Lots of people have said to just let it go, which is good advice (pending a new variant that is way more risky to kids).
I think it's rare for a marriage to never have big conflicts about how to raise kids. There are obvious things like religion and school and sports that usually get signaled ahead of time.
"Is this worth fighting about? --> Probably not" is a heuristic most people learn early in relationships. Sometimes both people decide it *is* worth fighting about *and* come to different conclusions.
Macha_, I'm sorry your family is in a tough spot. Unfortunately, it's difficult to offer good advice based on what you've shared so far.
IMHO, some aspects of dynamics between you and your wife that are important to understand have to do with how you negotiate your differences in religiosity both in a practical sense, and also in an epistemic sense. If one of you happens to hold a modicum of contempt for another's worldview and hopes to change them, win them over, or sidestep their outlook when it comes to parenting (and thus effectively stamp out that thought lineage), you have yourself a bit of a complexifier, as Bezos might have put it. I'm not saying something like this would be beyond fixing, I'm saying that something like this would call for a professional (a family/couple's counselor) to be involved.
Another thought I have here is whether you have a healthy mechanism to humor one another's (sporadic/rare) irrational needs out of mutual care for each other ("I need this", "Can you let this one go", "Can you let me have this" style patterns). You'd need to have layered dealing with parenting related peccadillos on top of that pattern and have figured out a working relationship already in order to be able to leverage it in this situation (i.e., I don't think it would be effective to try and establish this type of mechanism anew right now because it would be rightly viewed as self-serving by your wife and would likely result in increased distrust).
Logic is only going to work to the extent that logic usually works in your marriage - you're not going to be able to marshal new arguments that will suddenly make logic more effective in your relationship. Think about times when your relationship was less well-established (than it is now), and you were still figuring out whether you were good long-term mates for one another. I'd hope that one of the experiences you'd both have gone through before deciding to stay together was conflict resolution and the knowledge that it was possible to receive love and generosity from the other person in ways that was very satisfying and moving - then try to re-emulate those experiences by adapting it to this particular context.
Thanks for this very good, compassionate advice. Are there deeper problems than a vaccine disagreement? Probably there are. The religiosity one is the obvious example. But where my policy here is is that raising the kids religious is the concession I make to her, the concession is not received that way. Instead, her assumption is that religion is so *obviously* correct and true that my conceding this is to be expected, even demanded. And so similarly, the vaccines pose such an *obvious* threat to the children, there is so safe way she could ever concede on this topic.
I should probably just admit you're right and there are things that need professional mediation here. When we got together it was in a different country and with a difference cultural milieu––one that was more in keeping with her belief system over mine. Now that we live somewhere else which is more consonant with my outlook, these kinds of tribal, identity-based flare-ups are more common.
And in the meantime, there kids whose welfare must be placed first ...
I'm curious if she gives any evidence for her anti-vax views? It could be a simple matter of what media she chooses to consume, so that if you could shift her to less partisan sources, her opinions would change likewise (obviously you can't shift them from right to left, but I wonder if there's something more centrist available that wouldn't offend her)
That's probably a concern your wife has as well. The fact that you have a disagreement you're trying to work out suggests that the welfare of children is paramount in both your minds, and you're both doing your best towards that very end (even though one of you is necessarily wrong on the merits). This is another shared value you can (and probably ought to) try to recognize and reinforce - so you can remind her that the two of you are a team first - as a way to plead for her show you both empathy as well as compassion.
The way to discuss risks with those who aren't receptive to "vaccines are safe" point of view - at least in my somewhat imperfect way of thinking - is not based on whether the risk of COVID-19 for children is small or large, but rather whether one can mount an effective contingency plan (when failure to receive vaccines may lead to problems later on).
Suppose I was to concede, provisionally and hypothetically, that vaccines (esp. mRNA ones) pose some risk, but only in exchange for a reciprocal concession that not being vaccinated also poses some finite risk, then the situation either becomes a stalemate, or one of assessing relative risks and contingencies.
Let's say we assume that the relative risks are similar in magnitude and focus on contingencies, the question then becomes whether one can deal effectively with the low-probability-high-impact adverse consequences of COVID-19, or whether it is preferable to deal with similar low-probability-high-impact adverse consequences of the side-effects of the vaccine itself.
This suggestion assumes that you can actually open and sustain a dialogue in good faith along these lines, and that it will lead to the outcome you hoped (and not to the opposite outcome - that's a risk that comes with good faith dialogues of this sort BTW).
In the US, COVID hospitalization rate for children about ~1 child per 1000.
About ~3 children per 1000 end up in ER after receiving the vaccine (~1 per 1000 after the dose, ~2 per 1000 after the second dose). Given that the risks seem comparable, what is the rational argument in favor of vaccinating children?
The first report doesn't say what (I think) you think it says. It does indeed say 0.2% of children end up in the ER a week after being given an mRNA vaccine, but what it does not say is that they end up in the ER *because* of the mRNA vaccine. It is entirely possible that the trip to the ER is coincidental, or trivial (plenty of people take their kid to the ER for a fever of 104, which is not actually especially dangerous and not especially uncommon for ordinary viral infections).
This is in fact strongly emphased on page 10 of the report, which has a big purple arrow pointing to "key limitations: Generally, cannot determine cause and effect" meaning all they know is 0.2% of kids made a trip to the ER after a COVID vaccine. Why? Is there a connection? Nobody knows yet.
On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that actually being hospitalized *for* COVID is a fairly serious situation most definitely directly caused by COVID.
So this is kind of apples and oranges here. Unfortunately the data you would need to do apples-to-apples, which is a careful study of medical treatment needed *because* of a COVID vaccine, is not generally available. In principle it lurks within the VAERS data that are the basis for this report, but someone needs to go back through all those cases and characterize the medical care -- was it trivial or serious? -- and try to winkle out whether it was a result of the vaccine, or just coindence. That hasn't been done yet.
"what it does not say is that they end up in the ER *because* of the mRNA vaccine. "
According to the data from the vaccine trials, the likelihood of side-effects is significantly higher after the second dose. If children end up in the ER for reasons unrelated to the vaccine, why would the observed rate double after the second dose?
"On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that actually being hospitalized *for* COVID is a fairly serious situation most definitely directly caused by COVID."
Do you happen to have data on what fraction of children hospitalized with COVID are hospitalized *for* COVID? Given that over ~1/3 of the population in the US have been infected with COVID in the past year, a significant fraction of children hospitalized with COVID might be hospitalized for unrelated reasons.
1) That the side-effects after the second dose are more common is a non-sequitur. The side-effects in question are pain, muscle aches, fever -- nothing at all that would require hospitalization. The more serious side effects that are known to be correlated (myocarditis) are sufficiently rare that they weren't discovered in the clinical trials.
2) "If the children end up in the ER for reasons unrelated to the vaccine, why would the observed rate double after the second dose?"
I actually have no idea what this means, sorry. Perhaps you can find some other way to put it?
3) Probably most data on hospitalizations comes from the HHS Hospital Reporting Data Hub:
There's a link there where you can see the data fields that are reported. Hospitals are supposed to report pediatric patients hospitalized with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID in field #18, if I'm reading this correctly. Whether some might report in this field a kid admitted for, say, a fracture who also happened to have COVID I do not know, but I suspect most would not, because it just gums up the data and they know that.
On the other hand, the data on complications per se comes from the VAERS system, and no attempt is made in that system to establish at the time of reporting a link -- indeed, there isn't any easy way to do that. So it's generally accepted that this is just initial data, and should not be used to make estimates of the magnitude of any causal relationships -- which is what you're doing, and which is exactly what was warning against in the report you quote with the big purple arrow.
As I said, so far as I know, the comparison you want to make just isn't possible right now, because the appropriate data have not collected. I'm sure there's people working feverishly on it, but it's not out there yet, except in small study populations.
0.000493 is around 5 hospitalizations per 10,000 children (not 1000).
Also, given that between ~1/3 and 1/2 of the population have been infected so far, one needs to multiply the risk of hospitalization in case of COVID infection by a factor of ~2-3.
Thanks for those links. I don't understand exactly what is being measured in the second link, but it doesn't look like "infection hospitalization rate", by which I mean the number of hospitalizations divided by the actual number of infections (which is unknown but presumably estimable; also note that my thinking here is that almost every unvaccinated person will eventually be infected, such that this metric is the correct one... but on second thought, children get sick from Covid rarely enough that I wonder if some children go beyond merely being asymptomatic into having some sort of natural immunity, or a very rapid and effective immune response). Plus the two links use substantially different age groups.
Nonetheless, 0.1% sounds vaguely plausible to me, while it is the 0.3% number that is much higher than I expected. I wish I knew how much this hospitalization corresponds to an actual danger, as opposed to an abundance of caution. I've seen reports suggesting that mRNA vaccine doses are too large, but smaller doses aren't being offered so... sigh.
Probably the chance of death is higher with Covid than with vaccines. I have felt, though, that both chances are very tiny, and perhaps the difference is so small that the main reason to vaccinate is to reduce contagiousness after exposure to Covid, in order to avoid infecting others. OTOH, the kind of person that refuses to vaccinate their kids also tends to be the kind of person who doesn't care much about not infecting others. Plus they might just argue that "meh, people can infect others even if they are immune themselves."
Since we don't know the baseline hospitalization rate for children, this is the absolute upper bound for the badness of the vaccine.
The absolute lower bound is that the ~1 per 1000 is the normal number of kids who go to the ER each week normally, and that only ~1 child per 1000 is because of the vaccine.
In summary, “Four IC elements and the National Intelligence Council assess with low confidence that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus”. However, “one IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident”. Three IC elements couldn’t come to a conclusion. Importantly, the IC as a whole agreed that China did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial COVID-19 outbreak emerged.
Before the review, only two agencies favored the natural origin theory, according to NYTimes. So whatever secret information the IC has access to that we don’t, it pushed two (three?) of the agencies toward the natural origin theory.
It’s fairly short (9 pages of text) and relatively non-technical by scientific paper standards. To summarize the arguments, (1) lots of zoonotic coronavirus have infected humans; (2) the earliest SARS-CoV-2 cases were clustered around the Huanan wet market, as expected for a zoonotic origin; (3) the WIV was not known to be working on any virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 (not even as similar as RaTG13), and there would have been no reason to hide such work before the pandemic; (4) more recent common ancestors than RaTG13 have been found in the wild since the pandemic began; (5) past recombinant virus research at WIV has used the WIV1 backbone, which is unrelated to SARS-CoV-2; (6) the furin cleavage site is present in a lot of coronaviruses, and the one in SARS-CoV-2 is suboptimal.
Some interesting facts I learned:
1. “In direct parallel to SARS-CoV-2, HCoV-HKU1, which was first described in a large Chinese city (Shenzhen, Guangdong) in the winter of 2004, has an unknown animal origin, contains a furin cleavage site in its spike protein, and was originally identified in a case of human pneumonia (Woo et al., 2005).”
2. “bat virus RaTG13 from the WIV has reportedly never been isolated nor cultured and only exists as a nucleotide sequence assembled from short sequencing reads”
3. Although RaTG13 has the highest genetic similarity to SARS-CoV-2, a history of recombination means that 3 other viruses have a more recent common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2. These are RmYN02, RpYN06, and PrC31, which were all sequenced after the pandemic had begun. So SARS-CoV-2 was not derived directly from RaTG13 (which we knew already), and scientists are making progress in tracking down the natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 (which I didn’t know before).
4. Page 31, showing the geographic distribution of the earliest cases. “Two of the three earliest documented COVID-19 cases were directly linked to this market selling wild animals, as were 28% of all cases reported in December 2019 (WHO, 2021). Overall, 55% of cases during December 2019 had an exposure to either the Huanan or other markets in Wuhan, with these cases more prevalent in the first half of that month (WHO, 2021)”.
This brings up an important philosophical issue: how much weight do you give to geographic coincidences? If you give them a lot of weight, and you believe it’s improbable for a zoonotic pandemic to have begun only 7.4 miles away from the Wuhan Virology Institute, then it should be downright impossible for a non-zoonotic pandemic to have begun 0 miles from a wet market and for a large fraction of the earliest cases to have traceable ties to the wet market. If you think the lack of traceable links between 72% of the December 2019 cases and the wet market is evidence the virus didn’t come from the wet market, then the lack of traceable links between 100% of the December 2019 cases and the WIV should be conclusive evidence that it didn’t come from the WIV. On the other hand, if you don’t put much weight on geographic coincidences, you could argue the wet market link means little because wet markets are crowded places with lots of people where viruses tend to spread easily--but then you’d have to agree that the coincidence that the WIV is in Wuhan means even less, because there’s no traceable link between the earliest cases and the WIV at all.
For myself, I'm not terribly concerned if it's 90-10 one way or the other, both lead squarely to a reaction of "we may never know but should try to make both less common".
The trouble with this conclusion is that either gain-of-function research should be dialed up (so as to give us better strategies against the next zoonotic pandemic) or banned (to stop the enhanced viruses from leaking). It's tough to fulfill both those strategies at once.
>so as to give us better strategies against the next zoonotic pandemic
Were any useful strategies developed as a result of such research thus far? From the outside it simply seems to be bonkers insane - unclear upside vs. catastrophic downside, a real life example of the "they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should".
There’s lots of other virology institutes and coronaviruses are common virus types and we already were working with them for SARS and Mers and it makes sense you’d detect a pandemic in the sort of city that’s have a virology institute as opposed to a small town etc
A good defence but were not the first cases detected in samples taken from September? And the wet market has already been thoroughly ruled out as the origin point.
" If you give them a lot of weight, and you believe it’s improbable for a zoonotic pandemic to have begun only 7.4 miles away from the Wuhan Virology Institute, then it should be downright impossible for a non-zoonotic pandemic to have begun 0 miles from a wet market and for a large fraction of the earliest cases to have traceable ties to the wet market. "
Lots of wet markets, and this one didn't have bats, which in any case hibernate in the winter. This virology institute was working on bat viruses — is there evidence that others were?
The paper puts a lot of weight on the Hunan Wet Market connection, even though that market doesn't seem to have sold either bats or pangolins. To that end, they discuss raccoon dogs as a potential intermediate species. I presume that's because they found raccoon dogs were being sold at the wet market. But this is the first I've heard of raccoon dogs as a pathway.
So, OK, look at their references and do some googling, and there have been papers speculating on the possibility and showing that raccoon dogs can contract and transmit SARS CoV-2 in the lab. But AFIK, nobody has ever found a raccoon dog in the wild infected with anything like SARS CoV-2.
The paper also makes a big deal of the fact that no bats have been found with Literal SARS CoV-2 or Immediate Ancestral SARS CoV-2. But the existence of bat populations infected with kissing cousins of CoV-2 is well-established, and I don't *think* there's any controversy that this started out as a COVID-like bat disease. There's also not any controversy that scientists from WIV were going out to study those very bats and then coming back to Wuhan.
So, it seems to me that one of these theories involves a known intermediary (Wuhan-based scientists) and one of them involves a purely speculative intermediary (raccoon dogs). Am I missing something, or are they stacking the deck with a raccoon-dog-shaped card?
I think anyway. I didnt have them bookmarked and pulled those up fast, so sorry if that is incomplete.
That brings up one thing i think you overlooked in your analysis: The Chinese government sure acted and is acting like they have something to hide. I mean, even if they cant prove that Covid didnt come from with WIV, why limit access to such a great extent? Why were they so insistant that the WHO team not investigate the possibility? Why not simply bring the virus database back online? And thats just the start. At every opportunity, they have chosen the course of cover up and deception, not of openness, in contrast to the past where they have been pretty up front about their virus research.
Also, your analysis looks at each item in isolation, which is good. But i think you also need to consider these things together. Sure, the FCS being encoded by (supposedly) unusual nucleotides isnt proof by itself. Neither is the fact that the WIV was manipulating coronaviruses, nor the supposed illnesses of the WIV workers or the disappearance of the virus database etc etc. But taken together, they start to look more like proof and less like coincidence.
Sorry i just dashed this response off, ill try a more thoughtful reply when i get a chance.
The Chinese government acts “hostile” when a web application has the Taiwanese flag in it, or when an Olympic official uses the word “Taiwan”, or when a foreign exchange student says “I hate China” on their Twitter account that has ten followers. It doesn’t really indicate guilt as much as it would if someone else did.
Agreed. I actually work with Chinese government agencies an I think 'something to hide' is a default setting, to the slightly weird point that they are actually more open with us (a university and research partner) than they are with other branches of government (you sometimes discover you're the vector of information between them...).
"But there was also this defensiveness around both the field because you’re asking a field . . . I’m an academic, and if somebody came to me and said, “Would you like to think about the fact that your field may have inadvertently, perhaps, even in the mildest potential case, sparked something that killed millions of people?” Of course, defensiveness is very human in that."
to people at the meetup: what does Scott's voice sound like? in my head, just because he writes in what I guess I'd term a "thoughtful style", my mental conception of his voice ends up assigning it a pleasant timbre, somewhat quiet and clipped. But as we all know, this is often a terrible assumption to make
There is a recording on youtube of him reading the final chapter of Unsong, so if you've already read Unsong or don't mind spoilers you can hear for yourself: https://youtu.be/FaifojyS_CQ?t=2116
Do you ever feign ignorance when debating with someone? I've found myself trying it.
The situation is: you want to say X. You know that saying X is going to make some people you're talking to angry, because X sounds a bit like Y. Y is something that "the other side" say. You think Y is false, and so do your friends. But Y is so toxic, if you say anything associated with it, like X, Y will come to mind. Examples in this blog post: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html
I used to clarify, disclaim, and preface a lot: "I'm about to say something that sounds like Y. We all know Y is false and bad. I believe X - that may sound like Y, but it's different because Z".
I've changed my mind; I think the best approach is to say X and let the other person bring up its connection to Y.
If you're the one who brings up the connection, from their point of view, this is a partial admission of a connection.
If they're the one who has to bring up the connection, they're offered the option of not bringing it up, and trying to attack X on its own terms. Offering that option allows them to think about how they might attack X if it wasn't related to Y. Their interest in doing that might entice them away from dwelling on the possible Y connection.
This comes partly from hearing about how to react when you've been cancelled (clarifying is taken as a sign of concession), and partly from Robin Hanson, who wrote the blog post a lot, and appears to live this himself - watch this remarked on amusingly 1m5s into this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBRwDYNjgog
I don't see Robin Hanson advising people not to put in disclaimers in that post. He says it is bad that you have to use disclaimers, which is not the same thing.
Complaining about the existence of situation X that necessitates action Y does not imply that action Y shouldn't be taken in situation X.
(For an especially obvious example, "it is bad that crime occurs and necessitates police departments" does not imply "we should shut down police departments".)
When he says "sharp people will distinguish themselves [...]", he is implicitly saying "so say things without disclaimers, and you'll be able to find out, and therefore select for, sharp people".
"A community of conversation where everything is open for discussion, people write directly and literally, and people respond mostly analytically to the direct and literal meanings of what people say. People make direct claims and explicit arguments, and refer to dictionaries for disputes about words mean. There’s little need for or acceptance of discussion of what people really meant, and any such claims are backed up by direct explicit arguments based on what people actually and directly said. Even when you believe there is subtext, your text should respond to their text, not to their subtext. Autists may be especially at home in such a community, but many others can find a congenial home there."
The most effective use of feigned ignorance I have discovered is when I’m at the Best Buy check out and the try to sell me an extended warranty. I act confused and start responding in Russian. Works like charm.
I do this frequently and mostly to great affect. Most of the time people aren't fully prepared to explain why Y is so bad it isn't worth discussing and trying to make someone work through this for themselves results in concessions they'd never make otherwise.
That being said, this works fine at a 1:1 level, but doesn't scale particularly well.
> I am talking about the situation where Y is something both people agree to be false, are you?
In terms of pre-existing knowledge, yes. In terms of what I bring to the argument - no. I feign ignorance of Y as a concept and its underlying negative connotations. I'll let someone build up a working definition of Y and have them set their own limits of how far Y extends. Then I'll use the limits they just set to point out that X doesn't fall within those limits.
>To what extent might you agree 1:1 conversations are just a crapshoot anyway?
I don't at all think 1:1 conversations are a crapshoot. I think once you get above 1:3 or so they turn into one though.
In American culture, is there a stigma associated with packing-up uneaten food, following an office function? In an office of about 100 staff (we all share the same break room), I am among the few people who will take home uneaten food following birthday celebrations, or retirement events, or whatever. Most people seem content to just leave the remaining food in there, where it will be thrown out within a day. Many of my co-workers earn minimum wage, or just above it, so you'd think that they would have an incentive to grab free food. I find it all a bit odd.
People might also be waiting to come back later and have another sandwich or slice of cake or whatever on their official break, so immediately packing it up and taking it away, unless invited to do so, does seem too quick off the mark.
My experience (lower middle class American) has been that the person supplying the food decides what to do with the extra. At some functions they go around giving out extra to take home toward the end, or let people know there's extra to take. Sometimes it stays in the fridge with an "eat me" sign on it, and is slowly eaten, or forgotten about. Sometimes they bought it themselves and take it home to their families. Sometimes none of this happens and it gets thrown out.
I would be mildly offended if someone who didn't bring or buy the food was obviously packing it up to take home on their own prerogative.
I should have specified that I'm talking about company-bought food, not brought by any individual employee. This is things like pizza, cupcakes, bagels, cookies, veggie trays with dip, sodas, fruit salad, etc.
That makes sense. I would expect people to leave it, even if they expect it to be thrown out, unless someone in charge (admin assistant? Someone like that) clearly asks people to take some; some people need to be asked twice.
I'm not exactly sure why. Probably something to do with not wanting to look greedy.
Some places do have rules, such as "the supervisor ordered it/brought it in so they decide what to do with leftovers" or "this was for a specific event, e.g. a board meeting, so the manager takes it home" or whatever.
If I’m around there is never any chance of there being any uneaten pizza leftover. I had an Italian grandmother and developed the super power of being able to eat any amount of food put in front of me.
The norm at my university is for it to be left in the break room for anyone in the building who wants some; I would regard packing up large quantities immediately as a bit rude, but if you wait till the end of the day then anything still uneaten is totally fair game.
Yeah, but... nobody ever says that. They just leave the food in the break room until someone eventually throws it in the trash (usually the next day). I typically wait until the end of the day, when I'm sure no-one else is going to come in and graze on the remaining food. I take it home not because I'm cheap, but because I hate to see food go to waste. A few other people do this, too, but we're definitely a small minority.
I need to be clear here - I'm not judging you or saying you shouldn't do this. It's definitely better than letting the food get thrown out. I'm going to try and steel-man why I think it's tacky, but please take this more as an expression of my own biases and not what I think about you/other people who do this.
From what I've seen, most food that ends up being served at offices is really meh. It's either bad pizza, some uninteresting snack food or some kind of forgettable dessert. You eat it in the office because the opportunity cost is pretty low, it's there, you're there, so you eat it. But taking it home changes that; it implies that relative to anything else you could chose to eat for/with dinner, you'd chose this.
This kind of implicitly implies either a strong preference for low quality food or such a level of cheapness that you'd prefer free bad food over good food you have to pay for. I guess you can tack on a third "such distaste for wasting food that it creates a willingness to consume low-quality food."
The first two behaviors definitely fall into what I'd classify as tacky. I'm not sure about the third.
For you, nowhere. It would, I'm sure, be an admirable saving of energy.
For the rando in my office who told me he was taking office pizza home because he didn't want to go shopping or cook... I'd say it would be roughly equal to seeing 3 separate instances of the person chewing with their mouth open or one instance of coming into the office wearing spectacularly ugly pants.
Well, some of us were reared that "it's a sin to waste food" so if you've grown up being encouraged to clear your plate because "think of the starving children in Africa" or wherever, then seeing food (even if it is cheap food) thrown out does trigger that "no, this is wrong!" reflex.
I don't think I've ever understood this. If you eat until satiation, why is it so terrible to just throw away the remaining food? Food supply isn't fungible, the food you don't eat wasn't taken away from the starving kids in Africa; at best it just meant someone else didn't buy that particular eggplant or whatever at the grocery store.
Like, if this leads you to snack on unhealthy food between meals, I get why this would be seen as a negative. Ditto if you find yourself constantly cooking too much/buying too many perishables that don't get used and wasting money. But just not joining the clean plate club never seemed like a sin to me.
I think this is a cultural legacy of the relatively-recent issue that you were not guaranteed enough food in western society (from a limited sample of acquaintances I think this is particularly strong in Irish and East European families, probably unsurprisingly). And when starvation was common in western society then the food supply was much more fungible, since uneaten food could be sent to the family down the lane
If it's company-provided food, the model I'm familiar with is that you let it sit out long enough to make sure that anybody who wanted any would be able to get some. But at the end of the day it's a (reasonable) free-for-all. Food is encouraged to be taken home so that it isn't wasted.
There is no one american culture. I've been in places where everyone takes some home. I've been in places where everyone leaves it to go bad. There doesn't seem to be much consistancy.
But if you or another policy maker at the workplace encourage one or the other, it will happen. Break out some of those really cheap gladware type containers and plop them down 3/4 of the way through the party and say "You all better not leave any here when you leave" and I'll bet it gets taken.
Couldn't Reaper drones be reconfigured to take on light infantry/insurgents, like in Afghanistan? Why haven't they been, to date? I know when most people think of drones, they're thinking of the relatively small ones- and those little guys seem to have be the focus of most warfighting advances recently (as small/cheap bombers). But the America Reaper drone, and the Predator before it, is a 5000 lbs. beast. They're already loaded with missiles- why not the machine gun that goes on an attack helicopter now?
I understand that Reapers now fly at a much higher altitude. But couldn't the US reconfigure one with a mounted machine gun to hover 50ish feet off the ground and take out Taliban insurgents? Seems like a good way to route that sort of light infantry (and strike absolute terror into their hearts), while not risking American lives. If their range is too limited to be effective (hard to believe), a mothership cargo plane could circle over the battlespace and drop them off, then pick them up. Obviously this would be difficult/impossible in a war against Russia or China- but the US does a ton of these counterinsurgency campaigns against very unsophisticated foes all over the world, who lack anti-aircraft weapons.
Why hasn't this been done to date? Is it that the Reaper is vulnerable to small arms fire? I don't believe the Taliban has effective artillery or anti-aircraft weapons- is an AK gonna take the drone down? If so, is it just impossible to armor up a drone enough while still keeping it flyable? Or, is it that that level of firing precision isn't possible with a remote control? (Maybe operators could be in the mothership cargo plane, if latency is an issue).
Seems like a hardened Reaper drone with machine guns, that can't be taken down by small arms fire, would revolutionize remote US wars where we don't want to risk ground troops. Curious if it's technically possible. I am especially hoping to hear from John Schilling, of course
Technically possible? Probably, but would it be able to meet our standard of identifying a target and verifying its identity on the 'fly?' Probably not. For every Hellfire that comes off of a drone, there was a legal review of whether it was against a proper target and the likelihood of killing non-targeted people was minimized (there are other words used but that's the gist). Reapers flying around spraying .50 caliber rounds like an A-10 (which shoots higher caliber 30mm rounds but the trigger is pulled directly by the pilot) just would not pass Law of Armed Conflict muster and I can imagine many circumstances where the targets were 'wrong' as the video feed while good quality is still limited in its ability take in the surroundings without multiple viewpoints/cameras. Presumably the Hellfire variants used are also laser guided to the precise point highlighted by the laser used to aim it. I'll have to let you imagine how that laser aim point is established. This whole matter gets into a discussion about the future of semi-autonomous and autonomous weapon systems which I hope we don't go down.
"WASHINGTON—The Pentagon used a special Hellfire missile that packs no explosives to strike Islamic State militants in Afghanistan on Saturday in retaliation for a suicide bomb attack at the Kabul airport last week, according to two U.S. officials.
The airstrike, carried out by a Reaper drone flown from the Persian Gulf region, killed two militants associated with the Afghanistan offshoot of the Islamic State extremist group, and injured a third individual.
The Pentagon declined to release the identities of any of the individuals targeted. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Kabul airport attack that killed 13 American troops and nearly 200 Afghan civilians.
The missile used by the U.S. in the airstrike, called an R9X, is inert. Instead of exploding, the weapon ejects a halo of six large blades stowed inside the skin of the missile, which deploy at the last minute to shred the target of the strike, allowing military commanders to pinpoint their target and reduce the possibility for civilian casualties." - no way to be that precise with bullets from the air on a moving platform.
Basically, I'm talking about replacing actual combat operations, and you're thinking about these targeted assassinations. Different things. I'm talking using a drone to replace the 'regular' combat with massed open belligerents that to date has been done by the Army, Marines etc. These kind of assassination strikes would still be done via missile/six large blade halo amazing sci fi thingy
Oh no, we're talking about the same thing. We just don't have a good way to use an inaccurate weapon like automatic machine gun fire in a proportional and targeted way from a small drone like the Reaper (small being relative to their larger manned cousins) with its limited view. It has been proposed that we COULD have such weapons on future unmanned hovering platforms that would have more protection and this is the subject of much legal debate. How much authority will we give the machines?
I'm talking about engaging obvious militants and not, like, assassinating specific targets. I mean open warfare. Taliban laying siege to a crucial Afghan city? They have to be, like, out in the open to do so. I understand they do lots of skulking and blending in with the regular population, but if you're seizing entire cities you are by definition a visible belligerent.
We engaged the Taliban in a ton of small arms engagements over the last 20 years, obviously there was not a legal review every time before a guy in the A-10 squeezed the trigger. If you need multiple sensors on the Reaper then sure, but ultimately we're just talking about replacing what's been done by humans for the last two decades
"but ultimately we're just talking about replacing what's been done by humans for the last two decades" and that is the crux of the matter. Can someone on a moving platform from more than 500' up looking through a narrow view telescopic lens determine who is a combatant? Hard to say. Hell, it's often hard to determine on the ground from 50 yards using human eyeballs taking in all that's going on around the 'target.' Even the guy in an A-10 has to take reasonable precautions against hitting non-combatants. The days of large formations of force-on-force engagements where anything that moves is a target is likely over. The complex battlefield of a mix of urban and open terrain where combatants and the surrounding population are mixed in is the battlefield of the future - at least on land. Air and Sea are different environments where targeting is likely to be simpler.
The Taliban don't "lay siege" to cities in the way that e.g. medieval armies lay siege to cities. And certainly not cities that are under the active protection of the US military. If they are described as "laying siege" to a city, that mostly means that there are enough Taliban warbands hiding out in the surrounding hills that the supply convoys keep getting ambushed. The difficulty is still finding them; if and when we do, small missiles are good enough for killing them.
And when the Taliban actually *take* a city, that's mostly a matter of their calculating that the US is not going to defend it, the Afghan National Army isn't going to defend it without direct US assistance, and then going from "there are Taliban warbands hiding out in the hills" to "the Taliban just drove into the city center and told everyone they are in charge" in less time than it would take to get a drone from Bagram on scene. Sometimes the Taliban miscalculate and get driven back, but I think that also happens pretty quickly in most cases.
If the Taliban did do something that would make them particularly vulnerable to your hypothetical machine-gun drones, then they'd also be vulnerable to things like Apache helicopters and AC-130s and B-52s and we've already got plenty of those.
Look at the use of rubber and plastic bullets in Northern Ireland. Meant to be non-lethal, meant to be use to disperse rioters and protesters. Killed seventeen civilians, including eight children ages 10-15:
You're thinking of the Taliban as an army, however unconventional; you need to think of them as the IRA or the PLO: small cells acting independently but with a central co-ordinating organisation.
Reprisal by armed forces against civilians often turns neutrals to enemies:
Because that configuration isn't better than what other platforms bring to the table.
If the Taliban forms en masse, there are no shortage of air platforms to deal with that scenario. The opposite scenario has been and is the harder problem.
Short answer: The Afghan forces weren't being paid, didn't have the US as a partner force, and, most importantly, didn't believe in the mission. Taliban supporters had to wait out US presence then literally stand up in the jirga and say "All of you are governed by the Taliban now".
Longer answer: in the valleys I was in, the Taliban had the support of many elders. Unless there was sufficient US presence in an area, entire valleys, districts and even provinces were ruled by the Taliban government and were effectively denied areas. Their ability to constrict movement was/is incredibly robust. For example, there were passes where you were guaranteed to lose your legs if you drove through them. Most Afghan forces chose to live and let live. Truthfully so did many Americans. I'm sure you know this but the Taliban don't wear uniforms or fly their flags when they're not doing propaganda videos. So you can't just fly around in some attack helicopter and whack dudes based on visible characteristics. The days of the Taliban forming en masse to fight some large maneauver warfare style battle are long long gone. I've heard credible stories of Mazar-i-Sharif style engagements back in the day but the past decade (at least) has been an insurgency war so identifying the "bad guys" ends up being the hard problem.
If you're sincerely interested in this topic area, then I'd recommend Ken Burns' documentary on Vietnam. This is the most accurate depiction of how the US thinks about war from just about every stakeholder in the system. It will heavily shape how you think about weapon systems and their use.
OK. I do respect your experience man. So when the Taliban 'take' a city, they just.... drive in in some unmarked vehicles, and there's no way for a hovering Reaper at however many thousand feet above to 'know' it's Taliban? How about the whole 'pre-taking the city' stage? The drone can't get close enough to find the Taliban in the hills? (Or, use a much much cheaper unarmed intel drone for that kind of closer look, say?) I'm just trying to visualize this as a guy who's obviously never been to war. Maybe you can imagine my perspective as an obvious non-SME, visualizing taking over a whole country but never really providing enough of a view that a hovering drone can figure it out. Just hard to picture. When I read a story about the Baltimore PD's experimental surveillance drone over their city, it supposedly could make out individuals on the street, etc.
I watched some of Burns' documentary. What I saw was mostly interviews with the soldiers, not a technical or systems breakdown
Try thinking of the Taliban as, like, the Tea Party with guns. Some parts of the Tea Party are well organized and others are just your random uncle who hates Portland hipsters (the US or Afghan Government). In some parts of the country, people really like the Tea Party. Other parts like the ideals of the Portland hipsters or earn money serving them lattes but even in those parts there will be sizeable amounts of people who strictly prefer the Tea Party. The Tea Party doesn't have to invade anyone really because there are an abundance of random uncles across the country who would just really relish the opportunity to boot stomp some Portland hipsters if the circumstances present themselves.
1) How do we figure out which of these elders support the Taliban?
2) Once we figure that out, what do we do about it? They're engaging in the political process by attending the jirga. Should we drop on a bomb on their qalat? Try to change their minds?
Hopefully you see how identifying the random uncles is a whole thing. And then what to do with them is also a whole thing. Neither of those things is particularly helped by weapon systems honestly. You sorta just ask around and find out that Malik so and so is a Taliban supporter. And then (hopefully) think pretty carefully about how to deal with him so you don't lose your legs.
So those are the random uncles of the Taliban. Then there's the Tea Party leadership. Those guys are harder to find and harder to kill. But the live in Pakistan or in caves and off the grid and you'll never get in a firefight with them. Sometimes you can catch them when they're on the move in provinces they shouldn't be in (becaues there's more portland hipsters there who will tell you when they've shown up from out of town).
Maybe the Burns' documentary resonates more with me given my experiences. There's discussions in there around M16 development, the APC, and agent orange. Also featured are the use of air calvary, artillery and close air support. The shape of that war and even the operational themes are very similar to Iraq and Afghanistan. The general takeaway would be that war is inherently not a technology or engineering problem. Not to put too fine a point on it but the question to answer is "how do you defeat the Taliban?" not "how do we improve the specifications on X or Y weapon system?"
By the time the Taliban, or any other insurgency, gets around to visibly driving into a city, the city has already been taken (be that via negotiations or the ostensible defenders realising that if they stand and fight, all that gets them is a starring role in a beheading video).
Generally in historic warfare, the besieging army make conditions so unpleasant that the besieged are coerced into deciding to surrender first, because a siege is long and tedious and roars through resources like a forest fire for both sides, so the clear threat is "surrender and don't make us have to fight for this, because if you do, when we take the city there will be no quarter and there will be pillaging and looting and sacking and rape and murder and all those bad things, but if you surrender, we can negotiate terms".
Read up about Michael Collins and guerrilla warfare during the Irish War of Independence, and Tom Barry and the West Cork Flying Column.
You are native to the place so you know the terrain, you are holed up in the hills in your bases, you have the support (enthusiastic or grudging) of the locals, you are small and lightly equipped so you do hit-and-run raids, ambushes, and dig trenches across roads to detonate bombs when the military forces ride over them. You can blend in with the civilian population.
The occupying force is confined to areas like barracks and other central locations, they come out on regular patrols, they travel by large vehicles, they are not supposed to run wild and shoot every civilian they see, they have constraints. Mostly they are foreigners who are an occupying force. Even sympathetic locals will still want them to pack up and go home sometime.
You can use terrorist/freedom fighter tactics, they can't (because those are war crimes against a civilian population). And vitally, you are fighting the propaganda war and war of public opinion as much as you are fighting a military struggle.
A Reaper is a plane, not a helicopter, so that's probably the main reason nobody has made one that can hover and machine-gun terrorists.
I don't see why you *couldn't* build a drone helicopter with a machine gun, but that would be a fairly specific use case and it probably wouldn't be as flexible as a Predator. One of the Predator's main strengths is loiter time - it can circle an area for a long time and look carefully for suspected terrorists before it finally decides to announce its presence by Hellfire. (And as much as people like to talk about how a machine gun going BRRT will scare the pants off terrorists, making the terrorists explode every time they step outside has its own charms.)
And yes, armoring a plane or helicopter is actually pretty hard if you want it to get that close. Even famous "armored" planes like the A-10 are mostly armored in the sense of "can limp back to base after taking hits" rather than "can fly through a hail of bullets with impunity." And of course, rifles aren't the only thing the Taliban might be using - heavier machine guns or RPGs are well within their reach. If you ever saw/read Black Hawk Down, that's a case where an "unsophisticated" enemy shot down two US helicopters with RPGs.
What is the advantage to using a machine gun vs. a small missile?
The ammunition is cheaper, but by the time you've put a drone over a target with a trained crew in Nevada and a secure communications link between the two, the cost of the ordnance is not the long pole in the tent. Plus, the US is rich. I don't think there have been all that many drone strikes called off at the last minute because someone reasoned, "Hellfire missiles are just too expensive", and if that ever does become a problem, there are cheaper missiles available.
The ammunition is lighter, but a standard Reaper can carry eight Hellfires and a pair of 500 lb precision-guided bombs, which is probably enough to defeat a company-sized force and insurgents usually work in company-sized forces or less. On the rare occasions when they mass on battalion or regimental scale, if you're watching with drones you should see that coming and you can bring in aerial reinforcements faster than they can move by foot or Hilux.
And the down side of the gun is that it requires you to get in close. Close enough that the enemy is going to see and hear you whether you want them to or not, and you almost never actually *want* them to see you, and close enough that they can possibly shoot your very expensive drone with their own cheap machine guns.
Possibly you're thinking that something that is officially labeled an "antitank missile" can't possibly be the right weapon to use against small groups of light infantry. But the reality is, most of the "antitank missiles" that have been fired in anger since I think 1973, have been fired at small groups of light infantry. "Antitank" missiles are about the best tool anyone has yet come up with for killing small groups of people at ranges of 2-5 kilometers or so, and if they are more expensive than we would like for that purpose, they are much cheaper than who or whatever we would be putting at risk to get in closer to take a shot with a cheap munition.
I'm not averse to the idea of very small drones with say a 20mm cannon and a couple of small missiles might be a useful addition to the US arsenal. But, A: it's probably not going to be a game-changer and B: that would be a whole new weapons system (and doctrine and supporting logistics) rather than just a Reaper with a machine gun, and C: what is the problem that you are trying to solve? A Reaper with missiles is going to circle over the battlefield looking for targets and blowing them up whenever it finds them, until there are no more targets to be seen. A Reaper with machine guns is going to do the same, except maybe it gets shot down while there are still enemies on the field.
I take your points. But so- why did we lose Afghanistan to the Taliban? Reaper drones apparently cost $32 million apiece according to some quick Googling, which seems incredibly cheap by the standards of US military hardware. Couldn't we just have.... had 50 or 100 Reapers in rotating flight paths over Afghanistan, blasting massed Taliban fighters with Hellfire missiles? We have a bunch of Reapers, we divide Afghanistan into zones and put a Reaper flying in a circle over each zone, we swap it out for the day when its fuel is low, and we cover those zones 24/7/365. Might need some non-Reaper, unarmed pure intel gathering drones for additional coverage as well. I understand insurgents may still win some small skirmishes here or there, but in general they can't mass anywhere in the country because they'll get blasted. No US lives at stake, and it seems pretty affordable. Why doesn't this work?
I'm getting the feedback from other people that the Taliban never massed. Maybe you can imagine how hard it is for me to visualize, that you could take over an entire country but never form a standing army in one or several groupings that could be identified
The Taliban, like most "insurgent" forces, is very hard to find not because people are hard to find, but because you have no idea who's a member of it. Most of the Taliban's forces today were officially part of the Afghan army or police a month ago, and most of the rest were 'civilians'. A goat herder with a bunch of AKs hidden in his basement looks exactly the same as an innocent one.
If it helps, despite being a terribly inaccurate analogy, think of this as a game of Mafia/Werewolf with the US Army as an unkillable sheriff and the Taliban as the Mafia: you can't see who the Taliban are despite them being able to kill people in their own dispersed way.
Alternatively, think of the Taliban as a jumped up gang engaging in gang warfare against a local city government: their small warbands/street gangs are large enough to outshoot the local cops and small enough to hide from the (US) military. They couldn't *defeat* the US military as long as it was in the city, but the moment it left they could waltz right in and gun down the local cops. (Well they didn't have to do that because the local cops saw that they were about to be gunned down and surrendered/deserted their posts/joined the Taliban instead, but you get the picture.)
Think about it like this - we've had complete air superiority over Afghanistan for almost 2 decades now. During this time, we've done thousands and thousands of bombings/drone strikes. Our process for approving these is either "this unit is actively being attacked and needs immediate support" or "we have intelligence that the Taliban has massed in this area."
Putting the first situation aside, that means that these people have basically 2 decades of experience of accomplishing their goals without ever massing (or only massing in situations where any kind of force projection isn't possible for a force reliant on air superiority). The fact that there still is a Taliban is testimate to the inherent weaknesses of this kind of activity.
I think it would be more proper to say that the Taliban mass briefly and rapidly when the situation calls for it. I'm going to want to read the after-action reports of the fall of Afghanistan when they become available, but I believe the process is something like this:
There are fifty Taliban warbands hiding in the hills surrounding Provincial Capital X. Everybody knows this, but the Taliban are all hiding in caves or looking like shepherds or whatnot. There's an Afghan National Army garrison in Provincial Capital X (or a local militia/police force) and that's much more legible to the Taliban. Not merely visible, but some of their people are hanging out after-hours with the ANA people talking shop.
When the Taliban believe the ANA force is too weak, craven, and/or corrupt to fight, and are pretty sure there aren't any US troops in the city or aircraft overhead, they coordinate and at the trigger event (which these days can be a cellphone tree), fifty warbands swarm the city in a matter of hours. The ANA might run away, or they might switch sides and greet the Taliban as liberators, or there might be a few firefights but brief ones. In any event, it's over in hours. At which point the Taliban are massed, but they're massed in the city where removing them by any variant of Death From Above pretty much means going Full Daenerys.
If the Taliban have miscalculated and the ANA forces resist strongly enough that taking the city would mean going Full Stalingrad, they go back to being fifty scattered warbands hiding in caves or masquerading as shepherds, before the drones can arrive.
I think the pace at which the Taliban took towns and cities across large regions in the last days probably did involve massed movements on a scale that would have been vulnerable to air power, and it wouldn't have required any new type of aircraft. But that didn't happen until after the US had stopped providing air support to the ANA, and pullled out the contractors maintaining what passed for the Afghan Air Force (which promptly decided that if their planes were in good enough shape for one more flight, it should be to Uzbekistan).
When it was maybe one town falling to the Taliban every month, that was Taliban staying hidden outside many towns, and maybe once in a month in one of many towns the stars would align in a way that favored the quick takeover.
I can confidently say that GA has indeed looked at putting guns on reaper and similar platforms. However this had never actually been done with any production aircraft for several reasons. In addition to those John mentioned, Reaper is made out of spit and tissue paper, and even if it could survive the gun firing vibration, and recoil, and the CG issues the ammo could induce, flying it any lower and slower would likely get it shot down. Also, NLOS communication lag would likely make gun targeting rather difficult.
Now, what I really wish they would put on reaper are napalm cannisters, so that some of them could "accidentally" be dropped on training flights on any of the square miles plastic white grow houses littering the Mojave desert.
I was thinking about the debate regarding whether the obesity crisis has been caused by psychological factors like food reward / palatability, vs being caused by environmental contamination, which is being researched by Slime Mold Time Mold. One of the questions in my mind is how obesity set points come to be and how they become so stable, which led me to the following idea.
If your obesity set point is set by your psychology, would it make sense to use an extreme diet to get down to your desired set point, then take LSD to reset your neural bases, in the same way that Scott has written about before? Is there any possibility that would work?
Highly doubtful. The kinds of priors that LSD loosens do not include the lipostat, or LSD would be able to affect things like your body temperature set point or your growth hormone set point too.
I also find this doubtful, mostly on grounds of having priors against LSD as a panacea, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of psychologically adapting to the feeling of being away from the set point. Accepting hunger.
I have heard several accounts of people stopping, for instance, a nicotine addiction after taking LSD. It is not that the physical withdrawal, if any, miraculously disappears.
But the association to smoking becomes disgust, or some other form of internalized resolve that is strong enough to balance out the need to give in.
I generally eat one (large) meal a day, for unrelated reasons. My weight is stable and normal. For me, being slightly hungry is not infrequent, though occasionally mildly annoying. It's not exactly a pleasant feeling, but it's very bearable, and it invariably goes away completely after being ignored for a while. ~12h ish after a meal, I'm often slightly hungry. But 24h after, I usually don't really feel hunger, or I feel it as tiredness/weakness if I'm really running low.
I would not rule out the idea that someone who hasn't could adapt to staying below their set point with psychedelics.
Lipostat is the name of a medication and doesn't seem to be the name of a bodily system. Cursory investigation suggests theories of weight gain, hunger and satiety are still being worked out.
But if LSD could have an effect on weight, my guess would not be that it does so by changing levels of ghrelin or leptin hormone, but rather by changing the manner in which the brain interprets those hormones.
Obviously LSD would not affect the levels of leptin, but as explained in the book review, regulating body weight is an extremely low-level process crucial to survival, and as a result it's exceedingly unlikely that LSD would have any effect on it. If it did, you might expect that it also does something like stop your heart or make all your hair fall out.
Since the discussion of aducanumab put me at odds with most of the other commenters, I wanted to make my position more concise and offer predictions/betting opportunities:
1) I did not know that FDA approval may mean forcing Medicare to pay for it. I hope that that didn't happen and if it does, I'm against the approval. I am for allowing doctors to decide based on the available test data whether a drug with nice biomarker action but crappy endpoint evidence has a high enough chance of working on their patient to warrant the cost.
2) I am not so much a fan of aducanumab itself as I am more optimistic than others about the amyloids as a therapeutic target in general. I predict the following, and am willing to bet on these odds:
a) >50% chance of an amyloid targeting drug or a mix containing one showing success on cognitive tests in phase III trials within the next 4 years.
b) >75% within the next 7 years.
c) >30% chance of aducanumab specifically showing success on cognitive tests in some treatment modality within the next 3 years.
d) Conditional on (c) happening, >75% that that treatment modality will involve targeting to early stage or pro-dromic patients, or a combination with a drug against a different target.
">30% chance of aducanumab specifically showing success on cognitive tests in some treatment modality within the next 3 years."
It will be fascinating if it does, and if it does, do you have any odds/confidence on Biogen still holding the licence, or instead it in its turn will have been eaten up by one of the pharma giants?
The history of the development of aducanumab goes back to 2007, when a spin-off start-up from the University of Zurich, Neuimmune, collaborated with Biogen and they worked on it since:
Ezra Kline had an interesting conversation with Bessel van der Kolk about his book on trauma, "The Body Keeps Score." During the talk van Der Kolk made a statement that really tickled me. "Tango dancing is probably more effective treating trauma than CBT."
Funny he should say that. An ex boyfriend of mine coped with the psychological aftermath of a drive-by murder (his best friend died) followed by personal involvement in a revenge shootout (various other people died) by going to clubs and dancing for 72 hours at a time. With breaks.
We didn't know each other at the time.
Also, I gotta say, Tango is the best. It's so smooth it's like dancing on ice skates. As far as therapeutic dance goes, assuming you have a good partner, it sounds like a good choice.
It's worth checking out the podcast. van der Kolk's humanity and decency really shine. The Tango remark came as part of larger discussion of the importance of singing, dancing and just playing with others as an important part of our well being.
On the other hand, you can express your feelings through dance, Tango seems to accommodate feelings of tragedy and loss quite well, and you don't have to keep a damn stupid journal about "this morning the birdies were singing, suddenly I felt a piercing joy and all my cares fell away".
Nobody says you have to dance *well* and who knows, maybe you look good in red side-slit dress and heels? Yes, even if you're a gentleman!
Now that's what I'm talking about. That is some top rate tango dancing right there. None of that showy cruise ship bulls**t.
Also, fun fact I hear parroted around dance groups: in the early days, men danced tango with each other until they were good enough to dance with women at formal dances, with some reporting that their best and most experimental dancing was done with male friends.
I can't find a detailed web source on this that doesn't look like it was written in 1998 by some dance teacher who interviewed a couple old guys in Buenos Aires. A musical group's website gives the story a more masculine spin, describing the early development of tango as a simulation of combat between working class men that morphed into a romantic partner dance when hookers joined in the fun. I honestly can't tell whether the details of this chapter in Tango history are left out of mainstream sources (like wikipedia) because they're unsubstantiated or because Argentinian men are reluctant to talk about it, but I've heard it enough times that I suspect the latter.
What books would people recommend I read to get a basic grasp on modern science the history of science? I’d like the books to be engaging to a layperson and not a something I need to slog through. Is Steven Weinburg’s “To explain the world” worth buying ?
So I try to stir fry Kung Pao Chicken at home, and it never quite comes out right. I thought maybe it was the heat, so I tried it over a friend's gas grill at max heat to see if that worked - and it still didn't come out right. Is there something to it that most recipes miss? Szechuan peppercorns?
If you're making Kung Pao chicken without Szechuan peppercorns then you're not making Kung Pao chicken, you're just making some kind of boring sweet chilli chicken.
I recommend Fuschia Dunlop's recipe: http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/cooking/ . Echoing Melvin's comment about szechuan peppercorns --they add a key citrus-y flavor to the dish, in addition to their numbing quality. It is definitely important to keep the pan as hot as possible, so if that is an issue I find it better to cook the dish in batches and reheat in between.
I am getting my first COVID shot tomorrow in anticipation of a plenary shift away from remote work. ACX readers, which vaccine should I get?
I'm leaning towards J&J. I feel ashamed to even raise this point, but I waited so long out fear of unusually high reports of adverse reactions in VAERS. I know this data is not clinically verified and may not be helpful, but I have had a nagging paranoia nonetheless. I trust this community more than I would any other online group, so please feel free to critique my life choices or offer helpful explanations for your answers. At any rate, I will definitely be vaccinated. I am just trying to avoid adverse reactions or long-term effects. I prefer the J&J because I already had 3 viral vector shots for HPV, and to the best of my knowledge there are no long-term effects of adenovirus-based shots.
If there's a restricted supply, get whichever vaccine you can. All of the ones available in the West are decent (Sinovax is a joke). J&J advertises itself as a one-dose vaccine but it's about as effective as one dose of the mRNA ones - you will need to get a second jab in a couple of months with something else, and probably a third jab targeted at whatever variant has taken over next year. (Current recommendation re 3rd jab booster shots is ~ 6 months after the second shot.) The good news is all evidence is that mixing vaccines is totally fine - you can absolutely get a first dose of J&J or AstraZeneca and then a second dose of Moderna or Pfizer or AstraZeneca. I hear very good things about Novavax if you're worried about new tech vaccines and want one using more old fashioned methods, but I don't know if it's available where you are.
I think you can be quite relaxed about long-term side effects. Some people believe that you can get vaccined, be fine for 2-3 months, and then suddenly develop a side effect. But that's not how it works. Side effects show after a few days, in exceptional cases after 2-4 weeks. So we know really, really well what side effects the vaccines cause.
There are a few exceptions, where you get some damage which you detect only after long time. But these are very specific things. In pregnant women, you may only see damage for the baby after birth, or even at later developmental stage. Drugs that make you infertile are another such thing. But we don't have any indications for these things, so I would not worry about them unless you are a pregnant woman.
The reason why some side effects are discovered only after months, is a different one: if some side effect is very rare (1-10 in a million cases), then it takes insane amounts of vaccinations until you have 10-100 cases, where we can pick up a statistical signal. But even those we should have detected by now, and the personal risk is quite tiny.
For a concrete recommendation, Thor Odinson gave already perfect advice: all the ones used in the West are decent. If you still want to optimize for efficiency (since side effects lasting more than two days are really quite negligible), Moderna or Pfizer are slightly better than the others. They are even better if the interval between the shots is not too small (> 6 weeks). But all choices are good, and J&J is the most convenient because you are officially fully vaccinated after one shot.
Finally, if you worry about the one-day side effects, Moderna and Pfizer can be on the heavy side (you can feel sick and tired for one day, and your arm hurts). Afaik, AstraZeneca and J&J trigger less heavy immediate reactions.
To add some anecdata, after my first AZ shot I had 24 hours of a fever response and many of my peers reported the same. There was no similar response after the second shot. Looking at the UK covid stats (https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+stats&oq=uk+covid+stats), vaccination reduces the risk of death from Covid by about an order of magnitude.
Adding some more anecdata of a few hundred experiences I am familiar with (J&J, Moderna, Pfizer). I was in charge of coordinating the vaccines for the organization where I work.
Moderna and Pfizer didn't have too many side effects reported in our group, with most of it after the second shot and more severe after the second shot. Both shots resulted in sore arms and other minor effects. Most people with a longer reaction compared it to the flu and said it lasted one or two days. Not everyone had any reaction, especially rare for the first shot.
J&J being only one shot is easier to schedule around for potential side effects/sickness, but more people reported being sick after having it. Sleeplessness, nausea, and "flu like" symptoms were pretty common. Most people reported about two days of sickness, with a few more saying three. A handful (less than 1%) were sick for four to six days. Again, not everyone had any symptoms at all, though there seemed to be a higher percent who reported issues with J&J.
Got the Pfizer/BioNTech (which is now called Comirnaty), about four weeks in between doses. Day after the first dose, was practically living in the bathroom. Similar but less harsh after the second dose. No other side effects (sore arm, fever, etc.)
Was reluctant about the AstraZeneca one due to reports of blood clots (but those seem to affect women more, so if you're not a woman, you're okay for this).
Don't know if I would have gotten Covid-19 without vaccination, don't know if there's some new variant lurking to hit us all at Christmastime, but I'm vaccinated and haven't dropped dead of it (to date) so yeah, might as well go unless you have very strong feelings about mandatory vaccination, and if you've been vaccinated for measles etc. that's the same general principle.
I got the J&J in February. There has been some positive recent news about it. A second shot at 6 months increased the amount of antibodies 9-fold from the original response. There was also a study out of Brazil showing good efficacy against Delta. If you go the mRNA route, from what I've read, early data indicate that Moderna might be more effective than Pfizer against Delta. But def research.
Is there some kind of good legal/public policy reason why America can't make people save for retirement via a 401k? Like, everyone with an existing 401k registers it with the IRS- those without such a registration, the IRS auto-deducts say 3% from their paycheck (so 2ish% after taxes). Yes, it probably should be more, just trying to be politically realistic. The private 401k is some Vanguard target date fund or mutual fund, with ultra-low fees. If people really feel strongly about it, they can fill out a form and the IRS will stop deducting the retirement monies, and send them their funds back (maybe they can try again in a decade). Yes, it really should be mandatory, but again trying to be politically realistic ('big gubmint can't make me save for no retirement', etc.)
Why hasn't the US done this to date? Social Security (which this is not attempting to replace) is clearly not sending retirees enough money to actually live on. It could be argued this will actually help save SS. The US generally goes for market-oriented solutions way more than any other developed country, and this is not a government-run pension or anything. Tons & tons & tons of people are not saving for retirement, or don't start young enough, and here is a reasonable market-based nudge that's opt-out vs. opt-in, and will probably save the US government money in the very long run. Conservatives should love it, in that there's lots of evidence that having assets makes people more fiscally conservative. Liberals should love that it's reducing inequality, which is mostly about asset prices. I'm sure Vanguard or whomever would love it. Best of all, it doesn't cost the government much of anything that I can see- maybe some administration costs, but not a mondo amount. Why haven't we done this? Seems like virtually free money.
(I'm assuming we can discuss dry public policy like opt-out retirement savings in the 'no politics' thread. If this discussion is considered political, I will delete this comment, apologize, and also commit sepuku)
I tried looking this problem up briefly, since I hadn't heard of a poverty crisis amount elderly Americans, other than the problem that decent end of life care can be prohibitively expensive. There are a lot of projections, and some people disputing those projections, with the overall picture being unclear. According to one source, 8.9% of the population over 65 were under the poverty threshold, with SS, Medicare, SNAP, and housing assistance available. The overall poverty rate was reported 10.5% in 2019, so that sounds about to be expected. The elderly might be a bit better off than younger adults at similar income levels, since they're more likely to own a home.
If the problem is that SS might collapse, then reforming that seems like the more important priority, since according to quick googling it represents 12.4% of compensation (6.2% worker/6.2% employer).
Australia does something similar to what you describe - all employees have minimum ~10% of their paycheck mandatorily diverted to retirement savings accounts, which are privately run - most people use ones runs by a union, but people can manage their account themselves if they're willing to do the substantial paperwork involved. People can top up their fund to an extent, but it's capped so that rich people can't funnel all their income into the tax-advantaged accounts.
As to why America won't do this, I think your governance is just fundamentally broken, and I'm not sure if you could pass a resolution acknowledging that the sky is blue without needing to bribe half of Congress.
No disagreement- but this idea didn't get passed in an era when US politics was less nutso either. Social Security being inadequate has been known since my parents were children. So there has to be a really good reason that I'm just not thinking of
Mostly I think because what to *do* with the money becomes an inflated discussion. Let people do anything they please? Invest in real estate, buy a franchise, play the Lotto? Well then we're not accomplishing much. ("But I was sure my collection of vintage Pokemon cards would be worth a fortune by the time I was 65!")
Send it to a few carefully-vetted investment firms offering index funds with certain characteristics? Ah, but *which* firms? Those who donate the most to Congressional re-election campaigns? Those whose CEOs say the right things about the social debates of the day? ("See, the Blackrock CEO said Green Lives Matter, while the Vanguard CEO said #wethree, how can we possibly entrust the future of our country to someone with such corrupt and broken morals?")
Finally, if you just throw up your hands and say let's just make everyone buy Treasuries, safe as houses, then someone will point out you are just creating a new version of Social Security, where the government forcibly takes earnings from people and promises cross-it-heart-pinky-swear to give the money back in 40 years when you need it -- and in the *meantime* it can live well beyond its means.
After posting this, I Googled around and read up on an idea where someone involved in the process had to choose an administrator (Vanguard, Blackrock, etc.) who have their fees listed in a one-line summary. So at least nominal competition
Here's the real-polik reason: This was tried by W. The opposition party was uniformly against it, and his party was not uniformly for it. I expect that the trends that caused this have only gotten stronger since then. The left is more anti-market than then. The right is more fractured since then.
There are a few less realist arguments - any program like this is going to turn in to a huge rent seeking oppertunity that will distort the stock market into an even less efficient market for stocks, which would be very bad. We will be forcing people to gamble on speculation! / We will be forcing everyone into even-more-homogeneous instruments, which increases risk (pick your before/after based on your level of anti-market bias). if you can't convince people to do it with education and suasion, are you really making them better off than they would be if they could make thier own choice? (Might be that the money you are making a parent save could have gone to making their kid's life better at a young age, and why do we think nation-wide rules are going to get the choices better than the parent, for example?)
I thought W was trying to replace Social Security, not supplement it. (I mean, I think SS should be turned into an index fund too, but I understand that's not politically realistic).
I don't really see how nudging people to buy index funds is gambling or speculation, seeing as this how the upper middle classes are financing their retirement. I would personally recommend like the Vanguard World Fund which literally has a piece of every major market- US, Europe, Asia- so if it's 'gambling' and the entire world sees 50+ years of nothing but declines- I'm gonna say the world has larger issues going on than just retirement. Anyways, it's opt-out, so if you feel strongly about it you don't have to do it.
I mean, the people who don't save for retirement are going to end up being wards of the state for the most part in their old age, so really it's the responsible thing for society to 'nudge' them into saving. Costs all of us responsible taxpayers far less in the long run than taking care of the flaky self-employed, the low income worker who can't even spell the word retirement, etc.
Why is consent the issue at hand? I don’t really see the relevance, directly. Babies aren’t asked for consent when born - similar copies of them are, with the benefit that those people are healthy, and want kids - but Neumann wanted kids.. also you can’t overcome a bias with more bias, but that’s rather minor.
I don’t think the consent part works for dead people and shifting it to clones seems very questionable. Cloning alive people being consent based is more like how copyright is consent based than how sex or medicine is consent based in terms of why it is.
In that the reason it is isn’t that the thing directly harms the person
As far as medical ethics is concerned, your consent wishes continue after death.
There is a story of a man who got a penis transplant after losing his original in an IED, but he could not get the testes, because the donor (before he had died) had not only consented to the use of his penis, not his testicles and gametes.
Maybe it shouldn't work that way, but right now it does.
There could be an argument against collecting DNA without permission (or digging up a grave without permission). For example the police are not supposed to enlist civilian help when collecting the DNA of a suspected rapist. But making clones once DNA is known isn't problematic IMHO.
Outside of privacy concerns, why should you presume any control over your DNA? This isn't like copyright where more versions of me decrease my value; if someone decides they want more me's in the world and have the means to do so without harming me... why should I get a say in this?
In some contexts... sure. Someone walking up to me and ostentatiously snapping my pic would be weird. But on the other hand, just by walking down the street to get coffee in a city, my image was probably captured dozens of times without my consent today alone. When I drove around a bit earlier, my car and license plate were almost certainly photographed dozens if not hundreds of times, again without my consent.
The current norms around privacy are really only about overt collection of information, and even those are degrading.
Sure, you might be in a bunch of photographs, but if someone decides to *publish* one of those photographs, they need your permission. If they go ahead and make a national billboard campaign without your consent, you can sue.
Likewise DNA. Say you get a nosebleed at a coffeeshop and the barista helps you clean up. Obviously, no one has done anything wrong. If the barista thinks you have an interesting look and decides to use your cells to make a baby, now they're way out of bounds. Your materials belong to *you*, and can't be used for research (or reproduction!) without your consent.
I think this would be like von Neumann complaining that somebody has the same name as him. Your DNA is not copyrighted material.
The glib answer is that this happens all the time with the Star Trek transporters. But really we are getting into the hard problem of consciousness territory here.
It's heady stuff of course. Lately I've been considering the proposed notion that consciousness could exist outside of our packages of meat and our living bodies could be thought of transmitter/receiver mechanisms.
But honestly this stuff throws me for a loop as I expect it does to a lot of people who consider these matters.
Suppose someone measured you down to the atom and created a perfect replica here and now, in the room right next to you. Would you suddenly experience a dual consciousness? Would you experience both sets of senses and control both bodies? The intuitive answer is no, since otherwise you could create an ansible by putting your split bodies light-years away (although that would be an interesting premise for a short story, it would require information to be transmitted faster than light with no observable mechanism). It seems like you should not be affected over here by someone creating a copy of you over there.
This suggests that your first-person experience requires some element with spatial & temporal continuity. The ancient concept of a soul matches pretty well to this: something immaterial and unobservable (except through introspection) that marks your body as the receptacle of "you."
But what if the matter of your two bodies and the matter of your two mind swere quantumly entangled? — it could very likely be the case if the duplication process duplicated down to the subatomic level. And as you proceeded down you life streams, at what point if any would your quantum entanglement cease? And what are the implications vis a vis consciousness of your quantum entanglement? I'm thinking of Roger Penrose's suggestion that consciousness has a quantum basis (which I thought was pretty absurd when I first heard it, but now I'm more sympathetic to his viewpoint).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WXTX0IUaOg
Well, part of the problem is that continuity only exists in classical physics. In quantum mechanics there is no such thing. That is, there is no way to guarantee that this particle here and now was at some earlier time over there (unless it is the only particle in the system).
Very good point. And if Penrose's theory of quantum consciousness were correct, it would destroy the consciousness system when we measured. Oh, my brain hurts! ;-)
Ha ha well don't worry, it's totally possible for your consciousness to spontaneously arise again out of nothing as a result of a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum. In fact, if the universe lasts long enough, it's pretty much guaranteed to do so.
No. The complexity of the task is too high.
But humor us. Assume it's a Gedankenexperiment...
If I wandered down to the electronics store and bought a new laptop exactly the same as mine, and turned it on, would it be the same laptop?
Ted Chiang's short story "Exhalation" is a beautiful and inventive meditation on this question. Highly recommended for any fan of philosophical science fiction:
Text - https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
Audio - https://archive.org/details/ExhalationByTedChiang
If replicating a person is also contingent on being able to measure and replicate both the position and momentum of all their parts, I suspect you're out of luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Position_and_momentum_space
Excellent point! The whole Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal could defeat the perfect reproduction scenario!
Not sure what you mean by "lens". I believe it would look like you, think like you, be conscious and be very shocked to be suddenly "transported" to the future. However if you mean that the consciousnesses are linked in some way... Nope.
You're trying to reason on a high level and extrapolate to a low level. I think this kind of thought experiment is sometimes useful, but rarely. It's like asking "Is it reasonable that man be able to predict the future?" to draw conclusions about quantum mechanics. It's better to start from the double slit.
So in this case the real question is "is consciousness just chemical and electrical processes". It's obviously not fully answerable given the state of the art, but I feel like the evidence we do have says yes.
So I believe we'd get a you in the future. If we did it in the present, we'd have two yous. In fact, I think that if we just built a decent approximation of you, not atom by atom, but tissue by tissue and neuron by neuron, no one would know the difference. Not even you.
Sure. Doesn't violate any laws of nature. Indeed, the principle of indistinguishability tells us that if we *did* recreate your exact wavefunction in 10,000 years, there is no way even in principle to tell the difference between it and you right now. There's no such thing as a trajectory that we could trace, even in principle, to be sure that every particle in the future being was at one point in the current being.
Is it you? It would certainly *think* so, would have all your memories, would just remember taking a 10,000 year nap. To all the rest of us, it would pass any test of youness that we could devise. But is it you, for real? That may depend on what you think happens to "you" (the conscious you that is aware of itself) every night when you go to sleep.
Just peering at my own consciousness I think we need at least the illusion of temporal continuity plus a spatial continuity (as in my consciousness is in my body) to maintain our identity. You mileage may vary, though. Consider that we go off-line all the time for all sorts of reasons, the most frequent being sleep (but anesthesia, coma events, can also take us offline for a period of time). Waking, we may not be aware of the gap, but out stream of consciousness picks up where it left off. But if you were to clone me, my clone would be like a twin raised with a totally different stream of consciousness and identity.
On the other hand, if you had a Star Trek type transporter machine and were to measure my electrochemical state perfectly, and you were able to disassemble me (i.e. kill me) and reconstruct me somewhere else, I could easily believe that I would still have the same stream of consciousness and identity I had before I was transported.
Non-sequitur: but are persons partially repeatable? Consider that people are patterns -- particular organizations of matter, experience, etc. Consider also that people are layers of patterns: I am an animal, and a human, and a male, and I have such-and-such personality type, etc. How far down my pattern-onion would some other being have to match in order for it to be considered a "repeat" of me? What about a "rhyme" or (formal repeat) of me?
I fear if we are too strict then I will not even be a repetition of myself, and if we are too loose then I will become a repetition of all things.
If the Universe is infinite and people are repeatable, we all already have an infinite number of clones whose experiences are identical to ours.
But the question of whether we are repeatable isn't just about dualism or continuity of experience. Even if we assume that the mind is purely mechanical, as most of us do, we also have to assume that the precise states of our atoms or subatomic particles can only vary discretely. This is admittedly the key finding of quantum theory, so it's probably true, but it is possible to imagine some underlying continuous variation. If this were involved in consciousness, people wouldn't be repeatable.
Only if consciousness has cardinality greater than the universe, e.g. the former is aleph 1 and the latter aleph 0. Hard to see how that's possible, given consciousness is embedded in the universe.
I guess it depends on what we mean by the universe. If it's just infinite space and time, we have "only" aleph 0 chances to be repeated so any continuous variable would have greater cardinality. If there's a multiverse from (eg.) many worlds, eternal inflation or modal realism, our number of chances could be a bigger infinity.
I'm intrigued by your belief that infinite spacetime is countably infinite. That's certainly what happens if its quantized, but no one has a theory of quantum spacetime yet. So far we are obliged to treat it as a continuum (because GR is a classical field theory), which leads, willy nilly, to ultraviolet catastrophes and the very unsatisfactory kludge of renormalization.
Are you asserting spacetime *is* quantized? If so, what makes you suspect that?
I am not really assuming that spacetime is quantized, just that the number of people we can fit into the the Universe is countable. I think this is reasonable given that a person occupies a macroscopic volume of space, is made of matter, requires energy, etc.
If consciousness involves interaction with spacetime at quantum scales, the quantization (or not) of spacetime could affect whether people are repeatable.
I think the answer is yes, it's still you, but only in the disappointing sense that "you" are an illusion anyway. The idea of copying yourself without killing the original copy has already been brought up. As soon as that happens, you'll have two distinct brains starting as the same person with the same shared experiences, but they immediately diverge and no longer share anything. If this actually happens in the Star Trek transporter sense where both bodies are new and the original no longer exists, then which one gets some canonical claim to be the same as the original? They're both equally the same. This has of course been explored in science fiction, too. It's the plot of The Prestige. It's also part of the plot of the television version of Westworld.
But go deeper into a single brain and I don't think it's any different. While I don't think Daniel Dennett managed to actually explain away the hard problem as he intended to in Consciousness Explained, he did pretty convincingly argue that there is no such thing as a self. The brain on its own is already a distributed set of competing and conflicting processes that come to consensus to control sensory input and communication output streams, but patients with very specific types of brain damage have shown those streams can become entirely disconnected and no longer behave like a single person, even inside of one brain. The only difference between within-brain distributed processing and between-brain distributed processing is processes in one brain have no direct way to access the processes in other brains. If they did, it's entirely possible we'd have a true hive mind, and it raises the question of say, what the experience of being an ant is like. Are the chemical signals they send each other actually capable of sharing experiences directly rather than via mental modeling as when humans describe the past to each other, and if so, do they experience life as if they're one entity rather than many?
Of course, it's entirely possible they don't experience life at all, but to know that, we have to be able to answer the hard problem.
In any case, take heart I guess in the reality that you will die, as every temporary consensus of distinct processes that ever expressed itself to the world as you has already died countless times. You never existed to begin with. But still, it would be nice if there was a way to copy my memory stream and revive it in a future body. I think it has value even if it is only contingently experienced as a single person.
> Do we truly need this spacial and temporal continuity for it to be you?
Don't think so. The intuitive sense of continuity me-in-the-present has with my past selves is entirely a product of me-in-the-present's brain state. No *actual* continuity required.
There's no reason to assume this simple evolutionarily useful intuition magically hints at laws of the universe we've never had the chance to explore.
It seems reasonable to assume that we are a software executed on meat hardware. If a different copy of my software will be executed in the identical circumstances, getting similar inputs I expect both of us behave identically. I won't expect us having shared consciousness and subjective experience, just come to the same decisions for the same reasons.
Identity stuff seems mysterious, and I can't get rid of the feeling that I'm approaching the problem from the wrong angle. Suppose my consciousness is ceased. And then started from the same point some time after. I expect to be the same me as before. If the restart happenned on a different hardware, or even in a different level of virtualisation then I'll experience the transition from one body to another. But what will happen if my previous hardware will be restarted as well after a couple of minutes? My identity won't return back. It will be a new instance of me in my previous body, a couple of minutes dissynchronised with this me.
So far so good. The first restart from a checkpoint will carry on my identity. But time is relative. In different reference frames it would be different bodies that continue to carry on my identity! If someone can create an instance of my mind from its current point will my identity transition to this new hardware with some "objective probability"? According to MW interpretation of quantum mechanics that's what happening all the time.
At this moment I'm tempted to think illiminatively about identity. Consciousness is real, but identity is not. And there is no reason why I should care about this version of my consciousness more than about any other version of my consciousness. But I still feel confused about the subject so the question isn't dissolved yet.
Okay, I’ve let the us idea cook for almost a week.
“Down to the atoms” Quite an idea. If we do go with an entirely materialistic perspective, then you would be “reconstituted” - what a term - with all your memories and past conditioning intact.
So 10,000 years from now you would be a Rip Van Winkle who blinked and found himself in a new world.
That is a very interesting idea. We don’t know exactly how memories are stored yet. But if we say you and I are nothing more than a package of well organized atoms, we would have to believe that an exact copy of you would be another “you”.
That second person singular pronoun is doing a lot of work in your thought experiment.
There were several debates FOR and AGAINST the "LIKE" button on SSC/ACX. And when it existed on ACX, it was heavily used by at least a portion of the readership. However, since it's been disabled, I've noticed that it's quite rare that somebody simply states (in text) that they like or appreciate a comment. I'd guess that the ratio of "LIKE" button presses, to a written notes of gratitude is 100:1 (maybe 1000:1). If this is close to the truth, then why is it the case?
It's obvious that pressing a button is more convenient than typing a few words. But does this entirely explain the effect?
Is it the anonymity of the Like button?
Is it simply used by many for voting versus liking?
Is it "Like-light"? Kind of like saying "love youuuuu" versus "I love you."
Do many people lack the confidence in using their words, especially in "talking" with strangers?
I'm guessing it's a combination of the above that creates the massive multiplier. Regardless of the answer, I highly recommend spending the few seconds typing appreciative comments. I'd say that those are at least 100x more appreciated by the writer than a clicked "like".
Seeing a wall of comments saying "I like this" would be really annoying, so people don't do it.
I like this
I like this too, and miss the like button.
I like the entire chain of comments above this one
"Listen very closely. There is a time and a place for meta-humor, the sort of humor where you try to be funny by applying something to itself. The time is when you are Douglas Hoftstadter. And the place is in a Douglas Hofstadter book."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/15/ten-things-i-want-to-stop-seeing-on-the-internet-in-2014/
Given as it's 2021 and yet here we are, the project is clearly hopeless and we might as well abandon it and give in to temptations with abandon. Also, Doge is now $129 billion coin. How's that for meta-humor.
That's not meta. What comes after meta?
mtheta?
'Pata. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics
Metta
I don't like this.
Funny thing here is, the Hofstätter guy´s name is spelled differently in one sentence. Doesn't matter but amused me.
Look, all this namby-pamby modern mushy niceness and "Oh, I like this! Heart!" is dispiriting to the cynical and atrabilious like myself.
Where are the Detestation buttons? The Abhorrence spleen? Hmm? Where or when will we get catered to for our needs and desires with custom buttons and icons?
I grudgingly approve this.
I rage against the fact that this does not exist. RAGE !
I read half of it before getting distracted by something else but sort of liked the gist of it, button?
I like that I learned a new word: atrabilious.
You may give the credit to Stephen Donaldson and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, which I read when I was seventeen.
*Insanely* over-written, "purple prose" is only the faintest, most washed-out pastel hue to describe it, and I had enormous fun matching my vocabulary with his ("yes, I know what 'viridian' is; hmm, this is a slightly different usage of 'aumbry' than the one I'm familiar with") but it did expand it 😀
I am surprised no editor sat down with him and went "Stephen, mate, you may or may not be competing with Tolkien, but there's no need to vomit up a thesaurus on every page."
On Discord you can react to anything with any emoji you want, including emojis custom-created for the server. So you can abhor things as much as you want.
Emoji are far and away the best part of Discord. I can give any reply I want, often amusingly, without disrupting the flow of anything. It's a thing of beauty.
I like this
I like this
I get that. But I think that the Like Button is a proxy for a long list of reactions. "Ha, that's funny!" "Good point!" "That was definitely worth reading." "Smart. I disagree, but smart." "Good effort!" "Awwwww." This list can go on and on. If all the responses were some version of these very short sentences, then I guess it would be annoying. But if they were interspersed, maybe not too annoying.
The other day, I sent a text to a friend and she "liked" my message. I saw a heart attached to my address. I was offended by this. If she responded "I like this", at least I could ask her "what about my address did she find so likable?"
The message that she liked was simply my street address.
was it the last in a string of messages that you sent?
That's just a quick way of acknowledging that she received the address, isn't it?
Yep, and also indicates the end of the message protocol - since there was no actual reply, the last message is acknowledged and no further action is required.
Microsoft teams has a small number of emoticons that you can attach directly to someone else's messages. The thumbs up icon in particular is very useful as a shorthand for "I read your message and agree/approve, but I don't really have anything useful to add."
I think more platforms should have something like this, it's a very useful substitute for some of the nonverbal communication that you miss when communicating using a text only system.
The former finance minister of Austria is currently under investigation partly because he answered with a thumbs up emoji to a text message. In the text he was thanked for his help in the (nepotistic and probably illegal) appointment of a crony of the junior partner in the governing coalition to a job in the state-owned lottery company. Now the minister denies that he ever helped and tried to explain that what he wanted to express with the thumbs up was not a tacit approval, but simply something alone the lines of 'stop messaging me'.
"I acknowledge and appreciate that you have sent me your street address."
Or one little heart.
When love is all around, a heart icon does no harm, does it? Reminds me of weird past thoughts (Why that heart? Is she interested in me? She sure is sweet...). Nobody move, nobody gets hurt.
If you want to express a positive sentiment to the above but don't have anything specific to add then you click like.
Bring verbose all the time would be tiring.
This is exactly why I keep silent even when a comment makes my day.
Agreed. (And I feel the same way about “agreed” but feel the use is justified in this case)
same
+1
I like this. In this case my like is because it is a true and factual comment.
as a related note, there should be a way to collapse replys so we don't need to scroll down so far
you can click on the grey bar to the right; that will collapse it and all sub-levels of replies
*to the left*
This works, but be careful on a touch screen. On my iPad, I accidentally touch one of these lines on the regular. If you are in the middle of a deep thread, it just dumps you into a seemingly random location further down the comment stream.
And to make matters worse, try accidentally clicking the left margin beside a comment you are writing.
I would guess it is because a "I liked this" comment is viewed as filler and not contributing much to the conversation. I sometimes appreciate reading this kind of comment when the original is very long or a link to another site, as it increases my interest. But mostly I agree with John that this kind of comment is annoying when it becomes too common.
The "like" button was annoying because you'd check your email and there would be fifty emails and you'd (I'd) think "oh, fifty new comments, must be an interesting thread" and instead it would be fifty likes.
Which is fine, but time-wasting. So I'm happier the like button is gone, but if people do want something similar and Substack can work out how to have "likes" but not send them out wholesale, that's be great. I know some people online do want to keep track of what likes/dislikes/reblogs/retweets they get, maybe because they want a sense of what is and is not popular when they write it or they really need the boost to their mood from "you like me, you really like me", so whatever floats your boat.
I'm happier not to get them. If somebody likes a comment of mine, I appreciate that, but I don't need to keep track of "nine people liked it, sixteen disliked it, oh woe is me".
This filter in gmail blocks all the like e-mails, but not the actual reply e-mails:
Matches: from:(reaction@mg1.substack.com)
Do this: Mark as read, Delete it
It's annoying that Substack doesn't have a setting to just turn them off, but the fact that likes come from a different e-mail address than replies makes it possible to do this on your own with a filter.
like. a private workaround seems easier than the ongoing public like button pro/con argument...which honestly has its own nostalgia atmosphere going for it at this point....
The level of effort to write a thoughtful comment is much higher than a level of effort to click a button. If the only thing you want to express is "right on, good job writing this" then you'd not bother to write anything. In fact, a good intermediate solution was to allow different emojis (facebook allows five I think? too lazy to check... and some platforms allow hundreds) to express reactions that aren't worthy of carefully verbalizing.
I went to "like" this comment, realized I couldn't, then realized how dumb I was being.
+1!
I agree with the sentiment of this comment that people enjoy getting positive feedback and that people should be encouraged to give each other positive feedback. I would add that the most effective feedback is specific and constructive, so such feedback could follow the format "say something you liked about the comment or agreed with, then say something you might change about the comment or add to the comment" which is kind of a standard formula for giving good and constructive feedback. It's something I've taught my students in giving peer feedback, and it works well. Also I'm doing the teacher thing and modeling the technique in this comment.
If you agree with something then, unless you have something to add, there’s nothing to say.
Here is another reason FOR a Like button: I am often overwhelmed with the number of comments on any one post and simply don't have the time to go through all of them (especially subscribing to several Substacks...) A high "Like" count let's me notice a particularly illuminating offering and decide if I want to dive deeper into that thread or move on to the next. Sometimes, it's the high "Like" comments that are the real takeaways from any thread anyway, and though grateful for the comments that led to them, I may not have the bandwidth to sort through to find them.
I really agree with this. Likes are a simple, spam-free way to highlight posts that many people have found particularly insightful or interesting. In healthy communities, a like function is a way to harness the hive-mind of that community for everyone's benefit.
I also just think likes feel good. I enjoy being able to express my appreciation of someone's post with a like, and I enjoy getting my comments liked and therefore feeling like people have heard and appreciated what I've said. It's the equivalent of seeing people nodding or showing other non-verbal signs of interest while you're talking in person.
One issue with likes is that people start competing for them, posting not what is necessarily good for the community but what the community "like"s. Ice cream for dinner would get the most "like"s even if it's not a good idea.
And we fear that even smart people who know what's going on can fall into that cognitive trap.
I still give out a few "like"s a day, but I try to be careful with them.
This is an entirely theoretical concern, in my experience. There's probably a hundred times as many posts complaining about it as there are instances of it actually happening.
But...what people in this community like is interesting and useful points that contribute to a conversation. So...then...I'll make those? I guess I agree with Alsadius that the worry here seems purely theoretical--I'm having a hard time concretely imagining how this would cause a problem.
In *some* communities, people will "like" counterproductive things for lols, or will "like" anything praising the thing they like, no longer how vapidly, while downvoting even useful constructive criticism. But I don't see that happening here in particular (and we could have likes without downvotes).
To reference one of Scott's earlier essays, its trivial inconvenience https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences
A long series of "like" or "agree" comments would be annoy some people and bloat up the already-huge comment threads.
But by making it harder to signal agreement, we are building exactly the kind of community Yudkowsky warned against: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pvim9PZJ6qHRTMqD3/p/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC
There's a reason I strongly support an upvote button but not a downvote: there are enough people eager to explain how they disagree via comment, and unexplained downvotes are painful to receive (at least for me), far in excess of the pleasure of an upvote.
There's something to be said for people making up their minds without too much influence from others, so I would accept temporarily hiding the upvote counter on new comments/posts.
The like button was good; it should be brought back.
> Is it the anonymity of the Like button?
Unfortunately, it isn't, and sends out emails.
There are extensions like Pycea's that get around the UI lockout, but I was always hesitant, until Dan L reminded me that "getting a like and an email for it" is strictly no more annoying that "getting a 'This!' and an email for it" and I am less stingy with them now.
One-line nods of agreement are low-effort, low value-add filler that vandalizes comment sections with spam you're forcing others to scroll past to see the real discussions. I don't think Scott explicitly forbids them a la Hacker News, but they certainly go against community norms, all the people doing it now as a joke notwithstanding.
> Do many people lack the confidence in using their words, especially in "talking" with strangers?
It does feel to me like claiming the space for a comment uses up social credit.
I experience this. I found it helpful lately to have a model of what might be called a “show and tell” Circle in kindergarten; Where everybody gets a turn. If I honestly feel I’m listening to other people then I can give myself permission to add something to it.
There’s always a chance of making a fool of oneself but what the heck
Personally, I find the lack of a Like button destroys the comment section so thoroughly that I almost never read the comments. There's just too many people here - without a filter, I don't have time to wade in. (I only noticed this one because it happened to be the top comment when I got to the end of Scott's post.)
I have often been tempted to post "+1" as a comment, but it's just that little bit too obnoxious. So good posts get neither recognition nor shown to more people. Because apparently the community thinks that rewarding people for posting good things is somehow a bad incentive.
I notice that I am confused.
You and me both. I never saw any rationale for removing 'likes'.
Like buttons with a limit on how many the user can dispense in a thread might prevent the cheerleading effect.
Did I correctly remember that you said you're open to accepting book reviews outside of the Book Review Contest window? If so, I can't find the post where you mentioned this.
Also, is it known if another one will happen?
Yes, I've got a couple of books I want to review given the chance...
I recall Scott saying self-promotion is allowed on these ones so I'm gonna self-promote. I run a music recommendation website, https://theshfl.com, that I've been building on and off for the last couple of years - it's basically a random sampler built from crawling album reviews and best-of lists. What's cool about it though is that it is steerable - as you're flipping through you can change the population sampled from - when the music was made, who recommended it, genre, label, pretty much anything. I built it because I wanted something like it. Anyway try it out if you have trouble finding something new to listen to, or if you want to get some suggestions for good music from a genre you're unfamiliar with.
Thanks. Yeah, I should promise to make Classified Threads on some specific timeline so people don't have to worry about this. I've just been putting off figuring out what that timeline is because I don't know how long it takes to "build up" enough comments to make the thread a success. Maybe I'll try another next month?
I would enjoy a "Subscribers Only Classified Thread" as well, perhaps the two could alternate (with one public thread every 6 weeks)?
Limiting the audience for a classified thread seems a bit counter to its purpose, doesn't it?
I guess if Substack supports it it could be readable by anyone, but only subscribers can comment?
That's how FdB's entire comment section is. Not sure if it can be selected for a particular post though. Also seems like it would be a craven cash grab.
Sometimes people want to advertise something, but not to the whole world right now. Like something is still in beta or needs testing.
There is no option for americana at the top level.
Personally, my feeling would be:
1.) You can post your stuff in open threads but it should be a discussion starter. "I wrote this article on How To Bake Pies Efficiently. What do you guys think about pies? I hear a lot of people say that efficiency subtracts from the artistry of pies. What's your thoughts on that?"
2.) You can add a footer link equivalent to how Substack does for other Substack newsletters. Ie, putting at the end, "I don't know, AI risk seems overblown to me." with a footer of: "I write Pies Weekly. Link."
3.) Plus a monthly classified/promotion thread. Maybe a subscriber only one too. "I write about pies here. Also, looking for a head pie chef."
PIE VERSUS TART - WHICH IS WHICH?
Pease pudding hot! Pease pudding cold! Pease pudding in the pot, nine days old!
And that is more a porridge than a pudding, and then where do we put congee?
Because I am confuzzled right now; I always thought a tart was basically the same thing as a pie (at least over here, it tends to be 'tart is fruit and sweet, pie is savoury e.g. apple tart but steak and kidney pie').
Then I watched an American cooking video on Youtube where they made an American pie (open top) versus a British tart (closed top) and called them both "pies".
And then another American site tells me a pie is covered but a tart only has the bottom crust!
This is the kind of apple tart recipe with which I am familiar: https://www.odlums.ie/recipes/apple-tart/ (they leave out the spices, and we can get into the shortcrust pastry - with or without egg? argument later).
Here's a recipe for steak and ale pie (pastry on top and bottom):
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/how_to_cook_steak_and_15585
Here, for more confusion, is a steak and kidney pie with pastry only on top:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/steakandkidneypie_73308
And if you like, you can make a pudding instead:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/steak-kidney-pudding
I'll take a good Cornish pasty any day.
Pie derives from English. Tart derives from Latin through French. So the real question is whether you're a sniveling Norman bootlicker or a good, true Anglo-Saxon.
Considering that Normans, Angles and Saxons were all Germans, it doesn't make much of a difference, does it? There were quite some Celtic Brits and maybe leftover Romans on these Isles in 11th century.
On English neck a Norman yoke! Bootlicker!
I'd say that a full or partial top crust is what makes it a pie, rather than a tart. I've never seen a savoury tart but I see no reason why one shouldn't exist in principle. And I'll allow Shepard's pie in on a technicality.
Also I'm annoyed that the linda mccartney not beef pies don't seem to be in supermarkets any more.
what about a key lime pie though? those are almost always open topped.
To me it’s a size thing; I think of tarts as being one serving, whereas pies are by necessity larger.
I am actually going to cook a cottage pie for tomorrow's dinner.
WHERE DOES IT ALL END? THIS RABBIT HOLE GOES ON FOREVER!
And the rarebit hole goes on even farther!
Huh. I just call the small ones tarts and the big ones pies.
Where I live in the US it's all pie. No matter what is in it or where the crust is. Tart describes the taste of good apples for pie. Or perhaps a saucy English lass.
You should read McArdle on pies: https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2017/07/megan_mcardle_the_parable_of_t.html
More seriously, Americans don't do savory meat pies, except calzones and kolaches, which are regional. (ish) (Okay, and some chicken pot pies). The standard size of an American fruit/sweet pie is 9 inches in diameter - if it is a smaller muffin sized piece then it is a tart. Many pies are traditionally open-faced/one crust (pumpkin, pecan, lemon meringue, etc) while apple pies are nearly always two crust. Cherry and (sometimes) peach pies are traditionally lattice for the top crust. Tarts are often single crust.
But basically there is only one right way to make a pie and that is how your favorite grandmother made it.
In the English vernacular there’s a world of difference….hmhm
1.) Incentives people to come up with clickbaity "discussion starters" to advertise their blog. It also comes across as super disingenuous to start a discussion only as a means to promote your own content.
2.) Sounds like it would waste a lot of screen real estate, but I would be begrudgingly ok with it if substack (or some third party plugin) let's you hide signatures/footers.
My preferred solution is just to have the monthly/biweekly/whatever classified thread and not allow blatant self promotion in the open threads.
1) Clearly the thing to do is to write shorter blog posts (less effort! Yay!) and copypaste them from your blog which no one follows because it doesn't have a following. No one has to ever find out it was a blog post!
1.) Other than the adjective "clickbaity" I'd agree. That's the point. It encourages people to write things that start discussions here to advertise their blog. That means it encourages them to produce content that stimulates interesting discussions.
2.) It already exists. You don't seem to have noticed so I don't think it'll be a problem.
1.) The threads here are sorted newest first or chronological so you don't need to stimulate interesting discussion to get visibility. All you need to do is to write something that looks like a credible attempt at starting a discussion and generates curiosity for your own content.
2.) That is indeed news to me, I don't think I've ever seen that on any comment here. Are they hidden by default or something? In any case, if I don't have to see them I'm fine with them existing, objection withdrawn.
Since the meetups have started now, can anyone give me some of their experience as to what generally happens at these and what they get out of it? It sounds like an interesting way to meet peoole but if anyone can give me some more info I would be grateful
We ran a south bay meetup every month or two before Covid, have done one a month or two ago but not since then because of rising infection rates.
Ours were usually on a Saturday, starting about 1 PM, ending about 10 PM, with people arriving and leaving over that period. Our most recent had over a hundred people but the usual was twenty to forty. We provide nibbles and (non-alcoholic) drinks, some people bring nibbles and (alcoholic or non) drinks. We provide bread fresh from the oven. About six, we serve dinner to whoever is still there, generally two main courses, one of them vegetarian.
That's it for organization. In practice, it's several rooms of our house, sometimes the porch and the yard, with groups of people having conversations on a variety of topics.
I’ve been running the Philadelphia meetup with a co-organizer since 2018. Our first meetup after the big “Meetups Everywhere” post got us around 20 people the first time. When Scott attended we got 75 people. But usually we were 5-8 people meeting in a restaurant, at least until COVID. We’d have dinner and discuss a recent post or something generally rationalist that had been on someone’s mind. Since COVID we’ve been meeting at my home- we have a big covered porch.
Our group is eclectic and has a mix of ages and professions. I really value the intellectual outlet it provides me since I’m primarily a homemaker. Before moving to Philly I attended the Amsterdam meetup and it was similar- a small group but good for the kind of deep conversation we had trouble making with colleagues at the bar after work.
I've been running DC meetups since they started with the help of some co-organizers. We have a meetup at 7pm on a Saturday every month at my place. The atmosphere is nerdy house party. There's no set topic or organized discussion, and once about a dozen people show up, everything breaks up into separate conversations. I provide bourbon and logistics, other people bring snacks and other drinks. It's a really great time with an interesting group of people. In the before time we'd 25-30 people minimum. Numbers were lower than that earlier this year, but they've been consistently climbing. We were doing them outside on my patio or roof deck, but DC is inhospitable 6 months of the year, so the last few months have been indoors.
We also use the mailing list for other events that members of the community want to organize or promote. We've done board gaming, hikes, museum trips, and meetups at alternate locations. Anything people want to organize, really. In the before time we were doing about one of those a month, now maybe half that.
Updates to some conversations yesterday:
I talked to some people about a sort of Pascal's Wager theory of medications. Since most medications have stronger main effects than side effects, if you have a serious illness (like COVID) is it worth taking ten untested drugs that each have only a 10% chance of working? After all, probably at least one of them will work, and treating COVID effectively might be worth inflicting ten drugs worth of mild side effects on yourself.
I looked into this more this morning, and the most relevant paper I found was https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-22446-z on HCQ, an untested drug that seemed to have at least a 10% chance of treating COVID earlier in the pandemic. The study finds HCQ increased mortality, by quite a lot. I was originally pretty surprised by this - HCQ gets used as malaria prophylaxis all the time and nobody acts like it's especially deadly. But I think it makes sense in the context where people who are on the verge of dying from COVID and need to be saved from it are actually really weak, and side effects that healthy people would shrug off can become fatal. I think this pretty clearly sinks the Pascal's Wager theory of medications in favor of the usual thing where you don't try anything until you have strong evidence that it's at least safe and probably also effective.
Also, Bram C brought up the idea that pandemics are deadlier than endemic diseases partly because you usually get endemic diseases as a child, and children get less severe versions of many conditions including COVID. Later I found https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00668-y , which was able to confirm that this pattern holds for many different conditions. Interested in hearing what knowledgeable commenters think about this.
Related to Bram C's point, the summer RSV surge was interesting because it suggested that just 14 months of nobody getting RSVs was sufficient to make the population extra-vulnerable to them, such that you could get an epidemic off-season and when schools are out. It really makes you wonder how contagious/deadly RSVs, flus, seasonal coronaviruses etc. would be in a truly immunological naive population.
RSV?
Google - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_syncytial_virus
warning: half remembered from unknown source
I remember description of epidemics ravaging Americas, brought from Europe.
One passing mention was that even common cold was being deadly in some cases, with entire tribes killed by it.
I think the unknown is how much of their vulnerability was because these were diseases they would have been better off getting at the age of <10, and how much was genetic vulnerability (particularly in terms of MHC loci). Old World humans had been evolving to survive smallpox for thousands of years, New World humans hadn't, and there were suddenly a whole bunch of diseases like that. I suspect the genetic factor was if anything more important, because you have descriptions of whole villages dying, kids and all.
I used to agree with Randall Munroe's "what if?" everyone stayed home a year to stop the cold.
But it looks like not being exposed to some stuff makes us extra-vulnerable to other stuff.
My understanding is that Bram C’s comment is one of the explanations for the Spanish Flu death distribution, where young and old people died, but not so much middle aged (since a relative of the flu had come through a couple decades before)
Lots of diseases have a mortality pattern where school-aged children are least vulnerable to mortality (see the paper Scott linked). Those of us old enough to have lived before the chickenpox vaccine can remember that you wanted to get get your chickenpox when you were roughly 5-10 years old and that it could be dangerous to make it all the way to adulthood without exposure. Apparently lots of diseases are like that.
The rough argument in the paper is that your ability to respond to completely new pathogens drops even by young adulthood. This seems at least plausible. As you grow older, your thymus involutes and while your pool of "naive" T-cells (trained against no particular antigen, ready for the unknown) doesn't go away, it becomes somewhat smaller and less genetically diverse over time.(https://www.jimmunol.org/content/194/9/4073.long)
Ah, I had partly misread the OP in a way that would’ve made my comment more relevant. Thanks for the paper summary though
The only problem I see with this theory is that the data in the paper shows that mortality is usually quite high for infants before lessening for children. Perhaps infants are less likely to catch an endemic disease than children though because of increased socialising/school etc?
As a disclaimer, I don’t work with mammals, but the data in the paper is does not surprise me from an ecoimmunology standpoint. It is a pattern I’d expect for a long-lived animal with slow development and delayed reproductive maturity. The very young (< 5 yrs), have more severe disease outcomes and higher mortality because they have naïve and undeveloped immune systems. Immune function can also trade-off with growth and development, and very young children are doing a lot of both.
Less severe disease in late childhood and early adolescence could be a sweet spot of immune system maturity and relaxed trade-offs with other traits. Growth rate slows, for example. The transition to reproductive maturity, especially reproduction itself, decreases the strength of immune responses across multiple taxa. Finally, immune senesce in old age.
Of course, caloric intake would substantially affect all of this. Modern humans in developed nations have ad libitum food access. In populations with caloric deficit, the trade-offs could go either way depending on whether immune function or the competing trait had more adaptive value.
Is the major trade-off on a stronger immune system limited calories or autoimmunity? I'm struggling to find the references or remember the genes involved, but I can recall mouse models that induced T or B-cell hyperplasia and a consequence was autoimmunity. Granted, lab mice in germ-free environments are especially prone to autoimmunity and are well-fed.
For an individual animal with limited resources, energy acquisition affects the relationship between all negatively associated traits. For example, under food limitation, reproductive effort and immune function have a strong negative association. Animals will allocate more to one or the other based on their life history strategy.
On a larger level, energy availability can determine the type of immune responses animals use. Although all vertebrates have adaptive immunity, ectotherms do not rely much on it; they have no lymph nodes or germinal centers. Ectotherm antibody titers and affinities do not increase much with a secondary exposure to a pathogen. When exposed to the same challenge, the binding affinity of mammalian antibodies increases orders of magnitude higher than amphibians. Ectothermic vertebrates have low metabolisms that cannot support the energetic expense of somatic hypermutation.
As for autoimmunity, I don’t know much about it. I work with wild populations and in animals without an adaptive immune system, but I don’t remember ever hearing about autoimmunity in discussions, seminars or classes about wildlife disease and ecoimmunology. All wild animals are diseased all the time. Their immune systems are always fighting something. I like the hygiene hypothesis as an explanation of human autoimmunity. I can’t speak about selection on specific mammalian genes, I just don’t know enough.
The strength of an immune response I know more about. An overly strong immune response to a pathogen can be maladaptive and cause self damage. For example, the mites that cause sarcoptic mange cause little direct damage. The mites don’t really cause the disease, it’s the overreaction of the inflammatory response.
I wrote about this a month or two ago: my naive estimate was that a drug on the WHO List of Essential Medicines that at least had some theory of treating COVID had a one in 25 chance of being "somewhat effective". https://www.notion.so/yevaud/The-Treatment-for-COVID-19-e052c9d829d34bc49eb6a2e1d2ad8e63
That said, this means that there should be a quick (ideally publishing results in under 2 months) and moderate-sized study to see if it's safe enough for people to go wild while you find out for sure. HCQ almost certainly is not safe enough, while IVM is (at least if you don't eat the horse paste version).
I was wondering if part of the increased mortality might be that, by the time the patients get the drug, they are so badly off it's a case of "try it and see if it helps" and the study does say this:
"The average mortality was 10.3% (standard deviation 13.5%) in inpatient trials and 0.08% (standard deviation 0.18%) in outpatient trials."
So I am wondering if in-patients (who after all are in hospital because they're so sick) are simply much worse off, and the benefits (if any) of HCQ aren't enough to overcome that stage of the illness. Mind, I am not convinced that it does any good at any stage of the illness, but if you're so sick with Covid you have to be kept in hospital, and they decide to try a drug on you because "hey, it might help and we've tried everything else", then maybe you should be preparing for the worst.
Also, I'd be wary of the interactions between your ten untested drugs. Maybe Drug 1 only gives you itchy feet and Drug 2 makes your nose run, but in combination suddenly you have a fit of apoplexy.
Side effects are not uniformly dangerous, because they can interact with the disease itself. In this case, HCQ is known to cause arrhythmias and COVID is known to stress the heart (which malaria does not), and this synergy may be one source for the increased danger for using HCQ in treating COVID versus treating malaria. Another is that people with pre-existing heart disease are more susceptible to severe COVID, and of course that would make them more vulnerable to the cardaic side effects of HCQ.
As far as I know, Budenosid (Pulmicort) is a drug where the odds should work out. I think it has at least a 10% chance, possibly higher, to make COVID less severe if taken early. It has about as little side effects as one can get. It's routinely taken for years on a daily basis by pretty healthy people, just as a precautionary measure against asthma attacks.
I have a spray at home, and plan to use it proactively if I have been exposed to someone with COVID, or if a get cold symptoms. (Hasn't happened yet, lucky me.)
Well I would say polio is the most famous example of that. I believe the current hypothesis is that it was the *improvement* in sanitation starting around 1900 that caused the disease to move from endemic to pandemic, and significantly increased the fraction of cases with unfortunate outcomes, since the cases were now occuring in significantly older children.
Sounds plausible. And sanitation improvement still paid off if for those who didn't die as infants or in childbed there were a much lower number killed or crippled by polio at another age. No gain is for free and no effort is in vain. Still, mankind is kinda out on a limb concerning infectious diseases.
Oh very much so. It tremendously reduced rates of cholera, for example, which slaughtered way more people in the 19th century. Just one of those weird unexpected effects that should keep us humble about how much we know about disease and health.
>most medications have stronger main effects than side effects
Is this true for experimental ones? For time-tested medications it would be an effect of survivorship bias, which isn't straightforwardly applicable to experimental drugs, especially those in the early trials.
I remember hearing sometime last year that some places where case fatality rates for covid were especially low may have already had endemic versions of coronaviruses that lent some protection from covid-19. Does anyone know how this hypothesis has fared since?
I mean, yes, but why on Earth would you ever have thought HCQ had a 10% chance of helping? My understanding is that the guy who promoted it - in the medical community, I mean - rubberstamps every paper that his grad students put in front of him. So, either you should place a great deal of faith in grad students, or this was close to the textbook case of a hypothesis rolled up via dice, lacking any evidence that would allow us to locate it in idea-space.
ACX has discussed Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome and aging before. I was involved in some research investigating the underlying cause of disease (other than progerin protein). Biased of course, but I think it goes a long way in explaining the disease's what-we-call 'aging.'
Nuclear membrane ruptures underlie the vascular pathology in a mouse model of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome
https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/151515
A fun brain teaser. You have an island, centered in a moat. The island is a 10x10 square, and the exterior of the moat forms a 30x30 square. You have two 9x1x1 boards to use to cross the moat. How do you get across? (all units are measured in feet).
Now, there is a “correct” answer, but there are also fun ones that I’ve heard like “accelerate the moat and island to .99 light speed so that relativity causes the distance across the moat to be shorter.” Feasibility of answers is not necessary, this is just a thought exercise I find fun.
Bar obneq tbrf npebff bar pbeare bs gur ynxr, gur bgure tbrf sebz gung obneq gb gur pbeare bs gur vfynaq
Yeah, that’s the “correct” one
That wouldn't work though, would it? The distance from corner to corner is 10*sqrt(2) ~= 14.15 ft. Laying the first board at a 45 degree angle would get you 9/2 = 4.5 ft there, which still leaves 9.64 ft to traverse. If you draw a picture it's pretty clear that trying to lay the boards at different angles won't help. Or is it about the 1 ft width/depth of the boards?
More likely it is that you’re right, and it’s been 5 years since I saw the actual writeup of the problem and I forgot the exact dimensions. I just didn’t care enough to check the math, since the “correct” answer wasn’t what I was curious about. But kudos to you for running the math and catching that error (this is sincere, but I’m not sure how to make it read that way)
Got it! I thought the problem might be cleverly constructed enough to make that solution *almost* work, but I'll take it.
Another idea I had was a pole vaulting maneuver, planting one of the boards right at the edge of the moat. Although they might be too heavy for that to be practical.
Correct. It is the width of the board that changes it from doesn't quite work to does.
Width alone isn't enough - if these were arbitrarily-thin planks, then board 2's weight would flip board 1 into the moat because board 2 doesn't intersect any chord on board 1 that's supported by the edge of the moat.
However, this is prevented by the thickness of the logs.
V vavgvnyyl pbafvqrerq gung bcgvba ohg qvfpneqrq vg orpnhfr V jnf guvaxvat bs gur fpranevb nf orvat nobhg fbzrbar *ba* gur vfynaq gelvat gb trg bss bs vg, fb gurl jbhyqa'g or va n cbfvgvba gb cynpr gur cynax bire gur pbeare. Gubhtu ybbxvat onpx ng gur dhrfgvba nyy vg fnlf vf "pebff gur zbng". Cebonoyl n yrffba gurer nobhg abg nqqvat rkgen pbafgenvagf haarprffnevyl.
Ah, I had been trying to work out how to get off the island. I think they should have explicitly said get onto the island.
Toss one of the boards in the water, sit on it and paddle across.
I'm pretty sure I can swim 20', maybe even more.
It's only ten feet. Ten foot moat, then ten foot island, then ten more feet of moat on the other side of the island.
Nccebkvzngvba jvgubhg qbvat nal pnyphyhf: frg gur svefg obneq qbja jvgu bayl 1’ fgvpxvat bss gur vfynaq. Gurer’f 1 phovp sbbg bs znff 8.5’ vaynaq, naq 1 phovp sbbg bs znff 7.5k’ vaynaq, sbe n gbgny gbedhr nobhg gur rqtr bs gur vfynaq bs ng yrnfg 16 phovp srrg gvzrf qrafvgl gvzrf srrg (artyrpgvat gur erfg bs gur obneq). Frg gur bgure obneq ba gur rqtr bs gur svefg bar, unatvat bss gur rqtr bs gur vfynaq. Rira fgnaqvat hc jvgu nyy vgf znff ba gur svefg obneq, gung’f bayl 10 phovp srrg gvzrf qrafvgl gvzrf srrg bs gbedhr, fb gur svefg obneq jba’g snyy va. Gvc bire gur frpbaq obneq fb vg ynaqf ba gur sne fvqr. Jnyx npebff.
Guvf nffhzrf gung lbhe znff vf artyvtvoyr eryngvir gb gur znff bs gur obneqf.
During some nasty weather yesterday I noticed our local PBS weather channel rotates between English, Spanish, Russian, Hmong and Somali. I think they should throw in a Rot13 translation occasionally just to keep things fresh.
Or perhaps even better Brain Teaser responders can encrypt their answers in Russian, Hmong or Somali for variety.
I like this.
This is a clever approach. I wonder what the plank:person mass ratio would be to make it work
I did some quick and dirty math; assuming the wood is 40 lbs/ft^3 (about average from a quick google) you should be able to support up to 450lbs with this method. I think technically you might lose a little bit since the boards have thickness, so you need to stick it out a little further, but this will probably be made up for by the angling of the board
Attempt to use the boards as a boat, fall in, and swim the rest of the way.
Interesting to point out that if your measurements are all in feet, then these aren't boards, these are veritable logs.
Dig out the center of the island with my hands to form a narrow land bridge towards the shore until the bridge is about 8ft from the shore, then plop a board down.
If the moat is shallow enough and the bottom of it firm enough, use the boards as stilts to wade across the water.
Light the boards on fire (by rubbing them together fast enough?) to form a smoke signal for someone to come rescue me.
Create a fulcrum by making a dirt berm, set one of the boards on it to make a seesaw, sit on one end, and wait for a comet or satellite or cannonball (or something) to land right on the other end of the seesaw to launch me across.
Drink the moat water until it's shallow enough for me to safely move across; use the boards to get up and down the sides of the moat safely.
Climb the big tree on the island, move over the moat on one of its branches, then get to where one of the branches is about 8ft off the ground on the other side of the moat and lower the boards down to help me safely get down.
Use my nanobot constructors to reform the boards into a 12x4x1 ultrastrong metamaterial low density bridge, then lay that across.
Cut and reshape the boards into a glider, then glide across.
Expertly toss the boards such that they land standing exactly upright in the water, solidly planted in the bottom, at the 3.3-across and 6.6 feet-across marks, so that they create 1x1 platforms, then use my mad parkour skillz to hop 3.3 feet at a time across the moat to the other side.
Dig a hole in the center of the island, down, then laterally, so that I tunnel underneath the moat and come up and out the other side. The boards are used as mobile supports for the tunnel.
Stilts? With these veritable logs? Hope you didn't skip leg day.
For your seesaw, if you also have the arm strength, you could hurl the other log onto the other end of the seesaw.
An easier task for your nanobot constructors would be to stick the logs together end-to-end so you've got an 18 foot log.
HOO-AH! *flexing arm emoji* All valid points.
More things I thought of:
Conduct strength training by lifting these massive logs until you can, by sheer force of musclery, launch yourself all the way across the moat.
Meditate on the nature of 9x1x1 boards until I ascend, and then, having ascended, dematerialize and rematerialize onto the other side of the moat.
'
Stand one of the logs upright near the edge of the island, veeeerry carefully shimmy up it so it doesn't fall while holding the other log, stand the other log on top of the first one, veeeerry carefully shimmy up the second log, then tilt yourself so that both logs fall over in an arc where you land on the other side.
Stand one of the logs upright on the edge of the island, very carefully shimmy up it, cause the log to fall towards the shore, then jump off the log at the right time to make it to the other side.
Plant one of the logs right up against the island standing upright in the water, so that from overhead, the island looks like a 10x10 with a 1x1 square sticking out of it, then fit the other log horizontally in between the upright log and the shore. It should fit/float perfectly in the remaining 9 ft, and you can walk across.
The diagonal between the corner of the island and the corner of the moat? Two x 9 foot boards is 18 feet in total length, which should be enough to get you across?
The original problem adds that you don't have any sort of nails or fasteners, so you can't just stick the boards together to get one long board.
Pythagorean theorem means going across the hypotenuse is longer, not shorter, than just cutting across one side. Corner to corner is just over 28 feet (sqrt(1800)-sqrt(200)) as opposed to 20 feet of cutting across side to side.
The answer I came up with when I first saw this problem was to break splinters off, use them to light a fire, use the fire to harden longer splinters into nails, and then nail the boards together
I know how to swim, so I just get across that way.
Ensure there are enough people on the island for a cantilever to work
I've the read the current replies and I still don't even understand the problem. Do the boards float unconditionally? Am I allowed/expected to lay down one board, walk along it, and place the second board? Does the path have to end at exactly the end of the water, or can it extend onto land? Without some more unstated restrictions the problem is trivial (unless I misunderstand something). Also, you say the island is centered in the moat, and I picture that its edges are parallel to the moat edges, but you don't say this.
Or can I throw a board and have it land exactly where I want?
I think you're allowed to levitate or telekinese the boards into whatever position you want. But once you release it from your telekinesis, the board must be supported under normal physics, and it'll sink in the water if not supported.
Writing that out suggested to me an amusing alternative solution: cebc gur gjb obneqf ntnvafg rnpu bgure gb sbez n fbeg bs hc-neebj be zbhagnva funcr, bar erfgvat ntnvafg gur vaare rqtr bs gur zbng naq bar ntnvafg gur bhgre. Gura jnyx guvf rqvsvpr irel pnershyyl.
Wow, if that condition is what's intended, it is SERIOUSLY missing from the problem.
The "correct" solution doesn't involve the boards floating, which is actually reasonable; they're too narrow to realistically bear a person's weight while floating. They'd rotate under your weight and dump you.
yeah I thought about that, but couldn’t figure out how to get the second board across. telekinesis is a good solution though
The version of this I saw had no water in the moat (it was set in a zoo), so you could have no support except from the edges of the moat. And the challenge was specifically to get *on* to the island, not *off* of it, so placing a board in the corner of the moat for the "intended" solution was no trouble.
it’s not a serious question, so you’re allowed to make basically any assumptions you need to make your solution work.
In terms of reasonable solutions, both Greg D and Melvin proposed good, technically sound solutions, while drossophillia proposed many more exotic solutions. All of them are acceptable
So you’re right that the problem is in some sense trivial, but the point is that it’s just fun to think about how to come up with cool solutions
You didn't say how deep the moat is. I used vines on the island to tie the boards to my legs, then walk across the moat in stilts.
These boards will weigh much more than I do, and I can jump 5 feet pretty easily. So lay out the first board so 5 feet is overhanging the moat and the other 4 feet is on land. Use the weight of the 2nd board on top of the land portion of the first to "anchor" it to the ground. I can then walk 5 feet out over the moat and jump the remaining 5.
I could draw the force diagrams to figure out exactly how far the first board can overhang the moat, but I'm pretty sure the idea would work.
Carve mortises and tenons into the ends of the beams (1'x1' is a beam, and a really big one at that, not really a board) and join them together into one 17'x1'x1' beam.
Since it isn't specified that the island is in the center of the mote or that it's side is parallel to the side of the mote, I will assume that the mote is narrower than 10 feet in some places and place one board there.
It is specified that it is in the center:
> You have an island, centered in a moat.
Though it does indeed not specify that the sides are parallel to each other.
My reading comprehension apparently isn't as good as I thought.
they're probably thin enough that you could sort of pole vault across, sticking one end in the middle of the middle of the moat and clinging on to the other.
The boards have a 1x1 feet (30x30 cm) cross section, that's one hell of a pole vault stick.
I'm glad I now know where that weird even in my calendar came from.
I was so baffled by that, too. Glad to know there is a simple and harmless explanation!
Only three of us actually showed up in Winnipeg, but we all had a great time.
Lol! Now we know your weakness, we will exploit it mercilessly to make you socialize constantly!
I do tend to respond best to trickery and deceit.
Well, you're doomed, but what a way to go.
I got it too. I guess it was from a meetup post I didn't read?
Wait a sec.. is this why a reservation for The Forks popped up on my phone yesterday? I'm in {southeastern state} but ate there in early July, so assumed that I had mistakenly put an entry on my calendar back then. Ah well, it was a good excuse to call my {sibling}.
I was wondering if my former grad student who has lived in Winnipeg for nearly ten years now somehow accidentally got his calendar event onto my calendar even though we never shared calendars and it didn't ever quite add up.
I got an appointment at The Forks too! Is it in Winnipeg?
I was also baffled by it. It's still not clear to me why Google decided to put it on my calendar just because a place, date, and time was mentioned in post. I'm tempted to try this right now as experiment, but I guess I'll forego understanding to spare you all spam calendar invites...
Gmail has this feature: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9308934?hl=en
But I'm not convinced that's what happened because why did the event have "Reservation" in the name?
... I admit to also being confused by this.
I’m just assuming this was a covert AGI, probing for human weakness.
I would love to see someone first steelman bitcoin maximalism, and then explain why it’s wrong.
I’ve looked at every argument I can find against bitcoin, and very few of them see to try anything like a steel-man approach.
Bitcoin is awesome but it’s be even more awesome if it had smart contracts and also didn’t cost 1 in 200 of every electrical kWh produced on the planet
The world would be greatly assisted by having a digital cash, that is, a medium of exchange that can't be gatekept and has no transaction cost.
Bitcoin is a deflationary-by-design commodity, it's not a currency.
That was my phone limited attempt, I'm sure you'll find it unsatisfactory.
Bitcoin can still be gatekept as long as there is such a thing as the state, and "no transaction costs" really strikes me as an "In a frictionless vacuum" type of statement.
Bitcoin possesses lots of elements that make it a bit goldilocks:
The fact that bitcoin was cleverly engineered (in a technical and a social sense) to be truly decentralised is the first characteristic that sets it apart from other crypto-currencies. Compare it with any other crypto-currency of reasonable size and you'll find Bitcoin is the only one that doesn't have a group of founders controlling inflation etc. This alone sets it apart.
It is now fashionable to note that because of bitcoin's deflationary monetary policy, it is unsuitable as a medium of exchange because holders are incentivised more to hold bitcoin than they are to spend it. While this is true to an extent, it fails to take other factors into account. Sure, bitcoin disincentivizes casual purchases. I'm going to think carefully before I buy anything with it and I'm only going to spend bitcoin on stuff that has real, long-term value for me but isn't that a good thing? Bitcoin was created, partly in order to demonstrate that inflationary money is a used by governments as a means to extract yet more value from their subjects, taxing them once when they're paid, then again as a penalty for attempting to accrue value by saving and then once again, at point of sale. Bitcoin of course, does exactly the opposite, it encourages one to hold the currency because its value will increase over time as long as the societal consensus that 'bitcoin is valuable' is maintained. This does not render it useless or of limited value as a currency but it does erode its usefulness as a means by which to propagate and accelerate consumerism and actually, this is what I think people mean when they talk about the bitcoin deflationary mechanism rendering it useless as a currency. It is useless as a currency within the context of a society fixated on consumerism. Here, I think we see bitcoin's true purpose. It's creator made it, partly in order to solve a technical problem (double-spend, digital scarcity) and partly as a teaching instrument. I'm guessing that Satoshi Nakamoto was infuriated by people talking about the inevitability of inflationary boom and bust cycles and the inevitability of central banks but I digress.
The other reason, or cluster of reasons, why bitcoin is singularly valuable, is the cost it takes to maintain the network. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. As we all know, it now takes an amount of computational energy, equivalent in cost to the GDP of several smaller countries , to maintain the network but this means that a transaction made a few minutes ago would require an expenditure of energy to roll-back, write over, or falsify, such as would render the operation pointless in terms of cost to benefit and of course, totally impractical. To do the same with a transaction recorded several months or years ago is as close as we can get to impossible. This is massively important and sets bitcoin apart from other chains, especially proof of stake networks, which are a step back in respect of 'Trustlessness'. The bitcoin ledger, the blockchain, is the first 'agile', unfalsifiable, record-keeping system in the history of the world. I use the term 'agile', so as to disambiguate the bitcoin blockchain from things like the pyramids, for example, which have also been used to record important events and are also protected by a 'proof of work' system. One can write a transaction into the bitcoin ledger and have no doubt that it will be there as long as the network itself is. Bitcoin is therefore, immutable, to all intents and purposes, on the human-scale. No other crypto currency comes close to this. Ethereum, famously failed to adhere to this principle since day 1, when the DAO was hacked, millions of tokens were stolen and the founders decided to roll-back time and create a new Ethereum blockchain where this event had not taken place. This will never be possible on the organically created, truly decentralised, bitcoin network.
Bitcoin's decentralisation, immutability, cost of maintaining the network and its deflationary policy all combine to create the 'perfect' currency.
There are two problems with bitcoin as a currency, though. The first is technical and will be overcome. This relates to the speed of transactions on the network and the general usability of bitcoin and I won't delve into it because it isn't pertinent. The second problem is the inevitable concentration of bitcoin into the hands of the wealthy.
Like all scarce assets, bitcoin becomes ever more valuable, partly because of the deflationary economic policy, partly through network effect. It will therefore inevitably move from the hands of people who 'need something' to those who 'need nothing', the wealthy. In perhaps five years, or ten, only the world's wealthy will possess bitcoin. There will be very little new bitcoin around and that will all be owned by miners. The world's bitcoin private keys will be locked away in safety deposit boxes belonging to the few. This fact alone means that bitcoin has a limited future as a currency.
We are moving towards a future where money will become a digital object, that much is certain. Bitcoin is the progenitor of all the monies that will come after but its own fate is to become something else, more like a museum exhibit; incredibly valuable, unattainable by most, exchanging hands infrequently.
Having read this back before posting, it isn't really complete enough to answer your challenge and also suffers from contradiction, around the deflationary bit. However, maybe it will provide food for thought, so I have decided to post it anyway.
It is eternally fashionable to say things that treat Moloch as a conscious agent who will make choices according to his supposed preferences, e.g. Bitcoin "is useless as a currency within the context of a society fixated on consumerism."
All such explanations aren't. If a person doesn't use Bitcoin their reasoning is not "well, nah, I'm in a society fixated on consumerism". There are much more plausible reasons like "Bitcoin transactions are slow and expensive", "someone could steal all my money just by hacking my PC or the third party holding my Bitcoin", etc.
Or, in the current circumstance, why should I buy a bagel and coffee with bitcoin when the odds are in a month I will be able to buy 100 bagels and 100 coffees with the same amount of bitcoin. In that sense it’s incredibly inflationary but maybe with the poles flopped
It's completely wrong to say that deflationary currency is fine because it only discourages "unnecessary" spending. I need to buy food, I don't think anyone would call that "consumerism," but Bitcoin is equally unsuitable for buying that as it is for buying anything else.
Many attempts have been made to explain why deflationary currencies suck. But if people really do not want to know why deflationary currencies suck, none of them will work, going back to "well, it would be cool if *I* had a deflationary currency."
> Bitcoin was created, partly in order to demonstrate that inflationary money is a used by governments as a means to extract yet more value from their subjects, taxing them once when they're paid,
Except maybe in weird second-order effect ways, the government doesn't extract value from inflation. Seignorage is not the government's way of funding itself.
None of society, the universe, nor the laws of physics say that you are promised a risk-free and stable store of value. If you buy 100 loafs of bread they will eventually rot. If you have a pound of gold you have to pay someone to guard it. If you have an options contract to give you 100 loafs of bread next year, you have the transaction costs and the risks that maybe 100 loafs of bread happened to decrease in value.
Getting free money sounds good, and so does a machine that keeps on going faster and faster with no input of energy.
Aren't you conflating entropy and inflation here? Certainly, in closed systems, there is the opportunity for organised growth, so why does money have to be inflationary? Gold has held its value, in real terms, perfectly adequately and there are many other examples.
You can make a much better argument for *minimal inflation*.
If I put ten bars of Deflatium in a drawer and come back in 20 years, and can now buy more stuff, where did the wealth come from?
The market confers value. It doesn't have to come from anywhere.
Assuming constant Stuff, deflation means less Money. So the wealth was always there, it's just that now you can access it rather than someone else because the someone else who otherwise would have accessed it now finds himself without the money he used to have.
Alternately, you can get deflation by having more Stuff for the same Money. In that case, the wealth probably came from the place it usually does - artisans, craftsmen, farmers, miners, and factory workers making more Stuff.
Thank you for the exposition. I appreciate the effort, and I've learnt a thing or two.
That being said, the two main things I'm taking away from this are:
1) It really isn't suitable to be a universal currency;
2) Its basic philosophy is only very good if you think things like central banks (and centralisation in general) are inherently bad. Which I guess is fine, but it's not me.
> The other reason, or cluster of reasons, why bitcoin is singularly valuable, is the cost it takes to maintain the network. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but disagree with it entirely. This cost is not scalable, it's prohibitive, and it's disproportionate to the value it provides.
What do you mean by Bitcoin maximalism? The first I'd heard that term years back, it was the claim that Bitcoin would eventually come to the be the only currency in use anywhere, and thus the fundamental value of Bitcoin can be computed as (value of all goods in existence) / (number of Bitcoin in circulation). An estimate of that number is something totally absurd in the hundreds of millions of USD or something, so Bitcoin is tremendously underpriced and you should buy it.
As for why that's wrong, well, the world has never had a single global currency. Maybe that will happen at some point, but it's an awfully bold claim that I don't feel much need to refute and I have no clue how to steelman it.
I see Investopedia currently defining "Bitcoin maximalism" as the claim that Bitcoin is the only digital currency needed and will thus be the only digital currency in use at some point in the future. To steelman that, well, Bitcoin has some nice properties. It is truly decentralized, so to the extent that is or should be a goal of digital currency, I doubt you can improve upon it. The only possible attack against the entire network, trying to control 50% + 1 nodes, is expensive to the point of being self-defeating as you'd make the network you just took over worthless as soon as you did it. So it's pretty resilient.
As for arguments against that, users of currencies desire other qualities than those Bitcoin offers. A lot of these are downstream to the currency itself, like convenient and cheap transaction processing, safe storage, broad acceptance. Those don't generally speak to strengths and weaknesses of the currency itself, but rather to the surrounding ecosystem and the business communities you find yourself involved with. Bitcoin does have one major drawback in this area, though. Proof work is, by design, an expensive and slow way of verifying transactions. Transactions on the actual blockchain can be processed in bulk, however, allowing individual transactions to be processed off-chain by higher layers, but then you're avoiding some of the strengths of Bitcoin. Those higher layers are just as susceptible to whatever it is you're trying to avoid by using Bitcoin instead of normal currencies in the first place.
Arguing against this second weaker claim would seem to me to be largely another matter of basic probability. Permanent monopolies like this don't really exist. So why should we expect Bitcoin will be the first ever? Even if it really is the best digital currency that can possibly ever be conceived, that doesn't make it inevitable or even likely it will forever be the only one actually used.
On a broader level, the central purposes and features of Bitcoin are being decentralized and computationally expensive to use. The expense is somewhat hidden from end-users as it is pushed onto node owners, who are presently compensated mostly by the rapid appreciation of Bitcoin itself, meaning they don't need to explicitly charge. This can't remain the case forever, so at some point the cost of running a node drops below what you can be compensated for just by Bitcoin appreciation, so you're left where equilibrium can only be maintained by charging users to use the blockchain or reducing network size, either making it more expensive or weaker. The only way to sustain itself seems to be draining value from other stores into the Bitcoin network at a fast enough rate to compensate blockchain node owners without charging users. But a scheme that generates no additional intrinsic value on its own, instead relying on draining value from external sources paying in, is typically a Ponzi scheme. It can potentially keep going for a very long time and serve as a sink for tremendous amounts of wealth coming from elsewhere, but it can't do that forever.
That isn't an argument against owning it, of course. As an individual investor, there is no reason for you to care about forever. But it is an argument against some notion that Bitcoin will permanently become the only digital currency in use.
Of course, regular currencies also have no intrinsic value, but this is getting at a fundamental question of what the purpose of Bitcoin is supposed to be. Regular currencies are meant to be a medium of exchange, not a store of value. Some amount of inflation sufficient to make it undesirable to hoard large amounts of cash for long periods of time, but not quite enough that appreciation of consumer goods outpaces appreciation of labor compensation, is a feature, not a bug. Aside from the transactional specifications of how Bitcoin is exchanged on a blockchain, the other feature of Bitcoin is the permanent capped supply and exponentially decaying mint rate. Early on, proponents largely tried to argue that a deflationary currency was actually desirable for galaxy brain reasons, but it entails a massive shift in how civilizations presently function, relying on dynamism and economic activity in which goods and services are frequently exchanged rather than simply being held onto to by original owners. Value creation is largely a matter of specialization, division of labor, and trade. Some future where this is not the case is possible, I suppose, but we get back once again to basic probability estimation where claims that human society will be drastically different in some fundamental way are not really being backed up by anything other than the desire of Bitcoin owners to convince you to sink your money into the network so their Bitcoin becomes more valuable.
More recently, it seems proponents have largely abandoned the notion that Bitcoin is ever likely to be dominant as a medium of exchange, but that you should nonetheless sink your money into it because it's a great store of value. This may or may not be the case, but as we'd still need something else then to serve as a medium of exchange, it isn't maximalism.
Thank you! This looks like a good start. You have a great point about defining what bitcoin maximalism is, and i'll accept the way you started: positing there'll be only digital currency in the future. I'll cal myself a 'soft maximalist' and say that while i can see there being many, i think bitcoin will be the dominant one.
> Those higher layers are just as susceptible to whatever it is you're trying to avoid by using Bitcoin instead of normal currencies in the first place.
Can you say more about this? A big motivation for me in buying bitcoin is that fixed upper limit on supply. Does using lightning network to transmit bitcoin change that fixed upper limit on supply?
> Some amount of inflation sufficient to make it undesirable to hoard large amounts of cash for long periods of time, but not quite enough that appreciation of consumer goods outpaces appreciation of labor compensation, is a feature, not a bug
Can you say more about this? I think this is where our primary disagreement comes from: bitcoin maximalists absolutely see deflation in the currency as being a feature. A lot of people who don't like bitcoin see is deflationary nature as being a serious flaw.
> Early on, proponents largely tried to argue that a deflationary currency was actually desirable for galaxy brain reasons, but it entails a massive shift in how civilizations presently function, relying on dynamism and economic activity in which goods and services are frequently exchanged rather than simply being held onto to by original owners. Value creation is largely a matter of specialization, division of labor, and trade.
It seems like you believe here is that deflationary currencies are inherently bad for value creation, because deflationary encourage people to hold onto things, rather than to sell them. Is that far?
Do you think 'most people save too much money, and don't send enough, so that people don't do much economically" is likely to be a problem in a possible future bitcoin-based economy? Do you think this was a problem when the gold standard dominated?
When i look at the economy, i see a bipartite system, where large numbers of people are continuously spending money, and doing very little savings or investing. Their behavior is likely rational, because saving currency that loses its value over time makes little sense, and investing small amounts of money provides little meaningful chance for real return. Then there's a small amount of people which huge piles of money, which only ever seem to grow bigger. People who do have savings are 'investing' in things they don't really understand, because if they _don't_ engage in these 'investments', their money loses value over time. So, as a result of inflationary money, economic growth requires large numbers of people spending money they don't really have, while smaller numbers of people take the money they do have and invest it in systems they really don't understand, but depend on for their future.
Can you steelman just this portion of the argument - that deflationary currencies (which gain value over time) encourage and reward behavior that leads to value creation (i.e. saving as much as possible, not buying what you don't need or investing in what you don't understand), mores than inflationary currencies?
> it seems proponents have largely abandoned the notion that Bitcoin is ever likely to be dominant as a medium of exchange, but that you should nonetheless sink your money into it because it's a great store of value. This may or may not be the case, but as we'd still need something else then to serve as a medium of exchange,
The proponents i've seen have argued that bitcoin will _first_ be a globally accepted store of value, before it passes into the being a medium of exchange. Once people everywhere accept bitcoin as an appreciating store of value, they will then be more likely to accept it as a medium of exchange, via systems like lightning network for small transactions, and with on-chain transactions replacing things like large-scale wire transfers. Gresham's law then suggests that people will try to dump their fiat money first, until basically everyone agrees fiat is more or less worthless.
The very basic argument for crypto is that it's still in its infancy and most of the problems involving security, transaction costs and network latency will go away with technological improvement. Trying to use crypto for everyday transactions now is like online shopping, dating or video streaming over a dial-up modem in the mid-1990s: not impossible, but not competitive enough to be mainstream. This will change once the banking system understands the blockchain and we all have 7G phones running our own nodes.
The counterargument is that people already throw massive amounts of bandwidth and computing power at bitcoin, and it mostly goes towards zero-sum competition that doesn't really improve performance for anyone wanting using to buy and sell stuff.
Trying to design an efficient proof of work system is like trying to design a cold furnace.
It's kind of hard to Steelman something you don't agree with, or at least hold significant curiosity in. I'm also not convinced it's a good use of anyone's time.
I would only describe an argument as a steelman if made by someone who disagrees with it; otherwise it's just a strong argument.
Considering how massive education is as an institution, how deeply invested societies and individuals are in education, and the huge body of research and literature on education, it seems shocking to me that there is such a dearth of words/tools to discuss the QUALITY of education.
What tools do we currently have? We can talk about the outcomes -- discussion of which is often limited to graduation rates and standardized tests. We can talk about inputs -- small classes, higher-paid instructors, charter schools, homeschooling, project-based, etc.
But none of these things tell me very much about the objective quality of how Cathy spends 6-10 hours of every school day. And if we drill down to the quality of Cathy’s biology class versus Billy’s Physics class, things get even murkier. We’re stuck with “good teacher” versus “bad teacher”, and “easy” versus “hard”.
I think there may be a single, missing metric that would facilitate a lot of these conversations and analyses: ENGAGEMENT.
How engaged are the students?
And, if they are highly engaged, WHO CARES ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE?!?!
Let’s assume that a bunch of students in a classroom don’t have access to sugar, drugs, or screens. Nor are they fighting or having sex on top of the classroom desks. And let’s imagine that despite all this they are still highly engaged. Whatever magic is happening in that classroom should translate to better learning.
Finding out if a class is good or not should be as simple as seeing the student engagement score for that class. Finding out if a school is good or not should be based on the amount of high engagement hours that the average kid gets in that school. If I was to tell you that School A (an average Public school) provides 1 hour of high engagement per day, School B (a charter school) provides 1.5 hours, and School C (SSC Academy) provides 4 hours of high engagement, would you need any other metric to make a decision?
In honor of Bezos, this is the only metric that focuses on the customer. The customer is the one who is doing the learning. Schools should be obsessed with the quality of the customer experience (quality of engagement), because more engagement equals more learning. We should all be.
If this metric already exists in some form, and I’m missing something, please point it out.
Oh… and how do we measure ENGAGEMENT? Well, we can observe the students (automated tools are getting better at this sort of thing). Or we can ask them. Or we can do some combination of both.
I disagree that engagement is a sufficient condition. For example, imagine a classroom full of sports fans all watching an exciting and close game (on a screen or especially in person). They might be highly engaged (look at the student section at a college football game), but that doesn't mean it translates to better learning, especially about topics that you find valuable for them to be learning.
For a less extreme example, what about a teacher that has a really engaging and charismatic style but is actually sort of confusing and getting some of the facts wrong. They might be more engaging than the teacher next door but actually teaching their students less.
To be fair they did rule out "screens" so that eliminates the first example. Although, why did they do that? Because some kinds of engagement are "too easy."
I think reading is another interesting example - generally considered educational these days, but at one time novels were considered as bad as we now consider "screens." I carried books around as a kid and used them much as everyone use phones these days, to escape from boredom. I suppose reading every science fiction book in the high school library might have somehow helped.
It rules out watching a game on a screen, but doesn't rule out watching them in person. The student section at a football game tends to be very engaged without screens, but are they learning? Are they learning what society wants to value?
Yeah, I might like to maximize engagement × standardized test score instead. After all, Engagement isn't everything.
metrics are great until a munchkin comes along and uses it to break the game.
Metrics are great until they show the opposite of what the people in charge want. Which is what happens when you try getting really good metrics related to education.
The people in charge of education want every child to make above average progress every year.
I doubt this. We passed the point, some years ago, when the quality of teaching available online, surpassed that available in most physical environs. There are numerous examples, but how about Harvard's CS50 programme, which easily trounces equivalent cs courses available in local universities and colleges. Yet people cluster together in physical gathering places, perhaps out of habit and inertia, more than anything else.
If educating the mind were really the main point of 'education', it would look very different.
I think I mostly agree with you, but one other thing that "education" is trying to account for is measurable growth. Because there are so many students at all levels, it's very very hard to accurately track learning. This is especially true for the students in materially or socially poor environments, where there is little to no parental support.
A lot of what schools offer to in person learners is someone to track their progress and make adjustments when needed. If all students were self-actualized learners, this would not be necessary. This may not be necessary in college, if we are willing to allow students to fail when they do not meet the requirements, no matter how much money they have put into the system. For a general education offered to the full population to have meaning, then we do need monitors who can identify current or potential failures and take steps to remedy them. We cannot accept the option of "they didn't make an effort, so they failed." That would create huge stratification between students who come from healthy and/or wealthy families, and those who have various barriers to learning.
Something built primarily around engagement would probably look less like a school than like a community center with a bunch of clubs going on. Which isn't necessarily bad, but there will almost certainly be winners in engagement metrics where the kids don't learn to read or multiply or other pretty basic civilizational skills. There will be a cohort of students very engaged with basketball or makeup or cooking or something for hours a day, but won't learn any traditional academics at all.
Someone could say: well, they still have to write (and other fundamentals), and we'll measure engagement while writing. That doesn't necessarily seem like an improvement on just measuring their written work, and would probably mostly end up measuring selection effects of those who are highly engaged while doing academic tasks.
Surely it's easy enough to incentivise reading and writing to the extent that classes get the intakes required?
That brings in the problem of "are they engaged because the teacher is catching their interest and they are retaining this information, or are they engaged because it's all done in a flashy, entertaining style?"
I still have fond memories of my Fifth Class history lessons where Sister Joseph put aside the text book and simply told us the information as if it were a story (listen, if you want to grab the attention of ten year old convent school girls, telling them all about how the Viking who killed Brian Boru was caught up to by Brian's bodyguard who tied him to a tree - USING HIS OWN INTESTINES
That will do it.
But I read something online from somebody teaching (I don't know if it's high school or college) about how he writes his own curriculum and will change up selected texts if they're too old, because he can't expect kids to be interested from three months ago (yes, he did give that figure: a whopping entire THREE MONTHS BACK). And I can't help thinking "What the hell are those kids going to do when they have to engage with something that is not Relevant and Up-To-This-Second and specifically textured to be appealing to whatever the current fashion is? How are they going to learn about things that happened before they were born? How are they going to develop the ability and the cognitive tools to extract information from something that is not cut up into bite-size chunks and spoon-fed to them?" because you can fall into the trap of trying to make everything appealing and engaging.
You seem to be taking it for granted that reading boring texts now makes you better at reading boring texts later. What makes you think that engaging with something that is not relevant to your personal interests is a skill, and that teachers who force students to "engage" with outdated materials are in fact teaching that skill? It seems most people leave school thinking "academic texts are boring and I'm glad I'll never have to read one again!" and not "I'm glad I know how to read old boring things, it's really enriched my life!"
There are techniques for, as you say, extracting information from dense texts - but these techniques generally need to be taught explicitly, through modeling, guided practice, and feedback. (I say generally because the most gifted students - e.g. almost everyone in this comments section - will pick them up on our own; the majority of students will need to be taught explicitly). If the purpose of your class isn't teaching this particular literacy skill, then assigning dense, boring, or outdated texts will usually end up being detrimental to whatever the actual purpose is.
As a general thing, school is about training children to do things they don't want to do, and I think there's a deficiency in teaching children to be effective at things they do want to do. Even if some of the former is needed, there's also a need for the latter.
If someone is drawing up a new curriculum every three months because kids can't be expected to handle things that old or irrelevant, God help them when they need to read the information pamphlet in a box of medication, or fill out a form, or sign off on a contract, or any of the boring YOU NEED TO READ THE SMALL PRINT OR YOU WILL BE PAYING WITH ONE OF YOUR KIDNEYS DOWN NOW AND A PINT OF BLOOD EVERY WEEK FOR ETERNITY paperwork that businesses do use to trap people, because they know the big, singing and dancing, colourful banner grabs attention "Buy this now for no money at all!" and nobody reads "but three weeks later we sell you to the salt mines" small print.
There's a lot of boring, dull, no-fun, but it's necessary stuff in life. The earlier you start to learn how to deal with it, and find ways to make it bearable, the better. You can eat all the candyfloss and ice-cream you like, but eventually you will also have to eat your broccoli.
You talk about examples of engagement in your school classes, e.g. students have to do science experiments or anthropology field work or projects.
How would you deal with a kid complaining they can't read a source document for a history project because it was written all the way back in 1950? You can do all the "snatched from the headlines" work you like to make things relevant and attention-grabbing and so forth, but one day today's headlines *will* be tomorrow's boring stuff. If you're trapped within the tiny circle of what is familiar to you as the only thing you can understand, you are cut off from so much.
You don't really need a new curriculum for new texts. I used to do a music video production unit in a design/technology class where I'd change the case study video every few years because there's an uncanny valley of pop music between "fresh" and "classic" where music is considered cringe. But changing the case study doesn't mean you change the whole unit.
I don't know what subject would merit changing texts every three months, and I suspect that was exaggeration or virtue signaling of some type. But certainly in my global politics class I would try to choose case studies that were current, and I'd switch them up from year to year. One year I was covering revolutions and there was a coup in Zimbabwe that generated some good news stories for class.
As to the rest, sorry, but it sounds to me like "I suffered so children have to suffer too." Kids really, really, really don't need teachers to demonstrate that life can be boring and difficult. Do you read the entire instruction pamphlet for your box of medication or do you just read the part that says "take 2 pills every 4-6 hours"? Do you read every EULA and cookie policy for every app and website you use?
If you were saying "kids should be taught how to research medications, side effects, and interactions so they can be intelligent consumers of medications" I'd be totally on board. If you were saying "kids should be taught how to deal with paperwork and contracts intelligently and how to look for traps and gotcha clauses" then alright. Those are life skills I can get behind.
But "kids need to read primary source documents from the 1950s for history classes"? Hard disagree. I wasn't required to read anything but very short excerpts from primary sources until university, and at that point I had freely chosen and paid for all my courses and could drop boring ones if I chose to. AP and DP history kids have to engage with primary sources, but again, those are elective courses - I was a math nerd so I didn't take AP US History; I took AP calculus and AP compsci. And I wouldn't dream of demanding that every student learn integration or quicksort. To me, reading history documents from 70 years ago is equally esoteric and equally without practical application for most people's lives.
Making kids do boring, shitty stuff that they don't want to do isn't teaching them to "find ways to make it bearable". It's teaching them that school is boring and dense and adults are hypocritical sellouts who hate kids. Again, if you're explicitly teaching coping strategies, or scanning and skimming texts - and by "explicitly teaching" I mean explaining, modeling, guided drills, and feedback on practice - then it's fine to have some lessons on dealing with boredom or coping with dense texts. But you can't just give out work that kids hate - because you don't care enough to update your curriculum - and then turn around and say "well this will teach you the life lesson of putting up with things you hate".
Engagement isn't missing from educational theory and practice. I took an entire course on student engagement for my Master's of Education degree. I learned about using expectancy-value theory to assess reasons for lack of engagement. About student goal orientation (intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, performance vs mastery goal structure) and self-efficacy. About models for building and assessing engaging learning experiences. Engagement came up again and again even outside that course - for example, many modern classroom management techniques are build around engagement. There's self-determination theory - students are intrinsically motivated by autonomy, competence, and relevance. There's the related ARCS model of motivation: Attention, relevance, confidence, satisfaction. There's the TARGET model of analyzing lessons for engagement opportunities (task, authority, recognition, grouping, evaluation, time). A real wealth of literature on student engagement. I could go on about it all day.
The problem, as with most things in education, is that there aren't enough teachers with enough time to apply this knowledge to actually engaging students. To design a really engaging unit or topic, and then differentiate it so that it actually engages all of the students, adjusting as you go based on individual student needs, taking time to give students the feedback they need to stay engaged, you end up spending 2-3 hours of time outside work for each 1 hour of actual instruction.
What drove me absolutely mad as a teacher - and what I'm convinced drives a lot of teacher burnout - was knowing that if I had another 40-80 hours in a week I could make all my lessons as engaging as my best lessons. Knowing I constantly had to triage. Constantly had to pick and choose which students I devoted the bulk of my time to helping. Knowing I knew how to do more but it was not humanly possible to do so.
I totally agree with you that student engagement should be one of the most important metrics in our assessment of the quality of a school experience. It's not just that you learn more when you're engaged - it's also that being engaged is rewarding in and of itself. Being engaged instills a lifelong love of learning. Being engaged is a human right that too many teachers in too many schools are denying to kids on a regular basis. And done well, engagement can be used to teach kids to be better learners.
But it's incredibly difficult to teach a specific curriculum in a way that engages students. You need large-scale, institutional change in the way schools approach content and curriculum. And then inquiry-based and project-based curricula have their own problems - done poorly, they can lack rigor, and fail to provide students with needed facts and knowledge and skills practice.
In terms of measurement - you hit the major ones: observation (you can count time on task if you need to quantify something) and just asking students. It's also obvious to any teacher or adult in the school who takes the time to get to know the kids whether they're engaged in any particular task or subject.
Engagement is a pretty popular topic in progressive (not the same as politically progressive - see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education) educational theory and practice. Programs like the International Baccalaureate's Middle Years Programme lean pretty heavily into inquiry learning and project-based assessment for engagement purposes (this was the program I taught in for the last 8 years). For some reason it doesn't generate a ton of noise, but it's there.
Is this educational theory taught by experts or "experts"?
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-experts/
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/tetlock-and-the-taliban
Most likely both, depending on the school. Also it's not a theory per se; more like a field of inquiry.
Honestly I'm happy to address a specific concern or question about any of this stuff, if you have one. I think the study of how to engage students is generally quite valid and the problem is in its lack of application - by teachers who either don't care or don't have time - but I'm happy to debate whether or not, for instance, students are more likely to engage with a task if they are confident they can do it, and how teachers might foster that confidence if in fact it is needed.
But yeah, it's obvious that education, like every other field, is plagued by people who claim to know things that are absolute nonsense. Don't even get me started on learning styles.
So are there some schools that have adopted the right way of teaching and systematically get better results? I've heard some claims about Direct Instruction used in some charter schools, but that's about it.
I'll say a conditional yes, but with the caveat that proving causation in education is really hard.
So I mentioned the IB programs in my comment. These schools tend to build curriculum around student engagement. The Diploma Programme (DP) courses typically build some kind of active, performance task into course assessments. For example, in Global Politics, which I taught, one of the four assessment components (which determine final grades) was literally called the "Political Engagement Activity". In science classes the student has to do an experiment. In anthropology the student has to do actual ethnographic research. Etc. DP also has community service requirements that tie directly into coursework. The results are pretty great in the sense that DP grades are taken quite seriously by college admissions boards and scholarship committees.
However, of course there's a huge confounding factor, which is that these are almost always private schools selected by the kind of parents who can afford expensive private schools and care enough about "international-mindedness" and progressive education to pick IB over alternatives (like AP) that are more exam-based and less engagement-based. So one could argue that even if these kids were put in regular schools, they'd likely excel.
Also, having seen the implementation of IB programs from the inside... it's one thing to have a written curriculum built around engagement. It's another thing entirely to have teachers who deliver a taught curriculum around engagement. Many teachers are understandably results-driven, where results are measured by grades. Even in the DP, it's entirely possible for students and teachers to collaborate to produce something that looks like engagement on paper but is not real engagement, or is not sustained engagement.
Charter schools have the same kind of selection biases. Charters can adopt something like project-based learning, which promotes engagement, and get good results. Schools that don't get to pick their students and can't throw disruptive students out could adopt the same program and get worse results, because project-based learning is much harder for kids without academic self-management skills and every kid who needs special support takes time away from the teacher's ability to make the project go well in general overall.
Schools also aren't ever going to self-report "yeah, we don't even try to engage kids" and one of the recognized problems in educational research is that when you study an intervention (say, a program for increasing engagement) it works but then as soon as the research team stops paying attention, or you try to scale the intervention to other schools that aren't supervised by a study, the intervention suddenly stops working. There's a concept called "implementation fidelity" that is the bane of any pedagogical technique or curriculum program. Sure, Direct Instruction looks like it works - but does it work when teachers half-heartedly implement it? When they get tired of the structured drills and stop making kids repeat things back? When teachers don't really understand the technique and "adapt" it in a way that removes the part of it that works? This is not a critique of DI, by the way - the same applies to everything. "Differentiation" is an important concept in education but if you survey actual teachers most of them don't seem to know very much about how to actually do it. This is one of the reasons why ed reform is really hard.
Also "engagement" can be misused. My principal last year was all about making sure cameras were on in zoom classes. I rarely enforced this rule because my gut feeling was that the kids who were turning off cameras needed some refuge from the stress of the pandemic, and that was more important than demonstrating engagement at any given time. There are now numerous studies about zoom fatigue and how and why video calls cause increased stress and anxiety, all of which back up my gut feeling, and I'm not surprised because my teaching style is very much based on relating to students on a human level, and you can't relate to someone on a human level without seeing the effect being in video calls all day for five days a week during a once-in-a-century crisis is having on them. But anyway, some of the "cameras on" kids were totally disengaged - kids are smart about things like putting their mobile phone on their laptop screen so it looks like they're looking at the screen while they're watching TikTok - and some of the "cameras off" kids were totally engaged - participating in discussions, completing projects, learning - and so it's important to draw a distinction between engagement and the performance or appearance of engagement. A school that is hyper-focused on engagement will get a lot of hollow, performative engagement. Goodhart's law, and all that.
I'm all about engagement in my classroom and in my training to other teachers, but, weirdly, I also question how scalable it is.
It's not realistic to expect even a young mind to be able to think deep thoughts for six hours every day, and a student who leaves my class with their gears turning (always my goal) is going to have to put them aside in just a few minutes or be unable to engage with their next teacher's ideas. How would you like being forced to context shift every time you found a deep vein of thought? I have a lot of sympathy for cerebral kids.
So, it would be a nice problem to have, but I fear that the current design of a school day means that engagement starts to become a zero sum game once you have enough sufficiently engaging teachers.
Engagement for six hours a day is not impossible - television networks and YouTube have certainly figured out how to do it. And the "Khan Academy" videos seemed to have hit on at least one formula for engagement.
Maybe instead of making every teacher try to come up with their own Khan Academy-esque presentation, schools would do more "flipping" - where kids watch assigned engaging presentations on "You Tube" at home and then discuss said videos (and do homework) in the classroom the next day.
tanagra seems to be speaking of a mental engagement that keeps working after the class is over, which isn't the same kind of Engagement YouTube measures. Day to day, it may be impractical to measure it at all.
It sounds to me that you're basically saying that class sizes are too large (in a number of students: one teacher ratio way). If class sizes were 1 student to 1 teacher (basically tutoring), then you wouldn't need to triage and could instead devote all your time to that one student, delivering a carefully crafted and engaging lesson every time.
In other words, Bloom's Two Sigma Problem (https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/): nothing is as effective or as expensive as one-on-one tutoring, with tutored students scoring two standard deviations above mean (so in the top 2.5%). This is why Alexander the Great was personally tutored by Aristotle... and why this is a completely unworkable system to try scaling up, because we don't have an unlimited supply of Aristotles. (In fact, we only have an average of one person's time per person). As far as I can tell, much of education research is about figuring out how to replicate tutoring without the expense of actual tutoring.
This is why I hope that one day, eventually, the principles behind why games like Kerbal Space Program and Minecraft (Redstone = binary logic) teach so well will be understood well enough to mass produce them for every topic under the sun. In fact, that's already sort of happened with the DARPA digital tutor (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vbWBJGWyWyKyoxLBe/darpa-digital-tutor-four-months-to-total-technical-expertise). But given that it was discontinued for unknown reasons, despite its effectiveness (its students once outscored the instructors teaching other classes), it seems that point is still far off. A pity.
My son and I play Minecraft (he's 8) and the redstone=binary logic thing isn't quite a slam dunk - when he works with redstone he's mostly just following tutorials, which is fine. But I will say that by playing the game and watching Minecraft streamers/YouTubers, he's learned research and computer skills that are certainly more advanced than those of most of my middle school students. For example, he can install mods, which requires googling the mod name, navigating to the download page, downloading it, opening the downloads folder, copying the file, opening the mods folder, pasting the file, and relaunching the game. He can do limited troubleshooting and he's getting better with time. The number of students I've had in 8th or even 9th grade who can't download a file and then copy-paste it somewhere else is staggering. He can also use the minecraft command line and command blocks - even I didn't start typing commands until I was 10. At some point he may take up redstone programming (I've also started him on python). I just let him follow where his interests go.
You can also see the generational divide because when we are trying to figure out how to do something, he goes to youtube to watch a video on it and I go to the official Minecraft wiki to read the "man page" (man is short for manual in this context, for those unfamiliar with 90's computer slang).
Anyway, on class sizes: if the goal is to implant certain knowledge and skills into students' minds, 1:1 does seem to be the gold standard. However, I wouldn't underestimate the benefits of socialization and social learning - a tutor can't exactly assign a group project. Perhaps you could have tutors for mastering academic subjects and then group activities for practicing leadership, cooperation, delegation, etc. But peer groups can actually be quite valuable for improving engagement, if you know how to use them. I'd say the issue is part class size and part teaching hours. I think most teachers could engage a group of 15-20 students pretty consistently given 3:1 prep time to contact hours. The trouble is that no one wants to pay a teacher a full salary for 10 contact hours per week. Full time at my last school was 20-24 contact hours - meaning for full engagement I would have needed to work 80 hours per week at a bare minimum, and that's putting aside administrative and professional development tasks. I think most teachers would agree that if you put in 80-90 hours per week you can consistently deliver great lessons that engage the majority of students - and that this pace of work is draining, destroys work-life balance, and drives the ridiculous rate of teacher burnout.
There are other ways to optimize this - for example at larger schools, you can give one teacher several sections or groups of the same class (e.g. if your school has four seventh grade classes, they all take seventh grade math with the same teacher) and then that teacher only has to prep seventh grade math lessons, which they deliver four times each. This is also nice because if a lesson goes awry with your first section you can modify it for your next section. If the teacher has to prep 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th grade math lessons it's much less efficient. But not every school is large enough to make this work.
On tutoring: I have several friends who tutor English online to Chinese students, and they tell me China has just passed a law regulating tutoring hours outside of schools, apparently out of concern that students are spending too much time on education and not enough on having an actual life, and parents are spending too much money on private tutors. Where I live (Georgia the country) most public school teachers also tutor students in their subjects one on one after school hours, and most of my students have tutors in what their parents think of as the core subjects. We've had some problems with students whose tutors appear to be doing their homework for them. And of course in the US there's a whole "test prep" industry, which poses a problem in terms of equity, since competitive examinations can determine access to colleges and scholarships. So I think, broadly speaking, that many parents and teachers across the world intuitively recognize that if they want their kids to learn something, tutoring is the way to go. What are schools even for, then? Socialization and certification.
I’m still a bit mad at mojang about command blocks. Why would they expect people to make mods with that! It’s ridiculous the effort people have put into making official mods with them when they could’ve used an official forge or something like that, or even spigot... But I guess it’s in their wheelhouse - do something tremendously stupid and build arbitrarily and shakily upon it, this leaving a fun and endlessly complicated and deep system of random parts and challenges to uncover (this is why red stone is so fun! It’s horribly broken and ridiculous).
The other day I was building a redstone boat catapult to quickly launch my boat up to a higher road without the player having to get out of the boat... the system is so janky. Like, a pressure plate can power redstone two blocks below it, but powered redstone can't power a piston one block above it, but somehow cobblestone can transmit power from horizontally adjacent powered redstone to a vertically adjacent piston? It really is ridiculous, and fiddly, just like so many things in real life. Definitely rewards trial and error, and real-world problem solving skills applied to totally arbitrarily contrived situations.
That is the problem: if class sizes were something like six pupils to one teacher, then you could have individually-tailored learning plans and all the rest of it. But that is not going to happen when there are a hundred kids in one year to be taught. You can break them up into classes of thirty or so, and that's it.
Though maybe in a perverse way, if the waterfall of money poured into education was spent on "one teacher for every six pupils", it might be possible to fund it?
My belief is that almost all of the money poured into education that isn't directly funding hiring more and better teachers is wasted.
Most kids don't need individually-tailored learning plans from teachers - and one of the explicit goals in modern education is to teach students goal-setting and self-assessment, so they start making their own learning plans.
But really it depends on what you think you're getting out of education. The factory model was great when you needed to teach kids the three Rs and broadly sort kids into career paths, and the fact that kids who couldn't conform got drummed out was a feature, because they would have been disruptive or incompetent workers. It's not so great when your goals are producing a more equitable society full of self-actualized 20-somethings ready for the information age - when no child can be left behind, when ed reformers dogmatically believe that any kid can master any subject, and when education is supposed to fill the gaping void left by the lack of decent social services outside of schools.
So if you want schools to produce docile and compliant workers who have had every last shred of inspiration beaten out of them - i.e. if you want child prisons - the 1 teacher to 30 students model is perfect. If you want children to actually have a decent quality of life and grow up expecting something more from the world than drudgery and an early death from opioid addiction, then yeah, you're going to need more and better teachers.
At least per Freddie, reducing class size isn't a silver bullet*.
I'm sure that someone with individual access to a private tutor will probably have a great outcome. I would even buy that limiting class sizes at Deiseach's six would probably be a measurable improvement over 30 or so... but I'm remarkably unconvinced that these same gains are apparent when you're talking about a reduction from say... 30 to 20.
My not-in-anyway-well-informed opinion is that this is probably a span of control problem. Once you exceed the teacher's personal span of control, educational quality takes a direct and dramatic hit. Further burdening the teacher after that, however, doesn't cause a scaling decrease in quality.
*(https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work)
I think you're right. Each teacher probably has a magic number or range where they can know enough about each student to create truly meaningful personalized plans and get a similar effect to tutors. That number probably varies quite a bit between teachers, which may be a good portion of the difference between "good" and "bad" teachers. The best teachers might be able to individualize learning for 10-15 students at a time, maybe more. Most teachers would top out under 10, maybe closer to 5. To scale this plan, you would need a program that allows even average teachers to do what they can, which means something like Deiseach's 6. Alternately, you create a system of education where you don't individualize plans per student, but constantly adjust the overall curriculum in a vain attempt to do so by proxy. This allows a fairly competent teacher to handle a class of 25+ students, but does not achieve the benefits of individualized tutors. Given the potentially 5X costs of the individualized plan, it's easy to see why very few schools attempt it. If we did attempt it for real, we would also run into a massive teacher shortage, which would inevitably result in people who should never have been teachers who get hired at struggling/poorer schools which puts us in a similar position to what we have now, but at 5X cost.
About that 'factory model of education' thing... apparently it had the exact same objectives and used the exact same rhetoric as the modern education reforms of today. See http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model & https://hapgood.us/2014/07/09/the-original-factory-education-was-a-personalized-learning-experiment/ - basically, the villain of today was once the hero of yesterday, and the heroes of today are saying the exact same things about themselves as the villain once did, and in fact doing some of the exact same things as well. How that doesn't send the current generation of reformers shaking and trembling with perspective ("You're walking the exact same path he did.")... I don't know.
In other words, yes, I think you're right. All the money pouring into education that isn't spent on getting more and better teachers is money probably wasted, since it seems the problem in education has in fact been pinpointed: student to teacher ratios, and every other attempt at addressing the problem does nothing but turn into tomorrow's villain that the next generation of reformers swear they have to overthrow. Though given that we still have the "only one person's time per person" limit on how many teachers we can have, I think that efforts to develop a DARPA stye digital tutor are also worth investigating, given that they're attacking the teacher to students ratio (every student gets a digital tutor, even if it's just the Kerbal Space Program of the subject they're studying) rather than doing whatever it is the other reforms do...
I suppose Direct Instruction and Mastery Learning might also be worth pursuing, given the relative high praise Nintil gives it (https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/). Though it's been frequently criticized as nothing but barbaric memorization instead of true learning, stuff that produces the docile and compliant workers you warned about. Still, it was the only thing that actually worked when studied by Project Follow Through; according to the Nintil article, almost everything else actually *decreased* performance relative to traditional teaching methods. That's got to be worth something, being the only one to work.
(Incidentally, if you want to read more about the heady hopes and crushing reality of that era of reforms, in Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society era, see this Gwern tweet: https://web.archive.org/web/20190315005543if_/https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1017976030177488897. This is where you get the much reviled Project 100 000 [https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara], because reformers at the time genuinely believed they were helping people who were just missing some protein or something [see the Gwern tweet thread] and that the military would be glad to provide that help, or at least willing if forced to.
It never seemed to cross their mind that the entire idea was flawed and their good intentions were blinding them to the obvious moral repugnancy of sending medically-certified retards [I believe that was the term the era used as non-pejorative, until it got co-opted?] to die. Sometimes by blowing up their friends with grenades in a poorly thought out practical joke and being beaten to death by an angry mob, or by blowing themselves and ~300 other people up in Port Chicago with poorly thought out explosives handling, or by getting themselves and everyone else in their squad killed by walking right into an ambush...
Yeah, the military was not glad to take these people, and was not willing once it was no longer forced to. Hence the ban it negotiated on never taking anyone who scores too low on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Without the good intentions, they could see what was actually happening rather than what the designers were praying for. Sometimes, good intentions lead to the greatest evil, by the magic of wishful thinking. Every generation's heroic reform becomes the next generation's villain, rhetoric masking and then justifying anything. Anything. That's why every book about Utopia is inevitably a book about Dystopia.)
Yeah, the "factory model" is, as the first link points out, more a rhetorical device than a historical claim. Also I'm not saying the "create docile compliant workers" model of education is any worse than the "create a society of perfect equality of outcome" model of education - the first is feasible but morally questionable, as it grinds down most people until their natural creativity and love of learning are withered beyond recovery; the second is completely unfeasible but the attempt seems likely to make education actively worse for many students. I think modern education is in a crisis state because no one can even agree explicitly on what it's for, and so 99% of the "ed reform" debates seem to be people screeching "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" past each other until they get dizzy from the effort. I don't know, that was my impression, anyway, but I tend to stay off that corner of the internet. I just mind my own business and try to shield my students from the worst excesses of adults' general disregard for children's day-to-day well-being.
The school that is the main competitor to my school here in Tbilisi uses mastery learning, but not anything like 1:1 teaching. My impression is that academically they're a bit less rigorous than we are (were - I resigned at the end of last year for pandemic-related issues...) but socially and emotionally their students were a little better off. I suppose there's a bit less pressure from Mastery learning than from an IB curriculum. I'm not criticizing it - I actually think kids that are happier but know a bit less are meaningfully better off, especially if the quality or duration of their knowledge is actually higher. I tried to implement principles of mastery learning in my own classes, but my administration didn't like it, because it resulted in too many students getting really high grades. I was explicitly told to make it impossible for every student in the class to get the highest score on assessments.
This is not an isolated quirk of my admin - it's sort of baked in to the whole IB assessment methodology, which grades on a curve in order to maintain "rigor" for college admissions. In other words, if every student masters everything in the curriculum, then there's nothing to differentiate one student from another in competitive college admissions, and we can't have that because no one would take us seriously if we just told colleges "yes, this child has mastered school". I just think that it's terribly unfair to students to say they're going to be graded according to a standard, but then build in obstacles to achieving that standard in the name of sorting the kids into a normal distribution. The MYP grading materials explicitly disavow this strategy and forbid MYP teachers to use it when assigning grades, and yet they themselves use it in their externally-moderated assessments... so there's more than a bit of hypocrisy there. But also, it's understandable. If they didn't sort students by college readiness, their whole business model would evaporate, since no parent is going to pay for a curriculum that isn't going to get their kid into college.
I think a lot of the "problems" in mass, general education are just completely intractable - which, again, means we just aren't setting realistic goals.
> But given that it was discontinued for unknown reasons, despite its effectiveness
Has anyone tried to replicate it? I am a bit suspicious about "extremely good effects being reported, program shut down and ignored".
Rereading the LessWrong and Nintil articles again, it seems to be a matter of expense: "This process was long, arduous, and expensive. First they recruited subject area experts and had them do example tutoring sessions. They took the best tutors from among the subject area experts and had 24 of them tutor students one-on-one in their sub-domain of expertise. Those students essentially received a one-on-one 16 week course. Those sessions were all recorded and served as the template for the Digital Tutor...
So in terms of personnel we are talking 24 tutors, about 6 content authors, a team of AI engineers, several iterations through each module with test cohorts, and several proctors throughout the course, and maybe a few extra people to set up the virtual and physical problem configurations. Given this expense and effort, it will not be an easy task to try and replicate their results in a separate domain or even the same one. One note in the paper that I found obscure is that the paper claimed the Direct Tutor “is, at present, expensive to use for instruction.”" (from the LessWrong article)
&
"A common theme in the studies cited above is comparing advanced vs simplistic computer based tutoring. Making good software tutors is hard, and it would be a long review of its own to properly look at tutoring software...
Andy Matuschak (personal communication) suggested that the key difficulty is that one needs both to be a good creative problem solver, and have domain knowledge in order to translate knowledge and explanations into good software. Many are developed by PhD students and then abandoned. Even the DARPA tutor doesn't seem to have been put into production yet, for some reason." (from the Nintil article)
I guess the answer boils down to "Why can't we just make more Kerbal Space Programs for other subjects?" - there's something we're still missing about how to replicate good games/software tutors, as the track record of any AAA games studio can attest, and any Edutainment games developer can doubly attest. You catch lightning in a bottle once with Super Energy Apocalypse (see https://jayisgames.com/super-energy-apocalypse/ for a sense of its genius, or just play the game yourself with Flashpoint [https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/])... then you release CellCraft, then essentially disappear from the industry. There's something about making these things actually good that just takes a whole lot out of you, apparently.
> it will not be an easy task to try and replicate their results in a separate domain or even the same one
Wait, it's a *digital* tutor? It should not be costly to replicate just by using the same digital tutor again (and I see author JohnBuridan was likewise confused about this). The tutor being digital is what justifies the large expense of making it.
One teacher with a small number of students can do a lot of one-on-one tutoring with each student. That doesn't fix the 30:1 student:teacher ratio, but it might work for 8:1.
How engaged were you in that class you took?
Extremely, but I'm an atypical model student :)
Great comment, thank you for putting in the effort to go over all that.
One metric is insufficient and one should be constantly careful against relying too heavily on even a well thought out suite of metrics. Compare GDP and economics.
That said, in a large enough organised system metrics are a useful tool to check against.
Installing cameras in classrooms to measure engagement seems a bit dystopian to me.
Asking kids how engaged they are is rate my teacher. Which hasn't worked too well so far.
I was thinking about software I've heard about to keep track of whether the student is looking at the screen. Yes, dystopian.
"Engagement" is still a fakable measure. It's a surrogate for learning.
Student rating of teachers works just fine. I enjoy seeing feedback from my students, and generally the direct feedback and anonymous feedback I get line up well, and also match my own thoughts about how things are going in any particular year and class. There are studies that show that student ratings are at least somewhat correlated with teacher efficacy. On the other hand a teacher can hack student ratings if they know that's the primary metric - one study famously found if the teacher gives out snacks a bit before ratings, their ratings go up a lot. There are no perfect metrics for school but student ratings and surveys are a good piece of the puzzle.
Do your exam results line up with the feedback? You can have teachers rated as "Mr Brown is awful" but the kids in his class do well on tests, and teachers rated as "Ms Jones is so cool!" but the kids come out unable to read.
Engagement with the topic and subject is necessary, but I feel it could devolve into a popularity contest; the classes are fun, the teacher is cool, we all have a great time - but we learned nothing.
This is a good point. Broadly I would say that children are interested enough in their own learning that they're not going to rate a teacher highly across all metrics if they aren't learning anything. In my experience, students are usually dissatisfied if they feel they aren't learning anything, and they're not shy about expressing that dissatisfaction. On the other hand, sometimes students don't realize that they're learning things. In fact one thing that actually improves engagement is to have students reflect regularly on what they've learned - specifically, guided reflections on specific skills - because when they realize how much they're learning, it makes them happier.
When I was a kid I used to come home from school every day and my stepfather would ask "what did you learn in school today" and I'd say "nothing" and he wondered why I went to school in the first place. Part of this was that I was precocious and already knew most of the reading and math I was being assigned until about grade 7. But part of it was that kids don't necessarily recognize learning experiences that don't involve specific recitable facts - in other words, kids can tell you facts like "I learned there are nine million bicycles in Beijing" but can't necessarily articulate ideas like "I learned how to organize my notebook" or "I practiced putting my name and the date on my homework assignments" or "I got feedback on organizing my ideas in a paragraph". So actually I would have liked school better if my teachers had been better about telling me what my learning goals actually were - in other words, what the value was of the tasks I was being asked to perform. Which is to say, I would have rated my elementary school teachers much higher if I'd known that I was actually developing foundational academic skills.
I can only speak for myself, but generally the feedback I get from my students does line up with their assessment results (which are usually not exams, but reports of projects they've done, some of which are externally moderated by the IB) - in the sense that (at least in cases where feedback is not anonymous) there is a correlation between students/classes who are bored/dissatisfied with my teaching and students who perform poorly on assessments, and between students who are engaged and who perform well on assessments. But because I have taught in smaller private schools, there usually wasn't another teacher of my subject to compare results with, so I can't say with any certainty that some other teacher might not have been able to get better assessment results but with less engagement - or better engagement and assessment results. All I can say with any certainty is that when I am able to engage students they almost always perform better than when I am not able to engage them.
Wouldn't say we disagree by much. But I've seen evidence of decent correlations with attractiveness, easyness and gender. I'd be afraid that charming, good looking teachers that set easy work do great and their colleagues suffer by comparison.
Strong view is that it's absolutely insane to base teaching decisions on this single metric. Weaker view is that this metric is almost useless in light of test scores. Weaker still view (but still held) is that it will steadily push teachers towards easier curriculums and tests, and damage education over time.
I think learning should be easy. It was for me. I think people would be a lot more educated if school were easy and fun, and made learning something people actually wanted to do, rather than a chore full of artificial obstacles thrown up for the sake of teaching life lessons about grit and perseverance.
Congratulations on learning being easy for you. I'd offer a medal, but I'm sure you have plenty.
Wow, this is not the forum I expected a take like that to come from.
My point is not "I'm exceptional so screw everyone else". It's "if learning can be fun and easy for me, it can be fun and easy for everyone."
The human brain is designed to learn, and learning is intrinsically rewarding. Making it so it's *not* fun and easy usually takes deliberate effort. Kids learn through play, unless you stop them and force them to learn only by doing boring things that suck.
I somewhat disagree with this. I started highschool just as rate my teacher became ubiquitous and I basically never found it to be incorrect. Classes with highly rated teachers were almost always better and more instructive than classes with low rated teachers.
I haven't used it in many years, but it was mostly accurate for me as well. That's especially true for engagement measures, as "boring" was probably the measure seen most often when teachers were rated poorly.
I think engagement is a decent proxy measure for how much a teacher cares. If a teacher cares about the students they're responsive enough to know what the students find interesting and emphasize those aspects, and riff on them. If a teacher cares about the subject, their own interest shines through and becomes infectious. Teachers who are disengaged or lazy are usually the boring ones, and bore their students in turn.
This is probably true big picture, but the most "boring" professor I had in college seemed to genuinely love both the subject and the students. He just had a very boring presentation style and affectation. I enjoyed the subject and it was in my major, and I still found him very boring.
Right. The biggest negative factors I remember seeing were:
Boring - you nailed this.
Inordinate amount of coursework/homework - something I remember being strongly annoyed by
Harsh grader - something I remember being strongly annoyed by
Weird/Mean/Some kind of personality that made learning hard - Something that can be hit or miss, depending on the specifics.
Overall, I don't think it was necessarily a 1:1 in terms of rate my teacher rating to quality of education, but it did strongly correlate.
Students rate professors more highly if they're easier, though. The score is *partly* correlated with something of actual value, but it's also strongly correlated with easiness.
As a grad student, I once served as a TA for a professor who was *utter garbage*. He just told stories all day--not, like, stories that illustrated the course content in some way, just unrelated stories. He'd re-tell the same stories repeatedly over the course of the semester, because he couldn't remember that he'd told them before. Once he spent like 20 minutes genuinely teaching students something important about Kant, and it was great, and I got a glimpse into the competent teacher he might once have been, decades earlier. But...like...I *remember* that 20 minutes because it was *unique*.
But he was very lenient and gave the students all A's, in a program where very few professors gave many A's.
Oh, also, he cancelled the entire first week of class, because he got mixed up about when the semester was beginning, and was on vacation.
Anyhow, I assumed the students would criticize him pretty thoroughly in the student evaluations, particularly since this was an honors class, and I thought of these students as ones who really cared about their education. But instead, the student evaluations were the highest and most positive evaluations I ever saw of a professor at that institution. They raved about how much they learned from him. *eyeroll*
Admittedly, that was official university student evaluations, not RateMyProfessor, but they work similarly.
Even if this worked, it doesn't seem like it solves the actual problem, not of how do you get your kids a quality education, but how do we get all kids a quality education. Even if you could identify the best schools and the best teachers, unless you then go on to figure out how those were created and produce more of then, it won't do most students any good because they can't just all choose the same schools and same teachers.
One step at a time. There must be a metric before we can game it ;)
I just hope that if anyone accidentally went to Winnipeg, it was in the summer. Lovely in the summer ...
It was summer. Just a couple of days ago.
We had summer! For the entirety of July! Then it rained for three-quarters of August as per usual, but now we are getting Summer Part II: Indian Summer here (it might even last half-way into September if we're very lucky!)
I just had a discussion with my wife yesterday regarding Indian Summer. Can we still say that? Maybe call it "bonus warmth and sunshine period" or something. I'm pretty old and out of touch so I try to keep my guard up against unintentional offensiveness.
You're correct, somebody probably will get offended about it. When/if I see "don't use this term, it is a SLUR" on social media, I'll know to correct my foul and colonialist language.
To using it all the time, I would hope.
I spent years jogging around a local Lake Calhoun but it turns out that the lake was named after a dick. John Calhoun was a pro slavery US Vice President so the state DNR renamed it Lake Bde Maka Ska its original Ojibwe name. Okay, that make sense to me. We shouldn't be honoring pro-slavery VP's by naming urban lakes after them.
But of course this stuff is never simple.
https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2020/05/ap-supreme-court-dnr-name-lake-calhoun/
So how many people call it by the new impeccable Ojibwe name, and how many still call it Lake Calhoun?
There are streets in my town that have been named with a new name for a hundred years or so, and people still use the old names 😁
Ironically, politically correct Indian Summer comes early, before the South Asian monsoon kicks in.
I’ve written 100 tweets about Richard Rorty https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1430897432699629572
Can somebody point me at any previous intro or basic discussion of prediction markets? I'm struggling to see what the fascination with them is.
To me, they seem to be about as useful predictors of the future as Top Hits or blockbuster lists are as arbiters of taste. Sure, people have to think about some future event and assess its likelihood by putting their money where their mouth is. But since when does having money behind something make it true?
Or maybe they're sources of interesting ideas. Maybe you're curious what questions other folks find interesting but you don't want to be inundated with conspiracy theories and other noise; prediction markets function to add cost, which filters out batshit propositions. Okay, I guess, but how robust is this dynamic? For something to show up as a bet at all, someone has to sufficiently believe that the prevailing opinion is wrong. If the odds are extremely unbalanced, we're dealing with people who think the sun won't come up tomorrow, and it's not very interesting. If the odds are too balanced, then it's a horse race and also not very interesting. This seems a bit... distasteful to me. "Sorry, your idea is neither popular enough nor niche enough for me to care about it".
Thank you. So, assuming I'm not interested in playing the market: what can I actually learn from observing them? They are opaque, in the sense that although they might be saying what people truly believe, they do not say what makes them believe those things. And it's the latter that I usually find insightful.
Intellectually? Yes, they're useless.
Pragmatically, having (good) predictions you don't understand is still way better than having no predictions at all. "Food left at room temperature will spoil" is an incredibly-important thing to know, and understanding microbiology is not essential to most of the practical applications of that knowledge.
The idea is that the markets are "trained". If you're a better predictor than the market, you can make money (assuming the market is liquid enough - meaning, is there someone for you to actually trade with if you think the market prices are wrong). If you're a worse predictor, you lose money. The end result is that the bad predictors lose all their money and stop playing, and good predictors get rich and are able to move the market quite a lot when they trade.
The issue is figuring out where the liquidity comes from. In theory you have to subsidize the market if you want to get good results. Through that lens, prediction markets are a decentralized way for you to turn money into predictions, without having to trust any particular person (except to trust that they will act in their self interest, i.e. try to make correct predictions so they can make money).
Economists and other ratty types tend to like them because they're an example of "mechanism design", which is basically the study of how to make trustless mechanisms for doing things, trustless meaning that you only have to trust that people will try to make money.
Yeah, but in order to make money, don't you need to retain some percentage of 'bad' predictors, or at least "not as good at predicting this outcome as me" predictors, in order to get money from their failed predictions? If everyone is predicting "tomorrow the sun will come up" and everyone is right, where does the money come from?
That money can come from the subsidizer, but if everyone agrees anyway there doesn't need to be any opportunities to make money
My jaundiced view is that somebody looked at the stock market and went "*This* is how we should set public policy! What could possibly go wrong?"
I too don't see the fascination, but plainly there are enough smart people who are gigantic maths nerds who want to throw their money onto a bonfire out there to make it worth setting one up?
I mean, the stock market at least usually works in a way where the company that seems to be doing a good job selling a new product to people gets better access to investor capital if it wants to ramp up production quickly, while the one that requires customers to go indoors in a pandemic while home video gives a better experience loses access to investor capital, which is usually well and good. But now we've got meme stocks (and we've always had bubbles).
Scott Sumner would deny the existence of bubbles (unless you think there are also anti-bubbles).
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/bubbles-are-such-a-useful-concept/
That possition seems to boil down too 'lots of people said something was in a bubble but then the price didn't crash'
Seems decent evidence that people overuse / misuse the word bubble but not that they don't exist
Not just that, but people continue saying it after the price goes up rather than down without ever admitting they were wrong. The Economist claimed vindication on a "housing bubble" even as housing prices continued increasing after they called it:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/another-bubble-when-was-the-first-one/
The economist is just not wrong it’s just not right yet. The political classes have moved the goalposts with QE and cheap money in general.
Of course there are anti-bubbles. Do people deny the existence of anti-bubbles? If so, why?
Few people who speak of bubbles even have the concept of an "anti-bubble", which is why Sumner had to invent the term "negative bubble" (which I misremembered as anti-bubble).
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/richard-rorty-and-the-efficient-markets-debate/
It’s just not called an anti bubble? Plenty of asset classes have abnormally low valuation for lots of time
> The 1929 bubble is the easiest to explain with fundamentals. Studies have shown that stocks were not grossly overpriced in 1929, and the collapse has a very good “fundamental” explanation—the Great Depression.
“He doesn’t have an eating disorder! His starvation has a perfectly serviceable alternative explanation - vomiting and not eating!”
> How many remember frequent predictions of bubbles, that turned out not to be bubbles
And there were millions of crank claims of flight until planes flew, and most day traders losing money doesn’t mean none make money
I wouldn't deny the existence of anti-bubbles, but they seem to be rarer and/or shallower than bubbles.
And, logically, they should be. No matter how clearly and correctly you recognize a bubble, it is difficult to profit from it without taking on a large risk. An anti-bubble, you can just buy the grossly undervalued asset on the cheap and hold it until the bubble anti-breaks. There's still the risk of being *wrong* and holding on to a lot of stock in a buggy-whip manufacturer, but not the risk of being right but margin-called into bankruptcy before you can profit from it.
So the anti-bubbles should generally be popped earlier, and this tracks with my casual observation.
How do you know they are rarer? If they are discussed so rarely there isn't even a common term like "bubble", how would you know how common they are?
“The market can stay irrational longer than you solvent” doesn’t mean absurdly high valuations in large markets can’t exist
On what grounds is a market deemed "irrational"?
it’s a Keynes quote. Irrational in the sense of stupid, or will adjust or move eventually. But maybe in a decade.
Prediction markets are for questions that can actually be resolved, not matters of taste. So if the thing being sold is a security that pays $1 if average global temperature exceeds value X in a certain year, the payoff is determined by such actual facts rather than fads.
"If the odds are too balanced, then it's a horse race and also not very interesting"
On the contrary, it's very interesting if that turns out to be the case! People might be insisting something is obvious, but a horse race suggests otherwise.
"Horse race" strikes me as a dubious metaphor for something that one is arguing that nobody would be interested in betting on it.
истинецjust now
One draw for me is this: there are a lot of pundits. There are a lot of self-proclaimed experts on every side of every issue. You can't know how knowledgeable they actually are, only how convincing they are.
I can imagine there being a handful of people that have a very clear idea of, say, how the Middle East works - but they'll never be on TV, because every time you ask them a question, they say "Well, it depends...".
Instead, who gets a large platform is people that are really good at appearing smart. This may be correlated with actually being smart, but it's definitely not the same thing.
Prediction markets would work as a tool to identify the former and weed out the latter.
Unfortunately, prediction markets don't really work. They are not that fun to participate in, because there's no immediate feedback, and they're not that great at predicting stuff, possibly because they can't attract enough motivated people.
Studies have been done: prediction markets work.
Work on what, though? "Joe bet $X that there would be a nuclear explosion in Upsidedowntania by March 39th against Bill betting $Y it would go well, Joe was correct" and how does that effect the wider world?
So far, prediction markets seem to be a combination of navel gazing and gambling for people who think they're too smart for what they are doing to be called gambling. Granted, it's hard to demonstrate they will have a good/bad effect on wider society until they get adopted widely, but what exactly are they good for?
Regrettably the invite to Winnipeg arrived with too little notice for me to make the 850-mile drive from Chicago. It did at least enhance my morning with a delightful touch of AI weirdness, no harm no foul.
I'm now very curious why, out of the dozens of events listed in that email, Google Calendar decided the Winnipeg event and *only* that event warranted an auto-created entry.
I can't think of any special connections I might have to Winnipeg, real or Google-imagined, and any of the events in Ontario would have been closer by hundreds of miles. Is there something special about the event description? I guess it's the only event that that it doesn't have a "Coordinates" item, and the only one before Europe that mentions a restaurant instead of a park.
This sponsored automated calendar brought to you by TourismWinnipeg in association with Google AI pilot project! Come to beautiful, historical Winnipeg!
No, you don't understand. You *will* come. You don't have a choice in this.
(For all of us who pooh-poohed AI risk, now we have an example of it in action! 🤣)
This is more of what Tourism Winnipeg subsidizes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne7Knf6Ko9E
Gloriously weird short(?) films.
Now that you mention it... we can't eliminate that possibility.
I overlooked another piece of the puzzle - Google got the date wrong. My calendar event was scheduled for 6:00pm on August 28, when the real Winnipeg event is listed for the same time of day, but on Sep 9. There are (were) several other events scheduled for the 28th, but none of them at that exact time of day.
My calendar event was 1 pm on my Texas calendar (which I believe is the same time zone as Winnipeg).
I'm only one time zone away from you, but mine said 6 pm.
Ya know...Scott seems surer than I would be that Google doesn't do OCR in simple images.
A google search for
"A previous ACX post mentioned" site:https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-187
does not show any results. Which is some evidence for Google not doing OCR at least in this case.
I suspect the calender events were generated from the e-mail substack sends out. So the question is if gmail does OCR on your e-mails, rather than if google search does OCR on websites.
Yea, very curious as well. There is a least one more entry without coordinates though (COLOGNE (KÖLN), GERMANY).
Also looks like google got the date (and time?) wrong. The mail says "Time: 6:00 PM, Thursday, September 9", but the calendar entry is on August 28.
There is a lot of covid-related school closure/learning loss literature out there, as well as on broader effects of school closures. I'm posting this one because Hanushek is a big deal in the area of economics of education and because it has a brief section on previous school closures or disruptions which comes to a different conclusion than the ACX piece. https://www.oecd.org/education/The-economic-impacts-of-coronavirus-covid-19-learning-losses.pdf
Oh, so that's why I got a message saying I had a restaurant reservation in Winnipeg. I did wonder about that, but seeing it was for, like, right then, I elected to ignore it rather than try to figure out how to cancel it.
I intermittently get likes on ACX comments. How?
If you reply to someone's comment, then the person gets an e-mail with your reply, and the e-mail includes "like", "view", and "reply" buttons. I believe this is the only way to "like" a comment on ACX, by clicking the "like" button in the e-mail.
There's also a browser extension that adds them back
What's it called?
ACX Tweaks: https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks
The "like" button is probably only disabled in CSS, so anyone could swap in their own CSS and access the hidden functionality.
So does the email button really work? or do all likes come from the browser extension?
Putting the question differently, has anyone ever received a like from me?
I liked that from the email.
Works!
How would you run basic tests for whether a nuclear power plant is leaking radiation, or causing health damage in some other way (assuming you don't trust the government to be honest about it)?
Walking around the area with a Geiger counter seems like the obvious one. Testing the tap water in the nearby town for radiation also seems required (looks like there's a bunch of home water radiation testing kits available online - does anyone know how reliable it scalable they are?) Anything else I'm missing?
On a completely unrelated note, there's rumors that the Israeli nuclear/textile plant in dimona leaks radiation, causing high rates of cancer in dimona. Does anyone know any trustworthy data on this? Is this even a plausible thing to be worried about?
Detect ambient radiation carried by the wind? Probably wouldn’t be enough for small leaks but it works for big ones. Should check both groundwater and river water. Could also put a Geiger counter (or whatever counters for the types of radiation you’re worried about) on a drone and transmit the data back to base as it suicides into the plant. I don’t speak squiggles so I can’t google stuff but I think most nuclear plants have very strict monitoring for leaks of all kinds and there should be something of that available online.
I don’t know anything about this though
You could also check data from nearby measuring stations. Chernobyl was "discovered" in the west when the meters at a Swedish nuclear plant went way up (they thought they themselves had a minor leak at first). But the best way is probably to just use a Geiger counter, they're not that expensive.
On that note, even I minor leak would probably be impossible to hide (to many nerds with Geiger counters), even if you wanted to do so. I can't think of any historical leak that was hidden for more than a couple of days. I'd be much more worried of a leak of something non-radioactive but cancerogenic.
Would you be able to detect that by testing the water supply?
Detect cancerogenics? Maybe: there are lots and lots of chemicals that can cause cancer. Some are unknown. Testing can rule out some compounds. More advanced tests can rule out more, but are harder to do. And the chemical might not be in the water anyway.
If you mean detect radioactivity, yes (although idk about whatever home test you buy on eBay)
Commonly radiation monitoring systems are used to detect leaks at nuclear plants. In particular gamma and neutron detectors can be used similar to the ones here. https://www.mirion.com/products/area-monitoring
Would they detect leaks that just going around with a Geiger counter wouldn't?
The radiation generally doesn't get loose on its own. Direct radiation works on line-of-sight, and if there's a hole clean through the wall of the reactor core and containment structure, then people would probably notice that in short order.
The fuel rods, control rods, and the structure of the reactor core are all solids (unless something has gone terribly wrong) and are generally pretty reliable at staying where they're put.
As far as I know, the main bit that's nontrivially radioactive and at risk of leaking is the primary coolant, which is a fluid and becomes radioactive from absorbing neutrons from the reactor core. If the primary coolant is leaking, then you should be able to notice that by monitoring coolant levels in your primary coolant loop.
And in general, one of the benefits of the containment building is that anything that escape from the reactor core will still be inside the containment building. By putting up radiation detectors inside the containment building but outside the core, you should notice leaks early before the radiation leaks into the outside environment.
It's not really radiation per se that will be the major concern, as long as you aren't standing right next to the core the inverse square law will make it difficult for radiation to hurt you. The major concern would be the leakage of radioisotopes into the environment, because you could eat or breathe these and then they would irradiate your cells for a long time at an exceedingly close range (microns to inches). For example the most dangerous long-term result of the Chernobyl accident was the release of something like 3 million curies of cesium-137 and 250,000 curies of strontium-90, which both have moderately long half-lives (so they are both highly radioactive and stick around a while), and which are unusually dangerous biologically for slightly different reasons. (A lot of I-131 was also released, but it has a much shorter half life so while it was very dangerous initially it goes away in a few weeks.)
A reasonable and accurate check would be to examine nearby groundwater for the presence of unusual levels of Cs-137 (there's a natural amount from atmospheric nuclear tests), as it's a characteristic product of uranium fission, and its compounds dissolve readily in water, which contributes to its spread, and it would be a direct measure of health risk.
However, the only way I know to reliably detect Cs-137 is through gammy ray spectroscopy. There are professional tools that do this, but they're not cheap. Here's someone who built a homebrew spectrometer, though:
https://physicsopenlab.org/2016/01/26/diy-gamma-spectrometry/
Hang on, strontium's a problem because it's taken up by bones (ditto radium and plutonium), and iodine's a problem because it's taken up by the thyroid, but where's the especial issue with cesium (compared to equivalently-radioactive stuff)?
Partly because Group 1A salts are generally highly water soluble, so cesium gets around. As for the biological uptake, recall that the two most common ions in the body (Na+ and K+) are also in Group 1A. So just as Sr+2 substitutes for Ca+2 in the bones, Cs+ substitutes for Na+ and K+ in all kinds of places.
Note that there is a difference between "leaking radiation" and "leaking radioactivity".
Radiation is emitted by radioactive isotopes of elements produced in nuclear reactors, as well as directly by fissions. Fissions won't generally occur outside a nuclear reactor.
"Leaking radiation" means that while the radioactive isotopes are confined, there is not enough radiation shielding around the reactor, and as such things in close proximity (and *only* things in close proximity) will be irradiated. This is sometimes done deliberately - radiation sources for medical and other uses need an openable hole in their shielding, else they won't irradiate anything. You don't generally need to worry about this one unless you plan on visiting (or working at) the reactor site, reprocessing site and/or waste disposal site - buildings, the horizon, and even long distances through air are pretty good at attenuating ionising radiation, and it can't turn corners.
"Leaking radioactivity" means that the radioactive isotopes are not confined, and are leaking (as dust, solution, gas, etc.) into the environment, where they can then irradiate things. As bored-anon says, groundwater and river water are obvious places to check. Dusts/gases (such as what was released from Windscale or Chernobyl) are trickier to check reliably from ground level, although airborne dusts coming from nuclear reactors are pretty rare outside of accidents (the usual case is if the core is open to the air and on fire; the former has occasionally been designed into the more cowboyish reactors - such as Windscale - but the latter is emphatically not an intended part of nuclear reactor operation).
If you're just concerned about yourself rather than Uncovering The Truth - having a Geiger counter on your person, plus testing your water and food ought to do it. Only radiation that hits you or gets produced inside you is dangerous to you. I note *food* because plants can take up radioactive isotopes from soil or groundwater (and animals that eat those plants can take them up in turn).
What's the hydrology in the Negev like? Presumably anything that leaks out in water is either reaching the dead sea or drying up and accumulating somewhere in the desert.
Does the Jordanian government send people with geiger counters along the border?
If you're worried about long term effects, you could get local parents to mail you their kids' baby teeth. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Tooth_Survey
*I have no idea if a leaky modern nuclear plant would leak strontium 90, I just like this particular piece of historical trivia.
So here's my problem. My wife has turned anti-vaccine and is refusing to allow our kids to get vaccinated if children are recommended the vaccine (as looks like will happen where we live). What does one do in this situation if (like me) you think the vaccines are the best defence against whatever horrible variant of COVID is currently evolving somewhere?
For background, I always knew that my wife's family were anti-vaccine, but this is the first time it's been imported into our house. I've obviously tried rational argument, persuasion, appeals to authority and the rest––she's not budging on the "vaccines are untested and will make our kids infertile (or whatever)" line. This is unsupported by any evidence beyond anti-vaxx propaganda from wackadoodle world.
This specific problem is about vaccines, but I should also say that I'm finding it very hard not to read my wife's thoughts on the vaccine as a verdict on something bigger.
Sorry to hear this. I'm sure you have tried rational argument. If you've not tried this, one thing to try might be irrational argument, i.e. appeals to emotion. That might mean talk about individual cases, show the videos of people begging others to get vaccinated, show the nasty side of some anti-vaxx people. Maybe look up some online tutorials, I'm sure there are some, maybe even ones heavily research-backed.
Failing that: the safety of your kids, and others', are at risk. This is more important than any feelings your wife has. So, could you sort it out in secret? Even a very elaborate and difficult plan could well be worth it by any practical measure, and morally it's the right thing to do.
The first strategy seems likely to make her dig in further. The second should only be tried if he is legitimately willing to end his marriage over this.
The joke will be on him if it turns out to be a shit test and his wife, deep down, would *prefer* him to go behind her back.
(I'm glad it's not me in poor Macha_'s situation)
Hard disagree. COVID is not significantly dangerous to children, nor are children appreciably contagious when they get it, so absent the signaling value of "my kids are vaxxed" the vaccine is of very little value to them. Both strategies described here are waaaaay beyond the pale.
Do you have a citation for "nor are children appreciably contagious when they get it"?
From my point of view, teachers getting it from their students is a cliche at this point.
And, of course, we know have this confirmed incident where an unvaccinated Marin County (California) teacher infected the whole front row of her class (by reading to them out loud). For some reason, she came to work while symptomatic. I wonder if anyone has done IQ and personality studies of the anti-vaccine crowd. Is there some sort of reasoning deficit affecting these people? Or are they just bullheadedly self-centered?
And, to MasteringTheClassics point, some of these kids infected their parents. Luckily Marin County, even at back in May when this happened, had a very high vaccine uptake rate. So I don't think this outbreak spread beyond the parents.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/unvaccinated-unmasked-teacher-spreads-covid-19-elementary-school-students-cdc-n1277852
Not sure where you're getting your data from, but some links would help us to evaluate the probable validity of your statement. Whether or not Delta is increased hospitalizations among school-age children, I think you can assume that a child with a symptomatic COVID-19 infection is probably shedding the virus at the same rate as an infected adult. Unless you can identify a possible mechanism that they wouldn't, I think your assertion that children are not "appreciably contagious" is likely wrong.
Per the July 9 update from CDC (link below), they note that there are dearth of studies about the impact of new variants on school-age children. Referencing older studies, the CDC points out...
"In the United States through March 2021, the estimated cumulative rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 symptomatic illness in children ages 5-17 years were comparable to infection and symptomatic illness rates in adults ages 18-49 and higher than rates in adults ages 50 and older. Estimated cumulative rates of infection and symptomatic illness in children ages 0-4 years are roughly half of those in children ages 5-17 years, but are comparable to those in adults ages 65 years or older. These cumulative rates were estimated from CDC models that account for under-detection among reported cases."
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-briefs/transmission_k_12_schools.html
Thanks. I've tried the showing the stories of anti-vaxx DJ/politician/personality gets COVID and changes his mind, but the reply is always that there's no need for children to get the vaccine. The COVID causes cognitive decline gave a slight hesitation, but not by much.
We snuck my 11 year old daughter in to get vaccinated early so we are very pro vaccine. But to me the risk to children do not warrant deception or risking the loss of trust in your marriage. For under 12 kids I think the benefit/cost are pretty marginal and not worth screwing up your marriage over.
Well.... The evidence about whether the very small risk from the vaccines is currently smaller than the very small risk from Covid for children is still in the balance, so I wouldn't feel too bad about it.
In England, at least, only clinically at risk children of 12 years and up are being vaccinated. https://www.england.nhs.uk/2021/08/one-million-children-and-young-people-can-get-nhs-covid-jab/
Did your kids have other, more established, vaccines?
They have all the regular vaccines; this resistance is COVID specific.
In that case, it sounds like your wife is being pretty reasonable in her assessment of relative risk.
It sounds like the main problem is less whether it's a good idea to give this specific vaccine to children (something about which reasonable people can disagree), than that you and your wife do not trust one another's reasoning or sources of information.
That may be more likely to adversely affect your children's lives than either Covid or vaccine side effects, both being very small risks if they don't have other major health issues.
"Anti-vaxx propaganda from wackadoodle world" is very inflammatory, and I could see, if you're using that language openly, why your wife would want to dig her heels in even if her preference was fairly weak to begin with. I generally like vaccines, and think this one sounds basically useful and safe, and the current levels of shrill preachiness are still making me kind of regret getting it.
A good place to start is to demonstrate that you can tell where she's coming from, and why she listens to the sources she does. Do you understand where she's coming from? Going by this post, it sounds like not. A lot of people currently feel like they're living in Stalinist Russia, with an antagonistic government, media, and scientific community, that has very different interests from theirs, with no desire or ability to pursue their best interests.
I guess the main issue is that her main source of information is her family, who are then informed by the usual suspects on social media. So it's more a question of "my sister has done research on this and I trust her", when her sister is touting ivermectin on the back of the Weinstein brothers or whoever.
Here’s a podcast that might help. If you can’t listen to the whole thing, skip to about 19 minutes in for a summary.
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2021/08/23/yanss-213-how-to-improve-your-chances-of-nudging-the-vaccine-hesitant-away-from-hesitancy-and-toward-vaccination/
Thanks, will do!
Sorry, turns out I sent you to the middle of an ad. Skip to 21:30 instead, that’s when the summary actually starts.
I like this, except they speak too slowly and I quickly zone out. Is there a way to speed it up?
I use the Apple Podcasts app which lets you speed it up to 1.5x.
Try to get her to fully and step by step explain her reasoning, people usually break down from this, especially if their belief is illogical. She'll probably then just become sullen and stubborn, but maybe it will work.
This eventually gets to "well, there's stuff in vaccines we just aren't told about and that's what I'm resisting". I mean, there no doubt is, just like there is in milkshakes or mustard or the family car ...
Well the ingredients: SM-102, 1,2-dimyristoyl-rac-glycero3-methoxypolyethylene glycol-2000 [PEG2000-DMG], cholesterol, 1,2-distearoyl-snglycero-3-phosphocholine [DSPC], Tromethamine, sucrose, acetic acid
I’m sure that’ll help!
But don't forget about the Arbutus Biopharma nanoparticles that are carrying the mRNA! Either they (a) are small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier, or (b) they are not dissolving until they reach the bloodstream and are releasing the mRNA into our system to pass through the BBB! Because studies have shown small quantities of mRNA reaching rat brains! And since the spike protein mRNA is now in our brain tissue, once we get the third dose Pfizer, our immune system will start attacking our neurons, and we'll all come down with Alzheimer's.
If so, we should start seeing a lot of people who received their booster dose displaying cognitive problems in the next few weeks. Waiting with bated breath! <#snarkasm>
The risk to children is very low, might even be less than the risk of adverse results to the vaccine. The other issue is the risk of the kids getting infected and passing it on to you. If both of you are vaccinated that's pretty low. If your wife isn't — it's her life, and if she is under 50 the risk to her is pretty low as well.
I got vaccinated and think most people should. On the other hand, I think it's clear that authoritative sources of information such as Fauci and the NYT are routinely dishonest, say what they want people to believe not what they believe is true, which gives me some sympathy with those who don't trust such sources on this issue. Happy to expand on that if you disagree.
Please expand? We're in the UK, so Fauci at al are less relevant here. But I am hearing a lot of "the authorities were wrong about masks and viral spread and herd immunity; therefore they're wrong on this."
I'd argue that Fauci, CDC, and WHO were not being dishonest, rather it's been their SOP to be very cautious with their messaging. They've always been much more concerned with not making positive claims that might later be proven false than providing useful advice in a timely fashion. They weren't lying about masks and viral spread, rather they they just extremely conservative in the way they evaluated the new data that was coming in, and they were organizationally clinging to the null hypothesis until the counter-evidence was overwhelming.
For instance, the Chinese response to their epidemic early on showed that mask-wearing and social distancing greatly reduced the spread of the virus. In fact, China recommended these steps to WHO and CDC in late Feb '20. Both organizations ignored the evidence, and instead relied on a transmission model that was 60 years out of date.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
The evidence on Fauci is from his own words. He was interviewed in, I believe, the New York Times, and said he had decided to raise his estimate of what was required for herd immunity in response to polling evidence showing an increased number of people willing to be vaccinated. That evidence couldn't change what was needed for herd immunity, only what he wanted people to believe. So either his previous estimate or his new estimate was a lie. What I found surprising about that was that it didn't occur to him to conceal the fact that his purported scientific opinion wasn't.
On masks, Fauci early on was arguing they did no good, and his later explanation was that he was trying to discourage people from buying up masks because they were needed for medical personnel. That might be wise, but it was pretty clearly dishonest. The CDC has never, so far as I know, produced serious scientific evidence that masks work, only anecdotes, and they have never made a serious push to distinguish between masks that they have some reason to expect to work and tying a bandanna over your face, and limit mask mandates to the former. That looks to me like the "something must be done. This is something" sort of policy. There's a pretty good discussion of the evidence on masks here:
https://www.city-journal.org/do-masks-work-a-review-of-the-evidence
As Fauci wearing a Pinocchio nose, I don't remember hearing about his herd immunity "triangulation", but he *is* a politician as much as he is an MD. You don't get to the top of the NIH without having abundant political skills as well academic chops — which means you have to kiss ass, bully, lie, arm twist, sooth, weep crocodile tears, and shake hands with people you hate. On the whole he's been less wrong than say Anders Tegnell, all the "experts" who signed The Great Barrington Declaration, anyone at the Hoover or Cato institutes.
But, yes, I do remember Fauci claiming that he only recommended against masks because there was a shortage. The thing is, we don't really know his original reasoning for being dismissive of masks. However, I don't go as far as to say he was lying, only that he was spinning messages for reasons unknown to us. I would love to have the late Mike Wallace interview him, to see if and how he could hold his own against the master interrogator. Lol!
Yes, I agree with you the CDC has certainly uselessly muddle the mask data into recommendations that actually may not work at all well — such as double masking always being a good idea (for a KF94 mask it's a bad idea because it defeats the purpose of the mask's design). There's certainly lots of studies now about masks, and comparisons of how well different mask types and materials work. And the CDC seems to have not bothered to update their information. But is that lying? Or is it just bureaucratic inertia and consensus by committee? Who knows...
I suggest you not listen to bullshit articles about mask effectiveness on the MSM (or any SARS-CoV-2 related subject for that matter). Most journalists aren't capable of evaluating the scientific arguments and studies on their own, and they tend to rely on "experts" who will match their confirmational biases.
But if you look at the research papers there's a huge load of evidence that masks work. If you consider yourself to be rationalist, and moreover a if you consider yourself to be Bayesian rationalist, here's some bedtime reading for you. If you're not a rationalist, well, I'm wasting my time...
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2776536
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2007800
https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.00818
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02801-8
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext#%20
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6549/1439
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7191274/
This is your standard reminder, from someone who has looked at far too many research papers on this particular matter, that anyone who makes claims regarding the efficiency of "masks" without specifying what *kind* of mask, is probably wasting your time.
I'm afraid I don't know about information sources in the U.K.
One result of Trump getting elected was that quite a lot of people in the U.S. media concluded that telling the truth was less important than not saying anything that might help Trump. One place that intersected Covid issues was the question of its origin. It was obvious from the beginning that a lab leak was a likely source, given that it first appeared within a few miles of a Chinese lab doing research on bat viruses. But Trump mentioned that possibility so it was widely treated as obviously wrong until he was safely out of office, at which point people started discussing the question again.
I think elite sources of opinion have always been willing to shade the truth in service of either a good story or their political preferences, but it seems to have gotten worse in the US in recent years. I don't know if the same thing happened in the U.K. The easiest test is to take some subject you actually know a good deal about and look at how it gets discussed in the media, ideally something that many people have reasons to push beliefs about independent of their truth or falsity.
There is the old verse by Humbert Wolfe:
There is no way to bribe or twist –
Thank God! – the British journalist;
But seeing what the man will do
Unbribed, there is no reason to.
Lab Leak became "ok" again after Nicholas Wade's article (first published May 2 on Medium); I saw no shift after the election or inauguration.
It sounds like you are talking specifically about kids 12 or under, and specifically COVID vaccine. In which case, you might treat this the way your wife's hypothetical fear of guns was preventing you from buying an AR-15 to protect your children against rampaging herds of 30-50 feral hogs. While it is theoretically *possible* for your child to be killed or seriously injured by rampaging feral hogs, or by COVID, both outcomes are sufficiently rare that you'll probably do OK if you ignore the threat.
The much bigger threat is the great many childhood diseases that, unlike COVID, have actually killed young children in significant numbers and for which vaccines are well established as a safe and effective defense. So if your wife is currently OK with vaccinating your children against those diseases (and if they are young enough that there are still regular childhood-disease vaccines on the schedule), be wary of upsetting that apple cart. People can maintain a level of cognitive dissonance where COVID vaccines are an Evil Conspiracy but e.g. MMR vaccines are fine. They are also capable, if you force them to come up with a "logical" defense for their fear of COVID vaccines, of deciding that all the other vaccines have to go as well.
>So if your wife is currently OK with vaccinating your children against those diseases (and if they are young enough that there are still regular childhood-disease vaccines on the schedule), be wary of upsetting that apple cart.
This is a very insightful point. She *is* OK with the other vaccines and always was; partly, I expect, because she got them herself. But you are absolutely correct that it will only take a nudge to send those vaccines into "all vaccines are potential poison that will make our kids infertile." (I have independent experiences of cognitive contagion like this with her.)
It looks like your wife is probably right, or at least in agreement with the UK vaccine authority. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58438669
Hey man, I'm really sorry to hear this. I'm sure you know this but this issue is almost certainly not limited to the vaccine. Your wife didn't wake up one day and say "hey, I really find the arguments for vaccinating children to be uncompelling". I'm not sure why she feels the vaccine sucks but the answer is almost certainly not the object level science or whatever. This is the most important question for you to figure out.
My guesses would probably be that the people who say the vaccine are "the best thing ever" are distasteful to her. Maybe those people make her feel condescended to and she wants to retain her agency in not capitulating to them. Maybe you make her feel condescended to (too far? sorry) and this compounded with her media diet illicits a strong protective maternal instinct to save her kids at all costs. The stakes are clearly very high on her end and it sounds like on your end too.
My advice would be to lower the stakes of the conversation. COVID isn't the measles and the vaccines aren't thalidomide. This is not worth getting divorced over. That's obviously stupid. She's the mother of your kids for a reason. Literally every person I know well holds at least one completely insane belief. Welcome to being in relationship with other humans.
All of this is true, but it doesn't make it any the less dismaying to see a rational human being fall into a cognitive trap like this. She's religious and I'm not; I can accept this because religion been shaped by centuries of use to co-exist with and probably confer benefits on the societies that exhibit it (i.e. all of them).
But this anti-vaxx stuff ... it's hard to stomach.
Maybe you can use a tactic like Scott mentions in #7 here:
7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
I am not sure what motivates her, but if she is worried about new unproven things created by scientist maybe play up the idea that COVID was genetically engineered by Chinese scientist in Wuhan.
How exactly does "she's religious and I'm not" follow for you here? The vaccine (as a vaccine) does not seem like a religious question. The vaccine (as a cultural signifier) is. Perhaps the vaccine question is a proxy for a bigger values-disagreement between you and your wife here...
I think the meaning is that the wife is literally religious (believes in god, goes to church), not that her anti-vax beliefs are held with religious fervor.
The anti-vaxx stuff is very distasteful on a lot of levels. But I don't think that matters.
Rationality is largely overrated in relationships. I'm not sure the idea of relationships themselves perform well through a rationality framework.
Would you rather be with a rational human being or someone who will lie to the police for you? Relationships are tribal and tapping into those primal needs will be what ultimately reconciles this conflict (in my opinion).
I feel like you've given the best advice in this thread, so a genuine question: How do you think addressing the underlying primal needs differs from rationality?
Imo, if you address a situation "rationally," you must necessarily speak to the underlying needs in a way that will resolve the dispute; if you do not so speak to the underlying needs, your "rational solutions" are (rationally speaking) non-sequiturs.
Re: lying to the police. I'd like to be with somebody who would lie to the police if and only if it is right to do so. I think this capacity requires steady rationality as well as emotional awareness. Likewise, I think any resolution of conflict will require the rational and emotion working in harmonious tandem.
I generally use definitions by their de facto effects more than de jure assertions. In other words, a flooded parking lot is better described as a pool than by the parking lot sign. In that vein, Rationality (TM) is the set of beliefs and actions held by people describing themselves as rationalists. The consenus view in this thread was something other than addressing human needs. And that's fine. It's just not effective. Addressing the "object level" concerns tends to be a rationalist pattern of engagement. The movement is called Rationality, not Effectiveness.
Re:lying to the police, yea I guess that's just a set of preferences on my part. I value the hardcore loyalty of tribalism. And to be clear, I'm thankful and appreciative of our local police force and support them over suspects everyday of the year. My close relationships just trump all those concerns in my own value hierarchy.
So addressing needs may be rationality but it is not Rationality. If this is your position I think you have it absolutely right.
Re: lying to the police: Do you think people can be too loyal? Strictly I mean so loyal that it defeats the ends of the loyalty in the first place, but loosely I just mean that loyalty ends up not being good for them or for you.
--
OOC, why do you prefer de facto definitions? To me: R is only r sometimes, but r is r all the time. R then confusingly becomes both r and not r.
Moreover, R by itself seems to be an empty label, signifying nothing. Likewise for all de facto definitions.
This is sage advice.
"Literally every person I know well holds at least one completely insane belief. Welcome to being in relationship with other humans."
I'd say there's a lot of insane beliefs out there, and it's often a matter of picking your poison. Look at the whole transgender kid stuff. But there's some distance between making that compromise and convincing yourself there isn't a problem.
I would just wait. You've made it this far, it would seem fairly reasonable that events over the next year will solve the problem for you. Maybe a variant *will* emerge that kills kids, and it will be in the news, and I would guess she will change her mind rapidly then. Or maybe the schools will require them. Or maybe in a year the irrational heat around the issue will fade away, it won't be so much of a tribal identification ritual -- and in any event there will be an extra year of "testing" (in all the rest of us guinea pigs) to reduce the cogency of the "untested" argument.
Yes, this could be a wise choice. I am disproportionately exercised by the topic now, and maybe I'll care less too. I'm also of the view that if COVID had the symptoms of say, Ebola, everyone on Earth would be screaming for the vaccine, so maybe a change of COVID virulence will make the difference.
If COVID has the symptoms of Ebola, then the risk would be several orders of magnitude higher - of course everyone would be screaming for the vaccine. You say that you're disproportionately exercised (incensed?) by the topic now - why is that? As several other people have pointed out in this thread, the risk of covid to children is essentially nil. Vaccinating them is certainly the pro-social choice, but as to the your own kids, their covid vaccination status is far down the list of decisions you make about them that will affect their health outcomes. You say that you're "dismay[ed] to see a rational human being fall into a cognitive trap like this", but I'd really encourage you to turn that mirror on yourself and try to sus out how much of your pro-vax position is tribal signaling vs an honest cost-benefit assessment. IMO that cost-benefit comes out positive, but its a marginal benefit and not something to stress over. Especially for a relationship as important as one with a spouse I would personally only press the issue if my kids had other health conditions that significantly raised their risk profile, or if the issue was over much nastier diseases that we vaccinate against.
I'm not so foolish as to think that I'm above tribal signalling, and especially in favour of the "I'm-too-smart-to-belong-to-a-tribe" tribe. However, there's a big difference between two people weighing up a the probabilities and coming to a reasonable disagreement as to the risk-reward trade-off, and what's happening in my house.
If the health authorities recommend vaccination and the statistics look reasonable, I'll get my kids vaccinated; if they don't, I won't––I'm not shilling for the vaccines. The problem I'm having is that my wife gets false information from poor sources (her family) and insinuates vaccine roll-out is being driven by big pharma who want to make profit at the cost of making our daughters infertile. This is not a rational way to think.
You say that "the risk of covid to children is essentially nil". Maybe it is and maybe it isn't; I'm not a medic and I couldn't say for sure. That's why I make the point about vaccinating if the public health authorities recommend it, and only then.
What is the need behind your wife's resistance? Are you appealing to that when you argue? A lot of the times when folks find rational argument unpersuasive, it's because the rational argument does not address the underlying needs from which the irrationality springs.
I had a friend who ate so much sugar that he developed rashes and could not sleep. He insisted the sugar was good for him. Trying to convince him that this was irrational and unhealthy and bad for him did not work.
What worked much better was first uncovering that he ate sugar primarily for pleasure. From here, we reasoned that eating that much sugar contrary to his reasons for eating sugar in the first place. That is, eating that much sugar for pleasure was actually unpleasurable. If he wanted more pleasure he would eat less sugar.
My point here is that often someone else's "irrational" position can be dissolved only by showing it to be inconsistent with the person's own reason for holding that position.
Good point.
Strange that everyone is giving you advice on how to convince a rationalist that they should vaccinate thier kids, when you obviously need marital advice. You won't get that here, but you should seek it out.
I mean what else would one expect? I typed about several paragraphs of decisive pieces of data (like, it’s been >9 months since the first vaccines, and no fertility drops have been observed by the extensive monitoring programs) and that’s a lot more interesting than marital advice, which also probably depends on his situation (try a bunch of different approaches and see what works and expect it to take a while)
Lots of people have said to just let it go, which is good advice (pending a new variant that is way more risky to kids).
I think it's rare for a marriage to never have big conflicts about how to raise kids. There are obvious things like religion and school and sports that usually get signaled ahead of time.
"Is this worth fighting about? --> Probably not" is a heuristic most people learn early in relationships. Sometimes both people decide it *is* worth fighting about *and* come to different conclusions.
The heuristic only works if both partners accept it. Otherwise, it just makes you a pushover.
Right, I would've added some edits, but we don't have those here.
Hopefully in the early parts of you can realize that you're always giving and never getting.
A lot of people's "can't give this up" are based on fundamental ideas of identity, which we are often loathe to change.
Depends whether you're getting enough out of the relationship in other ways to make blowing up the relationship still the worse option.
Macha_, I'm sorry your family is in a tough spot. Unfortunately, it's difficult to offer good advice based on what you've shared so far.
IMHO, some aspects of dynamics between you and your wife that are important to understand have to do with how you negotiate your differences in religiosity both in a practical sense, and also in an epistemic sense. If one of you happens to hold a modicum of contempt for another's worldview and hopes to change them, win them over, or sidestep their outlook when it comes to parenting (and thus effectively stamp out that thought lineage), you have yourself a bit of a complexifier, as Bezos might have put it. I'm not saying something like this would be beyond fixing, I'm saying that something like this would call for a professional (a family/couple's counselor) to be involved.
Another thought I have here is whether you have a healthy mechanism to humor one another's (sporadic/rare) irrational needs out of mutual care for each other ("I need this", "Can you let this one go", "Can you let me have this" style patterns). You'd need to have layered dealing with parenting related peccadillos on top of that pattern and have figured out a working relationship already in order to be able to leverage it in this situation (i.e., I don't think it would be effective to try and establish this type of mechanism anew right now because it would be rightly viewed as self-serving by your wife and would likely result in increased distrust).
Logic is only going to work to the extent that logic usually works in your marriage - you're not going to be able to marshal new arguments that will suddenly make logic more effective in your relationship. Think about times when your relationship was less well-established (than it is now), and you were still figuring out whether you were good long-term mates for one another. I'd hope that one of the experiences you'd both have gone through before deciding to stay together was conflict resolution and the knowledge that it was possible to receive love and generosity from the other person in ways that was very satisfying and moving - then try to re-emulate those experiences by adapting it to this particular context.
BTW, there is now evidence of long COVID in children (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/) and the numbers seems to be roughly similar to that of adults. I haven't seen more detailed study of long COVID's impact on kids - so maybe it's not so bad - but the impact studies on adults paint a grim picture (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext) and that's all we have to go on right now.
Thanks for this very good, compassionate advice. Are there deeper problems than a vaccine disagreement? Probably there are. The religiosity one is the obvious example. But where my policy here is is that raising the kids religious is the concession I make to her, the concession is not received that way. Instead, her assumption is that religion is so *obviously* correct and true that my conceding this is to be expected, even demanded. And so similarly, the vaccines pose such an *obvious* threat to the children, there is so safe way she could ever concede on this topic.
I should probably just admit you're right and there are things that need professional mediation here. When we got together it was in a different country and with a difference cultural milieu––one that was more in keeping with her belief system over mine. Now that we live somewhere else which is more consonant with my outlook, these kinds of tribal, identity-based flare-ups are more common.
And in the meantime, there kids whose welfare must be placed first ...
I'm curious if she gives any evidence for her anti-vax views? It could be a simple matter of what media she chooses to consume, so that if you could shift her to less partisan sources, her opinions would change likewise (obviously you can't shift them from right to left, but I wonder if there's something more centrist available that wouldn't offend her)
> there kids whose welfare must be placed first
That's probably a concern your wife has as well. The fact that you have a disagreement you're trying to work out suggests that the welfare of children is paramount in both your minds, and you're both doing your best towards that very end (even though one of you is necessarily wrong on the merits). This is another shared value you can (and probably ought to) try to recognize and reinforce - so you can remind her that the two of you are a team first - as a way to plead for her show you both empathy as well as compassion.
The way to discuss risks with those who aren't receptive to "vaccines are safe" point of view - at least in my somewhat imperfect way of thinking - is not based on whether the risk of COVID-19 for children is small or large, but rather whether one can mount an effective contingency plan (when failure to receive vaccines may lead to problems later on).
Suppose I was to concede, provisionally and hypothetically, that vaccines (esp. mRNA ones) pose some risk, but only in exchange for a reciprocal concession that not being vaccinated also poses some finite risk, then the situation either becomes a stalemate, or one of assessing relative risks and contingencies.
Let's say we assume that the relative risks are similar in magnitude and focus on contingencies, the question then becomes whether one can deal effectively with the low-probability-high-impact adverse consequences of COVID-19, or whether it is preferable to deal with similar low-probability-high-impact adverse consequences of the side-effects of the vaccine itself.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/pediatric-numbers-3-things-to-keep may help you advance arguments along these lines.
This suggestion assumes that you can actually open and sustain a dialogue in good faith along these lines, and that it will lead to the outcome you hoped (and not to the opposite outcome - that's a risk that comes with good faith dialogues of this sort BTW).
In the US, COVID hospitalization rate for children about ~1 child per 1000.
About ~3 children per 1000 end up in ER after receiving the vaccine (~1 per 1000 after the dose, ~2 per 1000 after the second dose). Given that the risks seem comparable, what is the rational argument in favor of vaccinating children?
Interesting figures. Where are they from?
data on vaccine side-effects in 12-25 age group (see page 8):
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2021-06/03-COVID-Shimabukuro-508.pdf
data on covid-related hospitalizations (note that this covers only ~10% of the US population):
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/COVID19_5.html
I don't buy it. Citation needed.
data on vaccine side-effects in 12-25 age group (see page 8):
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2021-06/03-COVID-Shimabukuro-508.pdf
data on covid-related hospitalizations (note that this covers only ~10% of the US population):
https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/covidnet/COVID19_5.html
If you know a reliable source whose data is significantly different from the above, I would very much appreciate a reference.
The first report doesn't say what (I think) you think it says. It does indeed say 0.2% of children end up in the ER a week after being given an mRNA vaccine, but what it does not say is that they end up in the ER *because* of the mRNA vaccine. It is entirely possible that the trip to the ER is coincidental, or trivial (plenty of people take their kid to the ER for a fever of 104, which is not actually especially dangerous and not especially uncommon for ordinary viral infections).
This is in fact strongly emphased on page 10 of the report, which has a big purple arrow pointing to "key limitations: Generally, cannot determine cause and effect" meaning all they know is 0.2% of kids made a trip to the ER after a COVID vaccine. Why? Is there a connection? Nobody knows yet.
On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that actually being hospitalized *for* COVID is a fairly serious situation most definitely directly caused by COVID.
So this is kind of apples and oranges here. Unfortunately the data you would need to do apples-to-apples, which is a careful study of medical treatment needed *because* of a COVID vaccine, is not generally available. In principle it lurks within the VAERS data that are the basis for this report, but someone needs to go back through all those cases and characterize the medical care -- was it trivial or serious? -- and try to winkle out whether it was a result of the vaccine, or just coindence. That hasn't been done yet.
"what it does not say is that they end up in the ER *because* of the mRNA vaccine. "
According to the data from the vaccine trials, the likelihood of side-effects is significantly higher after the second dose. If children end up in the ER for reasons unrelated to the vaccine, why would the observed rate double after the second dose?
"On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that actually being hospitalized *for* COVID is a fairly serious situation most definitely directly caused by COVID."
Do you happen to have data on what fraction of children hospitalized with COVID are hospitalized *for* COVID? Given that over ~1/3 of the population in the US have been infected with COVID in the past year, a significant fraction of children hospitalized with COVID might be hospitalized for unrelated reasons.
1) That the side-effects after the second dose are more common is a non-sequitur. The side-effects in question are pain, muscle aches, fever -- nothing at all that would require hospitalization. The more serious side effects that are known to be correlated (myocarditis) are sufficiently rare that they weren't discovered in the clinical trials.
2) "If the children end up in the ER for reasons unrelated to the vaccine, why would the observed rate double after the second dose?"
I actually have no idea what this means, sorry. Perhaps you can find some other way to put it?
3) Probably most data on hospitalizations comes from the HHS Hospital Reporting Data Hub:
https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-reporting
There's a link there where you can see the data fields that are reported. Hospitals are supposed to report pediatric patients hospitalized with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID in field #18, if I'm reading this correctly. Whether some might report in this field a kid admitted for, say, a fracture who also happened to have COVID I do not know, but I suspect most would not, because it just gums up the data and they know that.
On the other hand, the data on complications per se comes from the VAERS system, and no attempt is made in that system to establish at the time of reporting a link -- indeed, there isn't any easy way to do that. So it's generally accepted that this is just initial data, and should not be used to make estimates of the magnitude of any causal relationships -- which is what you're doing, and which is exactly what was warning against in the report you quote with the big purple arrow.
As I said, so far as I know, the comparison you want to make just isn't possible right now, because the appropriate data have not collected. I'm sure there's people working feverishly on it, but it's not out there yet, except in small study populations.
3649 [number of children hospitalized re: your link] / (0.1 [10%] * 74 million [see link]) = 0.000493 = 5 hospitalizations per 1000 children
Am I not seeing some data that shows the ~1 child per 1000 hospitalized metric you listed above, or is it really ~5 in 1000?
link: https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp
0.000493 is around 5 hospitalizations per 10,000 children (not 1000).
Also, given that between ~1/3 and 1/2 of the population have been infected so far, one needs to multiply the risk of hospitalization in case of COVID infection by a factor of ~2-3.
Thanks for those links. I don't understand exactly what is being measured in the second link, but it doesn't look like "infection hospitalization rate", by which I mean the number of hospitalizations divided by the actual number of infections (which is unknown but presumably estimable; also note that my thinking here is that almost every unvaccinated person will eventually be infected, such that this metric is the correct one... but on second thought, children get sick from Covid rarely enough that I wonder if some children go beyond merely being asymptomatic into having some sort of natural immunity, or a very rapid and effective immune response). Plus the two links use substantially different age groups.
Nonetheless, 0.1% sounds vaguely plausible to me, while it is the 0.3% number that is much higher than I expected. I wish I knew how much this hospitalization corresponds to an actual danger, as opposed to an abundance of caution. I've seen reports suggesting that mRNA vaccine doses are too large, but smaller doses aren't being offered so... sigh.
Probably the chance of death is higher with Covid than with vaccines. I have felt, though, that both chances are very tiny, and perhaps the difference is so small that the main reason to vaccinate is to reduce contagiousness after exposure to Covid, in order to avoid infecting others. OTOH, the kind of person that refuses to vaccinate their kids also tends to be the kind of person who doesn't care much about not infecting others. Plus they might just argue that "meh, people can infect others even if they are immune themselves."
"the kind of person that refuses to vaccinate their kids also tends to be the kind of person who doesn't care much about not infecting others"
Is your opinion based on the personal experience with such people?
Since we don't know the baseline hospitalization rate for children, this is the absolute upper bound for the badness of the vaccine.
The absolute lower bound is that the ~1 per 1000 is the normal number of kids who go to the ER each week normally, and that only ~1 child per 1000 is because of the vaccine.
A few weeks ago I examined the lab leak hypothesis for COVID-19 (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-178/comments#comment-2270264). Alex Power suggested that I put it on a web page, so I did:
https://medium.com/@pseudodionysus/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab-a-critical-examination-208f0eff7c3
There are also some new developments on this front. President Joe Biden asked the intelligence community (IC) to prepare a report for him on the origins of COVID-19 within 90 days. They did so, and the declassified summary is here (https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Unclassified-Summary-of-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf).
In summary, “Four IC elements and the National Intelligence Council assess with low confidence that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus”. However, “one IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident”. Three IC elements couldn’t come to a conclusion. Importantly, the IC as a whole agreed that China did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial COVID-19 outbreak emerged.
Before the review, only two agencies favored the natural origin theory, according to NYTimes. So whatever secret information the IC has access to that we don’t, it pushed two (three?) of the agencies toward the natural origin theory.
I also stumbled across this paper in Cell, critically reviewing the lab leak hypothesis: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf
It’s fairly short (9 pages of text) and relatively non-technical by scientific paper standards. To summarize the arguments, (1) lots of zoonotic coronavirus have infected humans; (2) the earliest SARS-CoV-2 cases were clustered around the Huanan wet market, as expected for a zoonotic origin; (3) the WIV was not known to be working on any virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 (not even as similar as RaTG13), and there would have been no reason to hide such work before the pandemic; (4) more recent common ancestors than RaTG13 have been found in the wild since the pandemic began; (5) past recombinant virus research at WIV has used the WIV1 backbone, which is unrelated to SARS-CoV-2; (6) the furin cleavage site is present in a lot of coronaviruses, and the one in SARS-CoV-2 is suboptimal.
Some interesting facts I learned:
1. “In direct parallel to SARS-CoV-2, HCoV-HKU1, which was first described in a large Chinese city (Shenzhen, Guangdong) in the winter of 2004, has an unknown animal origin, contains a furin cleavage site in its spike protein, and was originally identified in a case of human pneumonia (Woo et al., 2005).”
2. “bat virus RaTG13 from the WIV has reportedly never been isolated nor cultured and only exists as a nucleotide sequence assembled from short sequencing reads”
3. Although RaTG13 has the highest genetic similarity to SARS-CoV-2, a history of recombination means that 3 other viruses have a more recent common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2. These are RmYN02, RpYN06, and PrC31, which were all sequenced after the pandemic had begun. So SARS-CoV-2 was not derived directly from RaTG13 (which we knew already), and scientists are making progress in tracking down the natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 (which I didn’t know before).
4. Page 31, showing the geographic distribution of the earliest cases. “Two of the three earliest documented COVID-19 cases were directly linked to this market selling wild animals, as were 28% of all cases reported in December 2019 (WHO, 2021). Overall, 55% of cases during December 2019 had an exposure to either the Huanan or other markets in Wuhan, with these cases more prevalent in the first half of that month (WHO, 2021)”.
This brings up an important philosophical issue: how much weight do you give to geographic coincidences? If you give them a lot of weight, and you believe it’s improbable for a zoonotic pandemic to have begun only 7.4 miles away from the Wuhan Virology Institute, then it should be downright impossible for a non-zoonotic pandemic to have begun 0 miles from a wet market and for a large fraction of the earliest cases to have traceable ties to the wet market. If you think the lack of traceable links between 72% of the December 2019 cases and the wet market is evidence the virus didn’t come from the wet market, then the lack of traceable links between 100% of the December 2019 cases and the WIV should be conclusive evidence that it didn’t come from the WIV. On the other hand, if you don’t put much weight on geographic coincidences, you could argue the wet market link means little because wet markets are crowded places with lots of people where viruses tend to spread easily--but then you’d have to agree that the coincidence that the WIV is in Wuhan means even less, because there’s no traceable link between the earliest cases and the WIV at all.
Thanks; that's a great resource.
For myself, I'm not terribly concerned if it's 90-10 one way or the other, both lead squarely to a reaction of "we may never know but should try to make both less common".
The trouble with this conclusion is that either gain-of-function research should be dialed up (so as to give us better strategies against the next zoonotic pandemic) or banned (to stop the enhanced viruses from leaking). It's tough to fulfill both those strategies at once.
>so as to give us better strategies against the next zoonotic pandemic
Were any useful strategies developed as a result of such research thus far? From the outside it simply seems to be bonkers insane - unclear upside vs. catastrophic downside, a real life example of the "they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should".
There’s lots of other virology institutes and coronaviruses are common virus types and we already were working with them for SARS and Mers and it makes sense you’d detect a pandemic in the sort of city that’s have a virology institute as opposed to a small town etc
A good defence but were not the first cases detected in samples taken from September? And the wet market has already been thoroughly ruled out as the origin point.
" If you give them a lot of weight, and you believe it’s improbable for a zoonotic pandemic to have begun only 7.4 miles away from the Wuhan Virology Institute, then it should be downright impossible for a non-zoonotic pandemic to have begun 0 miles from a wet market and for a large fraction of the earliest cases to have traceable ties to the wet market. "
Lots of wet markets, and this one didn't have bats, which in any case hibernate in the winter. This virology institute was working on bat viruses — is there evidence that others were?
The paper puts a lot of weight on the Hunan Wet Market connection, even though that market doesn't seem to have sold either bats or pangolins. To that end, they discuss raccoon dogs as a potential intermediate species. I presume that's because they found raccoon dogs were being sold at the wet market. But this is the first I've heard of raccoon dogs as a pathway.
So, OK, look at their references and do some googling, and there have been papers speculating on the possibility and showing that raccoon dogs can contract and transmit SARS CoV-2 in the lab. But AFIK, nobody has ever found a raccoon dog in the wild infected with anything like SARS CoV-2.
The paper also makes a big deal of the fact that no bats have been found with Literal SARS CoV-2 or Immediate Ancestral SARS CoV-2. But the existence of bat populations infected with kissing cousins of CoV-2 is well-established, and I don't *think* there's any controversy that this started out as a COVID-like bat disease. There's also not any controversy that scientists from WIV were going out to study those very bats and then coming back to Wuhan.
So, it seems to me that one of these theories involves a known intermediary (Wuhan-based scientists) and one of them involves a purely speculative intermediary (raccoon dogs). Am I missing something, or are they stacking the deck with a raccoon-dog-shaped card?
Im not sure if youve seen it, but the GOP minority report on the origins of covid is worht a look.
https://gop-foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/ORIGINS-OF-COVID-19-REPORT.pdf
and
https://gop-foreignaffairs.house.gov/blog/mccaul-releases-final-report-on-origins-of-covid-19-pandemic/
I think anyway. I didnt have them bookmarked and pulled those up fast, so sorry if that is incomplete.
That brings up one thing i think you overlooked in your analysis: The Chinese government sure acted and is acting like they have something to hide. I mean, even if they cant prove that Covid didnt come from with WIV, why limit access to such a great extent? Why were they so insistant that the WHO team not investigate the possibility? Why not simply bring the virus database back online? And thats just the start. At every opportunity, they have chosen the course of cover up and deception, not of openness, in contrast to the past where they have been pretty up front about their virus research.
Also, your analysis looks at each item in isolation, which is good. But i think you also need to consider these things together. Sure, the FCS being encoded by (supposedly) unusual nucleotides isnt proof by itself. Neither is the fact that the WIV was manipulating coronaviruses, nor the supposed illnesses of the WIV workers or the disappearance of the virus database etc etc. But taken together, they start to look more like proof and less like coincidence.
Sorry i just dashed this response off, ill try a more thoughtful reply when i get a chance.
The Chinese government acts “hostile” when a web application has the Taiwanese flag in it, or when an Olympic official uses the word “Taiwan”, or when a foreign exchange student says “I hate China” on their Twitter account that has ten followers. It doesn’t really indicate guilt as much as it would if someone else did.
Agreed. I actually work with Chinese government agencies an I think 'something to hide' is a default setting, to the slightly weird point that they are actually more open with us (a university and research partner) than they are with other branches of government (you sometimes discover you're the vector of information between them...).
Remember the SNAFU principle-- communication is only possible between equals. I'd add that it isn't reliable even then.
In any case, the threat of punishment makes communication even less likely.
I annoy people by pointing out that you can punish people or you can find out what's going on, but not both.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/zeynep-tufekci/
"But there was also this defensiveness around both the field because you’re asking a field . . . I’m an academic, and if somebody came to me and said, “Would you like to think about the fact that your field may have inadvertently, perhaps, even in the mildest potential case, sparked something that killed millions of people?” Of course, defensiveness is very human in that."
to people at the meetup: what does Scott's voice sound like? in my head, just because he writes in what I guess I'd term a "thoughtful style", my mental conception of his voice ends up assigning it a pleasant timbre, somewhat quiet and clipped. But as we all know, this is often a terrible assumption to make
Hmm, I always read the blog as having the voice of Kermit the frog with a lungful of Sulphur Hexaflouride.
Anything else would spoil it.
In my head, I always hear writing in my own voice, unless it's from someone whose voice I know.
He's just some guy.
Ah hell. I was thinking something like Patrick Stewart.
He actually sounds quite a bit like Howard Cosell.
I'd say pleasant, quiet, and thoughtful are all correct :)
There is a recording on youtube of him reading the final chapter of Unsong, so if you've already read Unsong or don't mind spoilers you can hear for yourself: https://youtu.be/FaifojyS_CQ?t=2116
Do you ever feign ignorance when debating with someone? I've found myself trying it.
The situation is: you want to say X. You know that saying X is going to make some people you're talking to angry, because X sounds a bit like Y. Y is something that "the other side" say. You think Y is false, and so do your friends. But Y is so toxic, if you say anything associated with it, like X, Y will come to mind. Examples in this blog post: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html
I used to clarify, disclaim, and preface a lot: "I'm about to say something that sounds like Y. We all know Y is false and bad. I believe X - that may sound like Y, but it's different because Z".
I've changed my mind; I think the best approach is to say X and let the other person bring up its connection to Y.
If you're the one who brings up the connection, from their point of view, this is a partial admission of a connection.
If they're the one who has to bring up the connection, they're offered the option of not bringing it up, and trying to attack X on its own terms. Offering that option allows them to think about how they might attack X if it wasn't related to Y. Their interest in doing that might entice them away from dwelling on the possible Y connection.
This comes partly from hearing about how to react when you've been cancelled (clarifying is taken as a sign of concession), and partly from Robin Hanson, who wrote the blog post a lot, and appears to live this himself - watch this remarked on amusingly 1m5s into this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBRwDYNjgog
"If you're writing, then you need to address possible connections people will make"
Robin Hanson disagrees with you https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html
I don't see Robin Hanson advising people not to put in disclaimers in that post. He says it is bad that you have to use disclaimers, which is not the same thing.
Complaining about the existence of situation X that necessitates action Y does not imply that action Y shouldn't be taken in situation X.
(For an especially obvious example, "it is bad that crime occurs and necessitates police departments" does not imply "we should shut down police departments".)
(He does suggest something vaguely like what you're saying here - https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/05/skip-value-signals.html - but it's a bit narrower.)
When he says "sharp people will distinguish themselves [...]", he is implicitly saying "so say things without disclaimers, and you'll be able to find out, and therefore select for, sharp people".
"A community of conversation where everything is open for discussion, people write directly and literally, and people respond mostly analytically to the direct and literal meanings of what people say. People make direct claims and explicit arguments, and refer to dictionaries for disputes about words mean. There’s little need for or acceptance of discussion of what people really meant, and any such claims are backed up by direct explicit arguments based on what people actually and directly said. Even when you believe there is subtext, your text should respond to their text, not to their subtext. Autists may be especially at home in such a community, but many others can find a congenial home there."
Awww
The most effective use of feigned ignorance I have discovered is when I’m at the Best Buy check out and the try to sell me an extended warranty. I act confused and start responding in Russian. Works like charm.
не понимаю тебя извини??
I do this frequently and mostly to great affect. Most of the time people aren't fully prepared to explain why Y is so bad it isn't worth discussing and trying to make someone work through this for themselves results in concessions they'd never make otherwise.
That being said, this works fine at a 1:1 level, but doesn't scale particularly well.
Thank you! To be clear, I am talking about the situation where Y is something both people agree to be false, are you?
"this works fine at a 1:1 level, but doesn't scale particularly well"
Definitely. Not very surprising, because if there's "something that needs to be said", each individual looks bad if they fail to say it.
To what extent might you agree 1:1 conversations are just a crapshoot anyway?
> I am talking about the situation where Y is something both people agree to be false, are you?
In terms of pre-existing knowledge, yes. In terms of what I bring to the argument - no. I feign ignorance of Y as a concept and its underlying negative connotations. I'll let someone build up a working definition of Y and have them set their own limits of how far Y extends. Then I'll use the limits they just set to point out that X doesn't fall within those limits.
>To what extent might you agree 1:1 conversations are just a crapshoot anyway?
I don't at all think 1:1 conversations are a crapshoot. I think once you get above 1:3 or so they turn into one though.
>Then I'll use the limits they just set to point out that X doesn't fall within those limits.
I like it!
In American culture, is there a stigma associated with packing-up uneaten food, following an office function? In an office of about 100 staff (we all share the same break room), I am among the few people who will take home uneaten food following birthday celebrations, or retirement events, or whatever. Most people seem content to just leave the remaining food in there, where it will be thrown out within a day. Many of my co-workers earn minimum wage, or just above it, so you'd think that they would have an incentive to grab free food. I find it all a bit odd.
People might also be waiting to come back later and have another sandwich or slice of cake or whatever on their official break, so immediately packing it up and taking it away, unless invited to do so, does seem too quick off the mark.
My experience (lower middle class American) has been that the person supplying the food decides what to do with the extra. At some functions they go around giving out extra to take home toward the end, or let people know there's extra to take. Sometimes it stays in the fridge with an "eat me" sign on it, and is slowly eaten, or forgotten about. Sometimes they bought it themselves and take it home to their families. Sometimes none of this happens and it gets thrown out.
I would be mildly offended if someone who didn't bring or buy the food was obviously packing it up to take home on their own prerogative.
I should have specified that I'm talking about company-bought food, not brought by any individual employee. This is things like pizza, cupcakes, bagels, cookies, veggie trays with dip, sodas, fruit salad, etc.
That makes sense. I would expect people to leave it, even if they expect it to be thrown out, unless someone in charge (admin assistant? Someone like that) clearly asks people to take some; some people need to be asked twice.
I'm not exactly sure why. Probably something to do with not wanting to look greedy.
Some places do have rules, such as "the supervisor ordered it/brought it in so they decide what to do with leftovers" or "this was for a specific event, e.g. a board meeting, so the manager takes it home" or whatever.
If I’m around there is never any chance of there being any uneaten pizza leftover. I had an Italian grandmother and developed the super power of being able to eat any amount of food put in front of me.
The norm at my university is for it to be left in the break room for anyone in the building who wants some; I would regard packing up large quantities immediately as a bit rude, but if you wait till the end of the day then anything still uneaten is totally fair game.
In a professional environment, yes - I would find this to be extremely tacky unless someone has explicitly said, "please take the leftovers home."
Yeah, but... nobody ever says that. They just leave the food in the break room until someone eventually throws it in the trash (usually the next day). I typically wait until the end of the day, when I'm sure no-one else is going to come in and graze on the remaining food. I take it home not because I'm cheap, but because I hate to see food go to waste. A few other people do this, too, but we're definitely a small minority.
I need to be clear here - I'm not judging you or saying you shouldn't do this. It's definitely better than letting the food get thrown out. I'm going to try and steel-man why I think it's tacky, but please take this more as an expression of my own biases and not what I think about you/other people who do this.
From what I've seen, most food that ends up being served at offices is really meh. It's either bad pizza, some uninteresting snack food or some kind of forgettable dessert. You eat it in the office because the opportunity cost is pretty low, it's there, you're there, so you eat it. But taking it home changes that; it implies that relative to anything else you could chose to eat for/with dinner, you'd chose this.
This kind of implicitly implies either a strong preference for low quality food or such a level of cheapness that you'd prefer free bad food over good food you have to pay for. I guess you can tack on a third "such distaste for wasting food that it creates a willingness to consume low-quality food."
The first two behaviors definitely fall into what I'd classify as tacky. I'm not sure about the third.
I can add another motivation, that applies to me, at least.
I don’t like shopping or cooking, or dining out particularly. So office leftovers are a convenient way to avoid all of these things.
I must confess to some curiosity as to where you would assign this on the tackiness scale :-)
For you, nowhere. It would, I'm sure, be an admirable saving of energy.
For the rando in my office who told me he was taking office pizza home because he didn't want to go shopping or cook... I'd say it would be roughly equal to seeing 3 separate instances of the person chewing with their mouth open or one instance of coming into the office wearing spectacularly ugly pants.
Well, some of us were reared that "it's a sin to waste food" so if you've grown up being encouraged to clear your plate because "think of the starving children in Africa" or wherever, then seeing food (even if it is cheap food) thrown out does trigger that "no, this is wrong!" reflex.
I don't think I've ever understood this. If you eat until satiation, why is it so terrible to just throw away the remaining food? Food supply isn't fungible, the food you don't eat wasn't taken away from the starving kids in Africa; at best it just meant someone else didn't buy that particular eggplant or whatever at the grocery store.
Like, if this leads you to snack on unhealthy food between meals, I get why this would be seen as a negative. Ditto if you find yourself constantly cooking too much/buying too many perishables that don't get used and wasting money. But just not joining the clean plate club never seemed like a sin to me.
I think this is a cultural legacy of the relatively-recent issue that you were not guaranteed enough food in western society (from a limited sample of acquaintances I think this is particularly strong in Irish and East European families, probably unsurprisingly). And when starvation was common in western society then the food supply was much more fungible, since uneaten food could be sent to the family down the lane
If it's company-provided food, the model I'm familiar with is that you let it sit out long enough to make sure that anybody who wanted any would be able to get some. But at the end of the day it's a (reasonable) free-for-all. Food is encouraged to be taken home so that it isn't wasted.
There is no one american culture. I've been in places where everyone takes some home. I've been in places where everyone leaves it to go bad. There doesn't seem to be much consistancy.
But if you or another policy maker at the workplace encourage one or the other, it will happen. Break out some of those really cheap gladware type containers and plop them down 3/4 of the way through the party and say "You all better not leave any here when you leave" and I'll bet it gets taken.
Couldn't Reaper drones be reconfigured to take on light infantry/insurgents, like in Afghanistan? Why haven't they been, to date? I know when most people think of drones, they're thinking of the relatively small ones- and those little guys seem to have be the focus of most warfighting advances recently (as small/cheap bombers). But the America Reaper drone, and the Predator before it, is a 5000 lbs. beast. They're already loaded with missiles- why not the machine gun that goes on an attack helicopter now?
I understand that Reapers now fly at a much higher altitude. But couldn't the US reconfigure one with a mounted machine gun to hover 50ish feet off the ground and take out Taliban insurgents? Seems like a good way to route that sort of light infantry (and strike absolute terror into their hearts), while not risking American lives. If their range is too limited to be effective (hard to believe), a mothership cargo plane could circle over the battlespace and drop them off, then pick them up. Obviously this would be difficult/impossible in a war against Russia or China- but the US does a ton of these counterinsurgency campaigns against very unsophisticated foes all over the world, who lack anti-aircraft weapons.
Why hasn't this been done to date? Is it that the Reaper is vulnerable to small arms fire? I don't believe the Taliban has effective artillery or anti-aircraft weapons- is an AK gonna take the drone down? If so, is it just impossible to armor up a drone enough while still keeping it flyable? Or, is it that that level of firing precision isn't possible with a remote control? (Maybe operators could be in the mothership cargo plane, if latency is an issue).
Seems like a hardened Reaper drone with machine guns, that can't be taken down by small arms fire, would revolutionize remote US wars where we don't want to risk ground troops. Curious if it's technically possible. I am especially hoping to hear from John Schilling, of course
Technically possible? Probably, but would it be able to meet our standard of identifying a target and verifying its identity on the 'fly?' Probably not. For every Hellfire that comes off of a drone, there was a legal review of whether it was against a proper target and the likelihood of killing non-targeted people was minimized (there are other words used but that's the gist). Reapers flying around spraying .50 caliber rounds like an A-10 (which shoots higher caliber 30mm rounds but the trigger is pulled directly by the pilot) just would not pass Law of Armed Conflict muster and I can imagine many circumstances where the targets were 'wrong' as the video feed while good quality is still limited in its ability take in the surroundings without multiple viewpoints/cameras. Presumably the Hellfire variants used are also laser guided to the precise point highlighted by the laser used to aim it. I'll have to let you imagine how that laser aim point is established. This whole matter gets into a discussion about the future of semi-autonomous and autonomous weapon systems which I hope we don't go down.
oh and there's this from the WSJ today:
"WASHINGTON—The Pentagon used a special Hellfire missile that packs no explosives to strike Islamic State militants in Afghanistan on Saturday in retaliation for a suicide bomb attack at the Kabul airport last week, according to two U.S. officials.
The airstrike, carried out by a Reaper drone flown from the Persian Gulf region, killed two militants associated with the Afghanistan offshoot of the Islamic State extremist group, and injured a third individual.
The Pentagon declined to release the identities of any of the individuals targeted. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Kabul airport attack that killed 13 American troops and nearly 200 Afghan civilians.
The missile used by the U.S. in the airstrike, called an R9X, is inert. Instead of exploding, the weapon ejects a halo of six large blades stowed inside the skin of the missile, which deploy at the last minute to shred the target of the strike, allowing military commanders to pinpoint their target and reduce the possibility for civilian casualties." - no way to be that precise with bullets from the air on a moving platform.
Basically, I'm talking about replacing actual combat operations, and you're thinking about these targeted assassinations. Different things. I'm talking using a drone to replace the 'regular' combat with massed open belligerents that to date has been done by the Army, Marines etc. These kind of assassination strikes would still be done via missile/six large blade halo amazing sci fi thingy
Oh no, we're talking about the same thing. We just don't have a good way to use an inaccurate weapon like automatic machine gun fire in a proportional and targeted way from a small drone like the Reaper (small being relative to their larger manned cousins) with its limited view. It has been proposed that we COULD have such weapons on future unmanned hovering platforms that would have more protection and this is the subject of much legal debate. How much authority will we give the machines?
Why would this be better than an attack helicopter (which does basically the same thing), if you know you're going into "regular" combat?
No human casualties for the public/populists to complain about.
I do take your points in your other comment though- all good stuff. I totally didn't think about the plane/helicopter distinction
Laser-guided, rocket-powered shuriken. Sounds like the Pentagon has been mining uncyclopedia's "List Of Weapons That Don't Exist But Should" page for ideas. https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/List_of_weapons_that_don%27t_exist,_but_should
I'm talking about engaging obvious militants and not, like, assassinating specific targets. I mean open warfare. Taliban laying siege to a crucial Afghan city? They have to be, like, out in the open to do so. I understand they do lots of skulking and blending in with the regular population, but if you're seizing entire cities you are by definition a visible belligerent.
We engaged the Taliban in a ton of small arms engagements over the last 20 years, obviously there was not a legal review every time before a guy in the A-10 squeezed the trigger. If you need multiple sensors on the Reaper then sure, but ultimately we're just talking about replacing what's been done by humans for the last two decades
"but ultimately we're just talking about replacing what's been done by humans for the last two decades" and that is the crux of the matter. Can someone on a moving platform from more than 500' up looking through a narrow view telescopic lens determine who is a combatant? Hard to say. Hell, it's often hard to determine on the ground from 50 yards using human eyeballs taking in all that's going on around the 'target.' Even the guy in an A-10 has to take reasonable precautions against hitting non-combatants. The days of large formations of force-on-force engagements where anything that moves is a target is likely over. The complex battlefield of a mix of urban and open terrain where combatants and the surrounding population are mixed in is the battlefield of the future - at least on land. Air and Sea are different environments where targeting is likely to be simpler.
The Taliban don't "lay siege" to cities in the way that e.g. medieval armies lay siege to cities. And certainly not cities that are under the active protection of the US military. If they are described as "laying siege" to a city, that mostly means that there are enough Taliban warbands hiding out in the surrounding hills that the supply convoys keep getting ambushed. The difficulty is still finding them; if and when we do, small missiles are good enough for killing them.
And when the Taliban actually *take* a city, that's mostly a matter of their calculating that the US is not going to defend it, the Afghan National Army isn't going to defend it without direct US assistance, and then going from "there are Taliban warbands hiding out in the hills" to "the Taliban just drove into the city center and told everyone they are in charge" in less time than it would take to get a drone from Bagram on scene. Sometimes the Taliban miscalculate and get driven back, but I think that also happens pretty quickly in most cases.
If the Taliban did do something that would make them particularly vulnerable to your hypothetical machine-gun drones, then they'd also be vulnerable to things like Apache helicopters and AC-130s and B-52s and we've already got plenty of those.
Look at the use of rubber and plastic bullets in Northern Ireland. Meant to be non-lethal, meant to be use to disperse rioters and protesters. Killed seventeen civilians, including eight children ages 10-15:
https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/violence/rubberplasticbullet.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_bullet
You're thinking of the Taliban as an army, however unconventional; you need to think of them as the IRA or the PLO: small cells acting independently but with a central co-ordinating organisation.
Reprisal by armed forces against civilians often turns neutrals to enemies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1920)
>Why haven't they been, to date?
Because that configuration isn't better than what other platforms bring to the table.
If the Taliban forms en masse, there are no shortage of air platforms to deal with that scenario. The opposite scenario has been and is the harder problem.
How did the Taliban seize control of an entire country if they never formed en masse? Lay siege to multiple cities? I don't believe that, sorry
Short answer: The Afghan forces weren't being paid, didn't have the US as a partner force, and, most importantly, didn't believe in the mission. Taliban supporters had to wait out US presence then literally stand up in the jirga and say "All of you are governed by the Taliban now".
Longer answer: in the valleys I was in, the Taliban had the support of many elders. Unless there was sufficient US presence in an area, entire valleys, districts and even provinces were ruled by the Taliban government and were effectively denied areas. Their ability to constrict movement was/is incredibly robust. For example, there were passes where you were guaranteed to lose your legs if you drove through them. Most Afghan forces chose to live and let live. Truthfully so did many Americans. I'm sure you know this but the Taliban don't wear uniforms or fly their flags when they're not doing propaganda videos. So you can't just fly around in some attack helicopter and whack dudes based on visible characteristics. The days of the Taliban forming en masse to fight some large maneauver warfare style battle are long long gone. I've heard credible stories of Mazar-i-Sharif style engagements back in the day but the past decade (at least) has been an insurgency war so identifying the "bad guys" ends up being the hard problem.
If you're sincerely interested in this topic area, then I'd recommend Ken Burns' documentary on Vietnam. This is the most accurate depiction of how the US thinks about war from just about every stakeholder in the system. It will heavily shape how you think about weapon systems and their use.
OK. I do respect your experience man. So when the Taliban 'take' a city, they just.... drive in in some unmarked vehicles, and there's no way for a hovering Reaper at however many thousand feet above to 'know' it's Taliban? How about the whole 'pre-taking the city' stage? The drone can't get close enough to find the Taliban in the hills? (Or, use a much much cheaper unarmed intel drone for that kind of closer look, say?) I'm just trying to visualize this as a guy who's obviously never been to war. Maybe you can imagine my perspective as an obvious non-SME, visualizing taking over a whole country but never really providing enough of a view that a hovering drone can figure it out. Just hard to picture. When I read a story about the Baltimore PD's experimental surveillance drone over their city, it supposedly could make out individuals on the street, etc.
I watched some of Burns' documentary. What I saw was mostly interviews with the soldiers, not a technical or systems breakdown
Try thinking of the Taliban as, like, the Tea Party with guns. Some parts of the Tea Party are well organized and others are just your random uncle who hates Portland hipsters (the US or Afghan Government). In some parts of the country, people really like the Tea Party. Other parts like the ideals of the Portland hipsters or earn money serving them lattes but even in those parts there will be sizeable amounts of people who strictly prefer the Tea Party. The Tea Party doesn't have to invade anyone really because there are an abundance of random uncles across the country who would just really relish the opportunity to boot stomp some Portland hipsters if the circumstances present themselves.
Maybe I can help you visualize what that looks like in practice. Here's a picture of a jirga: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ethnic-pashtun-elders-hold-a-jirga-or-assembly-to-discuss-news-photo/673639
So two questions:
1) How do we figure out which of these elders support the Taliban?
2) Once we figure that out, what do we do about it? They're engaging in the political process by attending the jirga. Should we drop on a bomb on their qalat? Try to change their minds?
Hopefully you see how identifying the random uncles is a whole thing. And then what to do with them is also a whole thing. Neither of those things is particularly helped by weapon systems honestly. You sorta just ask around and find out that Malik so and so is a Taliban supporter. And then (hopefully) think pretty carefully about how to deal with him so you don't lose your legs.
So those are the random uncles of the Taliban. Then there's the Tea Party leadership. Those guys are harder to find and harder to kill. But the live in Pakistan or in caves and off the grid and you'll never get in a firefight with them. Sometimes you can catch them when they're on the move in provinces they shouldn't be in (becaues there's more portland hipsters there who will tell you when they've shown up from out of town).
Maybe the Burns' documentary resonates more with me given my experiences. There's discussions in there around M16 development, the APC, and agent orange. Also featured are the use of air calvary, artillery and close air support. The shape of that war and even the operational themes are very similar to Iraq and Afghanistan. The general takeaway would be that war is inherently not a technology or engineering problem. Not to put too fine a point on it but the question to answer is "how do you defeat the Taliban?" not "how do we improve the specifications on X or Y weapon system?"
By the time the Taliban, or any other insurgency, gets around to visibly driving into a city, the city has already been taken (be that via negotiations or the ostensible defenders realising that if they stand and fight, all that gets them is a starring role in a beheading video).
Generally in historic warfare, the besieging army make conditions so unpleasant that the besieged are coerced into deciding to surrender first, because a siege is long and tedious and roars through resources like a forest fire for both sides, so the clear threat is "surrender and don't make us have to fight for this, because if you do, when we take the city there will be no quarter and there will be pillaging and looting and sacking and rape and murder and all those bad things, but if you surrender, we can negotiate terms".
Read up about Michael Collins and guerrilla warfare during the Irish War of Independence, and Tom Barry and the West Cork Flying Column.
You are native to the place so you know the terrain, you are holed up in the hills in your bases, you have the support (enthusiastic or grudging) of the locals, you are small and lightly equipped so you do hit-and-run raids, ambushes, and dig trenches across roads to detonate bombs when the military forces ride over them. You can blend in with the civilian population.
The occupying force is confined to areas like barracks and other central locations, they come out on regular patrols, they travel by large vehicles, they are not supposed to run wild and shoot every civilian they see, they have constraints. Mostly they are foreigners who are an occupying force. Even sympathetic locals will still want them to pack up and go home sometime.
You can use terrorist/freedom fighter tactics, they can't (because those are war crimes against a civilian population). And vitally, you are fighting the propaganda war and war of public opinion as much as you are fighting a military struggle.
https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/michael-collins-strategy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Barry_(Irish_republican)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1920)
A Reaper is a plane, not a helicopter, so that's probably the main reason nobody has made one that can hover and machine-gun terrorists.
I don't see why you *couldn't* build a drone helicopter with a machine gun, but that would be a fairly specific use case and it probably wouldn't be as flexible as a Predator. One of the Predator's main strengths is loiter time - it can circle an area for a long time and look carefully for suspected terrorists before it finally decides to announce its presence by Hellfire. (And as much as people like to talk about how a machine gun going BRRT will scare the pants off terrorists, making the terrorists explode every time they step outside has its own charms.)
And yes, armoring a plane or helicopter is actually pretty hard if you want it to get that close. Even famous "armored" planes like the A-10 are mostly armored in the sense of "can limp back to base after taking hits" rather than "can fly through a hail of bullets with impunity." And of course, rifles aren't the only thing the Taliban might be using - heavier machine guns or RPGs are well within their reach. If you ever saw/read Black Hawk Down, that's a case where an "unsophisticated" enemy shot down two US helicopters with RPGs.
What is the advantage to using a machine gun vs. a small missile?
The ammunition is cheaper, but by the time you've put a drone over a target with a trained crew in Nevada and a secure communications link between the two, the cost of the ordnance is not the long pole in the tent. Plus, the US is rich. I don't think there have been all that many drone strikes called off at the last minute because someone reasoned, "Hellfire missiles are just too expensive", and if that ever does become a problem, there are cheaper missiles available.
The ammunition is lighter, but a standard Reaper can carry eight Hellfires and a pair of 500 lb precision-guided bombs, which is probably enough to defeat a company-sized force and insurgents usually work in company-sized forces or less. On the rare occasions when they mass on battalion or regimental scale, if you're watching with drones you should see that coming and you can bring in aerial reinforcements faster than they can move by foot or Hilux.
And the down side of the gun is that it requires you to get in close. Close enough that the enemy is going to see and hear you whether you want them to or not, and you almost never actually *want* them to see you, and close enough that they can possibly shoot your very expensive drone with their own cheap machine guns.
Possibly you're thinking that something that is officially labeled an "antitank missile" can't possibly be the right weapon to use against small groups of light infantry. But the reality is, most of the "antitank missiles" that have been fired in anger since I think 1973, have been fired at small groups of light infantry. "Antitank" missiles are about the best tool anyone has yet come up with for killing small groups of people at ranges of 2-5 kilometers or so, and if they are more expensive than we would like for that purpose, they are much cheaper than who or whatever we would be putting at risk to get in closer to take a shot with a cheap munition.
I'm not averse to the idea of very small drones with say a 20mm cannon and a couple of small missiles might be a useful addition to the US arsenal. But, A: it's probably not going to be a game-changer and B: that would be a whole new weapons system (and doctrine and supporting logistics) rather than just a Reaper with a machine gun, and C: what is the problem that you are trying to solve? A Reaper with missiles is going to circle over the battlefield looking for targets and blowing them up whenever it finds them, until there are no more targets to be seen. A Reaper with machine guns is going to do the same, except maybe it gets shot down while there are still enemies on the field.
I take your points. But so- why did we lose Afghanistan to the Taliban? Reaper drones apparently cost $32 million apiece according to some quick Googling, which seems incredibly cheap by the standards of US military hardware. Couldn't we just have.... had 50 or 100 Reapers in rotating flight paths over Afghanistan, blasting massed Taliban fighters with Hellfire missiles? We have a bunch of Reapers, we divide Afghanistan into zones and put a Reaper flying in a circle over each zone, we swap it out for the day when its fuel is low, and we cover those zones 24/7/365. Might need some non-Reaper, unarmed pure intel gathering drones for additional coverage as well. I understand insurgents may still win some small skirmishes here or there, but in general they can't mass anywhere in the country because they'll get blasted. No US lives at stake, and it seems pretty affordable. Why doesn't this work?
I'm getting the feedback from other people that the Taliban never massed. Maybe you can imagine how hard it is for me to visualize, that you could take over an entire country but never form a standing army in one or several groupings that could be identified
The Taliban, like most "insurgent" forces, is very hard to find not because people are hard to find, but because you have no idea who's a member of it. Most of the Taliban's forces today were officially part of the Afghan army or police a month ago, and most of the rest were 'civilians'. A goat herder with a bunch of AKs hidden in his basement looks exactly the same as an innocent one.
If it helps, despite being a terribly inaccurate analogy, think of this as a game of Mafia/Werewolf with the US Army as an unkillable sheriff and the Taliban as the Mafia: you can't see who the Taliban are despite them being able to kill people in their own dispersed way.
Alternatively, think of the Taliban as a jumped up gang engaging in gang warfare against a local city government: their small warbands/street gangs are large enough to outshoot the local cops and small enough to hide from the (US) military. They couldn't *defeat* the US military as long as it was in the city, but the moment it left they could waltz right in and gun down the local cops. (Well they didn't have to do that because the local cops saw that they were about to be gunned down and surrendered/deserted their posts/joined the Taliban instead, but you get the picture.)
Think about it like this - we've had complete air superiority over Afghanistan for almost 2 decades now. During this time, we've done thousands and thousands of bombings/drone strikes. Our process for approving these is either "this unit is actively being attacked and needs immediate support" or "we have intelligence that the Taliban has massed in this area."
Putting the first situation aside, that means that these people have basically 2 decades of experience of accomplishing their goals without ever massing (or only massing in situations where any kind of force projection isn't possible for a force reliant on air superiority). The fact that there still is a Taliban is testimate to the inherent weaknesses of this kind of activity.
I think it would be more proper to say that the Taliban mass briefly and rapidly when the situation calls for it. I'm going to want to read the after-action reports of the fall of Afghanistan when they become available, but I believe the process is something like this:
There are fifty Taliban warbands hiding in the hills surrounding Provincial Capital X. Everybody knows this, but the Taliban are all hiding in caves or looking like shepherds or whatnot. There's an Afghan National Army garrison in Provincial Capital X (or a local militia/police force) and that's much more legible to the Taliban. Not merely visible, but some of their people are hanging out after-hours with the ANA people talking shop.
When the Taliban believe the ANA force is too weak, craven, and/or corrupt to fight, and are pretty sure there aren't any US troops in the city or aircraft overhead, they coordinate and at the trigger event (which these days can be a cellphone tree), fifty warbands swarm the city in a matter of hours. The ANA might run away, or they might switch sides and greet the Taliban as liberators, or there might be a few firefights but brief ones. In any event, it's over in hours. At which point the Taliban are massed, but they're massed in the city where removing them by any variant of Death From Above pretty much means going Full Daenerys.
If the Taliban have miscalculated and the ANA forces resist strongly enough that taking the city would mean going Full Stalingrad, they go back to being fifty scattered warbands hiding in caves or masquerading as shepherds, before the drones can arrive.
I think the pace at which the Taliban took towns and cities across large regions in the last days probably did involve massed movements on a scale that would have been vulnerable to air power, and it wouldn't have required any new type of aircraft. But that didn't happen until after the US had stopped providing air support to the ANA, and pullled out the contractors maintaining what passed for the Afghan Air Force (which promptly decided that if their planes were in good enough shape for one more flight, it should be to Uzbekistan).
When it was maybe one town falling to the Taliban every month, that was Taliban staying hidden outside many towns, and maybe once in a month in one of many towns the stars would align in a way that favored the quick takeover.
I can confidently say that GA has indeed looked at putting guns on reaper and similar platforms. However this had never actually been done with any production aircraft for several reasons. In addition to those John mentioned, Reaper is made out of spit and tissue paper, and even if it could survive the gun firing vibration, and recoil, and the CG issues the ammo could induce, flying it any lower and slower would likely get it shot down. Also, NLOS communication lag would likely make gun targeting rather difficult.
Now, what I really wish they would put on reaper are napalm cannisters, so that some of them could "accidentally" be dropped on training flights on any of the square miles plastic white grow houses littering the Mojave desert.
I was thinking about the debate regarding whether the obesity crisis has been caused by psychological factors like food reward / palatability, vs being caused by environmental contamination, which is being researched by Slime Mold Time Mold. One of the questions in my mind is how obesity set points come to be and how they become so stable, which led me to the following idea.
If your obesity set point is set by your psychology, would it make sense to use an extreme diet to get down to your desired set point, then take LSD to reset your neural bases, in the same way that Scott has written about before? Is there any possibility that would work?
Highly doubtful. The kinds of priors that LSD loosens do not include the lipostat, or LSD would be able to affect things like your body temperature set point or your growth hormone set point too.
I also find this doubtful, mostly on grounds of having priors against LSD as a panacea, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of psychologically adapting to the feeling of being away from the set point. Accepting hunger.
I have heard several accounts of people stopping, for instance, a nicotine addiction after taking LSD. It is not that the physical withdrawal, if any, miraculously disappears.
But the association to smoking becomes disgust, or some other form of internalized resolve that is strong enough to balance out the need to give in.
I generally eat one (large) meal a day, for unrelated reasons. My weight is stable and normal. For me, being slightly hungry is not infrequent, though occasionally mildly annoying. It's not exactly a pleasant feeling, but it's very bearable, and it invariably goes away completely after being ignored for a while. ~12h ish after a meal, I'm often slightly hungry. But 24h after, I usually don't really feel hunger, or I feel it as tiredness/weakness if I'm really running low.
I would not rule out the idea that someone who hasn't could adapt to staying below their set point with psychedelics.
Lipostat is the name of a medication and doesn't seem to be the name of a bodily system. Cursory investigation suggests theories of weight gain, hunger and satiety are still being worked out.
But if LSD could have an effect on weight, my guess would not be that it does so by changing levels of ghrelin or leptin hormone, but rather by changing the manner in which the brain interprets those hormones.
The lipostat is also the name given to the bodily system that regulates weight through the leptin hormone. The fact that it's now the name of a patented drug is fucking criminal. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
Obviously LSD would not affect the levels of leptin, but as explained in the book review, regulating body weight is an extremely low-level process crucial to survival, and as a result it's exceedingly unlikely that LSD would have any effect on it. If it did, you might expect that it also does something like stop your heart or make all your hair fall out.
It would be a safer experiment to eat slowly and moderately while tripping.
I don't expect it to do much, but it's unlikely to do harm.
Since the discussion of aducanumab put me at odds with most of the other commenters, I wanted to make my position more concise and offer predictions/betting opportunities:
1) I did not know that FDA approval may mean forcing Medicare to pay for it. I hope that that didn't happen and if it does, I'm against the approval. I am for allowing doctors to decide based on the available test data whether a drug with nice biomarker action but crappy endpoint evidence has a high enough chance of working on their patient to warrant the cost.
2) I am not so much a fan of aducanumab itself as I am more optimistic than others about the amyloids as a therapeutic target in general. I predict the following, and am willing to bet on these odds:
a) >50% chance of an amyloid targeting drug or a mix containing one showing success on cognitive tests in phase III trials within the next 4 years.
b) >75% within the next 7 years.
c) >30% chance of aducanumab specifically showing success on cognitive tests in some treatment modality within the next 3 years.
d) Conditional on (c) happening, >75% that that treatment modality will involve targeting to early stage or pro-dromic patients, or a combination with a drug against a different target.
I'm potentially interested in taking your bet b, email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and we can discuss terms.
I also will bet with you about this, but we'll need to be more clear about the terms. You can email me at metacelsus@protonmail.com
">30% chance of aducanumab specifically showing success on cognitive tests in some treatment modality within the next 3 years."
It will be fascinating if it does, and if it does, do you have any odds/confidence on Biogen still holding the licence, or instead it in its turn will have been eaten up by one of the pharma giants?
The history of the development of aducanumab goes back to 2007, when a spin-off start-up from the University of Zurich, Neuimmune, collaborated with Biogen and they worked on it since:
https://www.neurimmune.com/about-us/company-history
So that's thirteen years worth of raising capital and working on this, they need it to be a success.
I like the idea of normalizing bets in the comments
The idea of being tricked into going to Winnipeg makes me think of https://what-if.xkcd.com/155/
Ezra Kline had an interesting conversation with Bessel van der Kolk about his book on trauma, "The Body Keeps Score." During the talk van Der Kolk made a statement that really tickled me. "Tango dancing is probably more effective treating trauma than CBT."
Podcast link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/24/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-van-der-kolk.html
Funny he should say that. An ex boyfriend of mine coped with the psychological aftermath of a drive-by murder (his best friend died) followed by personal involvement in a revenge shootout (various other people died) by going to clubs and dancing for 72 hours at a time. With breaks.
We didn't know each other at the time.
Also, I gotta say, Tango is the best. It's so smooth it's like dancing on ice skates. As far as therapeutic dance goes, assuming you have a good partner, it sounds like a good choice.
It's worth checking out the podcast. van der Kolk's humanity and decency really shine. The Tango remark came as part of larger discussion of the importance of singing, dancing and just playing with others as an important part of our well being.
That sounds great and I think I'd relate to a lot of what he's talking about. I'm all about singing my blues away. I'll check it out ;)
I think that the knowledge that I would be expected to Tango after a traumatic event would only make things worse.
On the other hand, you can express your feelings through dance, Tango seems to accommodate feelings of tragedy and loss quite well, and you don't have to keep a damn stupid journal about "this morning the birdies were singing, suddenly I felt a piercing joy and all my cares fell away".
Nobody says you have to dance *well* and who knows, maybe you look good in red side-slit dress and heels? Yes, even if you're a gentleman!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaEsttvrXkY
Now that's what I'm talking about. That is some top rate tango dancing right there. None of that showy cruise ship bulls**t.
Also, fun fact I hear parroted around dance groups: in the early days, men danced tango with each other until they were good enough to dance with women at formal dances, with some reporting that their best and most experimental dancing was done with male friends.
I can't find a detailed web source on this that doesn't look like it was written in 1998 by some dance teacher who interviewed a couple old guys in Buenos Aires. A musical group's website gives the story a more masculine spin, describing the early development of tango as a simulation of combat between working class men that morphed into a romantic partner dance when hookers joined in the fun. I honestly can't tell whether the details of this chapter in Tango history are left out of mainstream sources (like wikipedia) because they're unsubstantiated or because Argentinian men are reluctant to talk about it, but I've heard it enough times that I suspect the latter.
From the United States Midwest. Yes, it’s true. We are yokels.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofq_nl366VM
omg I just found this and it's fantastic
Very interesting interview. There's a lot about compulsive feelings of shame. Does anyone know of work on the compulsion to shame other people?
Just let Winnipeg happen, Scott!
I live in Salt Lake City now, but I'm from Winnipeg originally, so I found the calendar thing doubly confusing.
What books would people recommend I read to get a basic grasp on modern science the history of science? I’d like the books to be engaging to a layperson and not a something I need to slog through. Is Steven Weinburg’s “To explain the world” worth buying ?
I’ll check into that. Thanks
> 4
What a relief, I thought I was being targeted by someone nefarious. Anyway.
Next up, in the quixotic ululations of AI Defense in Depth:
Could you have stopped Chernobyl?
https://aidid.substack.com/p/could-you-have-stopped-chernobyl
So I try to stir fry Kung Pao Chicken at home, and it never quite comes out right. I thought maybe it was the heat, so I tried it over a friend's gas grill at max heat to see if that worked - and it still didn't come out right. Is there something to it that most recipes miss? Szechuan peppercorns?
If you're making Kung Pao chicken without Szechuan peppercorns then you're not making Kung Pao chicken, you're just making some kind of boring sweet chilli chicken.
I recommend Fuschia Dunlop's recipe: http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/cooking/ . Echoing Melvin's comment about szechuan peppercorns --they add a key citrus-y flavor to the dish, in addition to their numbing quality. It is definitely important to keep the pan as hot as possible, so if that is an issue I find it better to cook the dish in batches and reheat in between.
I am getting my first COVID shot tomorrow in anticipation of a plenary shift away from remote work. ACX readers, which vaccine should I get?
I'm leaning towards J&J. I feel ashamed to even raise this point, but I waited so long out fear of unusually high reports of adverse reactions in VAERS. I know this data is not clinically verified and may not be helpful, but I have had a nagging paranoia nonetheless. I trust this community more than I would any other online group, so please feel free to critique my life choices or offer helpful explanations for your answers. At any rate, I will definitely be vaccinated. I am just trying to avoid adverse reactions or long-term effects. I prefer the J&J because I already had 3 viral vector shots for HPV, and to the best of my knowledge there are no long-term effects of adenovirus-based shots.
If there's a restricted supply, get whichever vaccine you can. All of the ones available in the West are decent (Sinovax is a joke). J&J advertises itself as a one-dose vaccine but it's about as effective as one dose of the mRNA ones - you will need to get a second jab in a couple of months with something else, and probably a third jab targeted at whatever variant has taken over next year. (Current recommendation re 3rd jab booster shots is ~ 6 months after the second shot.) The good news is all evidence is that mixing vaccines is totally fine - you can absolutely get a first dose of J&J or AstraZeneca and then a second dose of Moderna or Pfizer or AstraZeneca. I hear very good things about Novavax if you're worried about new tech vaccines and want one using more old fashioned methods, but I don't know if it's available where you are.
Just remember to check if regulations in your area permit the use of a particular combination of shots.
I think you can be quite relaxed about long-term side effects. Some people believe that you can get vaccined, be fine for 2-3 months, and then suddenly develop a side effect. But that's not how it works. Side effects show after a few days, in exceptional cases after 2-4 weeks. So we know really, really well what side effects the vaccines cause.
There are a few exceptions, where you get some damage which you detect only after long time. But these are very specific things. In pregnant women, you may only see damage for the baby after birth, or even at later developmental stage. Drugs that make you infertile are another such thing. But we don't have any indications for these things, so I would not worry about them unless you are a pregnant woman.
The reason why some side effects are discovered only after months, is a different one: if some side effect is very rare (1-10 in a million cases), then it takes insane amounts of vaccinations until you have 10-100 cases, where we can pick up a statistical signal. But even those we should have detected by now, and the personal risk is quite tiny.
For a concrete recommendation, Thor Odinson gave already perfect advice: all the ones used in the West are decent. If you still want to optimize for efficiency (since side effects lasting more than two days are really quite negligible), Moderna or Pfizer are slightly better than the others. They are even better if the interval between the shots is not too small (> 6 weeks). But all choices are good, and J&J is the most convenient because you are officially fully vaccinated after one shot.
Finally, if you worry about the one-day side effects, Moderna and Pfizer can be on the heavy side (you can feel sick and tired for one day, and your arm hurts). Afaik, AstraZeneca and J&J trigger less heavy immediate reactions.
To add some anecdata, after my first AZ shot I had 24 hours of a fever response and many of my peers reported the same. There was no similar response after the second shot. Looking at the UK covid stats (https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+covid+stats&oq=uk+covid+stats), vaccination reduces the risk of death from Covid by about an order of magnitude.
Adding some more anecdata of a few hundred experiences I am familiar with (J&J, Moderna, Pfizer). I was in charge of coordinating the vaccines for the organization where I work.
Moderna and Pfizer didn't have too many side effects reported in our group, with most of it after the second shot and more severe after the second shot. Both shots resulted in sore arms and other minor effects. Most people with a longer reaction compared it to the flu and said it lasted one or two days. Not everyone had any reaction, especially rare for the first shot.
J&J being only one shot is easier to schedule around for potential side effects/sickness, but more people reported being sick after having it. Sleeplessness, nausea, and "flu like" symptoms were pretty common. Most people reported about two days of sickness, with a few more saying three. A handful (less than 1%) were sick for four to six days. Again, not everyone had any symptoms at all, though there seemed to be a higher percent who reported issues with J&J.
Got the Pfizer/BioNTech (which is now called Comirnaty), about four weeks in between doses. Day after the first dose, was practically living in the bathroom. Similar but less harsh after the second dose. No other side effects (sore arm, fever, etc.)
Was reluctant about the AstraZeneca one due to reports of blood clots (but those seem to affect women more, so if you're not a woman, you're okay for this).
Don't know if I would have gotten Covid-19 without vaccination, don't know if there's some new variant lurking to hit us all at Christmastime, but I'm vaccinated and haven't dropped dead of it (to date) so yeah, might as well go unless you have very strong feelings about mandatory vaccination, and if you've been vaccinated for measles etc. that's the same general principle.
I got the J&J in February. There has been some positive recent news about it. A second shot at 6 months increased the amount of antibodies 9-fold from the original response. There was also a study out of Brazil showing good efficacy against Delta. If you go the mRNA route, from what I've read, early data indicate that Moderna might be more effective than Pfizer against Delta. But def research.
Is there some kind of good legal/public policy reason why America can't make people save for retirement via a 401k? Like, everyone with an existing 401k registers it with the IRS- those without such a registration, the IRS auto-deducts say 3% from their paycheck (so 2ish% after taxes). Yes, it probably should be more, just trying to be politically realistic. The private 401k is some Vanguard target date fund or mutual fund, with ultra-low fees. If people really feel strongly about it, they can fill out a form and the IRS will stop deducting the retirement monies, and send them their funds back (maybe they can try again in a decade). Yes, it really should be mandatory, but again trying to be politically realistic ('big gubmint can't make me save for no retirement', etc.)
Why hasn't the US done this to date? Social Security (which this is not attempting to replace) is clearly not sending retirees enough money to actually live on. It could be argued this will actually help save SS. The US generally goes for market-oriented solutions way more than any other developed country, and this is not a government-run pension or anything. Tons & tons & tons of people are not saving for retirement, or don't start young enough, and here is a reasonable market-based nudge that's opt-out vs. opt-in, and will probably save the US government money in the very long run. Conservatives should love it, in that there's lots of evidence that having assets makes people more fiscally conservative. Liberals should love that it's reducing inequality, which is mostly about asset prices. I'm sure Vanguard or whomever would love it. Best of all, it doesn't cost the government much of anything that I can see- maybe some administration costs, but not a mondo amount. Why haven't we done this? Seems like virtually free money.
(I'm assuming we can discuss dry public policy like opt-out retirement savings in the 'no politics' thread. If this discussion is considered political, I will delete this comment, apologize, and also commit sepuku)
Is there a pressing need to do this?
I tried looking this problem up briefly, since I hadn't heard of a poverty crisis amount elderly Americans, other than the problem that decent end of life care can be prohibitively expensive. There are a lot of projections, and some people disputing those projections, with the overall picture being unclear. According to one source, 8.9% of the population over 65 were under the poverty threshold, with SS, Medicare, SNAP, and housing assistance available. The overall poverty rate was reported 10.5% in 2019, so that sounds about to be expected. The elderly might be a bit better off than younger adults at similar income levels, since they're more likely to own a home.
If the problem is that SS might collapse, then reforming that seems like the more important priority, since according to quick googling it represents 12.4% of compensation (6.2% worker/6.2% employer).
Australia does something similar to what you describe - all employees have minimum ~10% of their paycheck mandatorily diverted to retirement savings accounts, which are privately run - most people use ones runs by a union, but people can manage their account themselves if they're willing to do the substantial paperwork involved. People can top up their fund to an extent, but it's capped so that rich people can't funnel all their income into the tax-advantaged accounts.
As to why America won't do this, I think your governance is just fundamentally broken, and I'm not sure if you could pass a resolution acknowledging that the sky is blue without needing to bribe half of Congress.
No disagreement- but this idea didn't get passed in an era when US politics was less nutso either. Social Security being inadequate has been known since my parents were children. So there has to be a really good reason that I'm just not thinking of
Mostly I think because what to *do* with the money becomes an inflated discussion. Let people do anything they please? Invest in real estate, buy a franchise, play the Lotto? Well then we're not accomplishing much. ("But I was sure my collection of vintage Pokemon cards would be worth a fortune by the time I was 65!")
Send it to a few carefully-vetted investment firms offering index funds with certain characteristics? Ah, but *which* firms? Those who donate the most to Congressional re-election campaigns? Those whose CEOs say the right things about the social debates of the day? ("See, the Blackrock CEO said Green Lives Matter, while the Vanguard CEO said #wethree, how can we possibly entrust the future of our country to someone with such corrupt and broken morals?")
Finally, if you just throw up your hands and say let's just make everyone buy Treasuries, safe as houses, then someone will point out you are just creating a new version of Social Security, where the government forcibly takes earnings from people and promises cross-it-heart-pinky-swear to give the money back in 40 years when you need it -- and in the *meantime* it can live well beyond its means.
After posting this, I Googled around and read up on an idea where someone involved in the process had to choose an administrator (Vanguard, Blackrock, etc.) who have their fees listed in a one-line summary. So at least nominal competition
Here's the real-polik reason: This was tried by W. The opposition party was uniformly against it, and his party was not uniformly for it. I expect that the trends that caused this have only gotten stronger since then. The left is more anti-market than then. The right is more fractured since then.
There are a few less realist arguments - any program like this is going to turn in to a huge rent seeking oppertunity that will distort the stock market into an even less efficient market for stocks, which would be very bad. We will be forcing people to gamble on speculation! / We will be forcing everyone into even-more-homogeneous instruments, which increases risk (pick your before/after based on your level of anti-market bias). if you can't convince people to do it with education and suasion, are you really making them better off than they would be if they could make thier own choice? (Might be that the money you are making a parent save could have gone to making their kid's life better at a young age, and why do we think nation-wide rules are going to get the choices better than the parent, for example?)
I thought W was trying to replace Social Security, not supplement it. (I mean, I think SS should be turned into an index fund too, but I understand that's not politically realistic).
I don't really see how nudging people to buy index funds is gambling or speculation, seeing as this how the upper middle classes are financing their retirement. I would personally recommend like the Vanguard World Fund which literally has a piece of every major market- US, Europe, Asia- so if it's 'gambling' and the entire world sees 50+ years of nothing but declines- I'm gonna say the world has larger issues going on than just retirement. Anyways, it's opt-out, so if you feel strongly about it you don't have to do it.
I mean, the people who don't save for retirement are going to end up being wards of the state for the most part in their old age, so really it's the responsible thing for society to 'nudge' them into saving. Costs all of us responsible taxpayers far less in the long run than taking care of the flaky self-employed, the low income worker who can't even spell the word retirement, etc.